Taking on the Local Color: Poems

By Cynthia Genser

Cynthia Genser's landscapes, like those of D.H. Lawrence, are analogues of human emotions; her men and women exist in their effects-prototypes one minute, passionate and distinctly visible individuals the next. Person and place invite the reader into an adventure that begins and ends everywhere.

The language employed throughout is voluptuous, sensuous, yet precise. The appeal is to all the senses as well as to reason and intelligence: the poems, seamed with a difficult, sweaty beauty, stimulate every pleasure center. But pure language play also leads to hard, intelligent sense.

Of her own work, Cynthia Genser has said, "Although I belong to no special school or group, I align my poetry with the work of others aiming their metaphors at the banality and reductionism of our world-at the terror or planned obsolescence, Vogue Magazine, the threat of nuclear warfare. I cannot agree more with the Marxist Henri Lefebvre that poetry is the enemy and eventual victor in the war against 'terrorism' and the terrorist society we now live in."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819572745

Book preview

Doubles

Fixed Foot

Sodden.

What sodden day we didn’t

walk in the rain.

You parading

your glorious head,

the last book’s last

sentence, read

on the first train

to town.

Il pleure sans raison,

my heart! here—

you never, after the first year, cared.

*

Lust, my fixed

star.

Both, how blue,

azure-headed,

my revolution.

To arms! To arms!

Two arms

to be held in,

mother, brother,

I cannot call you,

what—fellow sufferer

or spouse or

fellow dream-snuffer

or parasite, partner,

traitor

fixed foot.

*

The last sentence

of that book read:

"évohé, évohé, leaping

like young horses

on the banks of the Eurotas."

Meaning, you said,

they had freed their feet.

And you jumped up,

fell forward, head down,

skirt up, head over heels:

marvelous cartwheeler,

I remember

your legs flashed

scissorlike,

against the sky.

This is the fashion, you said,

to be free (adjusting your hat),

and you wet your mouth

and stared;

but you never really cared.

*

Music dreams:

Cars, battles,

axes.

If praxis be the gruel of love,

play on! Open

your starry door.

I throw myself

on all your shards

or lie

beneath your small, glass-slippered feet:

ecstatic.

*

What I want, you wrote,

is to get rid

of all this inwardly revolving.

One foot’s fixed:

you spin.

Or tacked up

to some lousy Cross, fall forward,

the hanged man

with a broken ankle—

it makes me spit.

Chère petite, I wrote back,

"it makes me spit, too.

Let us make love with whips.

The Diva Club, at two."

*

Cars dream:

violins, thighs,

loss.

If gnosis be the fool of love,

drive on. Through desert

to the micturating sun

of wetlands,

the dreamy jungle.

How richly I deserve you,

little demon,

little love-thing, little

bloody foot.

Filing

I look for you.

The alphabet melts behind a palm,