Sample Poems by Chad Prevost
Lyric of the Ever-Expanding Universe
What you thought was a star
in the north sky is a whole galaxy.
What you thought was a folk tale
about walking on water & lying with lions
turns out to be truer
than all the sun-bleached bones of hard facts.
What you thought was a mouth
is really a bottomless well.
What you thought was loss
is really an orchard of cherries.
What you thought was a youthful version
of yourself turns out to be a shadow
shifting out of your eye’s corner.
What you thought was a snail’s slick trail
turns out to be a sidewalk’s veins,
branching off among the dandelions.
You thought the dandelions stood in place,
but come to find they’re dancing
across the wind like tumbleweeds,
wheeling without thought of gravity.
What you thought was gravity
is only your body’s leaden weight
pinning down your dandelion soul.
What you thought was your chest
is really an impenetrable forest,
& what you thought was a forest
is the ever-diminishing hiding place
of your crimes, & the place to free them
is at the bottom of your lungs,
where a whole universe billows even now
in the form of old loves.
What you thought was a one-time high
becomes a string of lights wrapped
around the temple of your body
till you’re one great ball of wire, incandescent,
blowing fuses like popcorn.
What you thought was a one-night stand
becomes a diaper trail sagging over the moon.
What you thought were whitecaps
shouldering to shore like the heads of the old
is really your lover’s voice
waving against the walls & settling
in the corners, reaching through
your cobwebbed heart, calling your name,
asking you to rise once more, to quit
pretending, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to end.
A Frequency for Wherever You Are
Right now, you may be anywhere,
but let’s just say
you’re feet are planted on a floor
that was once a forest floor.
Right now, not far below you,
someone is breaking a stick into a fire,
someone is calling for their lost love,
someone is etching a name in stone.
None of you are aware of this space’s real estate,
of the nothing that is & is not.
In this very moment,
let’s just say you’re trying for some silence,
maybe hearing only the hiss
of cars whizzing through rain,
yet even as you read,
calls only dogs & deer can hear, whistle
out of your ear’s range,
& songs you’ll never hear leap
in electrostatic ecstasy, ready
at any given moment,
to be sucked into a radio’s wire,
& exhaled through an anonymous speaker.
Right now, wherever you are,
numinous spirits parade about
as if you aren’t even where you are,
as if you aren’t even real.
If only you could catch the wind
of their frequency, hear something concrete
about the difficulty of love,
or a meaning of life you’ve missed,
then you, too, might be moved,
mesmerized by what you know,
not believing you could’ve lived any other way.
When You Listen Long Enough
You step into that river, that ancient
river flowing as long as a thousand Mississippis,
your throat full of almonds, & you see how dreams
are thumbprints on the night sky,
that they cling like the puppet stars hanging
at their impossible distances long after
even your grave is gone, & you’re left
with a sharp pang in the belly
like your first sexual desire, a longing
no sooner quelled than it opened up a thousand
doors of possibility, & this isn’t all you learn
by stepping in the river because the river
unwinds like a neverending sentence, a current
that comes alive with each new turn, so long
you’d drown if you followed too far,
& it’s enough anyway to dip down once & again,
to drink from the river where belief begins
& ends, realizing that dreams are snails
tracking a glistening trail across the moon’s split
sidewalks because when you listen
long enough your chest fills with mud
& the maple’s arms, full of thousands of leaves,
move in unison, the clouds layering
in the empty azure like sandstone & slate & shale,
beneath all the moss & clover of your waking self
because when you suffer long enough
your mind fills with stones, & thousands of maples
leave your throat to clear an empty azure place
where you give birth to a self that sees
into the shared love of all humans,
that no one can make simple enough to understand.
Rules of Composition
There he goes again, the slow droop of the eyelids,
a faint flutter of resistance,
the eyes crossing, going back in his head.
1 p.m. may not be the best time to digest
rules of composition, not when the greasy campus pizza
takes slow passage through the veins. If I drop a book
or snap a ruler, he’ll jump back—cold desk,
concrete walls, a cream gray sky through small windows,
the class snickering, & me, the keeper of a grade
he needs to move ahead. But if I let him back slowly
as if the world was not just a place of cruel lessons,
as if it might have something else to say,
letting his head droop in the crook of an arm, drool
spilling onto his notebook, perhaps he’ll ease back
from his dream world to find something to write about—
the girl he met last night at the sorority mixer
when he drank one flaming White Russian too many,
or the gorgeous blonde with the low-cut tank,
who sits in front of him in class. She laughs
at his jokes, climbs on the back of his Vespa scooter
& lets him spin her home. This time, instead of a peck
on the cheek or a friendly, drunken wave goodbye,
she invites him in, they kiss with abandon, leave
a trail of clothes toward her bedroom where he jerks
awake, the class gone, my hand on his shoulder,
& the voice saying his name only my own.
A History of the Lost Art of Memory
He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must…form mental
images of the things they wish to remember...
—Cicero, on Simonides
My science teacher stands over me, telling us
that the body is mostly water. I am twelve,
the kid from the West Coast, & I remember
I wanted to become the rain. In California
it could rain an entire spring, one long breath
of reassurance—sawgrass, icycle flowers,
eucalyptus sleeping in the drizzle & mist.
Virginia’s fall was the same, as if the rain
had followed me, helping me hope I could leave
my fragile cage of bone & sinew, melt
among dark clouds that looked like the bruise
that swelled above my left eye where a boy
headlocked me in a bathroom, drove my head
against green tile while others clapped,
spread the news, then went on ignoring me.
O how I wanted to be like them, a drop falling
among thousands of fellow friends, losing myself
in Piedmont soil, & become a shining coat
to a once-dry seed, create a Chrysanthemum,
scarlet from the earth, then be summoned
to the palm of God, timeless as rain.
~
The boy is Simonedes of Ceos,
who before he was known for inventing
hallways of storage for memory that would last
for millennia, before he recited praise
to Scopas & the divine twins at the banquet
in Thessaly & saved himself, before he’d fall
into record as the first poet paid for poems,
he desires young Eleutheria.
Because the body is mostly water he wades
knee-deep within himself, & forces a love
that has no language, that the stilted body,
spilling forth dark roots of hair, has just begun
to know. Like summer rain after drought,
like a trail of bats scattering skyward
from a season’s dormancy to feed
on the insects of dusk, he believes in her
with the absolute love of one who doesn’t know
another. Years go by. He yearns for her,
wants to eat the wildness of her sweet body,
to reach the body of water within that body.
~
Am I making this up, or do I wade mouth-deep
in love? She washes over me like rain,
my heart pounding in my ears like surf.
Our favorite spot is a triassic basin
standing where once the ocean cut across
the continent—a thousand miles wide, layers
of lime, each foot or two a swath of centuries,
time measured by this remaining pool of a sea,
each square foot of crumbling stone
full of shark bones & teeth, snail shells. Wind
moves across the rivers of our skin, reminding us
of our bodies. We breathe beneath the lull
of ragged pines. I recognize the body’s greed,
its pull for more than the mouth can hold,
but I am cut off—not deep in my body’s heart
like her. Her eyes yield like waves repeating
I want, I
want, I want…
~
Simonedes wanders the earth for years, observing
flora & fauna, extravagant cities, each stained-glass
symbol in temple corridors. As he walks
he hammers out rhythms, & having nothing
to write on, stores lines beside a row of candles—
a stanza on top of a camel’s hump, an epic
on the Byzantium Coast between two seas.
Ethiopia brings metaphors for goats. Jerusalem,
a wall in ruins, wise sayings for safekeeping.
The sun has turned his skin dark olive.
When he’s given refuge he stands before the hearth,
a traveler with a distant stare, tense body,
sipping exotic tea, leaving only a sandal print
& dust, but keeping with him his memory-places.
He returns to her. She doesn’t recognize him.
His stories of remote lands sound beautiful
as lyre music, but she doesn’t understand them
like she doesn’t understand the star’s arrangement,
knows only Thessaly & her husband’s body. So,
Simonedes finds himself free from that furious love.
He no longer stares at her like one burning
a retina in the sun. Yet, in his blindness
he has composed his most wonderful sad poem
that lives through the memory of Cicero & his pupils.
~
We learn love by forgetting its particular odor,
knowing it only as it returns,
distinct from the burning of other arbors.
This is where we begin, our origins, in woods,
seeking love, learning that not even love lasts.
Instead, it keeps us repeating into replenishment,
again & again raining down, cloud-strewn
into the other though we are cloud-dark
from love’s bruising. Paul says it is better to marry
than to burn. Isaiah says each man walks in the fire
of his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the mindless dawn of one another, permits us
passage to its hard truth; like the way I lose
all sense of self studying a sand dollar’s thin shell,
taken away, however briefly, like some mad prophet
into a second existence, reading the future
from the past in the face of the tireless waves.
—for Jack Gilbert and Gerald Stern
Revision
Looking down off this abandoned train trestle,
it’s hard to believe that right here
two lovers jumped to their death last night.
I was among the crowd
staring and doing nothing
as if the pair were living out a script.
If I hadn’t seen them jump from this very spot,
watching them take that quick plunge,
two tiny splashes, then disappear from view,
I’d not believe it now.
Isn’t that what Heraclitus meant when he said
you can’t step into the same river twice?
Nature revises itself. The glass of beer
you’re drinking is not the same beer
it was moments ago. You will not be the same
when you rise from this poem.
We’ve all heard stories of the young couples
who can’t live without each other
though circumstance is set against it,
so they die as one rather than live apart.
It’s romantic. They’re young,
offering themselves as a testament
to the power of love. But for all the stories
that have been revised
the way this river revises itself,
the way this poem winds against the banks
of your experience, it really seems like
one great exaltation of disappointment
that jumping into death’s cold mouth.
You can’t revise death. Just like I can’t tell you
now that I made all this up
for a metaphor because death is not a trick.
We change our minds all the days of our lives.
This is what we have if nothing else.
We revise our memories into the future, hoping
for better selves out of the one
we’ve been creating, even as every day
we break down a little more,
coming that much closer to the period that comes too soon.