Because it's Friday

Yusef Komunyakaa's Thorn Merchant Poems. There are couple more than this--I think a son and a daughter poem, which are also lovely. Here is The Thorn Merchant, The Thorn Merchant's Wife and The Thorn Merchant's Mistress. Komunyakaa is, well, a bad ass. This is my favorite book from him. But almost all of his stuff is just killer. We'll talk in the afternoon.

UPDATE: Comments open guys. I have one thing to say:

Ready to auction off his hands

to the highest bidder,

he knows how death waits

in us like a light switch.

Beautiful.

[MORE]

The Thorn Merchant

There are teeth marks

on everything he loves.

When he enters the long room

more solemn than a threadbare Joseph coat,

the Minister of Hard Knocks & Golden Keys

begins to shuffle his feet.

The ink on contracts disappears.

Another stool pigeon leans

over a wrought-iron balcony.

Blood money's at work.

While men in black wetsuits

drag Blue Lake, his hands dally

at the hem of his daughter's skirt.

 

In the brain's shooting gallery

he goes down real slow.

His heart suspended in a mirror,

shadow of a crow over a lake.

With his fingers around his throat

he moans like a statue

of straw on a hillside.

Ready to auction off his hands

to the highest bidder,

he knows how death waits

in us like a light switch.

And:

The Thorn Merchant's Wife

She meditates on how rocks rise
in Bluebird Canyon, how hills
tremble as she makes love
to herself, how memories drift
& nod like belladonna
kissing the ground.

She remembers the first time, there
in his flashy two-tone Buick.
That night she was a big smile
in the moon's brokendown alley.
When she became the Madonna of Closed Eyes
nightmares bandaged each other
with old alibis & surgical gauze,
that red dress he fell for
turned to ghost cloth
in some bagwoman's wardrobe.

She thinks about the gardener's son.
But those black-haired hours only lasted
till the shake dancer's daughter
got into his blood & he grew sober --
before solitaire began to steal
her nights, stringing an opus
of worry beads, before Morphine
leaned into the gold frame.

 

And

The Thorn Merchant's Mistress

I was on my high
horse then. I
wore red with ease

& I knew how
to walk. There
were men undressing me

everywhere I went,
& women wishing
themselves in my place,

a swan unfractured
by August. I was still
a girl. If they

wanted culture,
I said Vivaldi
& Plato's Cave.

If they wanted
the streets, I said
Fuck you.

I knew how
to plead, Wait, Wait,
till I caught the eye

of some deus
ex machina.
I was in a deep dance

pulling the hidden
strings of nude
shadows. But when

his car drove by
my heart caught
like a fat moth

in spider web. Goddamn!
I didn't know
how to say No.

Comments

Not sure I like the 1st poem overall but I like how it surprises me. The stanzas seem almost like fragments told outside of order. It gives a view of his thought pattern which I like - raw and real. The others draw you to the thoughts themselves.

Posted by Persephone | November 14, 2008 1:21 PM

His voices are really distinct, and powerful.

"my heart caught
like a fat moth
in spider web"

"he knows how death waits
in us like a light switch."

The Mistresses' poem really resonated with me, I think because of the first person account, Also, I prefer for poems to tell me a complete story and I feel like her poem does this the best.

Posted by BelleIsa | November 14, 2008 1:37 PM

1/2 way b/tw Pound & Mayakovsky:
but not quite raps packs
candies surprise, canines
track marks, the light switch
doesn't, no, clothes down
Plato's cave, the brain's
shooting gallery, nor Morphine's
Ex Mafia--his car drove by.

Posted by CitizenE | November 14, 2008 2:01 PM

Any thoughts on what he's talking about?

Posted by Ta-Nehisi Coates | November 14, 2008 2:15 PM

Reetika was a professor of mine right before everything happened. I think about her and Jehan whenever I see Yousef's name. I know it's not his fault, but I can't really enjoy his poetry again yet. Maybe after some more time.

I keep seeing Jehan playing with my car keys and laughing...

Posted by Peter | November 14, 2008 2:31 PM

I should add that prior to all that Yousef was a big influence on my writing (not that he isn't anymore). Facing It was one of the few poems I ever had to write about in high school that I actually was touched by. Blackberry-Picking by Heaney was probably the only other one.

He's a powerful, powerful poet.

Posted by Peter | November 14, 2008 2:36 PM

Not sure what the narrator is talking about, but all of these people are in pain. They seem full of regret. At least the women's poems seem that way. The first poem, despite it's stark violence, I'm not sure what it "means."

I think that this Merchant brings pain to everyone around him.

Posted by BelleIsa | November 14, 2008 2:36 PM

The mistress seems clearest to me. She lost control when she met him, but the use of both the puppet imagery and 'goddamn' at the end suggests she's trapped herself, as they echo her tricks. Or maybe she's trying to get herself back with that.

Posted by Persephone | November 14, 2008 2:36 PM

Looks like either of the Thorn Merchant, Wife or Mistress is/was killed another:

Either:
A. Merchant k. wife.
C. Merchant k. Merchant.

D. Mistress k. wife.

E. Wife k. Merchant.

I think the Mistress is alive no matter.

If the Merchant is dead it's his ghost laying a hand on his Daughter's thigh.

If the Wife is dead it's her body in the lake, reminiscing.

Posted by talboito | November 14, 2008 2:45 PM

Persephone: I wonder if the mistress is cleareast to the both of us becasue she's expressing a universal notion of what mistress is. She is envied by women, everything to every man...,so much so that she doesn't know who she is beyond the "mistress" performance. The wife seems to have lost an identity while the mistress never had one to begin with.

Disclaimer: I much rather big up wives and put down mistress' anyway.

Posted by BelleIsa | November 14, 2008 2:47 PM

Googled Yousef's name to figure out what Peter was talking about.

That made for some harrowing afternoon reading.

Beautiful poetry. Wish I felt I had something to add to the discussion. This really gets me though:

When she became the Madonna of Closed Eyes
nightmares bandaged each other
with old alibis & surgical gauze

Posted by Katai | November 14, 2008 3:05 PM

These are really incredible, and thank you for sharing. I'm going to order this book.

The mistress's poem reminds me of a poem by Laura Kasischke, and its killing me that I can't remember the name of it, but it's about ending an affair, and it has a similar frankness to the language.

Seriously, thank you. I've been needing some writing like this.

Posted by alli | November 14, 2008 3:09 PM

Good point, Belle. It makes me wonder what so shakes the mistress, if that's who she always is. Also it strikes me that both women wear red in order to seduce, and the wife's dress is gone. I think she had that persona a bit too. They're not so different.

Posted by Persephone | November 14, 2008 3:12 PM

You sold me Ta-Nehisi, I'm off to the local independent to pick up the book. Great stuff.

Posted by Sam | November 14, 2008 3:18 PM

The Merchant is a rush of events, very close together, all in the present tense, as though all experienced with the heart speeding up from knowing there's danger and trying to understand it enough to survive.

The Mistress is a simple before and after "him."

The Wife has had a life of multiple phases, giving her layers of remembered joys and losses. Only, the present solitaire/Morphine maybe isn't quite being alive now.

Each person is speaking from a single moment, mentioning other experience that shapes how the present feels.

Posted by Sporcupine | November 14, 2008 3:51 PM

well, the real back story of which I have no idea notwithstanding:
Sounds to me like Mr. Merchant is looking back at the ravages of a life lived as a vampire--living dead of business transactions, the bad done to his wife, daughter, lover. My guess, wife suicide over the lacklove and the affair when junk didn't do it for her, and the affair obliterated when wife suicide left him there with their daughter.
A man strangling himself on the wrack of the wreckage--poems two and three--waiting for the light switch to take him out of the Plato's cave of his regrets.

Posted by CitiaenE | November 14, 2008 3:53 PM

Bob Dylan did practically all that during his classic methedrine period.

And he did it to music, upside-down and backwards. Just like Ginger Rogers.

Posted by vanderleun | November 14, 2008 3:55 PM

Wow.
A nice way to take the edge off an exhausting Friday...

Posted by Caralis | November 14, 2008 5:05 PM

The thing that's catching in my brain about the first poem is the disembodiment. The merchant only seems to have any physical existence in his hands, and anybody else who is mentioned either gets zero appendages ("men in black wetsuits") or, in contrast, feet.

I feel like this ties into a loss of control--at the end, there, he's trying to somehow end himself or whatever he's become (fingers at his throat), but it won't solve his problem (straw man), and he's hoping someone else will somehow do it for him--like how suicidal people hope to just get hit by a car. He has these all-important hands, but they're powerless.

Weirdly, the wife's poem is very physical--its sexuality makes me think of her body in a very concrete way--but completely lacking in appendages and any kind of bodily action. And oddly enough, the mistress's poem is the least physical of all, and, I think, the least sexual--possibly because of her emotional disengagement from sex.

Posted by miwome | November 15, 2008 6:48 AM

Never heard of him before, so I too googled the poet after reading the poems and being both attracted by the language and frightened in a weird way by what they were about. I found an interview where he talks about where the idea of the thorn merchant came from:

"Just one of those phrases that came out of my head. When I thought the phrase, I thought of the person who sells pain, violence. The dealers in human suffering is represented by the "thorn merchant.""

So there's where my uneasiness came from. . . dealers in pain, all. He is brave to go there. Takes courage and he finds complexity, family relationships, beauty too. A family that deals in selling pain. . . reminded me about what we talk about over and over among youth workers, how to reach the youth in families that have a genealogy of trouble, and interrupt that trouble with the youth. Just recently, a young boy from such a family was shot in Boston, and many lament his fate and say that it was because he was a member of such a family, with a tradition of guns and trouble.

In the interview, he also talks about writing poetry:

"I have to have sometimes a certain tension going on in my poem. The tension that makes the
common individual's life worth living."

When I tried to conversate with the poems about this, the moments of what makes their lives worth living are fast, but few, like fireworks against the sky, the dazzle gone too soon. And a sense of a life lived as if that dazzle were a north star to guide one's life:

"That night she was a big smile
in the moon's brokendown alley."

Sometimes the dazzle is youth,

"I was on my high
horse then. I
wore red with ease

& I knew how
to walk."

and in the Thorn Merchant's poem, it's way past, and left to the imagination, if it were ever real to begin with. . .

Thanks TC.

Posted by zackboston | November 15, 2008 10:02 AM

I keep coming back to this post and reading and re-reading the mistress poem. I've probably read it a hundred times now and it just keeps hitting me. The others are extremely powerful too, and without them I don't think the mistress would have such an impact on me. But there's just something about her...I can just feel exactly who she is and there's so much more to the poem behind such simple phrases.

Posted by Miranda | November 15, 2008 10:12 PM