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[with 3 poems by John Amen]
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Ode to Country Music
+++ after Sparklehorse
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I come from men who shoveled reserve for a living.
Who needs the wings of communion?
The veindrain of forgiveness?
Las night, my drowned brother paused at the fence,
parties his lips to sing, then vanished,
a shy oracle leaving a trail of mud
in the yellow leaves. the world
has always been broken or breaking,
&who can say whether loss or contentment
is the heart’s lifeblood. Who can say
whether time is bored or ambitious. Who’s
beyond reloading, firing a prayer into the long night?
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John Amen
from Dark Souvenirs, NYQ Books of New York Quarterly Foundation; © 2024
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Who can say whether time flows, one long line cast downstream with the current? Who can say time streams unbroken and we can ride that roller that curls but never crests? We don’t know, we aren’t paying attention, we don’t even feel the tug until we try to stop and look around, try to see what brought us here and where it’s taking us next. Then, if we’re honest, we confess we don’t know anything about time, especially this one particular moment of time. All those past times and all those future times keep roiling our mind like a pebble caught in the mad froth beneath a waterfall, hard edges knocked off until every pebble looks like every other pebble. How do we get back to sharp?
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Who can say time is not clots and frags and whirling pieces, uncoupled and festinating like an old man with one leg shorter than the other? Who can say those sharp chunks of time won’t break open right in front of us over and over and each time we will fall into them from a different angle? Time can be a hard-jawed mastiff that won’t let go of our leg. Time can be a poem that isn’t afraid of the truth and will overtake us no matter how swift we may think we run.
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Dark Souvenirs will break open right in front of you, every time a different angle. Dark Souvenirs will get you back to sharp. John Amen’s poetry is a can of broken glass shaken and scattered across the pavement. The splinters draw blood if you touch them but you can’t manage to hold yourself back. The shards are dull and bright, clear and clouded. Piece by glittering piece they begin to reveal a pattern that skips and stretches across time. The writing of these poems must be a last ditch bid to make sense; the reading of them and re-reading is to join the travail. As Amen himself says in Waiting for the Sibyl who never shows her face: For years I’ve studied the shadows that lurk behind a curtain, listening for a voice in the rafters. . . . I’ve made it my life’s work to put words in her mouth. Time, jagged wrenching unrepentant time can’t save us, but words can try, and sometimes with light to spare.
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Days of Love & Horses
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That Memorial Day when I was nine,
the demon leapt from my father’s hands.
My wax-paper mom crumpled in the kitchen,
surrounded by coffee mugs. All June & July,
trailers, U-hauls, our house was gaveled
into smoky embers. I kept flying Emily, though,
my Morgan with the milky left eye, surging
above the hospital, courthouse, labor camp.
++++ These days I rarely see a horse,
but that smoldering August
before the glow turned to ash,
I found myself lost in Scriven’s Holler,
toeing those dinosaur traps in the jimsonburr.
Emily carried me through Jones’s Gulley,
past the gray & yellow farms, night crashed
as we reached the dilapidated barn.
++++ Years later, May ‘99, IC unit on the Oconoluftee,
I grabbed for rocks, branches, craving subsided.
Sprawled on a grassy bank,
I dialed three exes, apologized
for stampeding through their sober lives.
A friend had warned me not to expect sorrys in return.
Good thing, I didn’t get any.
++++ Recently in a restless dream, I beheld
that familiar kitchen. My wife hummed the national anthem,
frying slabs of meat in a Mississippi wok. I crawled the floor,
gathering the coffee mugs, & woke to the canter of rain.
++++ I haven’t climbed a saddle in decades,
but when sleep eludes me, skull
throbbing with twisted math & phantom schemes,
I pretend I’m atop my loyal Emily,
we’re stranded in a minefield, blind beneath moonless sky.
I squeeze my thighs against her mahogany loins,
bury my face in her mane.
The champing in my belly calms, dawn returns,
the jumps I need to clear don’t seem as insurmountable
as when the world is smothered in darkness
We make it home again, with light to spare.
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John Amen
from Dark Souvenirs, NYQ Books of New York Quarterly Foundation; © 2024
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John Amen is founder and managing editor of Pedestal Magazine. His five previous poetry collections include Illusion of an Overwhelm (NYQ Books), which was finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Many of the poems in Dark Souvenirs explore addiction and recovery. A moment that recurs is John’s brother Richard’s suicide. Reading the book cover to cover in sequence one enters a mystical landscape without pathway or signpost, where time makes its own rules and where meaning gradually but persistently accrues as if percolating up through the floorboards of the subconscious.
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Purchase Dark Souvenirs from the publisher, New York Quarterly Books.
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So is time a continuum or is time quantized? Is it a silky thread or pieces? Is there a smallest finite particle of time of which all emergent time is an integer multiple? Is time even real, or is time simply a perceptual phenomenon, an illusion our consciousness creates to make sense of the quantum reality utterly beyond our perception or comprehension?
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No one knows! But you and I certainly know how time refuses to be shackled or delimited in dreams, and when we awake we know that moments supposedly separated by vast measures of time crowd in close and overwhelm. Only poetry can corral and release time, its sharp jab in the ribs, its clutch around the heart, its cool hand on the forehead. With wary reluctance and a shudder I say this to time – Welcome!
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Dark Souvenirs
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I studied your craft,
how you drove the demon of gluttonous age
from his hiding place,
freeing the infant who starved for 84 years,
pang & its host
dismantled with a single twitch.
Little mess, little clean-up,
nailbrush, toothbrush, soapy sponge.
No mention in the real-estate ad,
the previous owner’s
impeccable marksmanship.
No way to preserve your opus,
air that still trembles,
trying to catch its breath.
Memory does its best
to salvage a keepsake
– pulp, bullet, bone,
a new constellation in the night sky –
but symbols are lost,
art fails, except as it screams at the dead.
I hope what remains of you
can recognize my voice.
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John Amen
from Dark Souvenirs, NYQ Books of New York Quarterly Foundation; © 2024
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Lovely, uplifting for this cat lover.