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Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman has written and edited 24 books to date, including the anthology In the American Tree, which the National Poetry Foundation has republished with a new afterword. Since 1979, Silliman has been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet. Volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What and Xing. Silliman is a 2003 Literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.

from Parrot Eyes Lust

                     For Elliot Helfer



Hand-carved text


                The cross-bar of an H
                          or of a T
                  can vary day to day


                              hand-carved hex


        Open the pen


      replace the cartridge


                          the new ink


Pita or naan
which side are you on?


                Already
         by the time of Brahms
                      Stein & Pound
            & even Williams are alive


                     sound
                          is being recorded


Nothing will ever be the same
          but it never is


                           Great satisfaction
              with which
                       my grandfather
          would park on the back
                           side of Albany Hill
                   to watch the trains
                         on the Santa Fe tracks


That he even knew their schedules


That one wld
or cld
or had any such desire


               Who had himself
              before the Great War
              which he spent
               loading ammo into taxis
               in Paris
               that then drove out to
                          “the front”
    worked for Santa Fe
   & could have again
 but for the young man
with a brand new family
who was holding his job


                       so signed on instead
                                 at the mill in Emeryville
                                     for the next 42 years


My grandfather in Paris!
& as a young man
 
         What leaps of the imagination

                      it takes me to get there


                                            Moment of Panic!


                                    How could I

                           misplace
                                      a notebook this large?


                   My study
                           aka The Basement
                  approaches the “natural” world
                                                  mountains of books

                                            stacked on every surface

  

          I found your
                  set carefully
                         atop one of the few
                                       empty chairs


This pen by your side
a steady companion


                                Songs in my head
                                        better left for dead

            Cranberries in heaven
           are redundant


               something
               that when I was a kid
               came strictly in cans


as for example did peaches
with a few exceptions

my favorite part of the peach
was the syrup


       thick & sweet

            Robin atop
                 the little
                       concrete abstraction
                           in the middle of
                                       the garden


              surveys the lawn
         as tho it were a hawk




Five Poems I Did Not Write


20th Century

Petals on a wet, black bough

beside the white
chickens.



20th Century


Petals on a wet, black bough,

so sweet,

and so cold



20th Century


Petals on a wet, black bough,

Starving, hysterical, naked



20th Century


Petals on a wet, black bough,

They were a kind of solution.



20th Century


Petals on a wet, black bough.

They never knew what hit them.

From American Songbook

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