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Bruce Smith

I turned my back on the color fields. I turned my back
on the abstract, New York, the blue/red adjustments
and the inflamed men, the men inflated with trust
and acts of god and gorgeous manly man drag.
I turned my back on the furious magazines [I could
read], their reds and blues and frequencies I used
[I could use] to spin myself into an ecstasy, white
dervish, in custody of a story that begins troubled
with power, then the trouble is you as you spin,
a dance that ends with what kind of man I am.

Smith is the author of six poetry collections, including Devotions (University of Chicago Press, 2011), which was the recipient of the 2012 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

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“I feel the same way that painter Philip Guston did when he said about his drawings of Nixon: ‘So when the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world… going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue? I thought there must be some way I could do something about it.’”
—Bruce Smith

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Ferment

I saw the body of the jack fruit fall. I saw the body of the hero
fall, his armor clanging on his body. Then the juice and sutras
of the little spell of emptiness or the greater discourse of seed
and ovary. I saw the place ransacked to find a substitute
for the succulents—the lychee, the peach, the flower
infolded in the fig—that give up their season, their nation,
[mango, American pumpkin] the famous fated beauty/terror
rift before the swoon of the future. I saw that luscious rot.
I saw first thieves then police toss that place. I loved
that part.

Bruce Smith

2018

Beautiful Throat

Beheadings, slaughter of the innocents, suffering
and sorrow say all the stabbed, ecstatic art
of the museums and more of the same
says the news, the glowing, after glowing now
what, but also in the crowded galleries babies held
by mothers looking at babies being artfully held
in the celestial rain, the fat buttery ones, part putto,
part lard who appear ready to slip from mother’s arms
out of the frame into smoke and storm, the non-art part
of the world, that disobedient, expensive part
like a furious sea you paid to cross in an inflatable
plastic raft, a child’s toy in a bath it looks l

Bruce Smith

2018

Ballad and Proposition

after Alice Oswald

Take away my engine and I shall engineless go
to find you. Take away my bees
and I will flowerless walk the vectors of sweet
nothings until I’m face to face with Monsanto.

In my doomed town where small mechanic skills
make the evenings strung out and shrill
with compressors and vapors, I listen for crows
and wrens to overdub our nation’s ills

which are forgetting and further forgetting
so I don’t recognize my hand,
the length of rope, the knot, the limb
I throw it over, the aid and abetting

of the body, the shadow spans from Senegal
to my doomed town where Mrs.

Bruce Smith

2018

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