• Hardcover: 64 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (February 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155597516X
• ISBN-13: 978-1555975166
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 0.7 inches

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This fourth collection from Powell (Cocktails) is simultaneously an accessible heartbreaker, a rare gem for connoisseurs, a genre-altering breakthrough and a long anticipated follow-up. The San Francisco–based poet has lived with, and written about, HIV for a decade, and his own illness remains a subject here; so does his celebration of gay eroticism, of love in the spirit and in the flesh. Democrac (Powell pointedly omits the Y) shows 21st-century queer anguish and outrage: does god discriminate, slashing some flags, it asks, while farther above the chapels pale heaven expires. Powell goes on to investigate many more sources of sadness and happiness, solidarity and discontent: Cancer inside a little sea takes on environmental degradation: child to come, what will you make of this scratched paradise. The unruly long lines of Powell’s previous work here join more conventional-looking stanzaic lyrics; they join, too, two ultra-long poems, printed sideways, entitled Cinemascope and centerfold. This book will be remembered for years, for its serious feelings, their swerves, their tears, its jokes. A poem to a crab louse abuts a scene from the biblical binding of Isaac, and a poem in which the Twin Towers fall segues from bedroom to public space and then back: lips can say anything but first they say goodbye. –Publishers Weekly

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EXCERPT

cosmos, late blooming

already the warm days taper to a plumate end: sky, where is  your featherbed
some portion for me to fall to, in my contused and stricken state
not the extravagant robe I bartered for: tatters, pinked edges, unpressed

lord, I’m a homely child, scrabbling in the midden for my keep
why should you send this strapping gardener, hay in his teeth, to tend me
now that the showy crown begins to dip like a paper saucer

surely he’ll not content with corrupted flesh that dismantles daily
so singular this closing act: spectacular ruin, the spark that descends in air
might he find no thrill in this trodden bower.  ragamuffin sum of veins

in my mouth the mausoleum of refusal: everything died inside me
including fish and vegetables, language and lovers, desire, yes, and passion
how could I make room in this crypt for another sorrow: caretaker:

lost man, these brambles part for your boots, denizened to my lot
your hand upon my stem now grasps the last shoots of summer
choose me for your chaplet, sweetheart.   wasted were my early flowers

—-

sprig of lilac

in a week you could watch me crumble to smut: spent hues
spent perfumes.   dust up on the lapel where a moment I rested

yes, the moths have visited and deposited their velvet egg mass
the gnats were here:  they smelled the wilt and blight.   they salivated

in the folds of my garments:  you could practically taste the rot

look at the pluck you’ve made of my heart:  it broke open in your hands
oddments of ravished leaves:  blossom blast and dieback:  petals drooping

we kissed briefly in the deathless spring.    the koi pond hummed with flies

unbutton me now from your grasp.  no, hold tighter, let me disappear
into your nostrils, into your skin, a powdery smudge against your rough cheek

—-

corydon & alexis, redux

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs

what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau.   for don’t birds covet the seeds of the honey locust
and doesn’t the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare:  how this longing grabs me by the nape.

guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush

what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with him on my tongue

silly poet, silly man:  thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix.  as if stars go out when we shut out sleep eyes

From Chronic. © 2009 by D.A. Powell. All rights reserved.

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