To those who have followed Copper Canyon during the past year it may come as no surprise that I’m a fan of the poets Michael and Matthew Dickman (See The New Yorker, April 6,2009. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/06/090406fa_fact_mead) So the publishing gene that makes me want to share poems, immediately activated when Matthew recently emailed me a batch of new poems.
Here’s one of them:
MY BROTHER’S GRAVE
Like a city I’ve always hated, driving through but never stopping,
my foot on the gas, running all the lights,
wishing I were home. Hating even the children who live there
as if they had a choice. I imagine him
in his ten-million particles
of ash, tied up into a beautiful white bundle of lace, a silver bow
looped where his neck should be,
thrown into a washing machine, set on a delicate cycle
to spin forever under the dirt. The all of him
left, the vegetation of him, the no more thing
of him: his skateboard and mountain bike and beers and cigarettes and daughter
and mix-tapes and loneliness, his legs and feet and arms and brain and kneecaps.
Outside of the graveyard
there is still some part of him
buried in the mysticism of his DNA, smeared across a doorknob
or brushed along the jagged edge of his car keys. Two kids
from the high school nearby
will fuck each other on top of him
and I won’t know how to stop them. Someone, sometime,
will throw an empty bottle of vodka over their shoulder
and he will have to catch it.
***
Matthew was recently inteviewed by Michael Silverblatt on KCRW. (http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw090625matthew_dickman). It’s worth checking out.
(And just yesterday I received the preliminary offerings from a new book by his brother Michael Dickman. I expect to share some of those very soon.)
Thanks for posting this! I love Matthew’s poetry, his use of the colloquial and his imagery, “the mysticism of his DNA, smeared across a doorknob.” I can’t wait for his next book to come out!