American Dirge 1-6
American Dirge 1
“What does not change / is the will to change”
—Charles Olson
“where grows the alyssum to cure our rage”
—Bernadette Mayer
I.
What does not change changes us
Breaks inside
The mirror where we dare not plunge
Outside the rain
Rage
Is all we’re left inside for
Where does the sun go when I’m away from myself
Moving (still) outside of frame
In dreams we open up
The dream is on fire
In the smoke outside the page
Where we open up & there
In fears become engorged
II.
This rage that eats at all our hearts
Rage of others who don’t sing
But glare like hungry monsters
At a world they’re not exalted in
At a history not theirs
Exclusively
What do you do with them
Who expect so much, & care
For nothing but their monster thoughts & fears
How can we live with them
How escape
Into a world where memories ache
& Burn ’til grift they soon become
In memory’s dark capital
Where in dooms we quake
American Dirge 2
Where we quake in doom
Who says the whole body & mind are not engaged?
It’s just my luck
Order here
Where the streets pass
In the lute of evening or its
Contemplative breeziness
Is that some sort of semaphore
You’re doing with that
Streetlamp?
Get off that laptop!
Evening
Answers with
A question
I am unaware of evening’s answers
Yes, I’ve seen the election results
They are not among the things I’m thankful
For (but here are some)—
I am grateful now to be alive
In this (yet) diminished day
Where evening spills
When she’s not tender
I am grateful for all of you
Even the ones I don’t meet
Who still hold on & care
& Assemble against this night
I am grateful for the intelligence one feels
Of the body at rest or at play
& Of the strength to (yet) begin to
Build (again) the new day
American Dirge 3
We have ceased to be
Ourselves
We go on being beings
Not selves or wholes
Wholes with holes in them
Intermittent as the gray outside
What do you fear here
Which
Or whom do you burn
In doom of
Which here is the care that life wears
In the fearing
In the fearing & going about
Our partial stares
Our lucid cries
In the beginning was
The movement to
Begin & go on
But in going on we are choiceless
Voiceless intermittent beings
Who do not cry
But only shrug
& Chatter
In the beginning was the voice
The voice lost o-
riginal in-
cendiary
As any group of words
Put intent-
ly on the page
Our lucid cries
The wind is whipping stirring up
The detritus of the streets
As if it were
A snow globe
One shakes
As a little child
If you shake
A voice
Can you put it
Back
Can you put it past
Intention
In the language of the streets
Which haunts the page
In the bliss of seeming
An illuminated animal
Or in the bliss of already being one
Silence is the space
Which surrounds the voice, makes
Echoes possible
To be ourselves fully
Revelatory mammals
Begin
With the name of the wind burning
American Dirge 4
The world moves
& We don’t see
The tragedy
Of our becoming
Because what moves
Inside our
Breath
Is all we ever
Hear
We move, & it is
An animal
Gesture
An instinct— flight
From the
Continual
To
The momentary,
The partial—
A space
Abstracted
In the center
Of a public
Death
Which we
Constructed &
Construct
Mindlessly
Incessantly
Until its very fire
Burns our stares
American Dirge 5
I.
I don’t know how to change
What I have the grace to
Know
Is all
Unspeakable if public horror
In the window where you don’t know you’re here
What do you hear
Is anything private
Ghosted in the afterlight
Of our gross public afflictions
When evening is not stable
& All the weather hums
Flaunting the wind that you hear in your name
Flaunting the name that you heard the word burning in
While the wind binds you
In its force of naming
Everything lost everything
Lost that heaven
Fears
II.
The wind is the name for what we’ve lost
To say we is to presume
A connection, connectivity, something
In common. Can that
Presumption
Anymore be made?
Is we a dead word?
Are we a dead nation?
III.
We move outward into wind
Bank windows reflect car windows passing
Noon is broken in the eyes of strangers
Winter settles in all our hearts
Can a world be transformed
With so much lost
With so much so much
Still at stake?
Is there anywhere here more
To make?
American Dirge 6
Something
That you fear is singing
In a noon that binds us
To history’s dark
Corners
& Everything night
Fears
Night fears the tiny
Shadows
Of buildings falling
Over in the rain
Night fears words
Which have the power
To drown it in
The very pain
Pain that night inflicts
Night fears the textures
Of laughter
Common bonds
This song
When our voices quake
In night’s dark
Center
Do we only become
What we fear?
Mark DuCharme’s sixth full-length book of poetry, Here, Which Is Also a Place, was published in 2022 by Unlikely Books. That same year, his chapbook Scorpion Letters was released by Ethel. Later this year, C22 Open Editions will publish his collection Thousands Blink Outside. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Spinozablue, Talisman, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary. A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
