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Poetry by
David Michael Wolach
El cuarto de los recuerdos by Hèctor Pineda
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Puffing Up Our Convalescence Ode No other form of occupation involves the best and noblest. We have the greatest capacity to apprehend smells, unless they are very positive. Should one go to law about it and test the limit of our olfactory appreciation, an odor is as delicate as our ability to recognize the slightest light. Probably it is simply invaluable to have been washed and ironed, and probably educated. We have been busy with your tissues, and millions of molecular deaths and as many millions of births, although to liken this to average men who can neither weigh nor measure? This sets him over all professions, save one, and far above all forms of self-restraint. The doctor will always smile. Is it needful to even state the fact? odors which have no being to the ordinary man, a sweet, faint confusion of scents, some slight, some too intense, a gamut of odors and I detect it all when duty calls. Usually I have elsewhere stated, this is apt to leave our nerves oversensitive for a while, most unpleasant. Our unequaled sense of taste grew singularly appreciative for a glass of old Madeira, a demijohned veteran of many ripening summers, I recall to this day with astonishment the wonderful thing it was, and how it went over the tongue in a fortunate convalescence, do we see startling illustrations of grave moral weaknesses? Not then. But always.
I was sick in my stomach about you. It is possible to hide under cover of language. Unless we were 5am. Reading to one another as the light comes up from behind Saint Mark’s Cathedral. Your Finnish to my pop Americana. Reimagining a world in two tongues, transfiguring commonplaces as the moon is. It required little beyond recognizing that our sentences could only ever skim the surface of your Tuonela. And I knelt in the chapel for days. Praying that you would vanish. That bed was as low as the floor. I was always tired of. Sometimes it was Seppala, your Seppala, radical translations I had to commit to memory. Other nights, even ground. Trading paragraphs of Modesty Blaze, James Bond of schlock rack feminism. Tales of the outwit, romantic espionage, fast cars. Why did we ever get along? We never got along. Need is a term reserved for desires out of school. I do not kiss. We touched once for. The others were not ours. I left my hand to rest nearly in you, lip of crater, the prehensile syntax of warm quietism. Why were you so still? I ached. You didn’t move forever. Torture. The permanence of certain gestures. We didn’t. At the port authority before never seeing you again, you said: Thank you. Hallas. And then you were up a track. And we were an instant. |
 “Puffing Up Convalescence Ode in the Face of an Oncoming Vulnerability Sonnet” is part of a chapbook—Living Rooms—in which all poems are procedural works that use found materials as the input for a Markov Chain algorithm, a script that reduces large text into small, statistically weighted sentences. The source text used for this poem was Patient and Physician, S. Weill MD, 1901. Each poem attempts to juxtapose arcane healthcare practices of past centuries with the hyper-monopoly of the pay-as-you-die healthcare industry of today.
“Transliteration” is part of a cycle of responses to Susan Schultz’s wonderfully hybrid (prose/poetry; personal/sociopolitical; lyrical/procedural) and quietly beautiful Portraits: Parables (Tinfish Press). This particular poem is responding to Schultz’s “Natural Speech.” |