Beer & Music: Sonnets by Tom Zimmerman

Copyright © 2015 Tom Zimmerman Digital book design by Tom Zimmerman.

The author thanks the editors of the following publications, where the poems in this book first appeared, sometimes in different versions: Anima: “Fossil” Atavic Poetry: “For Pink Floyd” The Big Windows Review: “Zimmerman and Poetry” Cacti Fur: “Coping with Romanticism” Carcinogenic Poetry: “An Exhumation” and “Random Notes” Clementine Poetry Journal: “Thread” The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society: “Jive inside Interstices” and “Stuck inside of Louisville with the Dayton Blues Again” The Sacred Cow: “The Glory That Was” Verse-Virtual: “Tributary” All photographs by the author except the one on this page, which was taken

by Ann Zimmerman. Front- and back-cover photographs taken at Sunset Junque Shop, in South Haven, Michigan.

Tom Zimmerman teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. Tom’s website: https://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com 2

Beer & Music Sonnets by Tom Zimmerman Contents Random Notes Coping with Romanticism Fossil Stuck inside of Louisville with the Dayton Blues Again Jive inside Interstices For Pink Floyd Thread An Exhumation The Glory That Was Zimmerman and Poetry Tributary

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Random Notes It’s Dylan on the stereo again: “A Simple Twist of Fate” with lukewarm sun, obligatory bitter beer, my manufactured thoughts. The dogs asleep, and Ann downstairs, I dive inside the music. . . . When will hidden stars align their fires, or one of Hades’ weird sisters lift her skirt to tease me with the answer that I know conceals an undertow of human . . . woe?

My learning’s only half-digested. Hurt and anger, existential dread entwine with motorcycles, basement tapes, and love affairs. An idiot knows more. Above the trees, a crow tries random notes. They’re mine.

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Coping with Romanticism My wife is gone, and Bruckner’s Fourth is on full blast: Romantic’s what it’s called. A beer’s in front of me, of course. The slabs of sound build slow, misterioso: here on Earth, the lovely ache of purple dusk or dawn.

I’m sad and happy all at once. My fears, those briars binding me, an angel gowned in light cuts through. The music swells: a birth, a death, a glimpse of hell. Of heaven. Write of life, my wiser muse suggests, as I, brimmed full of bliss, glide fast from giddy height to kitchen sink. Composed, I now know why old Wordsworth counseled calm, tranquility: advice to seekers of sublimity.

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Fossil I’m listening to rock, so living comes damn easy, but it’s shallow. Facile’s what a critic calls it. Fossil, though, defines it best, for what I’ve lived’s been lived before, been lived to death, been petrified, a stone.

But everybody must get stoned, sings Bob. The tune revivifies a night beside a river. Red and I are drunk and stoned.

In lust. A feeding frenzy, strip the prey to bone. She just can’t get her bra unhooked.

And I am stymied by her button-fly.

We lie back laughing on the blanket. Time enough. The stars melt overhead, the fish grow lungs. Our bodies sculpt the sandy mud.

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Stuck inside of Louisville with the Dayton Blues Again Fairfield Inn and Suites, 12:15 a.m.

The floor-lamp’s fizzy, spinning molecules and atoms into orbitals as wild as bourbon in the throat, as King Lear’s fool’s bons mots, which Brian and I, half-drunk, self-styled Shakespeareans, ingested at the bar: the Seelbach Hilton, Scott Fitzgerald’s muse for part of Gatsby. Three Dog Night, the star attraction down on Fourth Street, sang a bluesand-Bud-Lite pop we didn’t hear. Game Two was on the television: Cardinals and Red Sox. I will botch the poems I read tomorrow at the conference. But need I care? Right now, if I sang madrigals in Dayton, there’d be strippers I could woo.

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Jive inside Interstices This restlessness I learned from Mom and Dad. My best work’s come since both their deaths, but how is life without them? Now, I jive inside interstices of feelings. Sun is cloud.

Commotion: silent. Motion: still. iPad shines bible-black, with indie-rock to wow or flagellate. It’s Yo La Tengo’s Ride the Tiger. No, it’s Painful. Wussy. Loud as Velvets, Stooges, Sonic Youth. Hand-backs betray my age. Chest puffed, I keep them tucked between my knees except to take a drink.

Oh, let the cymbals bash-gnash-clash! Relax, I re-remind myself. I’m not as fuckedup as the monk in me pretends to think.

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For Pink Floyd The pig’s still flying, fat above the plant, the blackened factory, demonic mill that grinds the workers, baaing sheep that can’t escape the bottle or the blade. No will to fight, so they deserve to die. A creed abhorrent, but we get the metaphor.

It’s Orwell, and it’s Animals. I need to play that album once again: a bore if I’m too critical, but energy’s impressive, even when malign. I tell the tattooed young bohemians who work with me, “Go get yourself a mate who’ll please, a money-maker. One who won’t compel a brute obeisance—that’s where demons lurk.”

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Thread That thread of fate down through my mind and spine still dangles, jangles me, a marionette erect then limp, just smart enough to get a cosmic joke. It’s tugging at my wineskin heart, that rind half-split with needs, tonight.

A kitchen fire, a dog that’s bit a man, a supper tantrum fit for Calaban: calamities in minor key that might erupt like Mahler’s Ninth, that’s playing on, unless I cool the warm detachment that I’ve cultivated. Garden not yet gone to weeds. Potatoes snug. Bell peppers fat.

And when my thread is cut, will I see God? Wake screaming? Or return to rain and sod?

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An Exhumation Along the cemetery’s edge, I wedge my bones and hedge my bets on getting home before I’m dead again. Dawn-pink ledge with cat above my head, that balding dome an egg fresh-laid and warm to break and eat with fur and Momma’s old Tabasco, brown as bedsheet blood. And now the rain falls sweet, like chili heat, Louise’s hymen down her leg. That morning’s lives ago, the house across the way on wheels down Some-such Ave or Street. I’m home to try the knob, but dowse the door with vodka, strike a match. Where have the good old visions crept, the ones that made the cellos moan, the hemlock bloom, not fade?

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The Glory That Was Greece: morning light bled rose, then bronze, then gold on Mount Parnassos. I was thinking of the grassy knolls an ocean west that hold my parents’ graves, of all the dead I love.

Tragedian and archaeologist: my Attic mode. I plumbed the dank and dark, recorded music antic in the mist of dream. I burned strange herbs at Delphi, spark of perfumed prophecy. Olympia reigned plainly, Epidaurus mute, and scoured Mycenae powdered my ephemera with dust of kings. Thoughts drifted, lotus-flowered, from Alfa beer to Agamemnon’s mask, from ghosts to questions they and I would ask

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Zimmerman and Poetry I google Zimmerman and poetry when I feel low. The point? A poet is a junkyard dog; the published poem, a bone.

Most readers give you twenty seconds. Then you’d better give them something back, or else you’ll end up teaching, never to atone.

I drink an ale called Anger. Two-thirds gone.

What’s next? That cheap Shiraz that vibrates by the stereo? I’ll workshop now. Alone.

Next time you want to die, remember just how good you feel right now. This jagged verse has snagged a drifting petal, scratched a stone.

So what’s a poem? A rhythm, and a tone.

So what’s this flesh I lug around? A loan.

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Tributary Along the Nishnabotna, sycamores, a cloud of gnats, a cawing crow, the sun, and Grandpa Horace Zimmerman, long dead, is under them with banjo, mason jar of moonshine, mouthing someone else’s song.

And Dad, who’s dead now seven years, is on his second beer, Hank Williams on the hifi soft, a crossword puzzle on his lap, three-quarters of it solved. The coffee’s gone: I’ve drunk it all. There’s tea this afternoon, and microbrews tonight. The river flows, it winds and rushes forward, floods its banks, or dwindles to a dirty string. Because it’s everything I need, I must look back.

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