CLA/WLIT 196
Ancient Lyric Poetry

Creative work from people in class

JESSE CHAMBERLAIN
VINNIE SCALIA
HENRY MELCHER



JESSE CHAMBERLAIN

Music
Incredible, working, Self-machined gold robots


VINNIE SCALIA

(Ancient Cento)

I know the songs of the bees.
Having eating sweet nectar myself
When I imbibe myself
with the kisses of this honey-tounged girl.

At Aphrodite's command
Her love distills and melts my heart.

I saw her first in a dream
My life  a shipwreck
She like an angel swooped in and rescued me
Ran her hands through my foamy hair

She spoke
With her right hand
She pushed me kisses
As she pranced about
With golden slippers

Her beauty was such
Even the gods were besieged with awe
As they beheld.

So harmoniously
About me she dances
Her delicate feet treading
Softly on the blossoms of grass.

The day passes
And the evening comes
The moon brings the sheep
Back to the fold
The lion to the den
the boy to his lover

As she lay
I wrapped her in delicate linens
I push you off to the sea of  your dreams

I sing charming words
My soft-eyed girl
If you are pressed and passion impels
Pledge to me your love.

There never was a girl like this
The charioteer of my soul
There never was a girl like this
with longing she loosens my limbs
there never was a girl like this.


HENRY MELCHER

Unsigned hype

She visited one evening and browsed my shelves,
fingered a thick Faber & Faber of love lyrics

and inserted her love poem, one which stuck
for more than six months.  I saw her whole soma

as holy as nascent sea foam, her silk hair and aesthetic
beautifully demure, drawn naturally as the tide’s breath.

Shit, we sat and chatted a semester of Romantic Poetry
and our eyes throbbed in each other, they did.

Onomatobody, man, from head to cured toe. 
Even her classes in Classics emanate the dark honed

frame.  So hungry I fed into the attention monger’s
trap, understood an impromptu and crowded ten

minute conversation as traversing ground, not her press
conference--
                        the bottom of a basement, my buddy Ari,

thank the obnoxious drunken gods for insight allotted
to this stabbing sage- who illuminated her appetite

for the postured perfection of a vogue rubric--
                                                                                     with the bawdy
of a figure skater.  Really, not much more than brushing

the surface, though making her scuffing look better
than anyone in Burlington.  Or so I’d have myself believe,

though self righteousness, I heard, killed the coquette’s facade.
An accessory, a tractable charm on her Tiffany’s bangle,

Kurt’s comment set my booby-trapped feet free-
just a chase after unsigned hype, a maintenance

anyone with a watch or wallet or any sense could see
is less sacred than Corpus Gucci, Texas.


Deep-sea fishing

Social setting- in the work of netting,
occasionally one comes awash, caught

in the serotonin undertow, letting
toxin wash over limitation’s line, frost
over lids in snerds, thought-out words turned stutters

and conjectslurs, self-signed contracts for the wind,
sure.  When the canvas is black, running with herds
and the choice of which girl-- easier than discipline.
And to wake, then, with fresh, warm skin ignores how strange

it may be, to be surprised by the stranger in your bed.
Paddling waves of what if, if the crest was tread--
setbacks of nets cast, the urge to toss back, exchange
an urge made bad on by vainglorious search of story
for a movie and tea, a healthy getting lost in story.


2 peas in a split pod

Granny sleeps downstairs, Lizzy, the attic-
a third floor pad, up flights Granny rarely climbs.
The space between hangs a portrait, static.

Rap’s Lizzy’s shit, the spike that gets crap kicked,
how her law firm monotony allows sublime:
Granny, downstairs, below the rap addict.

Reared with Aunt Ruth on the plains of Attica,
Kansas, just a wide place in the road by a sign,
posted.  The family frame shrugs dust, slightly tragic.

Breakfast and putting to bed.  Meds, but not sick.
She rises singing, eats like a child, and rises
every Sunday to gain stairs for the soap fix

given by Aunt Lisbeth, a respite.  The respite
modern medicine rain-checked,what she can’t find-
herself or husband in the second floor portrait, nick-

ing the surface, the oil dark as the attic
before Lizzy repainted red, mustard and pine.
Granny vegges downstairs, and Lizzy, the addict,
sustains the space still-life left static.


Chamber throne

In Health & Style, a first sigh
of spring in the air, forearm gavelled
to thigh, impressed.  Open to Travel
& Leisure the paper unwound and dry
sounds almost as crisp as if
I were in HD.  Reading of Peruvian
coffee, a smile for the alluvial floored
mountain outhouse I shivered into head-lit.

It sighs and the stall’s front floor bolt
has never been so interesting, enthralled
this Sunday morning by the lack of anything
but a yellectric fluorescent hum from above
when issued a service perturbance from below,
a heat wave, bowels yawning hello.


Walking to Haiti

A styrofoam cup of chinola
with already dissolved chips by the bottom, 
a toasted ham and cheese to charge the legs
in case of running.  Before the bridge, green

leaves hang heavily healthy as damp hair across a forehead. 
Not that I’ve been, but picture a Rolling Stones
concert jammed into a skinny vendor lined street
bustle, all one could think of not to buy,
being pushed and pushing, keeping up and swaying
with what a hand is kept in the pocket
against, what was sought to find and touch closely
enough to know yet not find out.  Squinting
behind and ahead over eggs stacked on heads,
by rusty wagon wheels and piles, piles of lawn chairs.

Then the window where passports are handed,
bUm-fwah shwi? Ahh, wi.  Money passed and stamps,
access granted.  By machine gunners,
dirty chickens slung over slim shoulders
clucking and sputtering filthy feathers,
mud-battered sandal feet, machetes
and fresh sugar cane, burning garbage,
not to mention the heat.  Through the swap grounds,
hushed English the target of cast glances,
jibes and yelps of “blan!” or “Americahhn.” 
Sadly conspicuous by the wrapped shades
and our shade, nudged by church and house roofs,
centuries of plumping.  My consciously
sucked in gut, all I could muster to match
the sharp angled strut of passing market men.

We walked a road where the dust didn’t settle,
rode rented bicycles by UN trucks,
and sat outside an acquaintance’s house
where a tree had grown up into the width
of a tread-worn car tire around its trunk.


A brush with God

Awake, then
up the hill, at work before
8 am, and I ‘d been the last
to leave yesterday evening, from
the scratching pitter-patter of the roof
squirrel family, grown fat and privileged
by trail mix, scattered barbecue scraps
and such.  The daddy’s stomach’s dyed brown
from dumpster diving and furrowing among damp
gutters and fresh mulch.  They’d break from sight
and ready reach at a squeak of the poorly installed
front door insulation.  Sometimes it took a resounding
jaw-clenched wrench clang against the window grate-
scared selectively, upon their hunger or guts.  Or need to play,
know our frustration, since they knew we’d let them away...
or so they thought, and at that 8 am sharp, arriving to the hundreds
of dollars of bourgeois Vermont gourmet trail mix we’d just bought
spread across the floor like a toddler’s work on a cereal destruction
spree, they knew it was the blowout, the unadulterated feast they never
anticipated might be their last.  Ice-coffee in hand, then quickly out,
they scurried back between the pane and cold metal-dowelled grey gate
designed to guard against exactly they.  With a few wedged pieces of wood,
the options that remained were to leave or stay, and it just so happened
that the day before, while perusing Wal-Mart with a University charge card,
a hand Daisy-power BB zinger had caught my first-check’s silly purchase eye.
Barreled down the hill then up again in an Econoline, by that time coworkers
had arrived for the egging-on... and after rapping back and forth, banging the cage,
ripping tail fur, everything to get them to go, to let our organic granola alone, Brian
Beck, the EMT, knew it was necessary, that it had to be done.  Only squirrels, I pointed
the nuzzle directly between old grey’s black beating eyes, brought myself to squeeze
every muscle, cerebral fold, fingernail calcium deposit, my eyes, to attend the trigger
alone.
His tiny pathetic teeth chattered.
His tiny pathetic dick pissed all over his stained belly.
Of that tiny and pathetic I wanted no part.
The remaining summer with his wife and kids would be too much.