My Heroes Have Always Been Dead
Selected Excerpts
Foreward | The Stitch | Justinie Dear, You're a Wedding Day | Melons | Afterbirth Fruit Salad | My Heroes Have Always Been Dead | Celtic Viking of Harlem
ForewardSylvia Plath, Celtic Viking of Harlem, Anne Sexton, springing stitch, Mama, Mozart, Salieri, Beethoven, T.S. Eliot, and the Stutterer. Welcome to the world of Charlotte Rice. There is such a tribute here in these poems to talent and love, especially for dead heroes. However, the biggest tribute is to creative energy; not only to the big names of creativity, but in an unconscious way, to her own. Rice, too, is talented and creative.
Because poetry is often a personal rendering, a reader is sometimes put off by intimate, thus incomprehensible items. For those poems that are more ambiguous, allow me to play teacher so that the reader is privy to some shades of meanings. Rice's Celtic Viking is Irish, red-haired, and computer-oriented. Watch for the first letters of each line. They may spell a theme or main subject.
"Reprimand" is just that - a reprimand written to T.S. Eliot after Rice viewed Tom and Viv, and that interpretation of the famous relationship. "B" was written after Rice received a B on a research paper about Sylvia Plath. She (Rice, but possibly Sylvia) was incensed that a paper about her creative idol was not awarded a superior grade. But these comments really are not necessary to appreciate the poetry printed on the pages of this book.
One of the many definitions of poetry is that it is a window to the soul. Some poetry is so powerful that the reader is allowed not only a glimpse into the soul, but also an entrance there. In perusing the poems in this collection, the reader will be amused, scathed, puzzled, saddened, shocked, impressed, and even awed. The poems reflect such a verbal power, such astonishing and remarkable phrasing, that one is left wondering if a new Sylvia Plath is at work. Or, is it a new voice for our reckoning - that of Charlotte Rice?
Judy K. Polhemus
Shreveport, Louisiana
September 2, 1996
Injection - then a deadness,
Gleaming perky instruments
Waiting to probe my head.
Curiosity satisfied,
So begins the sewing.
One neat little stitch,
Holding with all its might
My flesh.
I conduct my own examination
At home.
Touching the tiny crude spire,
It caterwauls with a cat-gut
"Sproin-n-ng!"
Flapping it back and forth,
Delighted.
My miniature musical instrument
I play my stitch,
A crooked harp string
Tinny and next to my ear.
Maybe I'll keep it
I've grown quite attached,
Might even grieve for it when
It's gone,
Little music-maker.
Justinie Dear, You're a Wedding Day Justinie Dear, You're a Wedding DaY |
Probation vocation
Schoolmarms scourging little
Naked molesters
In fishnetted Spectravision.
All punishing rulers and eye-brow pencils;
Your eyes glimmer
Succumbing to the plot;
Grip-clenched fist fortified through filth.
I watch from under the chair;
A contender.
Shall I shave it and dye it blonde?
Invest in a fruit stand?
One should never be short of melons.
To use or to wear or to pass off as one's own.
Surgery is not always the answer
Scalpels aren't insurance for dates;
I crouch with my new third eye beaming
And cellulite like a sister.
You pervert the word love
It's a sour cream dream;
Tell me, how can you smile
With that blood clot between your teeth?
(Is it that noticeable? Oh SHIT!)
A girl is never safe without a tampon toothbrush.
What's that hulking walnut stubborn in the cords?
Snared and plugging everything nicely in a grainy heap;
And that tiny Prufrock hiding behind the womb!
Lips all sticky from chawing down that peach, finally.
O, The Afterbirth!
Prophetic symbol out of an O'Connor novel;
A revelation of Mary Graces with books held high,
Ready to beat the God-blessed veins out of the do-mestic white-bread.
What can it ruin?
There is a prophet - a judgment in Afterbirth Fruit Salad;
It is the unstoppable duty of The Salad
To bestow its prophecy on all who
Require it.
Time to Converge.
Clock the placenta.
And let one's yeast GO.
My Heroes Have Always Been Dead
I.
You with your head in the oven
Pulpy heart beating in your hand;
Scattered bobby pins and razor blades
A pill or two tangled in the hair.
O Colossus, O Beauty
How could you?
What are you now but a
Bankrupt estate?
Brave Ariel,
Zoloft and I could have
Saved you.
I live for your sake
Open-mouth kiss.
II.
Wolfie, genius
Stony defective kidneys;
My little stomach, my
Little liver!
Your harpsichord voice
Squawks through sonata;
Your death rattle was a
Baby's.
The wig powdered and retired
Was your persona;
Hairless, naked gnome-God
A Salieri requiem.
III.
Nosed Ludwig
Pock-marked wonder;
Stubby flat fingers
A piano string disaster.
Herr Spangy
Chaste passion;
A pair of bad ears
And musical lice.
Presto agitato
Wolf-man snob;
Gentle monster
All fists and lightening strokes.
IV.
Dead heroes
Living work;
A cradled head sucking a
Rotten thumb.
A nourishing breast sagging
Are the followers;
Shooting in the eye of threat
Streams of syllables and notes.
You were always a brick
Ruddy and nudged into the corner;
Where your drunk daddy kicked you
And branded you worthless.
That Spanish eye didn't scare your
Green one;
That red hair didn't match his genes!
"God damn yer soul to Hell!"
Blistered in the truck in your underwear
Personal invitation;
Sitting for hours with a comic book
Outside the bar.
You watched him stumble and swerve you home
To break your mother like a domestic puzzle;
You knew the pieces to jam back together
You knew how to recognize
Whose pieces fit whom.
To make her whole again you'd
Pull a piece from yourself
And glue it snug.
Little Celtic Viking of Harlem
Vending-machine boy;
I watched from a cloud
An embryo.
And I saw you when you
Grabbed the neighbor's hand
And flew away.
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