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02-18-2012
Bruce Bond
Native Tongue
To glimpse it lounging in the red clay,
blind as a worm and skinless, shot through
with bluish veins and a craze of fibers,
any wonder we tend to conceal it?
To feel the full length of it, the appalling
ligament braided in our throat and bound there,
so tempting just to bury it in words,
and why not? The way it beats itself
senseless, flitting about like a bird
in a closet, what life is that? And whose?
Still you must confess: it's less disquieting
than going tongueless, and life enough
to rise up in spite of us, peering
over the rims of teeth, anxious to please.
God knows what possesses it to try,
as if it could tunnel back to some world
it lost, some day when it was little but
hunger and nonsense and the body tangled
in its root felt less intimate or strange.
Given time it became the odd sister
of our two hands, a kind of bridge between
the body and the air that walks it.
And we swore-it was all we could do-nothing
would tear this wick from the lamp of the skull,
this rude animal from a swarm of angels.
Postcard of Atomic Bomb Test, Yucca Flat, 1953
Say there is an explosion so great it shakes off
its boom and tremor and the voices
of those who watch huddled in their thin coats,
shivering, thrilled, stiff as matches,
and where they stand just shy of the cattle wire
they feel a broken aftermath of air
breezing through them in a fine snow.
Then just as suddenly you are there
and you've always been there,
a printed figure on a postcard snapshot,
made ancient, beautiful in your smallness
like a water boy under a Japanese mountain,
your legs shimmering in a photo blur,
under your feet a plate of floodlight.
You feel yourself rising like a morsel,
a slice, something offered to a guest,
and all around you the desert cicadas
freeze up in their armor, and every desire
is the gray night coming into focus.
A kind of blessing, you tell yourself,
how nothing so still could be true
or complete, as if the world's crust
were the ashen face in an open casket-
illusion really, a shadow play,
and that's why you stare, gazing out
through smoked lenses at the dry
cloud blooming in the distance,
because to stare this long and hard
makes the night sky sheer, translucent,
the sky and the tiny pins of ink
that hold you to it. It is 1953.
You are whispering something under your breath.
Every day is a day in June
at twilight. This is only a test,
you tell yourself, only a test.
-from Peal
BIO: Bruce Bond is a classical and jazz guitarist and professor of English. He earned a BA from Pomona College, an MA in English from Claremont Graduate School, an MA in music performance from the Lamont School of Music (University of Denver), and a PhD in English from the University of Denver. He is the author of a number of collections of poetry, including The Anteroom of Paradise (1991); Radiography (1997), winner of the Natalie Ornish Best Book of Poetry Award from BOA Editions; The Throats of Narcissus (2001); Cinder (2003); Blind Rain (2008); Peal (2009); The Visible (2012); Sacrum (2017); and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (2017). His poetry combines personal lyric and metaphysical inquiry as well as the influences of music and jazz musicians.
Bond has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts. He is a professor of English at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, and a poetry editor of the Literary Review.
