Boondoggle
Poems by Tim Earley
ISBN 1-930907-95-8
Poetry, 76 pages, $11.00
TWENTY SAD OPENINGS AND ONE HAPPY CLOSURE
I am the loneliest chore in the village.
Those legs are glass and do not move.
Yesterday was for pleasure, the rest, for knowledge and history.
I coughed like a theory and saw everything on mother’s plate.
Bob said, “Their tears opened a window. A big window.”
The road stretched past distemper and the river.
I have eight names for the mailman; he views my appreciation as mocking.
A minute more and I would have left him for good, a minute more of staring
at the roses not hearing thunder and I would have left him and the casket
and
all of March behind.
The inexpertly wielded flange disrupted the parade.
Darla made the shape of the beautiful construct unto its haunches.
Novice of the wrinkle.
So many dollars on the floor, she must have been crooning in her yellow
dress.
The stores close with epistles yet en route.
I do not care if it is sour or milky or parched or contrite.
What the Dauphin wants the Dauphin gets.
Each set includes one mouth, one plate.
When the red spirit whistles its coin through the distance, I often sit
among
friends and watch a fiction unfold.
A man strapped to a watch walks by my window. He swells with the breeze.
I feel we should try it again.
River me to sleep, dear damasker, dear furtive glove, dear tympanum rose.
She was right, of course. Toledo really was good for me.
JING POEM
Skittered. Everything. Across the surface
of a shale-colored lake of course knowing
all the while it knows it is a shale-colored lake
but is otherwise infinitely unimpressed.
Not much ripple. But plenty of Skittered.
Love is a line is a highway incomplete.
The boorish dens show their resplendent
recondite incomplete. The hoary bullocks
are then shocked and rosy, lord-a-lordy,
all them days. The machinations of . . . skittering.
Involutional and institutional.
Love is a rose by any other name and sticks you
with its plastic thorn. Sure it don’t hurt,
but sure who’s asking it to? There are certain people
I would follow to the ends of the earth
against all reason, conspiring
circumstance, unwarranted emotional
difficulties and upswinging ganglia,
i.e., you. What’s with that. I need
more off-kilter verbal dynamism
to make me forget: orbular nuances,
nuministic, numismatic tantric fellatio,
the gloaming peccadilloes of surfaces, oh, I need
a trolley, a tooth, I need to shatter an incisor under the jing, jing
maddening rush of corpuscular swing.
The jing, jing maddening rush of corpuscular swing
realizes it is the jing, jing maddening . . . and
that means more than dying when what
you pretend to know is not or neither you.
We must not tipple. We must not scratch
the mirror with our teeth. If the mirror
shows us who we are, we must not look
for our organs are neither fiery stars
nor organs. We shouldn’t even have organs.
No, ma’am, no more than two.
The space between God’s ears. Yee-ha.
Give me a vista, I’ll give you the flu.
My God, I love you,
says the saint to the crutch, the serpentine unwinding
sinner to the noose, the lark to the thrush, the green
to the blue, and so, through a portal
of broken letters and infantillic tongue,
says I to you.
VOICE POEM
I am a dead thing of my own
I particle and I ornithologist to the stars
I say water is process and remove
inkier perceptions I dire accomplice
see a new swiftness evolve I met an assortment
I hook I factor I am not deaf frog
dumb around the whistling I hear lurid things
happen near the bay I seek neighbors for refuge they give
their hearts and more cookies I ask them to dissemble
my sensory apparatus I think quick I clatter up the hill
I move halvish and true like the busyness of pots
I determine to possess forthrightly
I sad piece of money I get dimension at least five kinds
I up one down one all over your figurations
I help the ineluctable wyvern more appalling than a jar
feed on the hedges of what I near I near a face
and it radiates out who sleeps best but pilgrims on farms
I parataxis I further windmills and end the fundaments
I entire day of people loving
your eyes to death
Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for Tim Earley, precocious practitioner of patience and energy, music and wit, the hauntingly sad and outrageously funny, the aphoristic and the explosive. He seems to me to be striking in his language a marvelous balance between the torrential and a spacious clarity. He brings to mind the master, James Tate, and at the same time--this is strange!--an American and somewhat manic René Char. These poems are fun to read, but they hurt. The guy is going places.
Franz Wright
There are mystery and mastery in Tim Earley’s poems. He is able to give into the unfathomable forces that swirl around him: the geology and genealogy, the museum and mystery of the South among them. His poems speak to an immersion in the manifold, a look at the eccentric and odd; their idiosyncratic music envelops us in time, makes a new time. . . in this way he’s able to open up the perplexed interior for us to see. The sight can be unnerving or sad. Or it can be astonishing and gorgeous. His work is exuberant and restless and always wanting to “further.”
Bruce Smith
Dandily attired in newfangled dictions, the speakers of Boondoggle ride the 2-D velocipede of lyric form through the perilous and mysteriously 3-D human world. The resulting poems balance lightness with a nimble momentum; they ring their bells tirelessly in greeting and for joy.
Joyelle McSweeney
I’ve never met this fellow, Tim Earley, but his poems say we’ve browsed the same libraries, museums, cafeterias, and prisons—just missing each other each time. Dean Young was there maybe. Bob Kaufman, a gaggle of French poets… Edged in something like lucid, melancholic ecstasy the poems say: “I have been walking to greet my last idea of you.” I’m stunned by this poet’s ubiquitous coming and going, by his way of being both cousin and curiosity. Boondoggle honors the good times we almost had.
Terrance Hayes
Tim Earley was born and raised in the foothills of Western North Carolina. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where he also taught English and poetry workshops for a number of years. He has been the recipient of two Writing Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Chicago Review, jubilat, Hotel Amerika, La Petite Zine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Typo, DIAGRAM, and the Green Mountains Review issue, Comedy in Contemporary American Poetry. He lives and teaches in Hickory, North Carolina with his partner, Sallie Anglin, and their variegated collection of cats.