Andre F. Peltier: Two Poems

Les Bricoleurs et Le Jeu

The event,
the rupture
always/already exploding
w/ last week’s headlines,
always/already aflame
in the jungles
of western epistemé.
Down grow the roots
of language searching for
the water of meaning,
the flexible water of truth.
Like the roots,
the truth bends and tunnels.
Always at play
in the garden of meaning.

Queequeg’s coffin floats
on the waxen wings
of Skellig Michael vistas.

We make the world
w/ the tools at hand;
we build from the ground up.
We build in the image
of our gods:
the pen, the paper,
the dot-matrix.
We drink in the difference
of the word.
We feast upon the raw text,
 the cooked text,
the perfectly seasoned text
waiting to be understood
one phoneme
at a time.

 

FDR March 12, 1933 On The Bank Crisis (Humphrey Camardella Productions)

Fireside Chats

Sitting by the radio
while FDR calmed the
spirits of America
and the world,
we would ease into night
and the coming week.
Sunday evenings
we unwound in the bliss of
alliterative stillness
all was right with the world.
No war could trouble
our dreams.
Peace was on the horizon.
The economy was strong
in our minds.
No memories of October
crashes could make us lose
faith in the man we loved,
even if he was in a wheel chair.
He would talk to himself
through waves of light
and space;
dials would never miss
as the radios of
Brooklyn and Key West
found their frequencies.

Perhaps he glossed over
things.
The critics haven’t been
as kind as the listeners,
and the war didn’t
end all wars.
Our grandparents killed
and were killed and
invented histories to add
luster to the truth
of things.
A veneer of
half-veracities.
Economies rise and fall
and dust bowls stir up
again and again.
New deals are hard to
manifest
but we keep trying.
We see him with romantic
qualities he never had.
A cripple with a
pragmatic vision
yet as the voice,
the truth of Americanism,
flew through our mythos,
we held him in
happiness.

This too is a sort of
fireside chat.
Written in silence and
disseminated through
waves of publication.
Devoured by the
hungry throngs,
the poem is drowsily
dropped like the bombs
over London, Dresden
Hiroshima.
Born of brimstone and
suckled by mothers milk
as we lay by the lakes
dreaming daffodils
on the bay,
as we march towards

REVOLUTION

dying of fever in our tents.
We walk that walk:
romantic cripples
longing for connections
to the fireside
of life.

Andre F. Peltier

Riddled with Arrows 5.2: “Spotlight 2022”
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