Ed Skoog: Poems

Ed Skoog was commissioned by Hugo House to write new poems on the theme of Under the Influence as part of the first event of the 2010-2011 Hugo Literary Series. Skoog premiered his suite of poems at Hugo House on October 15, 2010, alongside novelists Jess Walter & Nancy Rawles and kid-pop band The Board of Education.

Ichiro Flies Out to Left

Pitchers have their superstitions and I have my honesty to consider

Gulls fight above the crowd.
The architect climbs the stadium steps,
her scarf a red assault against the software sky.

Pitcher and batter are co-creators of meaning.

I think of the Oriole who required his baseball sit on the mound when he went out to pitch and would not take one from the umpire, who despite his facemask is not a god.  

I had to learn the codes.
That is how masculinity wears its drag
and vulnerability is weeded out.

The gym teacher at Potwin Elementary warned they’d call my last name only and not care my feelings, well fuck that I thought, b/c I want to feel, that most of all.

How is this helping my death practice?

Final moments of the season, I scarf a chili dog, look off the upper deck at Puget Sound
puddling against cargo scales.
A small pleasure drifts off Alki Point.
After the game, other operations will continue with sails.
The ball will behave in familiar uncomforting ways in the constant contemporary,
someone else reading their fortune in shells
spat before the dugout.

When the game ends
attendants emerge with brooms

sweep away the chalk outlines as around a dig-site
lines brighter where not stepped on

a seasons’ repeated applications of lunar dust.

Or to put it a different way, how much freedom would you sacrifice for money, for

how much money? Seasons pass and we have
little to show but these recitals of self-annihilation.

On my way out of the stadium, I look back

where the field is quickly being put away
        a map that traces the surface and what hovers there a moment almost invisible
                flash of green, last moment of sunset over ocean

not a verbal answer but a sheer answering follows,

        and then I’m drawn into the consuming surge flowing from stadium to congested
boulevards that throng awhile then empty.

Route

I’m trying to find where influence ends
a force
        immigrant in spirit

slowly learning the new language
insufficient to rely on the old
so is mostly silent, or deafening.

I see now the original inquiry was too small to contain the experience I want to understand.

Who am I? What
should I do? We

go into certain happenings

like children into empty houses
                                       or an acquaintance continuing to talk

at the urinal.
It makes me want to run straight into the free clinic and steal
the hats veterans wear.

Oh, for beautiful language. I’ve been sleeping on the bus  
dreams of fox running morel forest in fast shadow.

It’s soothing to loose
everyplace. Sway wends
its give, breathy diaspora.

Oh, to steady the language back on its feet
        make it my
        father and my
        mother again.

Bell Ode

I felt like leaving
rightaway.

All through the better
months, the bell hung

                                        glowing over my front steps
ripening into itself a bloom.

What are stars, too?
                           Above cruise ships bearing
                     affinity groups away?

All through the month I lost
my name, that rind.

I shamble out with carnival favors, and down bright
road flinging the to-be found into the stray

                year where my cousins
                sleep. Let that news
        greet them underfoot and tin.

The Harvest Blues

run like mash from the cider press and I drink
right from the low machine as much worm as apple

“a technology that only reinforces old systems of loneliness”

like the image on the cell phone I found
during my final chore at the community garden,
digging up comfrey by where

the something used to be.

Fact is, I am sometimes
afraid to eat from my
own garden, pepper and tomato
I attended into being

Original questions remains unanswered
new questions bloom.
                                 Sometimes a kid
strolls through
           gardeners have gone.
The kid’s looking for a place to stash the six-pack among silk offers of late corn.

           Scarecrows sleep in their clothes.

What are his influences? Where does he get
his ideas?

He punts a newly-balooned watermelon,
pulls carrots up by their frizzy hair.
                                                    Scholar of the shovel
                   he adjusts almost

interlocking moments built to
a fall, a fugue. Truest gardener,

truth all summer, I see now,
bigger than question’s small answer, a stomp.

First Negative

Pulling me aside one afternoon the debate coach says
         I should hear what’s said about me.
         Friends are not my friends, life is not what I think.

Either I need
my coach’s truth
or dishonesty of my squad,

friendless in the auditorium or saved by enemy in Topeka leafless street
                                                                       Topeka basement hangouts
                                                                       long philosophical Topeka rides
                                                                       dishonest kisses, tender canards:

She’s trying to coach me to know, I know, to discern
                    con from mark. More than tutelary, it may
                              hurt her see me fooled.

Life was never what anyone thought it was, early
evening at the video store, comedy misshelved in drama.
                     Aerobic workouts stare
                     parking lot wintry
                     lunar outline.
                     As long to choose a movie as to watch it.

We step out, are our inside names no longer, enter
                                a new scene on a new reel

forward voyaging into conjecture, but I didn’t write
                                                               my eyes. I didn’t ask

my eyes to see anything for me.
They act on their own behalf

           and aren’t the only things that roll:
                      drum before an announcement
                      film frames before a bright bulb
                      skates, cigarettes get rolled, marks get rolled, consciousness probably too
                                                                                        universal figments

What the world hits first coming into town, border crossing
          so much abandoned at its
          threshold
                               yet forgone in the rush
familiar, forever alien

or open and closed alternating
like the drawer we keep knives in

a shapened memory.    

Coaches, you build your doorway too low. I smack
                                                          my head repeatedly, prow of entry
lee side putting the world away in drawers,

on the port side
a man looks at water
feels rain on his cheek.

In a Seattle Bar

At Kelly’s I watch the man lean, vomit
sweetpeas down his black sweatpants then swing
wheelchair over the spot. Is brought a fresh glass.

Many editions of the same story are issued,
sorrow’s collectibles.

I am just a performance, meanwhile,
                      or
the surviving twin looking off in the bar mirror.

Listen, I’ve seen that face before. Monday nights at Al’s on 45th
I sing ballads to the Wallingford slouch
           memory becomes notes,
           slouch to test and weigh. I call
    
                     a song the other musicians know
                                           or
           interrogating the major gestures, learn playing.

The underside of a drawn bow is pale as streetlight on the fiddle chaotic beside a pinball machine
          and echo orchestral intermission derelict lover of new concert halls in the language a
          lover’s clothes speak with black buttons red wool overcoat punctuation. And hear in
          harmony ermine re-enactments, lived-in arrangements,

one mood sharpened to its opposite  
carried out of money or memory forth.

Who calls the song pulls on a rope
secret knots that unburden and dissolve

more human for not dying
until the last note’s blown out.