Two
poems from Daniel Groves's The Lost Boys
followed
by a note on the author
Portrait
I. APERTURE
The monkey is the only producer of pictures
who imitates nothing and recognizes only the
unadulterated pleasure of the disruptive mark
– Thierry Lenain, Monkey Painting
That
old scene – monkey see and monkey do –
is done. That organizing grind, the grid,
is barred. Guerilla movements must exclude
such cagey, simian similitude,
banana republic exhibitions rid
the colony of artists. It's a zoo.
Or
New World Order? Pleased to trace our line
from theirs, the prim revere a primitive –
wrenching, illuminating – by Ape X.
Abstract expression climbing to an apex?
Creation thus evolving to outlive
our monkish copying? A monkeyshine?
We
draw on our background, animals instinct
with second nature (God, the strain), in the dark
of which we – as the continent, prehensile
detailers and apologists, with stencil
and rule – make light, for this disruptive mark,
to miss it, feeling, in the missing, linked.
II.
IMAGE
Featuring the complete line of
Canon copiers – Advertisement
Outside
the window, sheets of rain, the garden;
inside, the earth-toned ceiling sprouts a batch
of sprinklers, all aligned like silver flowers
to spray the cloud-gray tiled floor with showers
should I, and not the copier, strike a match.
The temps go down to smoke. I beg their pardon.
Reflecting
in the depthless black, I smack
the next original against the glass,
face down, and shut the lid – a blinding light –
its spitting image spits right up, upright.
The echoes of a Catechism class
reprove me as I'm thumbing through the stack:
Salvation
in the Information Age?
Or just mass reproduction? This debate
repeats itself until a paper jam
(these damn contraptions). I am that I am;
a copy copies, but cannot translate
the space beyond the margins of the page.
Way
Back
Episodic family vacations ... only one
still went along: "The Baby," whose own caprice –
expansive, interior-their out-dated wagon
became the seat of (a stationary agon;
express, per-minute revolutions vis-
a-vis – that plotted triptych-Dad, Mom, Son.)
Whoa.
Slow down. The vehicle's auto-emotive
design – that flipped-up way back – made him
turn
his back on where he came from, which was where
he headed also, as the impassive stare
that met his (had time permitted him to learn)
might well have shown, but – "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph..."
"Damn
Sunday drivers," stalling. The old man –
ingenuous, explosive – pulled away
at last, outdistancing that always-close-
behind (but farther, farther) figure. Adios,
El Camino. The Mini-Vanish age, one day,
will leave us in the dust. Headlights began,
in
grave procession, clicking on. Recline
from dim reflection, child, that long-rehearsed,
spectacular total reckoning, hard and fast
asleep, who saw it coming, going past,
past all recognition. Dad braked, cursed,
and bore toward the exit, hugging the broken line.
©
Daniel
Groves was born in Wakefield, RI, in 1977. He was educated at
Johns Hopkins University and now lives in Cambridge, MA. His
poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Paris,
Yale, Cincinnati, Virginia Quarterly, Sewanee
Theological, and Backwards City Reviews, Literary
Imagination, Raritan, Dark Horse, 32 Poems,
Confrontation, Unsplendid, Smartish Pace,
Best New Poets 2005, and Poetry.
"Portrait"
first appeared in the Paris Review, and "Way Back"
first appeared in the the Virginia Quarterly Review.
