Bruzina: Poems Copyright © 1998 by David Bruzina and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Poems David Bruzina The Politics Of Soup At The End Of The World By the house at the midpoint of the world's edge, the fire is burning nicely. There's a big pot hung on an iron hook hung from an iron chain hung from nothing. The Chef is there with his heavy ladle. The soup has been going for centuries, smoking a little, bubbling a little around the edges, smelling so delicious. Everything's in there: onions, beef, mushrooms and salt. Fish heads to strengthen the stock. Pepper to give the juices a little bite. There are also more exotic ingredients-the Chef is no slouch. He's got Russians and Jews, Arabs and Catholics, Germans, Spaniards and Serbs. He's got Zulu in there with Hutus and Tutsi. He's got the indigenous people of Brazil and a whole bundle of American Capitalists. He's got Chinese, Turks, Koreans and Tibetans. He just added a couple of extraordinarily ordinary citizens of France. Already the latter are getting soft, bits of them are breaking off and swimming around in circles. There's a pile of bowls on the grass. The Chef is stirring the soup. He's lifting ladles of soup and pouring it back, watching the steam rise and the smell-the smell is like a chord of excellent music. High in a window, the dinner bell is rung. We are all coming: soup for the wicked, soup for the righteous, soup for the ones in between, the ones who are cautious, the ones who like to think a little, first. Bruzina 2 Copyright © 1998 by David Bruzina and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 The Inventor Of Capitalism The mind was a hand that went groping among the stromatolites, picking at heaps of wet dung, rolling mud into balls and flicking them into the ocean. There were no thoughts. There was no place to keep them. The fist leaked. The thumb was an irritant. Everywhere the hand went there were temperatures, seams, and liquids of changing viscosities; there were good textures. The thumb wanted work. The thumb wanted numbers and tools. It liked to say one and five. I liked to protrude and be noticed. It poked its print in the wet black sand, it pried at the cracks. It pricked itself on a sea urchin, swelled and never went back. There was a Greek who cut off his thumb for the steel bead that sat in its joint, praying. No one remembers his name. There was a click in the back of his head. There was a thin wire reeling itself down his spine. Could I become a deity, he wondered. No one took him seriously. No one knows which poor child found the severed thumb. The Politics Of Soup (Symbiotics) We woke up to the morning of mornings, to water and salt and minerals, bits of vegetable matter, woke up like little mouths from the most unequivocal sleep. Educated in hunger and nothing else, we nibbled the hairs from each other and fastened ourselves to each other's bodies, sucking the thin juices, the chains of protein and swallowing them. Those of us with teeth chewed. Bruzina 3 Copyright © 1998 by David Bruzina and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Even the plastic husks, even the transparent membranes were eaten. Still, it was only when one, swollen, ambitious, with fins perhaps and eyes like a fetus's eyes, swallowed the other whole and the other decided to live there-it was then that politics became critical. The one issuing warnings and threats down its own primitive throat. And the other responding, revolting, drawing lines inside that gelatinous body, talking back from inside, setting terms and threatening revolution. Thank You Lord For The Love Of Fat Because the rich are rich, they want elaborate coffins. Wood of the tree. Silk of the shroud. Silver handles carved by Paul Revere. Meanwhile, a small boy eats eggs benedict for the first time and suddenly believes in God. What will he become? A peach-picker, a diplomat, traffic-cop, priest? On a slow, blue fire, the copper pot bubbles. The waiter shakes the table- cloths. In a dim corner of the parking lot, the boy is shaking hands with someone in a tall white hat. Bruzina 4 Copyright © 1998 by David Bruzina and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 From The Book Of Kitchens From the book of kitchens came a last wail and squawk. The cook had left for Jamaica. The waiters had sacked the cupboards, stolen the coffee and torched the rice. There was chaos in the stew kettle. The oven window was cracked from within. (Who crouched in that hot cupboard, escaping memories of Czars; broken and basted by no one; cooked to a fragrant, accidental, perfection? (After the gleam on the butcher's knife and in his one good eye? (the winged hope grown clumsy?))) Float a candle on the broth. Chicken of souls. Work On the screen of my ceiling, hands flutter like moths, paired and agile, detached or maybe the wrists are in darkness. They hover in flocks in a spectrum of dirt colors, dragging rubber shadows over my body, their fingers twitching, squeaking with finger-oil. I see a pair jiggle and itch and circle and dip towards another and two sets of hands clasp and fall in a four-handed fist, through tiers of gradual light, past mirrors and clocks and the edge of my bed. There is no sound of impact. I Bruzina 5 Copyright © 1998 by David Bruzina and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 would stand if I could. I would tilt the light, allow it to spill past the dip and rise of hands, past the edge of my bed to where I've imagined the lumped floor littered with dead hands rotting and drilled like cheese. Maybe the light would reveal them instead, merged into new shapes, centipede-like with fat legs and palm-shaped plates on their backs. Maybe the light would gleam off an ocean of finger flesh and liquid skin, a quivering soup lapping the legs of my bed, swelled the precise volume of four hands every fixed period of days or weeks or years, gnawing the paint, melting the plaster walls, preparing a slow and inevitable flood. The Egg Meaty gelatinous bread of the embryo. Stolen in the world's first crime. Sucked while some one sobbed and wailed, while another nursed an impotent pride and in the trees, predators fought to maintain their composure, drawing maps and inventing pots Bruzina 6 Copyright © 1998 by David Bruzina and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 of boiling water. Salt's lover. Pepper's lover. Crackable stuffed stone. Heart of my belly. Biscuit of patience. Agate of serenity. Filbert of unshakable optimism. Token of universal pre-memory. Egg, as I prepare to walk among the cowbirds, opossums and snakes of this pecking, tooth-sown world, I offer you the worship of my tastebuds, the unassailable cradle of my gut and the promise that tonight while sprinkling parsley on your stewing mother, I will praise and remember your elliptical, original architectural glory.