Joe Wenderoth

Joe Wenderoth was born in 1966, grew up in Baltimore, and attended Loyola College, New York University, and Warren Wilson College, where he received his MFA. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Great American Prose Poems. Wesleyan University Press published his first two books of poems: Disfortune (1995), and It Is If I Speak (2000). Verse Press published Letters To Wendy’s (2000), a work of fiction, and The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft’s Secret Self (2005). Wenderoth’s latest book, Agony: A Proposal, is forthcoming from Verse in 2007. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

As Hour and Year Collapsed

We were a whole army underground;

we did not move.

We were replicas, at first,

but the army above,

that which we were shaped to resemble,

moved, spoke, faded, and came

to rot

in shallow graves above us.

We were never them;

even as the workers painted our eyes

the colors of their eyes,

even as they hauled us by torchlight

into the vast royal burial chambers

and made us to stand the way they stood,

once, above,

we were never them.

When our faces were finally finished

and our ranks were formed,

we stood guard over the absence

of the one who required us.

No one was allowed to look.

The chambers were sealed

and the last few torches burned down.

We stood suddenly alone in silent darkness.

We knew, though, that someone above

could imagine us,

and we could sleep standing up

in that image.

The workers, who painted our eyes

and carved our horses’ manes,

could imagine us—the priests,

who looked into our faces and blessed us

before and for this dark, could imagine,

and knew that we were there.

But then they moved, faded, and came to rot.

We were still spoken of, as time passed,

but only as an idea, as though

we did not actually stand here

inside the earth, in these colors,

these unseeing eyes, this dark.

No one any longer imagined us as real;

we had to imagine ourselves—

the way we looked, the way we stood—

from the inside,

from the stillness of our own hearts.

And we did learn to see ourselves in this way:

blind, colorful, standing guard over nothing.

And we came to accept,

as hour and year collapsed

into one dull drizzle of dust,

that we would not be found—

our guard would never be relieved.

There are worse fates than this,

we told ourselves,

without speaking, without moving,

without anyone above us in this darkness.

But we were wrong—what we told ourselves,

the way we stood, for years, in this darkness,

was wrong—all wrong.

And you, you bring how wrong to light—

you alone let the sharp light that forged us

fall hard on our faces again.

You alone remind us that what we have understood

has never been what we are.

Send New Beasts

These beasts will not do.

1.    Their bleeding is decidedly inadequate—from a distance they appear not to bleed at all. Considering the likelihood of distance in today’s spectator, this is not a small problem.

2.    While they are exotic enough in appearance—and I assume this is why they were selected—they have a tendency, and an ability, to hide themselves in plain view. I don’t claim to understand this ability—I only know that it is widely felt that, even at close range, they are difficult to get a good look at, and this is especially true when a blow is being struck upon them. It’s almost as if they’re immune to isolation—as if they are able to always appear, no matter how alone they are, in the noise and confusion of a herd.

3.    They are far too obedient and willing to receive blows. Indeed, they seem to sense when a blow is coming and to move intuitively into it. If this movement was desperate—graceful or graceless—it might generate some interest, but it seems to fall, tragically, somewhere in between. That is, they seem able, at every point in their torture, to collapse in a reasonable fashion, as if the collapse was being dictated by their own will. No one enjoys—I don’t think I even need to tell you—a reasoned collapse. It is this aspect of the beasts that most deeply defeats us, our simple want of a show.

4.    Their attacks—and I hesitate to even call them attacks—are largely indistinguishable from the active reasoning of their own collapse. It is as though they seek above all to expose us to this activity of theirs— to infect us with their will to reason, and in so doing, reduce us to the unvarying rhythm of their irreducible herd. I would like to say that we are immune to this reduction, but I am not sure. In any case, I see no good reason for continuing to subject ourselves to these attacks. It would be better to have no beasts at all—to live altogether outside of shows—than to sink numbly into tolerance of a spectacle which fails to clarify what it is that distinguishes us from beasts.

Narrative Poem

Gradually I got to aching so bad

that I couldn’t lie still.

I had a fever every day for a few years.

I took out school loans.

I watched a little tv in a little room.

I came into some pills—

friends were having back problems, dental work.

I moved my little tv from city to city,

watching with delight, with loathing.

Gradually the ache withdrew

into the foundation, lapping more softly

at my bones.

My girlfriend and I drove to Canada

and bought codeine.

We watched a tv movie

in a resort motel in the off-season.

We drove back and rented a house in Baltimore.

We got credit.

We bought a 32-inch tv and a new couch—

two-thousand dollars, all told.

I kicked out the driver’s side window of our car

in a Denny’s parking lot.

I filed an insurance claim;

many valuable objects had been stolen from the car.

We ran out of codeine.

I couldn’t afford to get the window fixed.

We drove all winter with the window down.

Our neighbor gave us a ten-gallon aquarium

and I bought two piranha.

I feed them a goldfish every morning.

Sometimes one will get its head and tail torn off;

even so, it swims around the tank a while.

Where I Stand with Regard to the Game

At first, I played the game as I was given to play the game. I played without grace, without pretense—I played with pure joy, and with a brutality all my own. I played the game without understanding that there was a game. This could not go on. I could not help but be taken in by the others, by the warmth of their constant measure, in which, it was said, I had a considerable potential for grace. So I gave myself to them. I learned how to hold a pretense, how to hold myself in check, and in my play, it was said, there gradually arose a new grace, an understanding of the game. This could not go on. Pretense gave rise to grace, I gathered, and so I held myself in check. I withdrew as powerfully as I had first played. The game went on and I taught myself to keep out of it—I taught myself to watch. To demonstrate my detachment, I described the game. At first, the lay of the field, the way the weather came and how the light in the field endured it. Then the way the players moved, the waxing and waning of their graces, and the shouts that seemed, alternately, the achievement of complete fullness and complete vacancy. These shouts defied description. I turned away from them—I turned away from my whole project, and turned to the rules of the game, which everyone had to admit had never been made sufficiently clear. Why was the field marked in this fashion? Clearly there are boundaries, but what of these zones within the area of play—what could they signify? Even the movement of the players—what is legal, what is not? What moves should the children emulate? There was room here for an understanding such as mine to do good work. In clarifying the rules of the game, I did not feel graceful, exactly, but I did feel as though I was developing a clarity in which the various graces of the players would have to be more apparent. I also felt that, so long as I was clarifying the rules of the game, I could not be blamed for my failure to describe the shouts of the players. As I worked, the game went on, untouched by my efforts. As I poured forth my eloquent logics and settled fine points never before addressed, it was as though the players were not listening. I felt, at first, that this was not of consequence— the players, in the midst of play, could not be reasonably expected to listen to me. I realized, however, as time went by, and as my work on the rules of the game became an increasingly undeniable success, that even those who were not playing, those who, like myself, watched—even these were not listening to me, and were not at all interested in making the amendments to the rules that my work made logical. This irked me. I began to ask myself why I continued with my work. I began to write less about the rules of the game and more about why I felt the need to write about said rules. The question of play arose—the question, that is, of whether or not I should have ever stopped playing, and whether or not it would be possible to play now. I began to speculate, from the incredible distance I had worked years to create, on the benefits of a life of play. Such speculation proved only the distance I had worked years to create. If I was to play—if I was to abandon everything I had ever worked for in favor of resuming a life of play—there could be no graceful approach. There could be no speculation. There would have to be something new, something defying description. There would have to be a complete and hopeless destruction of every grace, every distance. And that is where I stand.