Alex Grant
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Absurd
This has taken years - that's the first absurdity, but that's not really what you want
to hear - you're looking for pithy observations and flashing epiphanies - you want
tight quadrilles of prose lining up like lobsters – you want enlightenment to bang
on your window and ask you to come out to play – this is the second absurdity –
If you hadn't smoked that first cigarette, you could be walking through a walled
garden discussing rhododendrons with the woman who invented grace – but she
succumbed too – and she's scratching out a living now in some blank hinterland.
Meanwhile, there are no more absurdities, not since the girl with the skin disease
or the boy with the caliper, or the diabetic dog who can't eat bones – the marrow
sugar toxic to his tangled genes. This is a cancer, this is the sound of a tiny silver
insect flying at a light-bulb, thinking it's the moon – this is the sea calling, systole
and diastole pumping red and blue waves over your head, while you think about
how many rings the tree has, the thickness of its branches, the color of its heart.
A Means of Escape
- For John Updike, 1932-2009
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The catheter pumps pale yellow meds into his arm – shrivelled by inactivity
and the quiet passage of days – liver-spots and wrinkles long-since accepted
– acknowledgement of dog-days and November evenings long turned away.
The arm, the hand which held a rifle, a sickle, a man by the throat, a woman
by the hand which made the sign of the cross and clenched in a fist to shake
at God - which lifted red glasses to the sky, blue cigarettes to the mouth, the
china cups of thick coffee from white linen table-cloths – the instrument of
all his thoughts, channelled onto paper napkins, notebooks, flickering white
screens – all of it, would you believe, the result of neurons firing, arcing the
boundaries of a microscopic universe – flashing like an electric storm at sea
lighting the water and all that swims below it, all of this energy being sucked
back into the source, endless triumvirate of hand and eye and shrinking skin.
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Bio
Alex Grant's Chains & Mirrors won the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award(Best Collection by a North Carolina poet) and the 2006 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. Fear of Moving Water, his 2009 full-length collection, was a finalist for a number of national book contests and runner-up for the 2010 Brockman Campbell award(Best North Carolina Poetry Collection) and the 2010 Oscar Arnold Young Award. The Circus Poems was released by Lorimer Press in October 2010. A Pushcart nominee, he has received the Kakalak Poetry Prize and The Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, and his poems have appeared in many national journals, including The Missouri Review, Best New Poets 2007, Arts & Letters, The Connecticut Review and Verse Daily. He lives in Chapel Hill NC, with his wife, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess. He can be found on the web at www.redroom.com/author/alex-grant.