The Logic of Clouds
by Marc Pietrzykowski
Published 2009 by Blaze Vox [books]
http://www.blazevox.org
ISBN 9781935402480
76 pp, Paperback, $16
Reviewed by David Blaine
I’m going to start right off saying that Marc Pietrzykowski is too smart for me. He’s grandly educated, enormously well read and if a belly full of molten lead is a good impetus to write from, he’s got a damn big belly.
Marc writes neither for an academic audience nor for a casual audience. Marc would probably say that he writes for Marc. It seems that way to me. The man has a penchant for the kind of diction you’d find in the Q’ran or the Old Testament. He also has a thing for obscure superheroes, although, well, obscure might just reflect an age difference, or how narrowly I’ve read comic books.
To write poems that decry the evils of our society and not cause offense is nearly impossible, but Marc seems quite skilled at it. I was actually startled after reading
“A Conceit for Middle Managers”
I just know you’re going to breed, or have done,
you booth-tanned deck-hands of industry
below deck your wife will pinch out a son
or future wife-well, que sera, sera
and as soon as the little mewler comes,
you’ll point at the stain on the floor and tell’em
“That’s where I was born,” then teach him his sums,
karate, French: cram his cerebellum
so full, the story goes, that one day he might
clean the captain’s quarters, or even take
the helm when some mate falls ill. I just know
you’ll bring him portside one calm, moony night
to see all the ramshackle rafts, the wake
churning up bodies whose eyes glow
like lost treasure, the thirsty moans rising
from the ones without sense enough to die,
and I know you’ll show him then how to piss
like a man, over the rail, chastising,
all the while, the shipless for their sloth. “Why
don’t they just get on board?” Ah, child. You’ll kiss
his innocent head and wonder, at dawn,
where in the hell all the rats could have gone.
I wondered, is it possible he had the stones to write what I think he’s written? And after I re-read it, yes, I believe he did. So many of us would have the captain walk the plank, but it was refreshing to read that someone else would also hold the lackeys accountable.
Another poem I found refreshing was
“The Perpetual Attrition of the 19th Regiment”
We set the lamps down beside the road
and squinted back beyond the dome of light,
back toward all the bodies—the captain showed
us the map again, where we should’ve gone right
instead of left, how we might get back on track—
but we’d had enough of cartography,
and captains too. He didn’t fight back,
so we fed his heart to the dog. Then Raffey
put his boots on and got us all walking
again, out toward the sound of running water
he swore he’d heard. After a mile of stalking
this aural mirage, we had to slaughter
him too, having noticed his kid-gloved hand
held a map, that his eyes burned to command.
This piece remindes me of the new fever that seems to be sweeping the conservative movement in the United States right now, that educated leaders are a problem and we just shouldn’t think too much about things. It reminded me how many attacked the Obama campaign because he’d been to Harvard, as if that was an evil thing.
This is a sizeable collection and selecting a couple of poems like this does not do the book justice, but there are many others I enjoyed as well, and many others I hope to one day understand well enough to get a hand hold on them.
If you like to read things that make you stop and think, this would be a good volume to add to your library.
[...] Ok, maybe not so shameless… review of my book #2 at outsiderwriters.org. [...]