Intimate Portrait

Intimate Portrait

To grow up knowing how
to hold your own death
like a library card...
and to softly place it
in a cupboard.
Perhaps field mice
would get it before
it got you.  You imagined
you could learn on-the-run.

AN EXTRA BLUE MILE, A Red Shuttleworth Poetry Chapbook

  

An Extra Blue Mile

poems

Red Shuttleworth

Realizing that a preceding chapbook, Blue Book, ought to have also contained five other poems from the blue books project, Red Shuttleworth bundled them into a new chapbook, An Extra Blue Mile, issued in a very limited edition (29 copies) by Bunchgrass Press.

The poems in An Extra Blue Mile are:

Stay or Go

Ambulance on Highway #17

Nikolai Gogol

Mikhail Bulgakov

and

Sunlight-Scatter... Saturday

Red Shuttleworth

BLUE BOOK, A Red Shuttleworh Poetry Chapbook

Blue Book

Eight Poems

Red Shuttleworth

Eight poems from a recent Red Shuttleworth series composed in longhand in 28-year-old Drake University examination blue books are presented in a new chapbook, Blue Book, published by Bunchgrass Press in a limited edition.

One of the rediscovered 28-year-old  Drake University

exam blue books used by Red Shuttleworth to compose new poems.

The poems included in Blue Book are:

Soren Kierkegaard

Sigmund Freud (On America)

Gary Cooper

Harry Truman

Salvador Dali

Joseph Beuys

Only for the Gone

and

South of the Snake River

South of the Snake River

Red Shuttleworth

Visiting Writer, Drake University, Spring Semester 1987

South of the Snake River

South of the Snake River

Early May... you slow-drive Lyons Ferry Road,
drought not so evident.  Windows rolled down,
you look-'n-listen for ancient Nez Perce  ponies.
Double-wide farmhouses... shower-damp road,
aged bloodshot eyes in the rear view mirror.

You park the car, walk a crushed rock road.
Head-down, you scrawl and organize
--jerky penmanship--  simple toolbox words.
Daydream-tangible, the sky turns choppy-grey.

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov

Furious, devil-growl thunder to a threadbare east,
cartoonish voices on crackle-patriotic television....

Kiev: May Day afternoon.  Your yellow-rose house
casts a pale shadow for the drunk and fevered.
They're selling potatoes, painted rugs, old shoes,
manuscript ashes on a street of broken stones.

In Moscow they peddle CD's of Joe Stalin singing...
We're alone... among the thorns of the bush.

Only for the Gone

Only for the Gone

The physical weight of a daydream:
Basho's decay-to-dust walking stick.

So it is that you establish
two children in a winter procession
carrying ancient bronzed toddler shoes.

The inner life: slumped over-and-into fried eggs
at a roadside cafe, you're way too old for funerals.

Abundance: a crush-heavy sky over desert.
Someday, We used to live around there.

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Set warm and face-down in the earth,
heart still beating, you were abandoned...
pain-twisted like a Ukrainian curved pine.
Laughter: the weight and heat of your fire:

light and darkest night... spilled ale...
rum cake.  Heaven never gets fleshed-out.

Vladimir Putin brings wild blue orchids
to your grave.  Big-gesture tsars are lost
forever in the scrawl of secretaries...
dead souls... gap-tooth nightmare grins.

Sunset on Mars

Sunset on Mars (NASA photograph)

Sunset on Mars

You awaken to mountains without tree line...

death-breeze... slow-settling red-ocher grit-veils.

Sadness grounded, you slow-roll toward eternity...

a water-gone Mars... burnt chocolate on cinnamon. 

Distant metallic scuffle of large Martian mammals,

armor against thick body plate?  No... it's wind...

an amethyst sky, a blinding pewter-blue sun

at horizon... broiled.  This is palpable dust-to-dust.

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys

Wrapped in elk grease and thick felt,
thinking grows tactile...
as your fingers comb your history...
as your neocortex loses its metaphysics.

As for the coyote...
the coyote is a generation ahead of itself...
engaged in watching a city street...
a captive and companion.

You and the coyote exchange
specially designed keys made with bison hump.

You ride around in an ambulance
until it is time to jet-away.

Wrapped in elk grease and thick felt,
you learn to walk and to sing...
to chew cyclone fence and warble...
man to moon... coyote to dead hare.

Coyote and Joseph Beuys

Stay or Go

Keota, Colorado, Dust Bowl

by Arthur Rothstein (courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Stay or Go

Along with a sand-wind to grit dishes,

a squabble of hawks in a sad claimants 

titanium-blue sky.

Not-right-now marionberry

cafe pie... dead flies

in the dust of a display case.

The looted aquifers....

No one knows anymore...

not for sure.

Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper

Every time it 1959-rains, teachers herd
jr. high kids into a High Noon auditorium.
Black 'n white Cooper and Grace Kelly...
train station, dust, and a gunfight street.

Weightlessness of autumn rain's whisper
on urban-cropped grass, no cattle for miles.
You have no concept of lovers-'n-ulcers.

The film always picks up at the last place
it was turned off... a dizziness of time.
Years pass before you can spell Prostate,
but it kills strong-'n-silent Marshal Kane.

With decades you can become your own double,
disappear into your own no-hero dumb stunts...
no snowy-mountain likeness to Cooper.

Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard

A serene elderly couple,
bodies compacted, whittled narrow
by wind through December aspen trees,
rides a rusty-chain swing set.
Against a windowless wall
of an abandoned factory,
a film is projected... a firing squad.
The cobbled ground glitters
with sunlight off colored
bits of bottle glass.

PLOUGHSHARES Includes a Ciara Shuttleworth Poem

The current issue of Ploughshares (Spring 2015), a "Transatlantic Poetry Issue" edited by Neil Astley, includes Ciara Shuttleworth's "Limerence."


Among the other poets presented in this issue of Ploughshares: Sean Borodale, Marianne Boruch, Louis de Paor, Stephen Dobyns, Elaine Feinstein, Nick Flynn, Vona Groarke, Barbara Hamby, Rita Ann Higgins, Tony Hoagland, John Hodgen, Michael Hofmann, Andrew Hudgins, Major Jackson, Michael Klein, Dorianne Laux, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Michael Longley, Thomas Lux, Aonghas MacNeacail, Medbh McGuckian, Paula Meehan, Sinead Morrissey, Paul Muldoon, Caitriona O'Reilly, Frank Ormsby, Roger Reeves, Michael Ryan, Austin Smith, Anne Stevenson, Amy Woolard, and Matthew Zapruder.

 Ciara Shuttleworth has published poetry in Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, The New Yorker, The Norton Introduction to Literature (11e), and The Southern Review.  She was a 2014 Jerome Foundation Fellow at the Anderson Center at Tower View.  She is currently in residence at Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida.

Ploughshares is a distinguished literary journal published at Emerson College in Boston.  The journal is guest edited serially by significant writers.

SOLITUDES: A Red Shuttleworth Poetry Chapbook

Solitudes

a scatter-shot poem

Red Shuttleworth

The final version of Red Shuttleworth's Solitudes, a moving-parts poem which has been presented in-progress on the blog, is now a (limited edition) Bunchgrass Press chapbook.

A Blood Moon... April 2015