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    Martial Music
    Martial Music
    Martial Music
    Ebook102 pages53 minutes

    Martial Music

    By George Amabile

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    About this ebook

    Martial Music, George Amabile's eleventh book and newest collection of poetry, explores the relationships between civilization, technology, empire and human violence, theatres of war, the collateral damage of military occupation, the machinations of power politics, oil spills, destruction of the environment, ptsd, and other characteristics of what we call "world events." These are tough poems for tough times--our times--when the human cost of military conflict, environmental disaster and gun violence have become the daily staple of news headlines. Provocative, unflinching and at times raw with the poet's fury at unfathomable acts, Amabile's poems converge as an urgent libretto against the militaristic tendencies that surround us, inciting a march toward the creation of a more peaceful and sincere world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSignature Editions
    Release dateJul 21, 2022
    ISBN9781773241074
    Martial Music
    Author

    George Amabile

    George Amabile has published ten books and has had his work published in over a hundred national and international venues, including The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, and Canadian Literature. He has won awards in the CAA National Prize, the CBC Literary Competition, the Petra Kenney International Competition and the MAC national poetry contest, and the National Magazine Awards. His most recent publications are a long poem, Dancing, with Mirrors (Porcupine's Quill, 2011) and Small Change (Fiction, Libros Libertad, 2011) both of which won Bressani Awards. George Amabile lives in Winnipeg.

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      Book preview

      Martial Music - George Amabile

      IN MEMORIAM

      It’s up

      like a mortar trailing sparks

      out of sight.

      Pock.

      Over a sea change

      of oohs and aahs,

      chalky pink & green

      feathers unfold

      a voodoo headdress in bright light.

      For nearly an hour

      there are sizzlers, pinwheels,

      lazy stardust

      fallouts

      like a Disney film

      intro, and the shock

      puffs of simple

      flak,

      building

      toward the climax, punch line, pay-off, denouement:

      at the center

      of the darkened stadium

      Old Glory hisses and glares,

      drools liquid fire into the grass

      and comes apart, slowly,

      like a skin disease under make-up.

      The ashes keep flickering

      in gridwork that looks like the street plan

      of a city that has been burning for thousands of years.

      BRICK

      Same and not the same, all these

      frail-edged tenants of sledge

      loads, shaped to stay where a slick

      parge sets them, in tight

      topple-proof walls or a stout

      fence, destined forever to be

      what they are, nothing

      else, though they also display

      attributes we admire:

      he, or she, is a brick,

      we say, a mute

      replaceable unit that keeps

      the team keen, and locked

      on target, a solid base

      we know how to multiply

      and make use of. Numberless,

      nearly invisible pockets

      of air make them easy

      to break anywhere,

      and ready to soak up

      coat after coat of public

      whitewash. Whole

      cities, whole civilizations:

      nothing left but ruins we pay

      to see centuries later. Standing

      before the walls of Hadrian

      or Diocletian, we are struck

      speechless by fortress power

      stripped of its marble, revealed

      as common clay dried in the sun,

      drab, colossal, the work of so many

      dead hands without names.

      STICKS AND STONES

      The Museo has devoted an entire floor

      to the history of weapons. Out in the light

      the columned facade of a temple

      sacred once to Diana is pocked

      with bullet-holes from The Great War.

      News Stands are still selling posters:

      Benito’s fat lips and thick neck, Adolf’s

      cowlick and rat’s eyes and clipped moustache,

      the first white rush at Los Alamos. . .

      And there are books, more every day, explaining

      with restrained awe and subdued satisfaction,

      that we’ve always had the know-how to develop

      improved ways and means, more compelling reasons,

      to kill: humans, animals, insects, weeds.

      HISTORY LESSON

      We stand before a flight of stone

      stairs that lead up, and up

      to nothing but a cool breeze

      above the disappeared

      villa of a Magistrate

      who marketed fair-skinned boys,

      Greek tutors, Abyssinian virgins

      and made a fortune serious enough

      to buy his place in the Senate.

      Years go by. Then, unwilling

      to listen or unable to read

      the signs, he finds himself

      on the wrong side of the room,

      red-faced and swearing in a striped

      tunic, wheedling, glancing once

      or twice at that rude gang

      of upstarts, but forcing his attentions

      back to business just in time

      to miss the way blood sprays

      a patch of sunlit marble

      but echoing shouts that twist

      in the dome wrestle him

      back and he remembers

      legends: an Egyptian King,

      the world’s longest river, turned

      suddenly red, a burst of hail

      and fire, insect wings choking the sun.

      REMNANTS OF EMPIRE

      1

      Fountains glisten and sing

      in the wind

      that blows as it did for Hadrian once

      at his Tivoli Villa. A water jet

      struggles to keep its willowy shape in a storm

      of rainbows. I see what he

      might have seen — Aphrodite, crowned

      with foam, deep in the mind.

      The stone women of Karyai

      seem to withstand the same wind

      that sweeps the reflective pool to chipped marble,

      but the soaked folds of their garments

      are pressed flat against thighs

      and nipples by imagined weather,

      by desire eased out of thought

      and found again at the powdering tip

      of a chisel. It blows

      where he stood, where I stand now,

      has blown for thousands of years

      in the flesh, between water and stone.

      2

      Night. I walk the streets

      of Rome for hours, climb

      stone stairs toward a window

      that soaks clotheslines

      and laundry with kitchen light,

      cross a piazza, follow a crumbling wall

      back toward the heart

      of the city and come out, blinking,

      into the glare

      of The American Bar.

      Tonight, the place is almost

      empty. A woman

      sits by herself. Light

      from the shape-shifting flame

      of a candle plays

      over her face and makes her look

      like a reflection on water.

      I watch a current of blue

      smoke speed up and slip

      through an air vent’s crusted grid

      like the

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