STEVEN JOYCE - POEMS

Steven Joyce is an Associate Professor of German and comparative studies at the Ohio State University, Mansfield campus.  He has published a book on G. B. Shaw entitled Transformations and Texts as well as a number of poems in literary journals including Kimera and Red River Review and Minimus.  His award winning book of essays entitled The Winds of Ilion appeared in 2011 and a book of poetry, The Apostate Djin, appeared in 2013.  He holds a Ph. D. in comparative literature from UNC-Chapel Hill and has published a number of articles on literary theory and criticism.
 

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Magician’s Hubris
​

​It drifts through us
like a mist, a small cloud, a murky overcast.
Neither father that abandons family
nor mother who slips away down those back steps of longing
can colonize despair like IT does.
This monogamous sleight-of-hand,
What kind of trick is this?
When revealed we say
How Simple
How Clever
How Awful
The night that sets in between the needy rounds of applause
rises and fills like the waters of a great lock
slowly
inexorably
wantonly
until one day in dream’s night
it fills
and father mother brother sister disappear
as the magician takes a bow.

Sea at Mollendo
​

​Like a phantom with a spit curl
roiling, mumbling, gyrating
this Moche sea breathes offshore through a thick
and cold phlegm--a croup that rattles in the lungs
and spews mist from the tumbling troughs  
where the sea birds in gyre
ride the Humboldt current dark
and graven in the greyest of urgency
it gathers in the black canyons at depth
where conversation grins with alien teeth
and chides with cutting iridescence
the dark into slices of despair. . .
 
Life lacks common sense
the Moche in their dark world
lacking what looks like grace
or humor  yet the bones lay in a comic heap
on the desert floor, this desiccated Eden
of jaguar teeth and  spider gods
tumi and the gush of oxygenated blood
to appease suburban gods--monsters
with broad smiles and bloated heads.
 
Elsewhere but not far off
the turf unrolls and washes
the feet of the pre-Incan clean
with Mists that rise and float
above the plain ossified with the scribble
of cut and mutilated bone.
 
They never ask about
Al Paec his untoward appetites
or require the eight-armed decapitator god to say
why he looks like an octopus.
 
Their cleverness with gold and copper
green and red parrot feathers,
with ceramics and textiles notwithstanding,
these preincaicos in their copper colored enthusiasms
and iridescent evils bend and break
in sloughs of cessation no god finds satisfying.
 
 
 
In Huaca de la Luna land--Cajamarca
the Moche still watch
the waves that break and exhaust
their small excesses.
 
The sea this day its teeth
stained grey with coca, fatigue, and fear
does not smile
but argues in the deep channels and offshore valleys
the unseen movement—the hortatory violence
that remains unrecompensed.
 
I never feared the sea
until I came to Mollendo
the land of the Moche
and felt the mist
and saw the grey
and heard the water,
the rip tides tearing at the heart
of things
and in the back seat of the station wagon
that nearly rolled into the desert
on the way to Mollendo,
saw firsthand how finality can look with sandy eyes
through a girl’s unruly bangs hiding
the funny face of the decapitator god.
 
 
 

Meno a Beauty Unmenaced (Iota in the Afterlife)
​

I have discovered
for the first time I
should say recovered
the eristic breath of Meno
and now believe that
 
the tree and the flower
the sun and the moon
the alpha and omega
have been mine
all along.
 
I forget here in Ohio
how much I know
of virtue and soul
of Eros and Agape
 
I dine at the house of Agathon,
the epideictic chatter between bites of dolmades
loud, the talk of virtue and goodness, strange
ideas I do not need on my trip—I look to Osiris
consolations I know in my pharaoh’s life--
cosmogonic sex or sipping Tenenit’s beer
some emmer wheat and figs.
 
These mounted thoughts like Nubian horsemen
scare me yet accompany me on my Journey
down darkly colorful corridors
dug with ferret teeth beneath sandstone I am cheered
at the clink and clank of my trove
my clunky numbers melted into geometric ingots
of orphic wisdom, my arithmetic coffin filled
with jostling Mnemosyne they bury
me with my sacred numbers
so I can speak the langue of the life to come
and chat with a god or two  . . .
 
You see its true
You can take it all with you.
 
 

The Basel Nightingale
​

A musty turn of heart
no nightingale, however
sweet its song
will sing
of annates or expectatives or precaria
that dwell in the breach
between Ohrmazd and Ahriman.
 
In their factories of contention
they split like woodcutters
the soulish thing from flesh and bone
then recede slinking
into dirty cowls and holy hoodies
gangsters hiding in transubstantiations
of stone and tree, wine and water
the benefices of self-loathing and scruffy hope in perpetuity--
first fruits rotting on the Tree.
 
We pray for belief
and for the day
when we no longer need to suffer
the logic of redemption
or the ecstasy of renunciation
and from the Venusberg or Brocken
enjoy the full cacophonous melody
of a god waking
to the human Other
curious and coy asking
“What are your Names, dear ones?”
 
 

Indictment
​

​You candlewaster quack
You kobold with a pen
selling amulets and glass beads
pretty cloth and ribbons
to unwary sinners—innocents
foreswunke in lists of philanthropy and to-do.
 
Superior in their devout enthusiasms
and religious arts,
they buy up
your salves and ointments
and Philosopher’s Eggs by the dozens
nested in bright but fatal inquiry
and like the salvor who tastes for a living
hope “not today.”
 
They apply this poultice,
these fatty philistines and armchair patriots
and sink in viral comfort to wait . . .
 
They recall the amber nights,
the times when they manned and womanned the barricades
high atop the trundled palaver and ergonomic philosophies
of the sacral Self from here they slung
their taunts and sneers from the makeshift obstacle
thinking
it might endure or thwart
that body of empty stabilities waiting ten deep
to butcher up their heroisms.
 
And there they take their stand
at someone else’s rebellion
brave and happy to have been called
to the higher Self,
eager for otherworldly recompense
and the gaud of heavenly casinos, the gilded spas
that echo with grace
as redemption appears sail-first on the horizon
only to sail away.