Writing Samples

Poetry by Jon Raasch


A Calzone

We've wandered the night somn
ambulists.
Dawn's alabaster drinks crimson
like a heliotropic dipsom-
aniac, alert, watch-checking,
waiting, as we do, for the eminent sun.
Behold! the anticipated spills its basin,
an orbed spear-tip gashes upward,
melting, it awakes the warred
and ridden people; with handsome
rays the sun cleanses, imitates St. Michael.
And, in its light, we find David's Michelangelo
 
action figure—surrealism in the bleak grass.  Henri Michaux
spots his orange bandana and sings une chanson:
"Ma colere est ma colere"
"Enlarge thy baldness like an eagle (Micah
1.16)" replies Dave the Biblist,
monotonical and brave as his Mikey-
angelo action icon.  Henri Michaux
kicks a soccerball, transforms into multiple Czech
writers and Marcel Proust, who disappears.   The Czechs
unify, raise rings to conjure Michael
Jackson, and exit, stage left, backwards.
Their distant drums fade westward.
 
Even as the sun grows empyrean. "The word,"
replies Dave "is effulgent."  Vestiges of Michaux
are gone, so we delight in moving forward
and walk hand in hand towards
the glorious refulgence of the sun,
the Southern Lord High Steward,
wigged, ephemeral.  We travel onward!
with Dave clutching his hero doll, the catalyst
of all events; a green, cutlassed
mutant, a fearless party dude warding
off Shredder cheese.  Splendid checkmarks 
of pure sun dance his plastic head.  Czech
 
Kafkaologists writing in German call this 'check-
ification' or heliocentric cowardice.
According to one, Helios played checkers
with the Queen of the Caucasus and was constantly in check.
Another claims Helios, goaded by loss, castrated Mike
D.  The last says Helios, bored of both checkers
and Mike D, sculpted the glorious Czech
race in three days from prominent rocks sun-
dered by seismic pressure;  and was so pleased by the consum-
mation, that he reclused, forgot his checkered
past, his Earthly body, and was rejoined to his blest
astral brothers and sisters in silent, fatalist
 
motion.  David and I are brown and calloused,
our forms and angular shadows are check-
marks of darkness in gold light.  Palaced
specks of sun coagulate in treebranches, listless
puppets of the dryads.  We hyperboreans travel homeward,
plenty beyond the north wind, with no ontologolous
thoughts between us.  Beyond all the edges glisten,
and Dave, replicant as always, quotes Micah:
"and the day shall be dark over them."  Michelangelo's
head, chryselephantine green, elicits
the last vibrant streaks of orange from the waning sun
and fades into cool gray, into jade, into gypsum.
 
We arrive in Hyperborea well after the sun.
According to legend Apollo was imprisoned here in a chrysalis
of light because he goaded the creator of the Czechs,
Helios, who decreed "His tomb shall be perpetually Northward!"
Tonight we sleep in the cold for tomorrow is Michaelmas.

2004