Joseph Voth

A Brief History of Words

And, if in the search for meaning, we should happen
Upon a box of photographs in God’s garage,
Shall we split it open, begin a post-mortem on that
Collection of images which passed before the camera’s
Unreliable shutter-stop, its tendency toward bleach
In the apertural snapshot, its iris all gawk, but
Our memories slim as greased nickels down a slot
So that the Almighty’s garage-box seams bulge
With neglect and even what is written on each photo
In the box, the cosmological catalogue of what was
And wasn’t, is pointless, as language seems pointless,
A landscape of points rounded by indifference
And smoothed into a flatland of mirrors under a blanket
Of clouds? Say Cibachrome. Say luminous histogram.
Say Book of Last Deeds, chaptered and indexed
By degrees of regret. And if at first what comes to mind
Is the failure of the heart to be recognized by
The Committee of Realistic Men, it may be time
To draw conclusions from the well of History, dug
Deep and left covered in the Post-Truth Industrial Complex
That hovers in God’s eye line. It’s one thing to drive
Words on and off the expressway of paper, so that the story
Of wind seems merely the story of a wayward balloon
While the story of a man who lights his pipe in the forest
At the edge of town seems like a tribute to the old days
When our lives felt like yarn strung between the pushpins
Of unmarked graves, a distinction like the space between

An ant and its conscience on the road to rotting oranges,
And it’s another thing to love the world and go unanswered by it,
To hear the floorboards of love creak from boredom in the dark
House of the universe, but what, then, are words for if not
To fill the dark with suggestions?

A Brief History of the Cinematic World

In the beginning, God created

A room fleshed busy with talk, and
I moved from one face to another in that room,
A garden of eyes, flash points above the small talk lines,
Cameras, all,
as I am, and have been a camera,

A composer of sob stories, a cinematic,
Crescent-moon dance partner
Roomed with partners, each in the same reality—
Framed, shot, cut and soundtracked.

I could learn to love this world not for
The rag soaked in gasoline or the match lit
Or the burned corpse discovered in a trunk,
But for the camera itself.

~

Let’s begin to film. Quiet on the set.

I am born in the year of a woman torn open
Under a careless doctor’s blink.

I draw breath and a map of desire unfolds, a relief
Of high country at the map’s edges, curled by time,

So, when a certain light moves from the map and reveals
A woodgrain dressed as pages at the bruised ribcage

Of a book, I forget to be angry with the already-
Dishonest world and lose myself in both love and hunger.

~
A woman cries as she tells me of her good deed
Over a stranger’s sick bed and I cry inside myself

As she speaks, acting out a scene from a movie in which
A saint who could not distinguish birdsong from

A hammer’s rage mimicked the many shadows
Of people losing loved ones to the other world.

Someday my world will be the sound of shoes at the door
Of a room painted in colors manufactured for cheer

And wallpapered with pictures of people disappointed
By my continuance, please forgive the five-dollar word.

I am so afraid to die and leave behind each thing
I did not know would be the last when it began its slow

Division of arranged cells in the projectionist’s light.

I want to let a hard taste feel reckless in my mouth
Before they crochet me into a room darkened with lasts breaths,

Before they paint my shadow blue or attach my shoes
To legs with sugar-stumped understudies.

In the time left, a song will drop
From my memory,
So that even what I mistook it for will be lost,

The smell of chlorine at the public pool, for instance,

And the memory of my son at twelve with my anger
In his pocket like a coin he thinks he can toss before

He owns it, each memory somehow lost because the song
Pinned to it will not make it back to me before I am

Shaped into shadow by death and then, not even that.

~

The film closes.

In a darkened house, a tired stove shifts its fat legs,
And the dreamer awakens for this, the epilogue,

Like the autopsy of a fall from the bridge above water,

An endless field of blues, lines of white,
as the frames of

Waves divide once twice and become,

Finally,
one frame,
composed in the lens of the dying,

As we compose our different
wakings,

Our resurrectional rests in which to consider
The shallow focus of living, a fanned-out collection

Of jump-cut gestures, and then something new and
Alive in the camera’s lens
and then nothing new at all.

The Hive

Had he been more curious, my
Mother’s father might have asked the moon
Advice about its fat happiness
In a window frame, its double-chin joy
In a lake’s reflection at dusk.

As it was, my grandfather shook the rose bushes
Awake and whispered secrets into
His hands before he drove cars loaded
With gin through all the lives around him.

Big Ed, you must be out of gas
In the cosmos by now; you must be
Pared thin as the president’s hair and
Drunk on the kind of certainty only the
Dead take the time to learn about.

You must be tired, too, of waiting for us
To bring you up.
I’ll bet you think you’re
The one bee in God’s hive who wears
His shame vertically, but you’re not.
So forget about what you think you deserve
And get to know your neighbors there,

Wherever there is. Get busy and make
The kind of friends you can look in the eye
And ask for lessons on how to love.

The Meadow

Today, I parked my car at the edge of a meadow.

The recent rains had stuffed the grass with greening confidence.

Two reporters on the radio analyzed the president’s plan
To convert warehouses into concentration camps.

One heron, then another, passed from my sight
To where a slough edged with irises yawned.

A wind cleared its throat and the hills beyond the meadow
Fluttered and bowed like paper.

There was some discussion on the radio about the number
Of people who could be fitted into small spaces.

A rabbit leapt near a fence post or from it, for all I know,
For I was becoming someone far from the meadow already,

Someone who wished to go back, as we always wish,

And to kiss his young son and weep with shame
At how fat his comfort had become to let this bad work begin.

Joseph Voth teaches writing at Fresno City College. Voth's first collection of poems, Living with Noise, was published by NorthShore Press. Voth's work has been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, Lake Effect, Connecticut Review, Southern Humanities Review, and numerous other journals.