Christopher Merrill

In October 2007, in the library of the Shambaugh House at the University of Iowa, six poets—Tomaž Šalamun from Slovenia, István László Geher from Hungary, Simone Inguanez from Malta, Ksenia Golubovich from Russia, Marvin Bell and Dean Young from the United States—and I met to write poems together. Over the course of several afternoons we took lines and images from one another, in a spirit of exploration, to create a conversation in poetry. We would write for thirty minutes, creating a poem of fifteen lines, and then read our works aloud, jotting down words and lines and images with which to start a new poem, and so it went until we had created, in a process of call and response, of laughter and exploration, 7 Poets 4 Days 1 Book.

Here are three of my contributions to the sequence, which began with us reflecting on definitions of the word union:

Of this and that. The union of fabric and flesh. As when the bugler rose one night from a deep sleep, pulled on his fatigues, and left the regiment camped outside the walled city to wander through the desert until he came to a cave in which the scrolls had moldered and the bones of the divine shone intermittently. Tracer rounds lit a new route to the interior of the mud hut in which the patriarch of the family at prayer opened the holy book to the page on which nothing was written, and closed his eyes to chant above the din of artillery shells and the staccato of small arms fire. The quartermaster studied the neighborhood associations listed in the appendix of the report on the bridges destroyed in the last offensive, and counted backwards from ten. A tune forgotten by the bugler echoed in the cave, like the words dissolving on the scroll. Five, four, three…
__________

Quicksilver, and a sliver in the seam
Of coal smoldering underground, and resin
Collected from the final totem pole
Carved for the anniversary of the war
On the invisible. What did you see
In the cruel hookah? A new red
For the fall fashion show, another network
To infiltrate before the spring offensive,
Words in an ancient script that no one read
Until the fire meandering through the earth
Had been extinguished. Too late! the model cried,
Slipping into an evening dress designed
For someone else. What happened to the silver
Mined by our enemies to pay their debts
To us? The totem pole swayed in the wind.
__________

Strip the tones of every color, every shade
Of meaning, and tell the women in the light-blue shawls
To meet us on the plain, near the burial mound
Dug by the martyrs for a cause no one remembers.
Their names were not recorded in the Book of Books;
And if our elders deemed their sacrifice a waste
We praised their unarmed charge in the most lavish terms—
Albeit in the code we had devised to evade
The censor’s heavy hand. Three moths! The leafless tree
On which they fed until the autumn winds began
Will bear new fruit next summer if the women find
Their way to us before the marching band arrives.