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The Poetry of T.C. Marshall | Print |  E-mail
Written by T.C. Marshall   
Friday, 12 December 2008

T.C. Marshall teaches writing at Cabrillo College by encouraging inventive use of forms. He has written a wide variety of things from “Jumbles” to a detective novel. In the ’70s and ’80s, he initiated three poetic movements (Horriblisme, Horripilisme and Phalanxologie) that got some attention at one MLA convention. Since then, Marshall has used and taught approaches based on the Latin American vanguardismo that Neruda practiced, the posthumous humanismo of Vallejo, and Cardenál’s exteriorismo. His poems and literary criticism can be found in magazines from North America and Europe. The following poems are all elegiac.

TC Marshall

Edwin

Sweet old man’s baby head cradled in mind,

the way hands now hold my niece’s. Lover

he’d have been of her scalp’s fresh smell. You’d find

it in his verse one day, well thought-over.


Each simple word, bead-bright sky on water,

reflecting off of some dark absorbing

jewel-like deep facet that thought’s daughter,

writing, would prove well worth our affording.


He shows a moment holds best where it tells

time’s innocence is once and always real.

As each breath disturbs soft hair, my tears well

up what we’re meant from birth to death to feel.


Smiling through, I, alive, myself once boy,

grown man, now cry for him, released past joy.

 

II. $

Re-gather your forces.

Think about where you spend

your attention.

Re-gathering yours

forces others to reckon

with you. Counting

the dead is not keeping score:

one / one / one,

she said, and

how many more ones

and fifties

litter the other shore.

IV.


It all falls down on

the child who carries a mother

where she wouldn’t go:

into the breach, over the line, over that

mine, into the target zone behind the sign

encircling the heart of the wallet

that keeps her enshrined.

She in turn has the soldier’s picture

on the mantle.

That other story’s mother wears a mantle

decorated

with all the stars of heaven,

each given on a ribbon to

some grieving mother

by the lie the nation buried

when it went for

the war.

 

July 4th 1983

(for Big Ted)


The street-black river is thick with moonlight;

you come across without getting wet,

and the night breaks open slowly like

a joke it takes awhile to get:

You’re here because you’re gone.

Hands of the impossible inside the sky

have tickled your ear for the last time.

We’ll do without your new secrets now,

though still we’ll dig through cool damp earth

in the folds of the works you left behind,

or warm our laughs by your melodic musculature.


I can see tomorrow morning staggering through

while you say goodbye to your old shoes

and the feel of a favorite shirt.

Shrug at the fridge and off you go,

to echo in people’s heads;

this is what you do now, being dead.

 

V. 


The flag flaps

running down the free-

way in a pick-up bed,

or lazily drapes

its tall pole in the still

blinding heat.

Neatly folded tri-corner,

it is handed

over in the end—

all the wind

knocked out of it—

to one who wonders if

she would or could

begin again.

 

VII. 


One would hope

“they” have learned by now

to put cotton into the ears

of their children when “we” fly over

to drop all at once

“more explosives than fell

on all of Germany

in all of World War II.”

We outdo

ourselves, and they do too.


Last time, in ’91, children

were seen reeling through the streets

like drunks; they had been

deafened by the explosions.

Now, there should be cotton

or clay or bits of something, so all

that is stunned is the mind that sees how

the imagination can hold on. We

outdo ourselves in this, and those

children do too.

 

VIII.


There was a sign in Baghdad that said

“Archaeological Museum.”

Now another in other words

points to less than that one did.

“Now you see ’em; now you don’t”:

the past, the present, & the future ransacked.

Each is taken in its logical way:

the past from right before our eyes,

the present out of our hands,

the future drawn into the voided heart where

the world as one knew it once

was burnt at an unearthly temperature.

What was dropped then

sucked the breath right out of the lungs

like an artifact stolen,

its sign still in place.

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T.C. Marshall's Poetry
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T.C. Marshall's poetry truly expresses the impact of our wars beyond the oft-published images of grief and destruction to the loss of history and of many peoples' present. His own images (eg., Edwin) give forth fragrances and tactile sensations that expand like high-relief from the page. Not only is he gifted in his portrayal of nuance but his shaping of poetic lines and rhymes shows him to be a fine craftsman. Thanks for Marshall's and all the other great local poets that GT shares with us.
Bruce
Redwood Pen , December 20, 2008

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