The Zingara Project

Tag: Roy Beckemeyer

  • Reading Moby Dick Again by Roy Beckemeyer

    1
    “…a way I have of driving off the spleen”

    says Ishmael, and I wonder
    if the writing of it is as much the remedy
    as the decoction of travel, the pen and page
    as much as the Pequod prescription,
    if the narrative, as dense as a cud of bolus,
    is truly the prima medicina for men at sea,
    at least for sailing men of letters
    longing to be shut of the shore,
    carpet bags stuffed with shirts,
    paper, a bottle of India’s finest,
    black, corked, ready.

    2

    “the whale would by all hands
    be considered a noble dish,
    were there not so much of him”

    …and Moby Dick a noble book,perhaps because there is so much
    of it, and all that explanatory
    digression between the true and
    hearty, grab you by the short-hairs
    narration is really needed, because,
    by Ahab, by Queequeg, by God,
    you cannot appreciate the story
    without you understand the job,
    the whaler’s lot in life, his tools,
    his fare, his devotion to his brothers
    on the sea, to the whale, his prey,
    the incarnation of his every need,
    his very nature.

    —

    Watch for Roy Beckemeyer’s new book of ekphrastic poems, Amanuensis Angel, coming soon (March 2018) from Spartan Press, Kansas City, MO.

     

     

  • Great Blue Heron by Roy Beckemeyer

    dead snag along the
    edge of the creek
    unfolds like a parasol opening,
    squawks  effort, pulls
    gangly
    legs
    that
    trail
    like
    reeds
    behind him, white lime of feces
    streak  onto water like an afterthought,
    wide wings mask the road of sky
    between the trees, a deep whoosh
    so thick with flapping
    you have to suck
    at your breath,
    cramp
    your
    diaphragm,
    catch and swallow
    that air before
    it curls away
    into the eddies
    of his leaving.
    —

    Roy Beckemeyer’s poems have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, The North Dakota Review, Coal City Review, and I-70 Review.  He was a 2016 Pushcart nominee, and his collection of poems, “Music I Once Could Dance To” (Coal City Review and Press, 2014), was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book.