God Particles - Hardcover

Lux, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618931821 ISBN 13: 9780618931828

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2008

Synopsis

God Particles displays the distinctive originality and unpredictability that prompted the Washington Post Book World to name Lux one of this generation's most gifted poets. A satiric edge, tempered by profound compassion, cuts through many of the poems in Lux's book. While themes of intolerance, inhumanity, loss, and a deep sense of mortality mark these poems, a lighthearted grace instills even the somberest moments with unexpected sweetness. In the title poem Lux writes, "there's no reason for God to feel guilt / I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary / to be angry anymore . . . / He wanted each of us, / and all the things we touch . . . / to have a tiny piece of Him / though we are unqualified, / of even the crumb of a crumb." Dark, humorous, and strikingly imaginative, this is Lux's most compassionate work to date.

About this title

About the Author

THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

God Particles

PoemsBy Thomas Lux

Houghton Mifflin

Copyright © 2008 Thomas Lux
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618931828
The Gentleman Who Spoke Like Music
—for Peter Davison, 1928–2004

was kind to me
though he did not have to be.
Who brought into the world a thousand books.
(Right there: a life well lived.)
Who wrote a dozen or so himself,
some prose about others,
some his own poems.
(Right there: a life lived well!)
Who corrected my spelling, gently, and
my history too, who once
or twice a year
would buy me lunch
and later let me leave his office
with shopping bags of books to read.
Who wore a bowtie sometimes,
and a vest, I think even a hanky
in his jacket pocket.
Who was generous to me,
the gentleman who spoke like music, who
was kind to me
though he did not have to be.



The Hungry Gap-Time,

late August, before the harvest, every one of us worn down
by the plow, the hoe, rake,
and worry over rain.
Chicken coop confiscated
by the rats and the raptors
with nary a mouse to hunt. The corn's too green and hard,
and the larder's down
to dried apples
and double-corned cod. We lie on our backs
and stare at the blue;
our work is done, our bellies flat.
The mold on the wheat killed hardly a sheaf.
The lambs fatten on the grass, our pigs we set
to forage on their own—they'll be back
when they whiff the first shucked ears
of corn. Albert's counting
bushels in his head
to see if there's enough to ask Harriet's father
for her hand. Harriet's father
is thinking about Harriet's mother's bread
pudding. The boys and girls
splash in the creek,
which is low but cold. Soon, soon
there will be food
again, and from what our hands have done
we shall live another year here
by the river
in the valley
above the fault line
beneath the mountain.


Lump of Sugar on an Anthill

The dumb ants hack and gnaw it off grain by grain
and haul it down to the chamber
where they keep such things
to feed their queen and young. The smart ants
dig another entrance, wait for rain.
Which melts the sugar,
and through viaducts they direct it
to their nurseries, the old ants' home, the unantennaed ward,
and so on—the good little engineering ants!
The dumb ants have to eat their sugar dry.
Put your ear to a dumb ant's anthill's hole—mandibles on
sandpaper is what you'll hear.
The dumb ants pray it doesn't rain before
they've done their task,
or else they will drown—in sweetness,
but drown, nonetheless.



Peacocks in Twilight

I think not, because I'll shoot both his eyes out
with one bullet. Lest you think I advocate
the blinding of peacocks in twilight,
I don't: to shoot both eyes out
shoots out, too, his frontal lobe, ergo, the bird is dead,
blind in one eye for a split second maybe, but
dead, bird brain dead. I'll do this
from the porch on a summer
evening, a pitcher of lemonade
on my left. Though I dislike doilies,
I'll place one of Mother's under
the pitcher. She insisted
on that, and my sister too. I'll use my daddy's gun.
Daddy didn't like peacocks
in twilight either, they offended
an iron aesthetic of his, something to do
with loathing cheap beauty, the meretricious,
which I must have inherited,
or else I love to hear and see
the peahens weep.




Midmorning,

accompanied by bees
banging the screen,
blind to it between them
and the blooms
on the sill, I turn pages,
just as desperate as they
to get where I am going.
Earlier, I tried to summon
my nervous friend,
a hummingbird, with sugar
water. The ants got there first.
Now, one shrill bird
makes its noise too often,
too close: ch-pecha, ch-pecha-pecha.
If he'd eat the caterpillars
(in sizes S to XXL!) eating my tomatoes,
we could live as neighbors, but
why can't he keep quiet
like the spiders and snakes?
I spoke to an exterminator
once who said he'd poison
birds but he didn't want me
to write about it. I have not
until now, and now starts up
that black genius, the crow,
who is answered by the blue
bully, the ubiquitous, the utterly
American, jay.




The Shooting Zoo

The giraffe can't stand up anymore: he's still tall
but not tall enough. The silverback is bald,
the zebra's black stripes gray. There's a virus at the zoo: the springbok
can't prong,
the alligators wracked by cataracts,
the last lion meowls like an auntie's cat.
The penguins walk as if they have a load in their pants!
The vultures are eating sandwiches and plants!
Something's wrong with all the animals: the pandas obstreperous,
the iguanas demand bananas, the loons
are out of tune.
What to do, what to do? Soon,
whatever it is that's deranging them
will pass through their bars,
across their moats,
and then: our dogs and goldfish,
the little parakeet
who pecks our lips
so we may say it kisses us, soon
they'll start dropping too.
Next: our children? grandma?
The zookeepers don't know what to do, so
print some permits permitting men
to bring their guns to the shooting zoo.



Puzzlehead

His thoughts like a deck of cards hit
by a howitzer. As they were only pieces
of thoughts in the first place, thoughts
without a beginning, middle, or end, they are now more
torn, bits
of red and black and white. Other shards
of the puzzle
in his head: some of blue sky, others a treetop, another one
a bird's foot, yellow. And piles
of gray—streaked with cream—granite. These seem
as if they belong in the same scene,
but look at this one: a loopy piece of black,
and more and more of them, all black. Half the puzzle
unbroken black!
Where does the blackness meet
the bird's foot (two toes
with visible talons), and the treetops, and what must be sky—blue,
with wisps of white?
What is the blackness thinking
about the whole mountain of blackness,
soon to rise over the aforementioned
granite mountain,
remedyless and truculent?


A Clearing, a Meadow, in Deep Forest

One lies down in the meadow, one hears the insects saw and gnaw
in the grass, and above, one hears
some music from childhood, sees a barn swallow diving.
One has these thoughts,
stricken. Clouds hang above the meadow's—how did
this clearing occur?—ragged
treeline. How did it happen, its edges irregular,
not cut for a field
of even rye or oats? When one first breaks
into it, the clearing,
one thinks: not large enough for a farm,
this fodder couldn't feed four cows.
One walks halfway across
and sits down, stricken. This is the place to rest,
one thinks, in the meadow's middle,
this is the place to stop
and wait for the wind, or a star, or a vole's nose
to point one on one's way.

Continues...

Excerpted from God Particlesby Thomas Lux Copyright © 2008 by Thomas Lux. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618931821
• ISBN 13: 9780618931828
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80