The Telemetry Chain

 

Telemetry is a response chain that began in fall ’06 when rather innocently I introduced my sonnet, “Tender Telemetry,” into the discussion thread on Jack Foley’s mailing list.  To my happy surprise, Jack wrote a response.  And then Ivan Argüelles followed.  And then I knew I had to capture this.  And then I knew I had a chain in the making.  Here, then, are

 

Jack Foley, Ivan Argüelles, Jake Berry, Jonathan Minton,

Scott Wilkerson, and Amy Grier.

 

 

 

 

Tender Telemetry

 

by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

 

 

in sets and stitches.  sequences. 

the like and supportive sequences. 

 

a cup or horn or root

are beam and fairly lantern. 

 

welcoming.  accompany.  readily. 

a palm or seat or provocation. 

 

unbuttoned.  untroubled. 

propers, pierced.  oh dear. 

 

the robin sings,

this bear is the color of bread pudding

 

and this bear is the set of all the bears

of all the bears the color of bread pudding. 

and is born, oh dear.  another

as yet undiscovered, unremembered poet . 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOLLY AFTER GREGORIO,
WHOSE POEM I LOVED

 

by Jack Foley

 

 

oh dear what promiscuity of poets

what dreary impervious prescience

 

we sit in a mahjongg of malstick

eating the gall of galimatias (urgh!)

 

so obviously enphytotic

though roundly entombed in tolyl groups

 

O Finno-Ugric, when will I hear your tremulous Finsteraarhorn!

tellmetellmetellmeswill(ay will)

 

oh tempora oh mores

I do love dirty stories

 

Uioptryunhrtuurewelq!

(Unwept and unremembered!)

 

 

 

 

to which reply, Oh dear Another,

 

why trouble your burdensome Bear

 

why mother this ancient flare

 

tellmetellmealltalesTold!

 

once a given smothers chance

 

twice a little remebrance dance!

 

who sails so flight this ancient Night?

 

who fails who falls rumbledown

 

tumbling in sacks of wooly sleep

 

will other wake ? will mother doubt?

 

all shake the bough all shake me out

 

’tis Pound’s round math we sing

 

this loudly canto all forgot

 

 

by Ivan Argüelles

 

argüelles after foley’s gregorio’s foley

 

 

 

 

Berry in St. Thomasino’s wake

 

by Jake Berry

 

 

I was collected.  All of us were alone. 

We knew how to divide ourselves. 

And carefully. 

 

Still, logic wants its roots,

and my hands were muddy. 

Tugging at them in the red clay. 

Gathering. 

 

The problem arrives, you see?  It is a bear. 

There is all about her,

in her (bread pudding) color.  fur. 

Her odor, which is a raw red shape

when it rises as you watch her eyes,

is primary and cautious, but death. 

 

Here is where they collect.  Where

I said I. 

 

From there they break again.  The

cardinal that is always first to arrive,

red on wet brown, and bare.  And

breaking they are sent.  And sent out! 

Roaring alone, all disappeared. 

 

If you can gather the frequency

he will tell you. 

 

 

 

 

Folly after Telemetry

 

by Jonathan Minton

 

 

Telemetry is like a bird’s eye, or the line

that divides yourself from your exquisite logic

 

the moment you admit that your clothes won’t fit. 

I’m embarrassed when I watch animals on tv: the odor of fur,

 

the sticky, wet breath, all the troubles of their simple animal

presence hauled on muddy haunches across vast grassy spaces. 

 

But everything seems absurd at a discrete distance, like
      Christmas lights

on palm trees, or grapefruit-sized satellites in their long,
      falling arcs. 

 

There’s a measure for our errors, but it startles and takes flight,

like a bird in the hand, birds of a feather.  The proof is in
      the pudding. 

 

Our telemetry is in the approach of misshapen birds, their
      omens tucked

under their wings, in their beaks. 

 

I want to tell them that I love them even before they sing. 

 

 

 

 

The Telemetric Inverse as Provocation

To a Collapsed Wilkerson Idiom

 

by Scott Wilkerson

 

 

There has been talk of an emerging periodicity,

precisely the kind of speculative prattle that

compels us to imagine stylized departures,

wave cycles of constitutive games. 

Of course, this thesis turns entirely

on the twin axes of lost referents

and certain grim proprieties of faith. 

We have wondered to what degree this

represents your characteristic motion,

the (igne)ous differential in tracing against

your own quilted brocades of memory. 

And then there was the fear that

we could not bear the necessary incompleteness

or survive its noumenal marbling of desire. 

What, then, to make of this fugitive talking,

codes of displacement negotiated at the edge

of the contra-positive, the disappearing evidence? 

Yours is that machine of an else in madness,

recombinant touch and go, nomenclatures in parallax,

unconfirmed rumors of a message received. 

 

 

 

 

The Bear Needs No Poem

 

by Amy Grier

 

 

“Your mind will stumble against

the ear.  Then…” Bear halts—

for language convolutes breathing—

“…you will listen to my color and eat it.”

 

She shifts and scratches and lifts

her tasty paws, and places one

on each of my pinkish cheeks—

her breath is honey and light—

 

whereupon her eyes glow green

and spicy; a moment of inky fur not hers

dashes across my wrist now against

her waist; she sings a robin rooted

 

in soil and tree; when her fluffy ear

morphs blonde I break.  Bear’s paws

drop and I think again the ease

of the spacious cave.