"No Alphabet" [by Joanne Dominique Dwyer]

If not for the lust of women, there would be no alphabet.
Save for the breaking of traffic rules, there would be
no Cubism; no fractured light scrutinized from subways
or kaleidoscopes in the tool belts of surveyors.
Save for the white shoes the busgirl wore
there would be no cloud-colored shoe polish hardening
under the sink cabinet; no wet-chalk streaking
the sidewalk during the summer monsoons.
Save for the ravishing bruise stenciled across the man’s cheek
there would be no hand-to-hand combat.
No 7-Eleven thieves with nylon stockings over their heads.
No trail marked with the shells of sunflower seeds
from the church steeple to the strip bar.
If not for the tiny, expensively coiffed gray-haired wife
the judge would never get out of bed.
Save for the lead saucepan of water in the dry grass
there would be no means to quench our thirst.
If not for the napoleons and éclairs the busgirl pilfered
from the walk-in cooler at the country club
she might not have been bulimic.
Save for the hearth rugs made from the skins of bears
placed in front of fireplaces lit with gas
falsifying every sighting of fallen stars seen
since the inception of love, there may never have
been application of kohl around women’s eyes.
If not for the avarice for heated seats and more legroom
the average new car might not be weighing-in
at four-thousand and nine pounds.
And the stranger’s car might have weighed just enough less
that my son’s black and white wolf-dog Santo
might not be dead and my son would not have the dog
lying on snow in the back of his pickup, bringing it home to bury.
Save for a hollowed-out tree trunk, there would be
no place for the dead to reassemble their limbs.
Save for a shovel, there might not be a heaven.
No flowers thrown into prehistoric graves.
Save for the aura of light before a seizure
there would be no steel girders
to keep the sublime monsters
from entering the atmosphere of earth.

Ed. note: From the new, highly recommended issue of The Common (October 2020).

Comments

[R Young]

Thank you for writing this.

[Dana Levin]

Love this poem!

Save for a hollowed-out tree trunk, there would be
no place for the dead to reassemble their limbs....

[AJ]

So beautiful -

[Linds A]

If not for the alphabet ...
So Beautiful!

[James Thomas Stevens]

Beautiul. So many layers of beauty and I love the anaphora - so appropriate for the times.

[Nodiah Brent]

She got me on the very first line...I will be mulling that over for days.

[Richard]

Three thoughts came to my mind. One was the comment made by a Professor I had in college who was teaching a course on Hemingway and Faulkner. He said this " you don't read Hemingway and Faulker, you have to study them." Second thought that came to mind was the complex and in many ways personal Jazz played by John Coltrane later in his career. Third is what Dylan said during the most productive period of his life about the lyrics that came to him, never to be duplicated again. He could not explain it.

[Paula Strongheart]

Merci beaucoup ma cherie
C'est tres magnifique comme toujours

[Gabrielle]

I love the way the poem gyrates with metaphors that immediately make sense, and those that play with the logical mind, and make wonder. The simple "Save for a shovel, there might be no heaven,"and then the intricate connections to the white shoes of the girl earlier in the poem. The line drawn from bear furs and fire places to kohl. Like someone else here, I also responded to the hollowed-out tree trunk. Love the anaphora form, which in this case repeats one thing depending on another. Thank you !

[Helen Hurley]

Joanne’s poetry clearly skirts the human condition. She takes you on a magic carpet ride, you cant get off.
Let’s talk about fluid language, vivid imagination, political satire, suspense, a sudden surprise, that “saucepan of water in the dry grass” offering love. And all in that brazen first person I. A poem of beauty. Thanks.

[Jean Fogel]

I find it interesting that poets with MBA's begin to sound alike.
The images here are strong yet the craft eclipses. This poem is filled with images thrown one after another, and the deeper inquiry is left untouched, drowning in a quirky inventive play of language, without risk, without exposure, (which is what our culture is made of, art is not far from the pulse) and our writers are being trained as business aficionados. I know that Dwyer is a serious poet, a praised poet, I find much of her work leaves me floating in a thick dependence on language, as though a riveting image were a message in a bottle. We end with sublime monsters. And what exactly are they? We are left on our own, without any clue as to Ms. Dwyers own monsters, standing in a lavender foray of metaphor, strung together with aphoristic sensationalism.