Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 The Language of Vultures Byron Kerr Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE LANGUAGE OF VULTURES By BYRON KERR A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester 2008 Copyright © 2008 Byron Kerr All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Byron Kerr defended on April 11, 2008 _______________________ David Kirby Professor Directing Dissertation _______________________ Juan Carlos Galeano Outside Committee Member _______________________ James Kimbrell Committee Member _______________________ Nancy Warren Committee Member Approved: _________________________________________ Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For Sydney I promise I won’t tell anyone about the anteater. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. David Kirby once again for his insight, wisdom, and excellent direction. Thanks to Dr. James Kimbrell, whose expert advice is, I hope, reflected in many of these poems. Thanks to Dr. Juan Galeano, who kindly let me drag him off the streets (very literally) to seek his opinions and support for this work. My apologies and thanks to Dr. Nancy Warren—remember, any resemblance is coincidental and…well, you ended up in a poem; sorry. Special thanks to Kim Barber, who helped me navigate the superstructure. Teresa, I don’t know how you get on with me; huge thanks for that one. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract vi I. The Opposite of Light 1 The Metallurgy of Light 2 Sirius Matters 4 Love of Heat 6 Hypothetical Paranoia 7 Observations on Bastille Day, 1992 9 Average Warfare 12 Love 13 Fundamentals for Poets 15 Moon Tides 16 An Urban Nocturne 18 II. The Language of Vultures 20 Vector-born Affection s 21 The Octopus’s Wife 22 The Language of Vultures 24 Lament of the Passing of the Epic 28 Lucky Wren 29 Aquatic Hamsters 31 Regretting Rabbits 33 Anteater 35 III. The Way Around Immortality 37 Creation 38 Time Depressed 39 A Pious Kitchen 41 Moonshine 42 Vertical Living 44 v Director’s Cut 46 What Became of de Lelenta? 48 Fault Line 49 My Car is a Target, Statistically 51 Blood 53 Kali, My Wife, Flies 56 Biographical Sketch 58 vi ABSTRACT Dr. Carol Tratchy once theorized that eventually we would need to reevaluate our nomenclatures regarding our most recent artistic eras. For instance, the “Modern Era” came into use nearly one hundred years ago; it is hardly an accurate description any longer. Dr. Tratchy thought that the term “Age of Anxiety” would be a better term for the time period from after WWI to present. I like it—it is descriptive, timeless, and conveniently works to my ends! The Language of Vultures is a collection of poems broken into three parts. The subject matter for this collection primarily deals with the anxieties of our age. Although some are more serious than others, I try to take small problems in my life and let them explode into major anxiety attacks (such as auto insurance or flying). I often use humor as a means of making the mundane entertaining and, I hope, poetic. The characters who roam about this collection are taken from life, but are exaggerated and modified to work in a world where vultures might have something to say. I hope the reader will find these as entertaining to read as I did to write them. vii I. THE OPPOSITE OF LIGHT 1 The Metallurgy of Light “Poetry is the window to the soul of the people” Gaetano Cipolla Stained glass has an odor of madness surrounding its reds and golds and greens, bordering the shapes of herons, fairies and Christs. It is the sort of scent one notices gradually, only after the body becomes ill, taking with it the mind, slowly, toward the ranting calamity that only lead can accomplish. I’m pretty sure that fat old Bishop Sugar had no idea a metaphor of light for God would not only separate the faithful from the faith, trapping a lofty deity insanely high in gothic rafters, but also would keep the parishioners apart. After years of melting lead against lead jointing pieces of glass stained itself by metals, artisans would become choleric from achy joints and sour stomachs and, due to their endless bickering and high-pitched inappropriate laughter, were asked to sit in the back of the church so they and their unruly children would not disturb the light-infused sermon. At least that would make a lot of sense to me; my stepmother worked the stained glass circuits and could clear out a raucous bar with her twittering wit and nervous, sob-wrenching breakdowns. I pity her now but at the time I had no idea that her art caused the madness and not the other way around. Quite frankly, I hated her ability to destroy a perfectly good night out. You see, the modern cottage industry is industrially advanced; between the glass, lead seams have been replaced with copper, tin solder, acetones for cleaning, patinas and particulate, inhaleable glass 2 kicked up by keening table-top grinders, poisons which will not leave her bones, nor mine, for a couple of decades to come. It’s amazing how many children are involved in this production. Every stained glass shop seems to have at least one kid in its chaos either dusting glass or crimping copper smooth over edges, which I know from experience will end up in their mouths, sucking the tangy metallic scent off their fingers. And the metal will find its way to their bones and brains the way poetry seeps through the skin and pores of my daughter, who now on a small blackboard drafts her first poem about white herons she saw startled from their rookery which took to sudden flight across the everglades, and she writes about how the light from the moon took to their wings like the fairy dust which she knows, for a fact, exists in our world. I had hoped that my daughter would not come to love the sound of words and their cadences, probably as my stepmother feared I would be drawn to colored glass, but in my house poetry is literally on the walls and on the floor she walks upon, and there is no hope now that she has drafted her first piece. She too stares out our stained glass window as light filters around the metal edges, hammering out in her mind the color, sound, and metaphors of birds, flight, and of children, like herself, already lost to the craft. 3 Sirius Matters I try to point out Canis Major to my wife following Sirius along a celestial curve to what might be a leg, but I can see only a handful of the stars necessary to complete Orion’s hound, in fact, sad few of them are still even visible due to diffused light that has polluted the sky so that small towns now blaze enough to obfuscate the classic constellations that once led sailors safely back to bustling ports. The Dog Star once stabbed brightly, a beacon in the scattered, sparkling night, but instead the whelp whimpers through a shroud of light that muddles the dark until it is a joke of Egypt’s understandable belief, long ago, that Sirius added fire to scorch the summer days. So magnificent, it was thought to heat the earth when the sun set in the west, causing life for the farmers, priests, and pharaohs to be equally miserable, sweating and swatting at mosquitoes, each hoping that the seventh month would hurry up and dissolve into a merciful autumn. The world wobbles and now Sirius is in August and the Dog Days have been pushed up over a month, and my wife tells me that in Rantoul, Kansas, during hot summer days, they would shoot down 4 stray dogs in the streets and alleys of that small town, because the mutts would go crazy from the sun and killed chickens, mauled children. I want to tell her that hunting strays is to keep them from dying during harsh winters, but at least superstitions still pay respect to the stars, the stars we no longer see as brightly as even a generation ago; they knew something of fear in the dark. Now we halogen our streets to guard us from crime and auto accidents and vagrancy, we arm ourselves brightly against a vast universe, the hearths of our dead diminish, the peepholes for angels muted. We shield ourselves until we forge a muted, slack-jawed, and monotonous night that hides us from the galactic ocean, a glowing curtain that snuffs out the candles on the dark ceiling of our lives. 5 Love of Heat On a hot day my daughter is a metronome, swinging under a tree, keeping time in a concaved arc, and she sings something about branches and leaves and how the sun needs to go home to its parents out in the stars. I try to tell her that Solaris joining its distant cousins in a far off suburb of the galaxy might not be the best thing, but a squirrel squawks twice, in rhythm on the down beat, and my daughter yells at it to “be quiet, damn it” and the squirrel is happy to oblige in this August heat, the kind of heat that claws at my chest like it’s angry that something as small as me would block its wavelengths, angry because all it wants to do is get back into space, angry because it remembers me in the Mojave Desert driving across in an un-air-conditioned Toyota pickup in questionable repair, on a little-used road, and I thought, at that time, the journey was romantic, a rite of passage few young men do in these days of climate-controlled airliners.