Leonard Gontarek Reveals That Perfume Is The Gateway Drug

Apart                                                              

1

Tell me about yourself in a 100 words or less.

2

I have always believed, if it is not broken, don’t fix it.

I who believe it is not broken. I have never trusted the TV version

of autumn over autumn. I am only interested in people

who have fallen in with anything. It looks like I brought a haiku

to an epic fight. I was there the day the music cried.

My cat hung up on you. I am not good at lying.

I have a sacred heart.

I have difficulty telling the Mysterious Universe

and the Outside World apart.

Morphine

 1

                                                           

He sits on a bench refolding the map, with difficulty,

now that he knows where he is going,

The bouquet next to him

may be a gift, may have been given to him.  

He is on morphine.

He is wearing alligator gloves.

                                             

2

Poetry must change the world.

                       

 3

Santana is playing at a party in the past,                               

so loud you think the party is outdoors.

Window                                                         

 one

                                   

A single syllable of lily, before night.

 two

Mostly green, but gold too,

trees are ejected into the day.

The book says the voices of children

arise clear in spring like toys,

balls or kites, miraculous and

loud, and it is so.

The silence is a public garden.

You go there for the scent of water,

the statues of angels and monsters

and lovers, the magnolia.

You cannot see the future.

It is out of view of the window,

to the west. Darkness is covering the houses.

The branches are going out one by one.

The perfume is of a teenage flame.

The cat rolls in the last dazzle of light.

Each season is contained in the next,

understood simply. You cannot understand

spring, or summer. It is mysterious, as it should be.

The children have gone in, against their wishes, for dinner.             

Fair                 

It’s just like the chair

in my movie, I mean, dream.

There are thirteen things that matter for me here.                 

 1

Five Hundred New

Fairy Tales Discovered

In Germany.

 2

Newly Divorced Man

Gets Creative With

His Ex-Wife’s

Wedding Dress.

 3

I want to be paid for the time

I go to my job in my dreams.

The minotaur in the cubicle next to me agrees.

 4

The woman I’m with is wearing a perfume called High School.

The light is intentional.

 5

Perfume is a gateway drug.

 

 6

I feel totally safe-ish with you.

 7

Dusk is ex cathedra. The mica-flecked dark is also.

 8

Now that paradise is locked, where will we go?

Now that there is nowhere to go, what will we do with these brochures?

I have set fire to these messages in an ashtray many times in the last hour

and dumped the ashes in the river of wind.

 9

Little wind.

Don’t let it in.

 10

Everything is done. The truce is not apparent.

 11

The world isn’t fair, ladling out light.

 12

It’s spring. Kids run

through streets, with

cherry-stained hands, yelling,

trailing strings.

 13

I want more than this.

I know you do.

Rake                                                               

 1

It is the cutouts or silhouettes

of the leaves that concern

us. What is not here

is on our mind. The door

that opened out on the vista of light

cannot be seen or remembered

at all. It is suggested                                      

that the rake left out                                       

was not elegant, but may be so

now. Think along these lines.

 2

There is only one question: How can I help?

This is a direct quote.

 3

The man sits down at the paper

and begins to write a letter.

It is understood that there are those

among you to whom the idea of letter

will have to be explained.                              

Say you are viewing paintings in a museum

for the first time and you are transported to

a clearing and it is mildly hot.

The dragonflies are flashing and the base

of the mountain hums.

Two liters of root beer or ginger ale

are poured over you. You equate                  

this to the imagery in the paintings

you have seen and the emotion that is

stirred. It’s crazy, of course, but that is

why you’ve put pen to paper.

You add something

witty and charming because

you are writing to someone close to

you. And you sign your name.

That’s all.

Or you want to say the world is a garden.

Your small garden, which is wild, beautiful

and disordered, connects you to the larger world.

The birds make a terrific racket,                                                       

praise it and call it singing.

The soil smells like green darkness,

praise the slight air of oregano and dark chocolate.

You say you live for the civil twilight

when the bats try out the night

and the embers even out.

Say you coast in one of the boats                                          

to the center of the lake.

Tell me the silk the milkweed emits                                      

means the world to you

and you talk all day with cats and rats           

as if they understood.

Tell me you have fallen for the darkness                              

and petals, but save the last dance for me.

Level              

 1

Item: She parked under the dogwood                        

and hoped the blossoms

would undo and cover

her dark car.

She would photograph it.

There is a mysterious

rain in the fields, I am told.

Finite amount of crows

in oak at dusk.

 2

I would not want to seem

as if I knew something about

faith or the way to it,

if I did not.

To know a thing is simple.

When you do not know it,

it is complex, with many layers.

There are many places

I would want to return

to without a dark heart.

Now as I purchase blueberries

on the sidewalk, I see my

heart as lightened.

The wind rustles Mirror

Lake once more. The pines or reflections?

It is hard to tell.

 3

Through the night of trees

and tree frog hum,

a clearing in the leaves.

A falls starts up. Sheet

by aluminum sheet.

Mostly gray, thunder distant in the day.

All happens so fast,

as though a letter had grown wings.

Perhaps there is a place

to set up the compass

and level,

to better see from one point to another,

the present to the past.

Maybe it is this park.                                                             

Customer Service                                          

 1

Somehow it is my father at the customer service window.

I feel sadness. I don’t know what to do with it.                                             

He hands me a brochure to take home, to think about it later.

I realize the cicadas I heard were in a dream.

The weather breaks.

The rides at the carnival are closed.

I cannot love the past again.

The city asks, Do you desire a glass coffin?

A skyline in haze and mist.

 2

I see a red dog and I want it painted black.

No more will my green seagull turn a deeper blue.

I want to see bats fly out from the sky.                                  

I want to see it plainly, plainly, plainly.

 3

There is a music.

It is like when you are reading and listening to music.

The story is longer and more drawn out.                               

There are people here and there.

You interact and four-hundred pages later you interact again.

Music, on the other hand, happens inside.

You are not really thinking about it.

It is a river.

            (after Richard Aldrich)

 4

The weather breaks. I realize

the cicadas I heard were in a dream.

I feel a sadness I do not know what to do with.

One that overcomes and confounds.

The rides at the carnival are closed.

I cannot have the past again.

A city skyline in a mist of heat and exhaust.

The wind asks, Do you desire a glass coffin?

Somehow it is my father at the customer service window.

He hands me a brochure to take home, to think about it later.

Leonard Gontarek’s recent book is He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs

A new book of poems is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press in 2016.

In 2015, his poem, 37 Photos From The Bridge, was a Poetry winner for the Big Bridges

MotionPoems project and the basis for the winning film from the Big Bridges poetry/

film contest sponsored by MotionPoems and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.