David Anthony Sam

I’ve posted some exerpts from my poetry reading in fall of 2007 on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDy75A1OW-A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyXSQP16q50

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VsYLxIhWl8

We Almost Caught the Turning

We had the time
to motion a part of the edge
to stop its wriggling.

Obeying, it ceased,
and the beginning was that edge.

We took a quasar’s pulse
and wondered if it would live.
There was the question of life at all,
until we discovered ourselves.

Beside a nightstand,
the unabridged prayerbook
opened itself to an astronomical page
when the six numbers parted
a red season.

We almost caught the turning.

Then the pulse quickened, faded,
and the edge reappeared, unopened again.

Published in Great River Review (1978)

He Reconciles The Scientist And Poet

Bent on quarks and omega mini,
eyed by the cosmic bits
that you eye on a photoplate
[spy into infinity),
you might deceive yourself
Breaking worlds into worlds,
banging clocks together
in infernal time till
the gears spill
like guts in streaks of white,
you might spy yourself
peering back; or
spin a beam
around the rim of universe
and see the back of your own head
bent over a retreating horizon.
Backed inside the whirling particles,
you watch your watching in a gas darkly.
Each time you break
something, it only makes something,
and the journey spills your guts
like gears,
and tells you stories
in different words.
You might receive yourself
coming back another way.

Published in Great River Review (1978)

Don’t Go Near The Edge

Staggering butterflies blind.
Dangerous skytraced motions
twist the mortician eyes loose
from their instaring;
the world takes on fluttering.
Don’t go near the edge.
You might fall, freefall like your dreamself
to a bedspring jingling conclusion.
“Don’t go near the edge,”
the voices monkey chatter
from the repetitious windows
in the samed in concrete structures
in the same and concrete words:
“Creations create…
Don’t go near the edge.”

But those damn staggering butterlifes,
nightdeepdiving skybirds after them,
sunset pinking the whole whorl with confusion.
Dangerous: you might see your blood
in the red mudpuddle,
might find your eyes on the wingcolors
of a moth.
Don’t go near them.

Even night’s not safe.
Moths bound around streetlights.
We hire yellow bulbs to keep them away.
The crazy white madness tempts.
Don’t go near them. They’ll edge you further
into the meaningless plan.
They’ll edge you into yourself’s selves.
They throw their lives into hot deaths
for the sake of the planned fall
fluff to the ground.
Trapped, you’ll hear them
scream
and explode in a dust cloud,
near the edge:
will you recognize in the wingwilt
of the downed mothcorpse of morning
the exhaustion of the saint. . . ?
Or plot the crazed course
of the worldmad wings
on quadruled paper?
You have both eyes.
Don’t go near the edge.
You’re playing with your life.

Published in Great River Review (1978)

Sonnet: Edward White

In dreams I float like Edward White
who died in fire, but only after
he had lost himself in free fall.
Get back inside, they had to tell him.
He drifted at the end of an umbilicus,
his eyes enchanted by the blackest
shadows, the purest specks for stars,
and the awe of blue and swirls of clouds
from the round place that used to be
his home. Get back inside, they say,
but I drift in my dream above
their voices, filled with the blue
and swirling clouds. And in a sudden
burst, too near the sun, I flame.

Published in Piedmont Literary Review Summer 1987

Hungry Inside

Hungry inside, my father eats
his way out of my flesh.
When he is free of me,
all that is left of him within
is a rough, brown scab,
like a surgeon’s wound,
along the left of my abdomen.

Hungry outside, my father tries
to cut back in. He cannot.
Beneath the scab, the scar is pale,
lifeless, but firm and tough.
It lets nothing back within‑‑‑
his hunger unable to do more
than scratch at my flesh.

I love him as I love each wound‑‑‑
They are so hungry
to be still inside me.
But I remove him from my flesh
as I remove the scab,
stand back, admire the whitened scar,
paled, nerveless, hardened.

Sometimes there is a little blood.

Published in The Blue Unicorn Fall 1987

On The Pavement

The only monument
to the careening weep of car
was bled in black on pavement.
It washes in the warm rainshower,
glistening streetgrease;
it will leave no pain, no
remembering in the street.

Streets forget no more than remember.
Streets simply never sense
the images they might forget, recall,
or distort. The faces of streets
soon take their character
from the things they wear,
in black tar, in rubber remnants,
in the sprinkle of glass
flickering in mobile streetlight.

So the consuming crunch of car
body in red paint against the wall
is rouge for a dark face.
Streets wear the makeup mute,
and protest only to the jackhammer.

Published in Great River Review (1978)