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Fred Schmalz
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the poet
Artist and poet Fred Schmalz is the author of collection Action in the Orchards, which explores intimacy and loss via encounters with contemporary art. His writing has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Zocalo Public Square, Places Journal, Diagram, Poetry and Oversound. Collaborating with Susy Bielak, the two mine social histories, texts and archives to create installations and actions that reflect the gravity and strangeness of contemporary cities. The duo's recent work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Grand Central Art Center.
the poems
Spring Triptych
on the concrete jetty
a piping plover
twice darts across the path
first off the breakwater
then alighting from a perch
on the seawall curl
where fishermen idle
a group of kids flits and dunks
they compare arm scars
histories of love and neglect
industry for the day’s
first hours shared
loose affiliation with the eddies’
swirl all of it behind them now
cut loose from a flotilla
they drift past the wreck
away with them a wallet a phone
a bag of clothes
sinks as they lift with the tide
gulls dive into the cove
covered in algae
staring into the surf
stones tumble toward
the mouth of the inlet
*
miles of hatched mosquito
cloud columns fold and surge
over the fields
so thick they crowd the light
wave on the hill’s crest
pelt passing bodies
the injured crawl
through my hair
to witness to warn
teeth and mouth
water poured into vessels
the narrows of breath
cover me in carcasses
and with them
flower petals flute down
from the northern border
*
I hadn’t seen
the woman who sings
the sun up
on the berm by the beach
since before the park closed
for months years ago
though one morning in winter
as I approached
was disillusioned by another
figure this morning she paces
just north of her old haunt
along the trail
tiny frame and one leg hitch
my heart rush at seeing her
and nobody around to tell
the lengths our bodies
age around us
muscles tender sag
the lax of years
mirrors a deep wildness
beyond her a seagull
beats a sunfish on a rock
Basic Training, 1991
every morgue in Chicago
anticipates influxes
today a backhoe
opens the meadow
I climb down into the trench
lay prone there a moment
its fetid walls its worms recoil
while the dead’s names go out
in response I eat a vitamin
a thyroid pill oatmeal my last orange
my odds of dying drop in the night
I can’t say what good crawling into a hole serves
though I recall twenty-nine years earlier
waiting for my brother
in a recess at Fort Knox
an absolute silence overcame me
the trench anechoic
save its peat leaching
new light formed flat
pale branches in relief against the sky
beneath the tree I saw
through the deaths
to the persistence of the living
lately I’m less sure than ever
my brother rises and waits for me
we may reach détente eventually
this century will claim us both forever
overnight men in blue coveralls
begin laying to rest the dead
never out of work
I will be there after all
what have I got to sleep for
New Year's Eve
leaning over a balcony railing
to shake the circular rug
of breadcrumbs and seeds
gathered and shed
I've been thinking again
of how a year closes and another
sets out from home
in the lightest perceptible rain
nightfall comes slowly
the foxes that play in the roadway
trot off between houses
soon the shops will shutter
your daughters take spoons
to devour the cakes we brought
propped on round white plates
they remind me of
the palm-sized paving stones
we pocketed last night on our walk home
they are everywhere around us working
loose in the freeze the thaw the freeze
Publishing credits
Spring triptych: Oversound (Issue Nine)
Basic training, 1991: The Canary (Issue 7)
New Year’s Eve: Oversound (Issue Six)