Anthony Robinson

Anthony Robinson is a poet, freelance writer, and perpetual student who makes his home in Eugene, Oregon. Anthony is concerend with the "big" themes--sex, god, the mystery of love, and most importantly, the role of language and symbols in shaping our reality and perception of these ideas. To write about these topics without sounding pretentious, sentimental or preachy is an immense challenge and what drives him to create. He is also driven to create by a desire to eat and sleep in a house. He is currently at work on a sonnet cycle and several short stories, and is available for freelance work, preferably with a creative non-fiction bent.

E-Mail Anthony at antrobin@rio.com

Naf=The Word

The Sufis have a word for wanting. They call it naf.
Say it with me, naf, feel how it pulls the breath from nose
and mouth, feel the flat of the a, like a paddle, a boat oar,
rowing this desire out of the body to a labio-dental conclusion.

But it’s never over; each naf departs on a jetstream of murky
exhalation, to make room for the next slow accumulation of desire.
It wells up in mysterious deeps, Stygian waters, barren sand dunes
of the body. Lingering wantings are only surrogates for knowledge.

There is a Yuma, Arizona in each of us, and a black river. Landscapes
of wanting, of longing and fulfillment, shaped from letters and numbers,
muted utterances and lusty yelps. Linguists deconstruct texts, scientists
crush tiny things, dwarfed by grains of sand and motes of dust, searching
for the beginning and ending of it all, the ultimate naf, the Word.

Each sancrosanct syllable represents a piece of flesh, pulsing, glowing as
the tail-end of a firefly, a will-o-wisp, shining headlights, neon signs, the quiet
heat and glow of a propane lamp that killed my grandfather thirteen years
ago. He only wanted a good night’s sleep. His last breath must have sounded
something like this, like the wind. He wasn’t a religious man; neither am
I.

Solomon built a temple, and in it, his priests found the Word. Solomon
heard the Word, pushing the desert air around him, and legendsays he tore
his garments, and fell to his knees. His flesh, though, rebelled many times,
before and after. He made love to Sheba as Yahweh made love to Israel,
and the Word still hummed, leaving traces, inimitable smudges, blurry hints.

When you listen closely at night sometimes, you can sense the breath
of others from behind thin walls; you hear in yourself the deep thick-heavy
resonance that comes from a mingling of atoms, cosmic butterflies,
ashlike particles too small to see with the naked eye, things untouchable
as the face of the sky. The only clues they leave are the breathings,
the wantings, each naf a tiny, powerful pushing and pulling and whirling.
Physicists quantify and measure, show us scratchings in books to prove
the existence of quarks and neutrinos. They look like child’s drawings.

Solomon wanted only a woman’s brown skin, a fleshy mango, divinities
in the unadorned Word. I want to gather up blood shed in ancient wars,
spin it around in a tumbler, faster and faster, my own supercollider,
and watch the patterns when it tumbles to the kitchen linoleum. I will
prove a new perhaps theory. I will discover liquids richer than wine,
higher than heaven, purer than sex, more genuine than a mother’s love.
I will return, in my bloody yearnings, with smeared red hands, to symbols,

to the Word.

Physics Lesson

there are no basic building blocks
matter doesn’t matter
tried to define you pin you down call you out
still, I failed--too newtonian, I guess

einstein said that space is curved
and time is a little kinky
so we stared wide-eyed like a pair
of dominoes into time

(or in my case, a cup of coffee--
you chose a flask of Galliano)

and within the empty space:
echoings of particles, potholes in the sky
which, like you and i
do not exist

you are a folding chair or an accordian
many-layered, and still...

i do not see you
only your interactions with other bodies
rubbing over, through, and always knowing
what is relative
but einstein never saw your body
i, for one, don’t care if you’re a particle or a wave

of course, this may be horseshit
but lao tse said
true words aren’t beautiful

lao tse never saw you, though
drink wine straight from the bottle
or descend the staircase barefoot

i am no more detached observer
than you are intangible speck
or pattern of probability

space unfolds like lawn furniture
time curves in upon itself
snake eats its tail

shortening the long
lengthening the short

Parable

When you fry a mustard seed it turns a pale grey,
something like my cat, or the concrete after a rain.

The smell is like old clothes, some say armpits,
not completely dissimilar to wet sidewalk, or a litterbox.

This is what we prophets smugly call a “pungent necessity,”
because were it not for excrement, our crops would never grow.

The element of sacrifice is present, too, although mortar and
pestle have been replaced by a coffee grinder these days.

Stone altars are out of vogue, and electricty is so efficient!
I love the smooth purring of my hand-held Braun.

When a man gets on in years, he turns a pale grey,
something like my cat, or rain-soaked concrete.

Es la vida, my mahogany grandfather used to say, before
he flickered out. He should have used electric heat, not gas.

Math Lesson

I flunked tenth-grade geometry for lack of proof.
Failed at fifteen to draw the perfect circle,
or to differentiate isosceles from right or wrong.
Mysteries captive on graph paper held no allure for me,
more interested in chemicals and friction between bodies.

Ten years later, I still have no proof. Every practiced
step is a test of faith around a ceaseless circle;
three point one four dot dot dot infinity, and still
only an approximation. I follow the arc of the
compass, and over my right shoulder, a wide empty beige
beckons like a desert where thirst and light and smoke push.

God is in the details, some say, but I would argue that he is
in between the numbers, the words, spaces on paper, nulls and
blanks, the three foot stretch of air between the apple and
Isaac’s head. This is integral to knowing.

Last week I saw a quote-unquote poet coaxing imperfect meaning
from sound and arrangement, nothing more. He left out the spaces
where understanding unfolds; his poems were flowerbeds choked
by weeds. Maybe this was the point I couldn’t see. It was too close.
The best metaphor is one that stands for absolutely nothing, nothing at all.

Two summers ago, I saw a mound of clay prodded into the
shape of a grey-faced woman, a putty knife protruding from
her forehead. The sculptor was a student of the School of Design.
This man was sleeping with my childhood love.
His paintings hung on her walls, his prints on her coffee table.
When she came to me that afternoon in her kitchen, her skin
the color of creme brulee, her body thin, hard, impossible,
I had no idea what these equations of closeness meant, but
I was glad for the first time that I was not an artist.

I could go on--there’s always more to tell, but the words alone don’t add up.
When we abolish the equal sign, we discover what isn’t:

A blue-chalk architecture of mundane boundaries,
where we telescope years into minutes over a few beers,
collapse experience into 3x5 glossies flattened in a book.
This is about the yellow of painted curbs, the slippery voiceless
song of motor oil and rainwater candycoating asphalt with a
sheening expanse I can not measure.

Between stucco and aluminum, brick and cedar houses, it continues.
Day by day we eke out lives, degree by dying degree.
Some, though, push words together like clay, taking care
to leave the white where it belongs, a crawlspace in between
for angels, devils, numbers, and nothing at all