from Last Poems
by Anthony Hassett
A new day comes
like something you cannot name.
And perhaps because once again,
you must bend yourself
to the task of living
you begin to hack your way
through the mute glyphs
and weird print of your own thinking.
Searching among the splayed alphabet
of time and space
for the word’s cordite shape.
So you bend yourself to the task
of those small impurities
that keep you fluid…the clay
and its constituents,
the powdered rock and water
of earth…in a moment
you’ll light a cigarette
and compare what you’ve made
to the old mud-caulked walls
that surround you.
You’ll look out the window
at the bodies moving around
in the dust of the plaza
and you’ll know in your heart
that the stream of blood that moves
within them is warm,
and that the current of it is swift enough
to tear a body in two.
Earlier in the day the strange
unexplainable pain
came again. Your right arm
felt weak and you had to sit
on the floor for a moment.
This desert you live in
is like a country hidden
within a country.
The way the crows holler out
their black enchantments.
The way the sound
moves through you
in warlike fury.
~
Anthony Hassett wrote most of these poems during the final months of his life when struggling with terminal illness. Hermetic in style, his poetry is the response of an ever-inquisitive, rebellious, yet magnanimous mind, to the unspeakable cruelty and beauty of the human realm. Hassett’s gaze is direct and sustaining — willing to fully in engage in the physical world in pursuit of emancipatory potential. His voice is of both an unapologetically well-read intellectual and an anarchistic nomad, crafted and honed from a half-century of travel and Gnostic pursuit.
Last Poems is of particular value and poignancy because the work presents a rare glimpse into the visceral subtleties of a failing body that is documented by a vital, enduring, and expansive mind…
–Erin Currier
From CSF Publishing.