Occasionally, a poem surfaces that is claimed to be a Bean Newton original. In this case, the present author was summoned to a lunch with a Russian lawyer by assurances that the manuscript in her possession was an authentic Bean Newton, an answer to many problems faced by those of us who have built our academic careers curating the work of obscure scribblers long believed to have died in 1997 (or, depending on sources, 1998).
Upon arriving at the meeting, however, the author had his doubts: the work had been printed on tractor-feed paper (a good sign), but makes reference to "140 characters," which would imply a knowledge of Twitter, which had yet to be invented at the time of Newton's purported demise. After the handoff of the supposedly Beany materials, the rest of the meeting was spent discussing the fate of Russian orphans, about which the author could do nothing.
Presented here in its entirety and with no further comment or analysis, "Phase/Change" adds to the growing number of Bean Newton poems of uncertain or indeterminate origin or attribution. -- E.W. Wilder
Phase/Change
I
We are out
--of desire to say nothing of
change, the phases of
clouds, amystical markers,
laden with dreams and lightening, with
cast and over-
cast, with the parting
of Romantic daffodils.
Christ-like
you're waiting, so attired,
beneath gleaming
glass and cooking on
asphalt, for Yeats's
yeasty release, the chaos of being
overrun
with mechanized life – a man alive
with his car,
more rubber, more roll, more
steel; mold
will one day grow here as well, a confluence
in rotting.
II
I'll depict my dreams
if you show me your last
bottom-
dollar; dreams being the last
of flesh,
tightened upon us, interrupted
by the odd
owl, the wronged
liberated by phone,
the breathless
power of projected presence.
I'll call for your voice;
I'll call to forget: how
we've surpassed six-billion,
and we've never felt more alone.
III
Tanks aim triumphant;
screens have reduced even these
into toys to be imagined
away,
all iron clouds, words worthian,
fickle as the signal
ways in and out. To be
is to be
technogrified, answering to ancient
calls
in 140 characters or less.
And how many
plied ancient sees, the seas
of myth,
the whale roads, when whales,
indeed,
there were: to photograph
is to mark
each passing.
IV
I'm reminded, now,
over coffee,
the dance of light the clouds make
in the wind
and the rush of Western Kansas,
unoccluded by tree or trouble,
high-rises or the stink
of people—then
the nose detects a feedlot: money
to the locals,
the end of fantasy
for the rest of us.
I'll spare you the particulars. Money = death,
work made
solid, love measured—no wonder
bills are rolled into coke-
snorting tubes,
the compaction of effort and oblivion.
There are no
metaphors after this, no safe
distances,
from tenor to tine,
panophagy of meaning, all phat
and ripe and oozing juice,
a cherry
tomato
popped
and drooling past your lips and chin.
This, too, is mostly vapor.