Cloud Tablets

F. Daniel Rzicznek

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612774749
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"F. Daniel Rzicznek's Cloud Tablets presents to us prose poems as they're meant to be—chock full of surprising images and compelling music. Where else would we find sheep in a library and a seraphim at a nightclub other than in a prose poem? Rzicznek presents these moments and others with the right mix of narrative and lyricism. There's a gasp of surprise in each of these poems, exclamation points of existential joy waiting in the marginalia."—Gary LaFemina

"F. Daniel Rzicznek harvests the world as process in fine detail, isolating the moment of perception as an act of faith. Read Cloud Tablets and learn the marvel of the wakened life; the vision is unsparing, exacting, and beautiful to know. Uncompromising in observation, unhesitant in lyric dream, Rzicznek's lovely voice is original, stripped in its honesty as he encounters, in the most poetic of prose, the stubborn and flexible world."—Amy Newman

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Response on a Cloud Tablet

In a Land with No Sky

Suddenly I am a Child

Seedtime

For a Moment

Seraphim in Nightclub, Shouting over the Music

Memory System

Saturday Afternoon

Pecuniary

Gambling on the Sabbath

Our Love at a Michigan Gas Station

Good Friday

Spring: Sure Signs

Absentia

Lengthening Night

Gesture

The Lucky Ones

Sheep

Flash Flood

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to the editors of the publications in which the following poems first appeared: Meridian: “Lengthening Night” (as “Lengthening”); Double Room: “Memory System,” “Flash Flood”; Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics: “Seraphim in Nightclub, Shouting over the Music,” “Sheep”; Quick Fiction: “Saturday Afternoon” (as “Garage Sailing”); Akron Life & Leisure: “Spring: Sure Signs.”

Thanks to my family and friends for their unfailing encouragement and support. Thanks also to my teachers, under whose care these poems were nourished: Larissa Szporluk, Gerry LaFemina, Alice Cone, David Hassler, Robert Miltner, Major Raigan, Sharona Muir, and Bob King. Extra thanks to Maggie Anderson for her care and attention to my work. Highest of thanks and love to Amanda McGuire, always.

RESPONSE ON A CLOUD TABLET

Dear beauty-faced, waiting listener: it pleases me to inform you that I am no longer burning. Not in the swarming wilderness and not in the furnaces of the sea. I have multiplied my leaves, my scales, my hair, creeping out between every atom like a faint wind, which is how I came to witness you pacing alone through the museum, eyes lowered, whispering to the bluer places of your breath. I was preparing to shout when you looked up to the grave eyes of kings, bowls of fruit like fallen planets, silent women on sunlit beds. You must understand I was at that point only a patch of afternoon shade crouching near the courtyard. I have left this up to you. I have now become a pattern that will play in the back of your eye. In case you are wondering, the campaign for reconstruction is humming along like a buzz saw, starting with the space above mountaintops...