A Rite to the Body
by Charles Potts
$5.00
The Temple Inc.

Compostrella - Starfield

Review by Klyd Watkins

as published at thetimegarden.com

A Rite to the Body, a new chapbook from Tsunami but a reprint of Ghost Dance #45, is another reason to be a Charles Potts' fan. First published in 1979, it bridges the poet of Little Lord Shiva to the poet of 100 Years in Idaho and The Dictatorship of the Environment, more or less.

Potts is a master of the cross over dribble. For example
[from "The Big Picture"]:

    Casting over the waters of
    Big Lost River
    As though I'd never left the
    Walls of my valley
    And crossed the desert in all directions.

    Its tributaries
    Run into it everywhere,
    But sooner there,
    Higher in Butte County,
    Astraddle the lava spatter cones
    In the craters of the Moon.

    What river is more lost than
    Okeanos
    Chemically wandering
    Through the sky? 

One reason I wish people read poetry is so I could persuade more of them to read Potts. His language reaches deep into the vernacular. He celebrates our basic and powerful instincts and their capacity to bring moments of transcendence [from "Vacuum Calliope"]:

    When the man's cock
            is inside the woman
                    he is freed from masculinity

    And becomes one again
            with the universe
                    women and everything else

    Never have to leave.
     
    It is no wonder
            he wants it all the time.
                    long live testosterone

    Accept no substitutes
            like Buddhism
                    or Jung.

The title poem is illustrated with a wonderful nude, in pen and ink, sprawled to expose pubic hair rendered playfully yet seriously. And tho her toes extend into the margins as if she's about to escape the page, she is headless, by necessity due to the scale of the drawing and the page. The book and the poem after all are rites to the body. The poetry is not ignorant of the sorrows of sexual love-- [from "A Rite to the Body"]:

    I've known girls . . .
    . . . .
    who could have been let down easier 

But it never apologizes for its celebrations

[from "A Rite to the Body"]:
    Lap sitters, spreading
    From the inside out,
    They cling as peaches
    To a stone
    You eat off sticky fingers. 


I say those who disapprove of taking this much time to praise the erotic, are not yet aware enough how

[from "A Rite to the Body"]:

    Desire wends its way
    Deaf to all except
    The richest, deepest tone.


I close this review by inviting you to go read the poem and marvel at the set up and sweet effect of the "placebo" in the middle of the poem.

A Debt I Owe the Tropics

I lay in the hammock recapitulating the days of your deep penetration.
People without friends drift over the edge in another world.
To feel the body at its best you have to be inside another body.
We are placental mammals.
Go back to the womb and start over.

Abandon all that dull poetry of place.
Let my voice placate you.
Be placid under the benign power of the central placebo.
Ignore the implacable fools.
Allow the world to be womb like.

Women carry the world around inside themselves.
The only way a man can get back inside is at their pleasure.
The world in nothing but a chain of wombs turned inside out.
She loves me she loves me not.
I am bound to the music of my singing body.
Equinoctial moonlight through the orange berries
On the branches of the mountain ash
Reverberates me