Aaron Poochigian: THE COUNTDOWN

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10, 9, 8, 7, 6 …
so many things are tough to fix—
love-lives and people, politics.
Me? On the threshold of the year to come
I hope to lose at last
the sad reluctance of my past,
like a grasshopper shedding his exuvium.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 …
now, with the old year nearly done,
my molting labor has begun:
I swear harder than I have ever sworn
that I will live all-out
and all-in and to Hell with doubt.
You hear me, everyone? I am a man reborn.


Published in the Rattle—from Poets Respond January 1, 2019

Aaron Poochigian: The living will

Too grizzled now to play the wunderkind,
too apt to sit where I have often sat,
I, Aaron Vaughn Poochigian, now that
my nose has thickened and my hair has thinned,

do hereby most imprudently rescind
the rulebook I propounded, all my sessile
growths and impediments, so that, a vessel
beholden only to the waves and wind,

I may be free to drift out of the bay.
Hereafter I shall whiff the fragrant coasts
of Araby, Dundeya, and Cathay

and, further out, beyond the round world’s spalling
margin, hear Odysseus’s ghosts
squeaking like hinges, hear the Sirens calling.


Aaron Poochigian is the author of the verse novel Mr. Either/Or (Etruscan Press) and the poetry collection Manhattanite (Able Muse Press).

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 37 Number 7, on page 27

AARON POOCHIGIAN's SONG: GO AND DO IT

Leap Niagara, ask a Mountie
where they keep the joie de vivre,
then cruise down to Orange County,
surf the curl and smoke some reefer.
Ride class fives in the Cascades,
water-ski the Everglades,
. . . .go, go, go
. . . .until you know
precisely where the Good Times flow.

Hitchhike through the heartland, travel
wide, acquire a taste for tillage.
Where the asphalt turns to gravel
settle down in some quaint village—
cloudy, clear or partly sunny,
your new Land of Milk and Honey
. . . .will appear
. . . .much like here
but less suburban, more sincere.

Search through endless desert places
for the perfect little spot.
When at last some plush oasis
tallies with the spa you sought,
think of me and write a letter
gloating over how much better
. . . .life is there—
. . . .I’ll still swear
we could be happy anywhere.

This poem has appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

Aaron Poochigian: Song: Defiantly of Love

Meet her at Grand Central Station
and walk her down under the bridge
where the wild kids play in the street all day
and your neighbor, a passionate Haitian,
sings ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically of love.
Feed her potatoes au gratin,
meatloaf and corn on the cob
when the couple upstairs quarrels and swears,
and all the rats in Manhattan
sing discordantly, discordantly, discordantly of love.
Worship her like a religion,
like Mary the Mother of God,
while he-dogs compete for a she-dog in heat
and a lonesome grizzled pigeon
sings obsessively, obsessively, obsessively of love.
Promise to love her forever
and always, come what may,
while the basso bum with his bottle of rum
and the post-industrial river
sing defiantly, defiantly, defiantly of love.




This poem appeared in Don't Talk to Me about Love

Aaron Poochigian: The Only Way

When Mister Right has strayed so far you hate him,
pluck a winter leek from peat-rich soil
and eat the stalk before you go to bed.

Spit thrice at sunrise, bathe, then scratch, verbatim,
this lethal summons into kitchen foil:
“Vengeance, go find him, bind him guts, heart, head.

Compel the traitor, no will of his own,
into my bedroom to be mine till death.
Should rival hags assail him, make him fail

to function, make him pleasure me alone—
KALOU KAGOEI BAINA-BAINAKETH.”
Roll up the love-charm, pierce it with a nail

and seed it in a field where fireweed
attests to ashes. With the next moonrise
he will arrive, the lover you deserve,

less work than when you knew him, guaranteed
to lock you, goddess, in his zombie eyes,
worship you, service you, and never swerve.






This poem appeared in Don't Talk to Me about Love

Aaron Poochigian: My political poem

Election Night. A Walmart parking lot.
A green fog off the half-drained reservoir
had jumped the fence to breed with puffs of pot
issuing from a mag-wheeled muscle car.
Like always, sick of work by eight o’clock,
I had gone out and squatted on my knees
among the dumpsters near the loading dock
to feed a pack of strays. The runt Burmese
that goes by Freak was up on lizard hips
licking the gravy from my fingertips.
So cute – one-eyed, scab-nostriled, stumpy-tailed.

Because, whichever rancid sack prevailed,
that evening meant, like, Fuck you all – The End,
civic Seppuku, the Apocalypse,
I guess I itched for something, some hushed friend
too innocent to be American.
Everywhere gobs of noise just wouldn’t quit:
a speaker-mounted Wrangler nagging Vote!,
fireworks like gunshots, bleats, gunshots again . . .

I grabbed my mutant future by the throat
and wrestled it, a squall of snag and spit,
into the footwell of my shotgun seat.
The whole drive home I wept to hear it…

This poem appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, in the Nov 30, 2016 edition.

Aaron Poochigian: Good Morning, Night

First a gunshot then the sirens
murdering sleep at three a.m.

Beyond the sill an urban gulf
and fear greater than for oneself.

There is no war of us and them
in the eternal Barrio,

only a desperate status quo.
Worse, after all that noise, the silence.

This poem appeared in https://aquietcourage.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/good-morning-night/

Aaron Poochigian: Derelicts

Aaron Poochigian

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota in 2006 and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in 2016. His book of translations from Sappho, Stung With Love, was published by Penguin Classics in 2009, and his translation of Apollonius’ Jason and the Argonauts was released October 2014. For his work in translation he was awarded a 2010-2011 Grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book of original poetry, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press) was published in 2012, and several of the poems in it collectively won the New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Prize. His work has appeared in such journals as The Guardian, Poems Out Loud and POETRY.   

These poems previously appeared in thehypertexts.com. 

Derelicts

I.

I heard the harmless maniac

who camps in front of my bodega

roar from his carton on the stoop:

“I am the Alpha and Omega,

the kick in the smack, the massive attack,

the zoom bah bah, zoom bah; whoop, whoop, whoop!”

Polychrome Christmas lights were blinking.

A white dove—well, alright, a pigeon—

posed on the guy’s cardboard façade.

I don’t go in much for religion

but, trust me, I could not help thinking,

“Lo, another son of God.”

II.

I love you, vagrant, with my own self-love

because I see myself there sleeping rough

on rubbish under a construction scaffold.

Because I hear my future in your cough,

my voice among your five defiant voices,

I love you, vagrant, with my own self-love.

What crisis crazed you? Was it chance or choices?

Come summer, if my doom does not improve,

your landmark madness will be me unraveled.

So here’s a buck—a fiver? That’s enough:

I love you, vagrant, with my own self-love."

III.

Ah, where the wind is ruffling

trash bags, and moonlight snags

on cracked façades: that shuffling

nebulous humanoid

who glooms through shreds and drags

a shadow like a void.

The beards of the Unemployed

dissolve in the rags

and shag of night.

Mott Street, each time I walk it,

parades this mental case.

Last week he dredged his pocket,

flashed me a watch—no band,

just a smashed, digital face.

The time: Please Understand.

A whirlpool demand 

from backward space; 

a black-hole wound.

He always gives me this funny

feeling, a pity akin

to rage: should I toss money

into a bottomless bum?

Indulge my nagging twin?

Feed what I could become? 

Here’s something, Mr. Mum,

but keep your grin—

I don’t want none.

IV.

It’s late and lost in tunnels that I find him— 

Mr. Mirror Shades (the mufflered one),

his past the tentacles of pipes behind him,

his stature like a hunched harp made of bone.

A tarot card, a king of prophecy

enthroned on coats and rubbish, he sometimes

rattles his wicked little cup my way

and conjures up a mishegoss of rhymes:

One wave of poison, two of disease,

and a pulse will roast your phones and freeze

your engines.

Rats, then, will rise through the sewer grates

as executors for the Fiend or Fates

and gnaw with a vengeance.

Sirens will sing the Apocalypse Blues

and, morning, noon and night, the news

will be static.

Why bother dialing nine-one-one?

Why dash for the drawer and get out the gun?

Why hide in the attic?

No one will be surviving this,

so go out and find somebody to kiss,

or religion.

A blood tide creeping up our shores,

it’s time to get down with the dinosaurs

and passenger pigeon.

So he intones, out of his nose, his skull.

Chuckling, then, he scrunches for a bow,

and I give something to the oracle

for briefly making Armageddon now.

Live from Holy Cross: Aaron Poochigian reading Daniel Varoujan

Click to hear the audio segment

Aaron Poochigian - photo by Khatchik Turabian

ALMS

TO THE STARVING PEOPLE.

“There is famine; bread, bread !”

Who is sighing?

On the threshold of my cottage, who is sighing?

My love has gone out, with the flame in my fireplace.

Ashes within me, ashes around me; oh, of what use is it

To sow tears on ashes?

I have nothing, nothing! To-day, with my last

Small coin I bought poison;

I shall mix poison within me.

Come to-morrow to the graveyard, thou Hungry One,

Through the storm, early, when around the village

Wolves are still wandering.

Come to-morrow! As bread, from my grave

I will throw into that bag of thine

My poet’s heart.

My poet’s heart shall be thy blood, the blood of thy orphans,

As long as thy grief lives.

Come to-morrow to the graveyard, O thou Hungry One!

Translated by Alice Stone Blackwell

The Longing Letter

My mother writes: “My son on pilgrimage, 

How long beneath a strange moon will you roam?

How long a time must pass ere your poor head

To my warm bosom I may press, at home?

“Oh, long enough upon strange stairs have trod

Your feet, which in my palms I warmed one day—

Your heart, in which my breasts were emptied once,

Far from my empty heart has pined away!

“My arms are weary at the spinning wheel;

I weave my shroud, too, with my hair of snow.

Ah, would mine eyes could see you once again,

Then close forever, with my heart below!

“Always I sit in sadness at my door,

And tidings ask from every crane that flies.

That willow slip you planted long ago

Has grown till over me its shadow lies.

“I wait in vain for your return at eve.

All the brave fellows of the village pass,

The laborer goes by, the herdsman bold—

I with the moon am left alone, alas!

“ My ruined house is left without a head.

Sometimes for death, and always for the cheer

Of my own hearth I yearn. A tortoise I,

Whose entrails to its broken shell adhere!

“Oh, come, my son, your ancient home restore!

They burst the door, they swept the larders bare.

Now all the swallows of the spring come in

Through shattered windows, open to the air.

“ Of all the goodly flocks of long ago

One brave ram only in our stable stands.

His mother once—remember, little son—

While yet a lamb, ate oats out of your hands.

“Rice, bran and clover fine I give him now,

To nourish his rich dmak,* of noble size;

I comb his soft wool with a wooden comb;

He is a dear and precious sacrifice.

“When you come back, his head with roses wreathed,

He shall be sacrificed to feast you, sweet;

And in his blood, my well-beloved son,

I then will wash my pilgrim’s weary feet.”

_____________________ 

* A mass of fat which hangs down behind sheep of this breed, in place of a tail.

Translated by Alice Stone Blackwell

Aaron Poochigian, a brief bio

AARON POOCHIGIAN was born in 1973. He attended Moorhead State University from 1991 to 1996 where he studied under the poets Dave Mason, Alan Sullivan, and Tim Murphy. He entered graduate school for Classics in 1997 at the University of Minnesota. After traveling and doing research in Greece on fellowship from 2003—4, he earned his Phd in Classics in 2006. He was a visiting professor of Classics at the University of Utah in 2007—8 and is currently D.L. Jordon Fellow at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.
He has recently completed translations, with introduction and notes, of Sappho’s poems and fragments for Penguin Classics (due out Spring of 2009). The British poet Carol Anne Duffy has agreed to write the preface. His translations of Aeschylus, Aratus and Apollonius of Rhodes will appear in the Norton Anthology of Greek Literature in Translation (due out Spring of 09), and Johns Hopkins University Press will put out his edition of Aratus' astronomical poem, The Phaenomena, with his introduction and notes, in the Spring of 2010. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Chronogram, Classical Journal, The Dark Horse, Poetry Magazine, Raintown Review, Smartish Pace and Unsplendid.

Aaron Poochigian: The Vigil

Because he was as hard to handle
As truth, which we equate with light,
Go somewhere dark and hold a candle
For Alan Sullivan tonight.

This poem has appeared in Poetry, March 2009. It is reprinted here by kind permission of the author.

Aaron Poochigian: The Parlor

Nothing was an heirloom. We had none,
But a cause cherished like a vintage gun
Hung there: why goatherds in a mountain town
Had dug pits by the roadside and lain down.

I can’t rest, even as a great grandson,
When young Turks tell me what was done is done.
Our women--raped not just by anyone.
We never called the couch an ottoman.

Aaron Poochigian: The Only Grandson

In Memoriam: Vaughn Bedros Poochigian, 1909—1996

From Midway over plains, divides, and basins
On smaller jets destined for shorter flights
I reached the Valley, where, at your last rites,
Three priests agreed: you had grown grapes for raisins
And never grumbled because family lines
Branch always into further mouths-to-feed.
(Old women in whispers talked about my seed.)
Soon we had sold the orchard, cleared the vines.

You died too early to have dubbed me “crazy”—
An honorific title in our tribe.
True to your memory, I have crossed the hazy
Land of the Lost Wine (the enchanted one)
And smuggled out this cutting as a bribe,
A scion for you, grandpa, if no son.