Not that I'm finished yet...

...but it seems like an appropriate time to post a poem from Tom Fink's After Taxes (Marsh Hawk, 2004):

MY DEAR BANK,

we tour the caviar
mirage
until it's hacked.
Squamous greenhouse
breathing debt.
Your aggregate

gapes.
Socratic dealership hats:
strictly invisible.
Under partition circumstance,
tom-tom furnace.

Arctic fast--
involuntary.
Hard-up night

throws me a tarantula
slipcover consolation.

I've never seen any of Tom Fink's paintings in person, but from the photographs of them I've seen I'm drawn to the way he emphasizes texture and surface effects, the simultaneity of back/middle/foregrounds, and this poem exhibits those same tendencies. The diction is textured, never flat, never smooth or overly fluid. It's not complacent, placid. A list of synonyms, none of which get at exactly what I mean.

For instance, the ground is provided by the epistolary "My Dear Bank," opening including the relatively straightforward first three lines in a familiar "we do this and that" formula of the letter, which in this case seems to hover between a formal "To Whom It May Concern" missive and something more personal in tone. But the surface of the poem is then impastoed by the thickly elaborated (how else can I describe them) sounds and syntax of the lines that follow:

Squamous greenhouse
breathing debt.
Your aggregate

gapes.

Etc.

There's a swindling going on, by both parties, evidenced by both the disingenuous gracious approach of the speaker toward his "dear bank," and by the invisibility of their Socratic dealership hats. (Though the hats aren't directly assigned to the bankers, I take that hint from "Your aggregate" above.) I see a used car lot man gladhanding in that line, in his professional costume, and pick up the hint that the bankers, while better dressed, are still suited in a similarly devious manner. (There's a poem a few pages before called "STUNG BY SUITS" that resonates with this impression.)

What's that tom-tom furnace? Tom Fink's initials are embedded there, and perhaps a nickname. His heart? And the partitioned circumstance, is that another reference to the veiling of costumes and the frosting of civility over hostility? Under his ambivalent attitude (his superficial politeness, his surface) toward the bankers he addresses (or the institution of the bank they embody maybe) his heart burns. And he's got heartburn. No wonder: he's hacked the caviar mirage. Played at being better off but now has to face the music.

"Consolation" seems to be the key in the last sentence (the final of three complete subject/verb constructions in the poem, interspersed with fragments, if you read "aggregate" as a noun and "gapes" as a verb, which I do.) Two reinforcing meanings lie together in that word: consolation as the process of allaying grief or distress, and the built-in runner-up status of "consolation prize." And both are applicable. The consolation of the caviar mirage disguises the barren sand of financial discomfort or ruin. He can't breathe in this landscape, even within the cash-colored greenhouse. The tarantula's a venomous spider that appears as fuzzy as a teddy bear. The slipcover dresses up the broken-in comfort of the stained couch. Textures. Surfaces.

If I'm still working on them tomorrow, something from Susan Wheeler's Ledger might be next.

Taxes, gag. Poets are no good at math. Or at least this one ain't. And totally disorganized. I'm also a "creative speller." These are some of my flaws.