The Weight of Bodily Touches by Joseph Zaccardi

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Weight of Bodily Touches by Joseph Zaccardi Susana H. Case (bio) the weight of bodily touches Joseph Zaccardi Kelsey Books http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/in-the-blink-of-a-third-eye.html 121 Pages; Print; $18.50 "[B]oy what I wouldn't give for a shot of bourbonized plasma," Joseph Zaccardi laments in The Weight of Bodily Touches, this former Marin Country, California Poet Laureate, refusing to allow the existence of mortality and its feast upon the body to bring him down in "ICU": and what itmeans to be useful and alive and in possession of a donor card thatsomeday a doctor-to-be will decide if any of my parts are reusableor retoolable or if I'm worth the trouble to resuscitate from amorphine haze as I breathe with the help of an antiquated iron lungwhile my arms flap and my feet kick. One expects personal and possibly erotic poems from the title and the idealized pair of bodies on the cover, but what Zaccardi means by weight has more to do with the tragic pressure of our human condition and connectedness: "what if she eats the grave dust/under her own nails" he asks in the stunning first poem in the volume, "To Feast on the Flesh of Decay," about a farm couple's reaction to their stillborn daughter, and we are reminded of the betrayals contained in flesh and in living throughout the collection, the inevitability of grief and our attempted negotiations to keep it at bay: suppose he genuflects and counts her rapid breathsand feels the thrum of blood move through her bodyhis trousers' knees and shirt sleeves wet as he waitsto catch the stillborn they've named Maia of the Angelswhile outside a breeze rattles the wheat stalks Even in a poem in which a woman plays a mandolin so beautifully that it breaks down all boundaries between the speaker and a woman named [End Page 121] Elaine, scars from a bypass surgery are part of the context. Scars, bruises, aches, wounds, overdose, fatal collision, drowning, war, blindness, HIV, the ravages of homelessness—in prose poems and enjambed poems—these are all parts of the musical instruments that make our bodies, the bodies that are ever-present in this, Zaccardi's fifth collection of poetry. In "The Guitarist," Zaccardi writes: he went blind then died then everything from his lifewas disassembled while everyone who had swayed to his strumscame to the wake to lay eyes on his body but he was a no-showthere was only a guitar's broken neck and tuning peg as well asthe strings and frets the waist and bridge bone and the fingerboard. I was taken by the author's effective use of repetition, in "The Sound the Tree Makes," for example, a selection of the prose poems becoming recursive chants in which he eliminates the punctuation, perhaps in homage to W. S. Merwin and an encounter he references in his book in which, after attempting to punctuate Merwin's The Rain in the Trees, he realized years later what a mistake it was to try to do that: The tree fell in the forest because of deep freeze the tree fellbecause it was another day because of gravity the tree fellsoundless onto shoulder-high snow the tree fell because the windswirled because of root rot termite buggery because its torso wasgirdled by bark beetles because the phloem and xylem dried the treefell because it was time for it to fall it fell and the sound echoedand birds rose from their roosts the sound was train-like crushingthunderous the tree fell in slow motion black and white silent Merwin signed the book for him and gifted him an eraser to rectify his intrusive punctuation, which he kept. In several poems, Zaccardi feels deeply the corporeal suffering of others, the inevitably human suffering, for example, of those who are victims of homophobia and racism: those who have killed themselves (there is another poem as well about the suicide of a school roommate). In "To Endure What Will...