Two poems by MARIO CHARD
Mar
After the war disfigured
they gave men effigies of their faces
cast by sculptors.
They took sculptors
who learned first to mar,
that ruin
always precedes art,
and gave them soldiers.
Then soldiers they taught first
to mar effigies
of men
were given sculptors.
153 The Paris-American
After the war disfigured
they gave men effigies of their faces
cast by sculptors.
They took sculptors
who learned first to mar,
that ruin
always precedes art,
and gave them soldiers.
Then soldiers they taught first
to mar effigies
of men
were given sculptors.
153 The Paris-American
Two Kingdoms
A son says this is my kingdom.
His father sees the play, says
this is my kingdom. Already
the son is pointing where
their kingdoms meet.
But where the father looks he sees
only poor in the boy’s kingdom:
a cemetery cleared
of headstones for the poor
to make gardens, a mother
who pulled out bones
with her potatoes
assuring her daughter the bones
once made a horse.
The father sees the girl
assemble the bones into figures,
dress them in potato skins.
They are headless. They guard
her kingdom. Some have shoots
growing from their eyes.
The father sees the mother
remake the same small hole
with her hands. He confuses repetition
for digging. The father says
there are only poor in your kingdom.
The son forgets
what kingdom means.
154 The Paris-American
A son says this is my kingdom.
His father sees the play, says
this is my kingdom. Already
the son is pointing where
their kingdoms meet.
But where the father looks he sees
only poor in the boy’s kingdom:
a cemetery cleared
of headstones for the poor
to make gardens, a mother
who pulled out bones
with her potatoes
assuring her daughter the bones
once made a horse.
The father sees the girl
assemble the bones into figures,
dress them in potato skins.
They are headless. They guard
her kingdom. Some have shoots
growing from their eyes.
The father sees the mother
remake the same small hole
with her hands. He confuses repetition
for digging. The father says
there are only poor in your kingdom.
The son forgets
what kingdom means.
154 The Paris-American
Mario Chard was born in northern Utah and educated at Weber State University, Purdue University, and Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, FIELD, and Indiana Review, among others. A winner of the 2012 “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize, he currently writes and teaches in Utah where he lives with his wife and sons.