Hungry Ghosts
Old friend, you write, Why write? It’s all trash,
nothing to say. Maybe you’re right. Why keep writing
with this tool to inscribe time, line by line, measuring
what is lost as it leaves? No one reads this stuff.
If only the words were a body I could inhabit
and you could feel me through this membrane,
like skins touching. I remember one day telling you
I felt I was just starting to wake from the long dumb
sleep of childhood, but was lost in the dark rush
of the senses, and I imagined my spirit
as blind, reaching through flesh and tickertape
consciousness, a hand trying to grasp itself.
I would like to believe in souls reaching through
the flesh of understanding, hungry to be seen
and detecting each other through defective means.
I would like to believe this life is a sleep we’ll wake from,
that some conductor drives our spirits through
this tunnel and for a reason. But I find myself talking
in darkness, huddled around the narrow flame
of my own being, the way a child I knew, yes, me,
would walk home from the bus stop chanting nonsense
because when he fell silent the empty dark
closed in and made him know how blind he was,
how ravenous for dinner, lights, and mother.
And he would make the television blaze and shout
just to stop that dead black eye from staring.
And in bed, he’d pull the covers over his head
when his mother said, Lights out, and pray for sleep.
Tony Barnstone, the son of poet and translator Willis Barnstone and visual artist Elli Barnstone, was born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Indiana, Vermont, and Spain. He was educated at Wesleyan University; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and the University of California-Berkeley, where he earned a PhD under poets Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass.
A poet, translator, editor, and writer of fiction, Barnstone has been influenced by such disparate figures as James Wright, Federico García Lorca, and T.S. Eliot. His poems merge crisp, precise imagery with humor, a longer cadence, and an essayistic or narrative arc. As poet Dorianne Laux notes, “The kaleidoscope of voices in Tony Barnstone’s Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki rise from the grit, blood and smoke of World War II to tell their complex tales of fear and brutality. Through charged, yet plainspeaking personal poems, the terrible, gasping truths are brought to light.” In an interview with Rebecca Seiferle for Drunken Boat, Barnstone stated, “I think that the work of poetry can be important, and that each poet needs to find his or her own way to make it so.”
Barnstone has authored twenty-one books, including poetry collections and chapbooks, and has produced multimedia work, including both a compact disc of music based on his poetry and a tarot deck, The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity, which draws upon the neuroscience of creativity to turn the tarot into a tool for creativity both in the arts and in reinventing one’s life. He is currently working on a libretto for an opera.
Barnstone’s poetry collections include Pulp Sonnets (Tupelo Press, 2015), illustrated by fellow poet and professor Amin Mansouri; Beast in the Apartment (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014); Tongue of War (BKMK Press, 2009); The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008); Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005); and Impure: Poems(University Press of Florida, 1999). His selected poetry collection, Buda en Llamas: Antología Poética [Buddha in Flames: Poetry Anthology] (1999–2012) appeared in a bilingual Spanish-English edition published by Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia in 2014, with translations by Mariano Zaro.
Barnstone has lived in China, Kenya, and Greece. He currently resides in California, where he is the Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English at Whittier College.