Zordani, Robert A.

English

The Keep

Eastern Illinois University
The Keep
Faculty Research & Creative Activity English
February 2004
Epileptic's Song: poems by Bob Zordani
Robert A. Zordani
Eastern Illinois University, razordani@eiu.edu
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Zordani, Robert A., "Epileptic's Song: poems by Bob Zordani" (2004). Faculty Research & Creative Activity. 57.
http://thekeep.eiu.edu/eng_fac/57
Epileptic’s Song 
I have come here 
to dance. Lurch 
into action like 
an old motor – sputtering, 
hacking, when click, 
switches kick on. 
Call me Clacking Jaw. 
Call me the dazzled boy 
who licks sockets. 
Call me Headknock. 
Broken Nose. Come 
see me dance without 
music. Come. See me 
shake out the rhythm 
no one can drum. 
Watch me hum. 
 
 
My Strongest Man 
Kenny cannot read the warning 
on the floor jack, does not know 
what truck might one day crush  
his legs or upper body. 
But Kenny is my strongest man, 
able easily to spin off even 
the tightest rust-laden lug 
from the dirtiest rim in town 
as if he himself is king 
of every tire buster here. 
Kenny says it is some chore 
to be stupid but that even  
a man with smarts like his 
has lapses, like last week 
when he didn't tighten 
the lugs on the rear wheels 
of my best customer's new Caddy. 
And Kenny says he'll never forget  
how he remembered his mistake 
as the car eased into traffic, 
the things that man said 
when he walked back. 
Still shaken, Kenny stares  
hard into the spin balancer, 
as if any small weight 
he is pounding onto that rim 
will balance out his life,  
make him roll true. 
 
 
Song for an Ex-Wife 
Whatever love I felt for you is gone 
is what I’d like to say, but that’s a lie 
I cannot even make myself believe. 
You float across my dreams, angelic face 
that darkens like a summer cloud at dusk 
when I approach. Sometimes a storm blows in, 
your voice the crack of thunder through the rain. 
I hide my head until the storm is gone 
and bats are feeding in the angry dusk, 
inhaling insects off the breeze like lies 
just sweet enough to twist a woman’s face 
into the only thing a man believes. 
When morning hits, I knot my tie and leave 
the house for work. I drive past Happy’s Inn 
and up Route 1 through Kankakee to face 
my students in their tidy rows. I’m gone 
by three, elated that the asphalt lies 
beneath my wheels, and ready for the dusk 
to spread its blanket over me. By dusk 
I’m nearly home. Fall’s almost here. The leaves 
look ripe enough to drop in this red light, 
love, their simple lives all but crashing in. 
On Saturdays, you’ll find me blowing one 
mean harp outside of Martinton, my face 
jammed up against the tiny holes, my face 
the bloody color of the coming dusk. 
Our drummer keeps good time, says, We be gone 
without a steady beat. You best believe 
it, too, big man, because you don’t you in 
a world of shit. It ain’t no fuckin’ lie. 
I nod and smile. It ain’t no fuckin’ lie, 
I say, and count off time. He grimaces, 
then flies into a roll. The band kicks in, 
our music pulsing high across the dusk, 
the song some simple treatise on belief, 
on heading down the road until we’re gone. 
We’re in a groove far smoother than the lies 
we might believe, the lies we have to face 
long after dusk when all the light has gone. 
 
 
Pond Management 
When I’d filled a five gallon bucket 
with bream too small to eat, I lugged it 
to the spillway. My son trailed behind, 
asking to count the fish before I dumped them. 
I listened to the numbers he called out, 
watched the fish sail from his hands 
as he threw them into the gully. 
By number thirty-five he got bored, 
so we emptied the near full bucket. 
Fifty pounds of fish slid down the hill 
to mix with the leaves and the rot. 
The live ones flopped and rustled on the way. 
My son asked why we had to kill them. 
The pond is all choked up with bream, I said. 
But he’d picked up a stray fish 
and wasn’t listening. He studied it, 
said it was the prettiest one he’d ever seen. 
Then he reared back and sent it flying 
over the gully and out of sight. 
 
 
A Few Long Feathers 
Just yesterday I watched a red-tailed hawk 
circle the house and land in the red oak 
next to the vacant chicken coop. He’d plucked 
my last hen off one afternoon last week 
and left a few long feathers in the pen, 
hard evidence that couldn’t be undone. 
I thought of pulling out my Winchester 
and downing him for good, right then and there. 
He kept staring into my empty yard 
as if my every chicken were not dead 
and there were plenty still for him to eat. 
It would have been, no doubt, an easy shot. 
I would have done it, too, without remorse, 
without a head shake or a single curse, 
but I admired his perching on that branch, 
scanning the idle barnyard for a catch, 
unaware that I held him in my sights, 
clicked the safety, and had to make a choice. 
This once, I let him sweep across the field, 
swing north, and slice straight through the cutting wind. 
 
 
Lament 
You asked me not to put you in a poem, 
to leave your voice and body out of it. 
You asked me this one night not far from home 
in the old oak grove where we used to come 
to settle back and stretch our legs a bit. 
You asked me not to put you in a poem, 
and when I winced, you sat straight up to comb 
your hair and let the moon shine into it. 
You asked me this one night not far from home. 
A poem is nothing but a lie that some 
believe is truth, you said, not made up shit, 
then asked me not to put you in a poem, 
your voice as steady as a metronome, 
as steady, love, as it was explicit. 
You asked me this one night not far from home, 
and truthfully, I found it troublesome 
to write and always scratch you out of it 
because you asked me this not far from home – 
you asked me not to put you in a poem. 
A Conversation With Bob Zordani 
 
1. Why do you write poetry? 
I write poetry (as opposed to short stories and novels) simply 
because poetry is the genre I love most. For me, there is nothing 
better than making a tiny, pristine object. Think of Yeats’s great 
poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” The best poems are highly crafted 
baubles meant to sit on the shelves of the kings and queens of 
Byzantium. 
2. What is your poetry about? 
This is a difficult question because I cover a lot of themes. One 
thing that interests me greatly is the power struggle in male/female 
relationships. A lot of my work examines this tenuous balance (or 
imbalance, as the case may be). Some of my poems discuss familial 
relationships, and my struggle to deal with epilepsy underlies much 
of what I write. 
3. Who are your influences? 
Since I write narrative poetry almost exclusively, my influences 
tend to be poets who have significant bodies of narrative work. For 
instance, I love the narratives of Tennyson and Robert Browning, 
but I could not care less about their lyric poetry. Marvell’s “To His 
Coy Mistress” is a huge influence on me. I love Chaucer’s The 
Canterbury Tales. Pope and Dryden really float my boat. 
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads is awesome. Who 
could forget Donne and Herbert? Those are old school influences, 
but I like newer stuff, too. 
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gained a lot of respect for Frost’s best 
poems, and all of Yeats sends me, especially his love poems from 
the first decade of the twentieth century. James Wright’s work, 
especially the pre-Bly stuff, has been huge, and so has that of 
Richard Hugo. I like Gary Soto’s poetry even though he’s mostly a 
free verse guy. The same goes for Thomas Lux. Andrew Hudgins is 
an absolute god. Lately, I’ve been reading Rodney Jones, Dorianne 
Laux, Kim Addonizio, Robert Wrigley, Tony Hoagland, Beth Ann 
Fennelly, and Bob Hicok, to name a few. 
Many of our faculty members and former faculty members have 
had lasting influences on my work: Bruce Guernsey, David 
Radavich, Jay Prefontaine, Sally McCluskey, John Guzlowski, 
Michael Loudon, Beth Kalikoff, Dave Miller, Mary Maddox, 
Graham Lewis, John Kilgore, Dan Tessitore, and John Martone. In 
graduate school, I studied under James Whitehead, Heather Ross 
Miller, Sidney Burris, and Michael Heffernan, and all of them 
helped me a great deal. Perhaps my most important influence, 
though, comes from Dominic Belmonte, my high school English 
teacher. After all, it was he who slid me a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl 
and Other Poems under the table and got the ball rolling. 
4. What is this particular book about and what 
inspired it? 
I struggled with the title of this book for years before – on the 
advice of poet Beth Ann Fennelly – settling on Epileptic’s 
Song. Although only four of the poems in the collection deal 
directly with epilepsy, this is the thematic glue that holds the book 
together. Some people may eventually take me to task for 
capitalizing on my disability, but I will always brush aside this 
shallow sort of criticism. Disability is something that is often left 
undiscussed. The grim truth of the matter is that many “normal” 
people simply consider those of us with disabilities as freaks and 
are uncomfortable in our presence. For me, the title of this 
collection is, for better or worse, an unflinching affirmation of 
selfhood. It should also be apparent that, although epilepsy is a 
cornerstone of my life, it is merely a component of my being, a 
fraction of what I am. 
5. What are you working on now? 
I’m working on some poems for a new manuscript tentatively 
entitled The Naturalist. In the summer, I hope to begin 
coauthoring a book on edible wild mushrooms with our own Drs. 
Michael Kuo and John David Moore. 
6. Why Water Press and Media? 
Thank you for asking this question. Patrick Peters, the publisher of 
Water Press and Media, has been my friend for twenty years. In the 
old days, we wrote poetry together, fished together, got drunk 
together, chased women together. I stood up in Patrick’s wedding, 
and he stood up in mine. There are not many people in the world 
whom I respect and trust more than Patrick Peters. 
When Patrick called me up out of the blue to talk about Water 
Press and Media and to ask to have a look at my manuscript, I was 
elated. I had been sending out different versions of the book for a 
decade and had come close to getting it published a dozen times by 
very prominent poetry presses, including The Yale Series of 
Younger Poets. My poetry had been published in a wide variety of 
journals, and I’d won a few awards for my work as well. In truth, I 
was pretty disheartened with the whole book thing. Ten years of 
manuscript rejection is a hard pill to swallow for anyone. That 
phone call was my lucky break. It was like hitting the lottery. 
I liked what Patrick had to say about Water Press and Media. He 
noted that most of the respected small poetry presses (Copper 
Canyon and Graywolf, for instance) are really no longer small 
presses. He also asserted that many small presses had been bought 
out by large publishing houses and that many university presses 
had cut back on their poetry titles or had stopped publishing poetry 
altogether. In other words, Patrick believed there was a need for a 
new high quality small press and that Water Press and Media could 
help fill this niche. I had to agree. 
Patrick also guaranteed me that we would work on the book 
together from start to finish. We would be able to discuss editorial 
issues and come up with fair solutions to any problems that might 
arise. Patrick’s editorial suggestions have been outstanding. He 
changed the ordering of the book sections so that the book flows 
much more coherently, and he suggested I discard one poem that 
seemed much weaker than the rest of them. I hated the idea of 
cutting that poem because of sentimental reasons. However, 
Patrick was dead right, and I gave in, no matter how much it 
pained me to do so. Patrick also suggested that I include a very 
early poem I’d written as an undergraduate. This freaked me out 
because I hadn’t even looked at the poem in fifteen years and 
considered it juvenilia and hoped no one would ever find it. 
Grumbling, I promised Patrick I’d have a look at the poem and see 
if I could do anything with it. It took me all afternoon to find the 
thing in an old, yellowed journal from the mid-80's. To my 
surprise, the poem was pretty good and just needed some sprucing 
up. I cut a few words, changed a couple others, fixed some bad 
punctuation, relined the poem into long unrhymed couplets, and fit 
it into the manuscript. Lately, we’ve been quibbling over the book’s 
cover design. We’re still not completely eye to eye on this issue, but 
I know the final product will be of excellent quality and both of us 
will be satisfied with the outcome. 
Finally, Patrick Peters is a very astute businessman who 
understands marketing and publicity. He has been involved in a 
number of successful businesses and knows what it takes to make a 
venture work. He understands deadlines and budgets, and he 
knows how to deal with people. In addition, Patrick loves literature 
and is a fine poet in his own right. I would be a moron not to let 
Water Press and Media publish Epileptic’s Song. 
	  


Epileptic\u27s Song: poems by Bob Zordani

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Epileptic\u27s Song: poems by Bob Zordani

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