Charlie Burks:
February 6, 1946 – January 29, 2018
Stand-up Aphorist, Scholar, Raconteur
[Editor’s Note: This was written for a memorial held for Charlie Burks on June 24, 2018, at Open Books: A Poem Emporium Bookstore in Seattle.]
Hey Charlie —
Folks are gathering to celebrate you. My part is a memory
plus a poem.
Go to a back-in-the-day time to your apartment where four
of us were gathered for our weekly jam. The occasion—the
prep time for working on OUR SHOW. Yes—Ricky Rankin,
Sandra Schroeder, you plus me. You told us to write poems
using only relative clauses on that day.
OMG! WHAMO! (What’s a relative clause?) I needed a snappy
comeback—so I changed the subject. I said, “How do you
practice your craft?” (Something like that.) You said, “Study
Dada.” (Something like that.) I said, “Who’s he?” (Something
like that.) You said, “The European Dada Movement.” (Some-
thing like that.) And so I did. And here’s what happened . . .
one summer
who put a nickel in the roof of my imagination
who paid six light bulbs to go slumming at the Eiffel Tower
who painted the Lido’s beaches blue w/ peanut butter
who told me love is as simple as a butterfly’s wishbone
who loved me so hard the sun lost its gold teeth
who cashed in trading stamps for a passport to Argentina
who followed you across cayenne pepper seas in leaky huaraches
who shampooed w/ tequila and revised the moon’s tides
who translated the exchange rate into eighty-five hither-to
inaccessible languages and miscellaneous obscure dialects
who stood w/ out shoes on the slate roofs of summer screaming
screaming I love you I love you I love you I love you I love
you
they tell me I did
Hold on, Charlie—just remembered another poem that’s made of relative clauaes. It took me years to conquer the grammar. Oceans of thanks for the challenge!
LESSSON
—for Roberto Valenza
What we learn from grammar books
confirms our sense of order
that every heart can be modified
by its own subjective compliment
that every dream can be coaxed into defeat
by a benign and tidy passive voice
and that apostate verbs can or may
shift into their own infinitives
i.e., to trap to seduce to confuse
and that for the real you
you the indefinite pronoun
you the intransitive lover
any modal substitution will do
and any run-on sentence stopped just
short of its own internal punctation will
prove that in this lesson we must conquer
our flawed choices and prod the clean heart
beyond loss pain grief and the change
of seasons
OK, Charlie—’Nuff Said . . .
JT Stewart (poet, writer, playwright, public artist, editor, teacher) co-founded the Clarion West SF Writers’ Workshop in 1984. As a public artist, JT considers the following as representative of her work: poetry broadsides placed at the Seattle Art Museum, the Washington State Convention Center Galleries, and the Allen Library (University of Washington). She was Poetry Editor for Seattle Poets and Photographers: A Millennium Reflection (Seattle Arts Commission, 1999). JT has gotten grants from Artist Trust, 4Culture, and the NEH. Viewers can see her poetry broadsides in the permanent installation Raven Brings Light To This House Of Stories (Allen Library). She currently serves as a juror (one of eighty from five countries) for the yearly SOVAS Awards (Society of Voice Arts & Sciences).
