Tribute to a Lost Writer & Friend - Patrick Schnoor (II)

My late friend and poet Patrick Schnoor [1947-1997] was writing poetry in high school, that was better than most serious writers ever write in their whole lives. I thought, when I first read it, realizing that he'd written these poems when just a junior high school student in Los Banos, California in the early 1960's, he might go on to be a major American poet, but that was short-circuited by Patrick's drug problem(s). 

  

Here are three selections from 24 Sonnets, which I published as a small pamphlet in 1975 [Kensington: L Publications].

  

  

_________

   

  

                              The Fly

 

Blue-bottle fly bake black beneath the sun.

Sear your jerky way across the concrete,

callous spot.  Your stop-go movements, discrete

quantum hops crack, seriate, the region

into stop-time, intense, and sequential.

I watch you close in a lyncean trance,

perhaps interpolate your random dance,

vibrant in the shattered air still full

of your buzz.  I'm dead.  And flat.   And supreme.

What an eerie sight you are--catch

some other god and teach him how to watch

the time, as rich and dense as thick, white cream.

soulless speck, setting scenes with dead finesse,

go, magnify another's emptiness.  

  

_________

  

  

                      The Friendly Cat People 

 

Cats are esthetes:  They don't like your crumbling newspaper.

Their air wisp tails remove, and they like to think

they're licentious, though concerning their rumored sex they are mystic.

their non-aligned, unbenign stare

blinks resolvedly slow, and their gruesomely pink

mouths, whence dangle occasional small dusty mouse feet,

widen yawningly, with that functionally quiet flair

peculiarly leonine, epiglottilly domestic.

Watch a cat pour itself through a fence hole.

Observe the cats hunt before their lunch appointment,

how their play turns, surely, to cruel, if nothing's served,

claws splayed, their planetary eye-lights cooled.

And cats discriminate:  Often, at noon, they rest,

purring, nice, how people make the best pets.

  

_________

  

  

                           Frog Catechist

 

Dry, abrasive tules smoulder, smokeless,

fester near the inadequate water,

as stagnant as the air aging in this

arid reservoir.  The curly mud sure

is fragile, cracked and peeling adobe

blanched by the exigeant sun.  Over there

the twin headgates are wound down uselessly.

I walk over to them, kneel, and stare

down through the grating at whatever may

be trapped behind it, in that concrete hole:

There's a bull-frog, with gold flecked constella-

tions in his eyes, and ex nihilo

nihil fit is demonstrated, as he

croaks, celebrates his office just for me.

  

_________

  

  

Though distressingly juvenile in several ways, these precocious works demonstrate the inculcation of a number of pre-modern and post-modern techniques. The effects are crudely achieved, but the power of the vision--especially by one so young--speaks to a penetrating vision. 

 

I will post several more of Patrick's poems in the days ahead.