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Three Poems
by Tony Tost

My first ambition was to make a film to be premiered on a small black and white television set, in the middle of a party, on a kitchen counter, and muted, which would be no problem at all, for the film would have been shot without sound anyway. The actors would not even pretend to be talking. For a time I thought the noise of the party could substitute for the lack of sound: dropped bottles, sing-a-longs, heavy breathing – a constant sense of novelty which, if one does not abandon it, leads to a sort of peace, which then turns into a monotony interrupted only by interludes of quiet, which are now, of course, charged. At this point, my film would be shown, but without any dialogue in the film, the party-people would be forced to talk to one another, which is always a disaster. But I think they wouldn’t mind the lack of sound if they understood the visual language: open curtains means the heroine has second thoughts, ducks on the pond and we know the hero is still alive, and so on. A lover gives the other a cross-eyed look, which means: “I can’t believe you are afraid to die.”


* * *


My beard is a bridge between my past and my face. I have shaved with a supreme carelessness. My beard of sugar is in the rain. My beard of regrets.

There is a rumor of a beard that leans towards the West. California is flooded in beards. As a child I drew a beard on my face with red ink and my new beard was transposed upon a pillow. The seas are red with beards.

California: the brief story of a whale’s beard.

She says my beard tickles her lips. She slips a valentine into my mouth.

My beard of red. Her hair of ashes, not flames. Her valentine: the forced laughter of the bearded lady or the constant quiet of her only son? I will shave quickly, at my leisure, at night, under a tree.


The rumor of an eternal beard. The moon is the face of madness (it has no beard). My false beard is drained of color as I dream.

There is a beard of untapped potential on the face of the dead assassin, the beard of Joseph Stalin is now twice the size of Russia, and I have a beard of false confessions that I tuck into my shirt at night—every beard has its thorn.


Bury your heads in the beard of sorrow, people. I shall sink my teeth into the beard of sorrows past.

“They will bury us next to our beards.”

My lord has a beard that goes all the way to his belly. A ridiculous beard and mine’s just like it


* * *

And the woman calling “and I let the fish go,” hoping it might be so. I saw nobody coming, so I went instead still clinging to your shirt of lost connections. A man of actions dials the telephone during the act, when our minds tend to wander back to the ordinary eye, the cauldron of morning. You take and drop my hand as though it soared suchwise through heaven too. It well may be. I do not think I would like priceless treasures sinking in the sand, in the cedar limbs.