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Best Poems Written by Christopher Bowen

Below are the all-time best Christopher Bowen poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Flesh

Musee

See where it burns in Titian's brush
subsides along the cool Aegean stone,
or twists in the fist-faces of Rome,
our only mystery--flesh.

There, uncertainty ends, or does it merely pause?
The surgeon's knife reveals a shadow
no surface contains, our laws
are not what we do or vow.

Yet surface is all, and scars--
the scuttled pains that heal.
Observe how memory collects in flaws
placed where they are most real.

Or how, as flowers, the persistent leaf
bears the color of its grief.

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Losers

Losers

Do you waver. are you shy?
When they look at you
do their eyes imply:
"We'll have to make do"?

Do you doubt your reasons,
suspect your goals,
commit self-treason
defer to trolls?

Are you always too reflective?
Are all your victories retrospective?
Do you try to do what's right
and end up being too polite?

Take heart then, don't despair!
Remember losers, everywhere,
it's within the infinite power of thought
to prove conclusively the winners are not.

Details | Christopher Bowen Poem

International Airport

International Airport

This nowhere, a contrived freedom
expatriate as air,
demonstrates our mastery
of what we meet or leave behind.

Each precise beginning
finds an ending imprecise,
as we fly to where or whom we wish
only to find them somehow less.

The conquered distance
returns within ourselves
as all that's joined grows relative
becomes a nowhere too. 

Until the town seems smaller
the loving eyes less absolute.

Details | Christopher Bowen Poem

Pro Patria Mori

Pro Patria Mori

Missouri volunteers bit bullets, watched
as Santa Ana's baggage washed
their brazen hair, hip deep
in the Rio Grande.
The ancient river moved across the land
Like slow drool down a leather cheek.

Bang! Paul Bunyan's balls
rolled down the Great Divide, rattled
across the porcelain sea.
Oh, the girls!
Hair hot and black, Whoopee!
Their tongues as pink as baby fat.

Now tongs drop a hissing crepe
on the defoliated plate. Butter complicates
our fingers, soils the bib.
We crack a claw. Like a crib
at Benin, wary and dull,
the eagle fills his nest with skulls.

Details | Christopher Bowen Poem

Swedish Saga

Swesish Saga

Gerda left Sweden with an odd liking for turnips.
She claimed hard labor ruined her hands.
She hated her father.
Fritchof walked like an ex-sailor.
He had a vein-blue tattoo on his left hand.
He once sailed the Red Sea and grew a mustache.

They met in Vancouver. A brown wedding oval preserves
her stiff upper lip, his doubting earnestness.
She made him smoke his after-dinner cigar
in a corner where he taught me chess.  
On the morning he died my mother removed the half pint 
of Jim Beam from his bed-table drawer.

Gerda now reads the Bible to her son.
He is 50 and masturbates in the tub.
They go to faith healers.
He has actually seen the Devil!

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Then and Now

Then and Now

Then, I did not know that you were there
or miss the slight confusion of your hair
or think about your gracious smile
while pausing by brook a while

Or wandering under cloud-blown skies
did not recall the beauty of your eyes
when walking in the woods in June
through green-filled Summers in full bloom.

I did not think of how you walk
or of the music of your talk
(so like sunlight among flowers).
Now, strolling over fields for hours

I forget what once had been
your beauty in my heart has so grown
you now are all the Spring times I have seen
and all the Summers I have known.

Details | Christopher Bowen Poem

Guadalcanal 2019

Guadalcanal 2019

Tour boat, ice-blue water.
Five rubber rafts,
12 heroes each, approach
Antarctic 'beach'.

‘Explorer’: 'Look! Penguins!'
Rest chirp approval, focus Canons,
shoot the penguins left and right.
'Great' 'Wonderful'.  

Two hours later, 3-star restaurant,
Tierra del Fuego.
'Global warming...' 
from the end of the table. 

Heads nod assent. Crab dinner,  
good Sauvignon Blanc. 'This is great!' 'Wonderful!' 
Are they talking about the crab? Or the penguins?  
Does it matter?

Details | Christopher Bowen Poem

Mao I

Mao I
(After an ink drawing by Mao I, Song dynasty, c. 1100
in the Freer Gallery of Oriental Art)

Faded, brown, discrete, as flowers pressed
in some antique book or magazine suggest
an intimate mood--fleeting, flown,
perennial, between timeless print grown 
meaningless, his femur sausage-linked
bamboo or supple joint-less trout, lightly inked,
survived the arson and the coup d'etats.
We find no window-sized Madonna
or noble in fluffed moustache
winking across the room at a burgher
winking back.
Here on a silk pane, light-boned swallows 
toss in the wind-sifted willows,
While at wind-arrested edge of flight one flies
caught forever turning in his almond eyes.

Details | Christopher Bowen Poem

Ars Longa

Ars Longa

It finally happened!
Someone in the East Wing
Goateed a Madonna and redid a Rembrant
a la de Kooning.

A blond with Vogue patterns
is crouched on the hall--
She's eyeing a Van Gogh
eyeing her from the wall.

We judge from the blushes
of blue-rinsed ladies in fur
Rude comments were made
on the audio tour.

The guards commandeer
Donatellos for targets
and are cleaning their pistols
with snips of Vermeer.

The staff in the Art Shoppe
is selling originals
and hanging the copies
in Gallery Five.

They're burning the Monets
they've tattooed Apollo,
crowds clamor outside 
to get in on the fun.

Cars circle the gallery
in infinite coils--
curbside parturitions
here a boy there a girl.

Details | Christopher Bowen Poem

Yucatan, Et Cetera

Yucatan, etc.

Cortez, DeMille are gone.
It's now the locus
of postgraduate honeymoons,
urban fugues, a minor literary genre.

Knowledge and ejection predispose us
to technological parody--
antique busses, burros, plumbing, pyramids--
as if nothing ever caught on.

There is no CHRONOLOGY, the pace and mores
are too counterproductive--
poster Indians pee along the road,
the women never dust.

We like the Sartrean-Spanish askewness--
bugs, sex, dysentery, moonlight--
as if, though settled with us, 
the Fates vacation here.