

Into every life a little ax must fall.

Every dog has its choke chain.

Every cloud has a shadow.

Better dead than fed.

He who laughs, will not last.

Sticks and stones will break you,

and then the names of things will be changed.

A stitch in time saves no one.

The darkest hour comes.



-Kim Addonizio

Poetry



They tell me that your heart

has been found in Iowa,

pumping along Interstate 35.

Do you want it back?



When the cold comes on

this fast, it's Iowa again.

where pollen disperses

evenly on the dented Fords,



where white houses sag

by the town's corn silos,

where people in the houses

sicken on corn dust.



Auctions sell entire farms.

It's not the auctions that's upsetting

but what they sell, the ragged towel

or the armless doll, for a dollar.

I hear they've found

an eye of yours in Osceola

calling out to your mouth in Davis City.

That mouth of yours is in the bar,



the only place left in town,

slow dancing and smoking.

It's no wonder you look so pale.

Ever wish you'd done more



with your thirty years?

Seeing you last week I wonder

if you crave that sky

filled with the milky way

or the sight of Amish girls in blue

at sunset against wheat-colored prairie grass.

Here, the trees are full of gossip.

They're waiting to see what you'll do next.



-Deborah Ager

La Petite Zine



Are you so tired then, Stranger? Are you so tired that you can’t lift your arms above a whisper or extend your hand? Are you so tired that you accept the verdicts of salamanders and fish bones, and the sun in the morning and the moon at night, so tired that you think another day’s another day and nothing in your life is new—while all around you ideas percolate, branches break, computers go wild? Stranger,

are you so tired

that you’d give up wishing for a second chance if you could only have a day or two in the country, sitting in an Adirondack chair with your wristwatch off until someone calls, “Croquet, croquet. Anyone for croquet?” Are you tired enough not to care who’s invading who, who’s playing who, who speaks for who, who’s rising to the top, whose cat’s got whose tongue? Was it experiences with an early grave that did you in? Why do you always think of yourself as half-dissolved, wretchedly torn? Talk to us, Stranger, tell us what we’ve forgotten about room dividers, bottle caps, memory lapse, cufflinks, sad sacks, and how young men/young women stand on various fire escapes promising themselves the world but at the same time sensing they’ll be lost in money, houses and children. Stranger, are you tired enough to lay down your burdens, to think of opportunities finally as things to let slip by with no regrets, like early morning starlings rising above green pastures, skimming across bristlegrass and wildflowers, heading somewhere no one knows? If so, we’ll straighten the pictures on our guest room walls, turn down the covers, fluff up the pillows. . . . Tap at our door,

Stranger

or send us your message on the Internet’s blue waves, and we’ll provide for you a place to rest your head.



-Dick Allen

The Gettysburg Review



Grandmother left her youngest child, Alice, with a neighbor

on the top floor because she was moving

into another building where she could be the Super. She didn’t

want the baby in the middle of all that mess. Her husband, Blackie,

driving up and down Tenth Avenue,



delivering electrical supplies--plugs, cords, little relay boxes like

the black recorders plucked years later

from drowned airliners, a voice behind Blackie already saying,

“We’re going down, we’re going down!” The neighbor disappeared

with Alice. No note, no nothing. Just



the empty apartment. Blackie had a few more drinks near the docks

on Twelfth Avenue, near the German

freighters, talking about the Lindbergh baby. Burly men grew misty

eyed and cursed Bruno Hauptmann. The newsreel ran on and on.

After mother grew up and married the ex-



bootleg driver with the melancholy face, maybe she thought her

sister could be recovered

if she named her own daughter Alice. The baby growing into a

pigtailed girl inside my sister, who woke nights afraid she couldn’t

breathe, who sleepwalked



toward the kitchen window with the loose pane that popped out

the next morning and floated down

into the alley like a transparent soul the neighbors looked through

before it crashed near the Super sweeping up clothespins and bottle

caps. Whose hand was it in art class drew



the little house with the smoking chimney and three children

instead of two, arms and legs spread

out, spinning in the air? Who first bled through bargain cotton

panties? My sister clawing at her face, something pinching her

abdomen, twisting up an eye.





- John Allman

Blackbird

OUTSIDER ART Or visionary. Or raw. Primitive.

Naif. As if being abandoned in a corn field

at birth, a child of the veil, caul

over her face, weren't enough to send a woman

to the easel. Except there is no easel. No

canvas. Only a door. So she paints on the door.

"The Devil Have Folks Coming Out His Ears,

Eyes, Mouth and Butt." A deaf man leans

toward red geraniums blooming just before a frost

and he scolds them, "You fools!" Another

paints with mud and molasses--showing

the wealthy the true nature of their homes

on plaster board that they hang in their

parlors. Here's the piano cow with ivory keys

along her spine. A gray-haired Mary holding

dead Christ, painted on the lid of a flour

drum. Who has ever seen her in her age? An old man's

face on dented rusted tin has his own kind

of crumpled truth. There was a man who painted

his sofa, his floor, his lamp shades, toilet tank,

visions pouring out of his long brush like

tears. It arrives any time of life. The seeing.

The feel that is texture. The bright pinks

and greens of a fractured dawn, the dewless

smooth petals, the voice in the tree, where twin

peacocks face each other, "You will bloom forever."

-John Allman 5 AM SYNTAX Reeds, mud grip, shell that forms only upon shell, this marsh rising and falling to sea-pulse, moon-drag: news of itself the only front-page effort worth its time. I'm bored with self, the drop-out ego abashed at how little it confounds the tide's insistence. I'm fed up with a name lifting itself into the breeze of opinion, the sky's azure only air that curves to authoring roundness. Nothing steps out of nature. Nothing returns from the vast water that does not crave its tidal beginning. Look across Calibogue Sound, at the three-masted dredge adding ocean floor to Daufuskie Island: spewing sand and broken bi-valves, crackled carapaces, torn whip coral, stag-horn weed, the sea's waste like the mind's creaturely ideas sinking to the bottom, pulverized into voiceless god-ground poverty. A turning over. Shuck and thrust. Hurled column and collapse. A foothold reappearing further from tidy lawns and a porch filled with tourists in peaked caps, their glinting binoculars tilted to a sight-line low as this row of belly-wet pelicans close to white-caps, profile pterodactyl, their glide precise as a hand moving over text, without hesitation, instincted to its course. Sucking sound. Fume-moan. Stinking blackness. Shuddering belts, sudden fling: the given-up now the only given. -John Allman The Beloit Poetry Journal A DISTANT SUNDER Index

What God hath joined together,

let no man put— I used to solder.

The reasons why are now obscure.

Maybe just to bring old junk back to life:

a clock, a ceiling fan, my father’s Philco;

to see or hear gizmos, gone silent or dark,

whirr, light up, or sound an alarm.



There was a rude art to it, and an odor:

The shock of a barely audible pfusssst;

a sudden melt; quick hardening.



Just a lad, fooling around in Dad’s cellar;

making intimate connections;

bringing strands of copper

—cleansed of dirt & grease—

together (or back together)

with a silvery ring.



Do you, wire A, take this wire, C,

to be your lawful wedded weld?



As I built each bridge over troubled metal,

pulses quickened; couples thrummed: I do!



But Judas snuck into my make-believe chapel

and hid in the last pew; while the parson

argued a slam-dunk case against betrayal.



Still, I heard God’s demiurge say:

Do what fasteners may,

love & solder will be kissed away

by a distant sunder.



-David Alpaugh

Runes Sweet Nothing



You may take four words with you

cried the Angel of Death.



Why four?

(Already I was giving them grief.)



She shrugged her wings: Seasons,

Winds… Corners of the Earth…

Horsepeople of the Apocalypse...

Not even Euclid fully understands

why Divinity favors that number.

God is nothing if not inscrutable.



Now there’s a word I’d gladly go

into that good night with, I said.



God? We gave it to Milton ages ago.



Hey, he worked hard for it.

No, the word I want is nothing.

I can hear myself chanting it over

and over—through all eternity.



She smiled. Speaking of chanting,

I visited a fellow named Ginsberg

recently. He chose “howl,” “cock,”

“Moloch,” and “OMMMMMMM.”



What do the GREAT poets usually pick?



Their immortal names! Colley Cibber…

Robert Service… Kathryn Kookewicz…

Alfie Tennyson caused an awful stir

when he insisted on adding Lord

which so irked Saint John of the Cross

he proclaimed him blasphemous.



No, I don’t want my name.

I was never that crazy about it.



You don’t have to take all four.

The Zennists always complain

that we offer three too many.



Then I’ll just suck on “nothing.” Roll it

up and down the roof of my mouth forever

as if the stone Death punished Sisyphus with

were no bigger than an Altoid. But, soft—

while you’re at it, I’ll also take “forever.”



She had turned on her laptop and was typing NOTHING

like a DMV clerk checking a personal license plate request.

Alas, it had been assigned to Thomas Hobbes in 1679

after he took his “great leap in the dark.”

And John Donne had dibs on “forever” forever

(along with “ecstasy,” “bone,” and “desire”).



The Dead had scavenged the lexicon,

a few nouns and verbs at a time.

They’d eaten the red meat.

Even the adjectives had been picked clean.

Nothing was left but the parsley:

adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions...



I chose: “up,” “down,” “if,” and “meanwhile.”



Just in case I awoke in a dark wood.

-David Alpaugh

Convolvulus Pivotal Question



Why must they turn and look back?

Ruin everything at the last moment.

Lot’s wife... Eurydice’s lover...



Their answers only partly satisfy:

“Had to make certain she still followed.”

“Couldn’t believe the city I loved was in flames.”



Why, steps away from sure ground,

This urge to look over our shoulders?

To risk untold joy just up ahead—

For a furtive glance behind.



-David Alpaugh

Hummingbird LITTLE ELEGY Index Even the stars wear out. Their great engines fail. The unapproachable roar and heat subside as wind blows across the hole in the sky with a noise like a boy playing on an empty bottle. It is an owl, or a train. You hear it underground. Where the worms live that can be cut in half and start over again and again. Their heart must be in two places at once, like mine. -Keith Althaus Grand Street FEBRUARY The murder of Malcolm X took place long ago but now hes everywhere, coming up from underground the first thing you see, books with his face on the cover on a cloth spread out on the sidewalk next to T-shirts on which a splotch of colored ink mixes with nothingness to form his eyes, the edge of the familiar jaw and brow. He was in transition then, the crowds that themselves were thinking, rethinking, knew it was important, even brave, to come, the nadir of the winter, dark hole of the week, Sunday afternoon, the street all dirt and wind, corrupted snow. That is also when Horowitz always played, Sunday afternoon, at 4 PM... He was dead by then, on stage, among cables and wires from microphones and tape recorders, freed from his age in its swollen strings, untuned, like a bead curtain you push aside to enter a room denied to others. - Keith Althaus The Yale Review SOME NIGHTS, between the car and door in the dark I look up to find the great river of the Milky Way, and stand for minutes growing cold in the autumn air, unable to move, take my eyes away, only to look back, wishing the house would vanish, and I was alone, far from lights and roads, with its dark, its cold, its change from everything known, which makes even those reaching claw-like backyard trees seem welcoming, and I think this must be how innocents are drawn into madness, a whispering begins, that could be anything, the wind, but then turns definite, becomes a voice that has but one intended listener. In a field years ago I watched another river, dark, without a name or end, flow overhead, hundreds of thousands of birds, the complete opposite, the negative of that silent, lifeless stream of stars. The cornfield is gone, so are the birds, though their descendants may still follow that same flyway, perhaps some stars are also dead, and only their light survives like a memory a million years old. Tired and cold, under icy reminders of how insignificant, how brief we are, I mouth their message in words I see disintegrate: I am alone; I am almost nothing. Yet these rivers meet in me. -Keith Althaus American Poetry Review



THE PERFECT COMPANY Index

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My Life As a Bull

I know this guy who turns into a fish. He does it again and again. First he’s a man, then he’s a fish, then he’s a man again. Everyone claps and cheers. Wow, they say, can you believe it? What’s the big deal? I ask them. What good is a fish? If it were me? I’d turn into a bull. Yep. That's a fact. A bull. You've got to admit, a bull is something to turn into. I do it whenever I can. No one would believe this of course. A nice lady like me. Not until they see me do it, that is. I’m something to see, too. First my feet become hooves. Then the fur grows all over my skin, and I get fat. Really fat. Fast. And I start to stink. Such an amazing stink, I could get high on it. Then the horns bust out of my forehead. The weight of them, it's amazing. I lower my neck and bellow. Next thing you know I’m charging across streets and yards, looking for a few men to spear. Usually the streets empty in a flash. No one likes hanging around with a bull these days. It’s sad how that happens. This isn’t Palermo after all. But sometimes I find a man or two. Usually it’s some cocky hapless fellows. You have to be a bull to know just how dumb some men are. They’ll start running around out there, waving their arms in the air, thinking they're so brave. They pretend their matadors or cowboys, diving in front of me. Or they try to ride me. Hah! That's when I nail them. How can I resist? I nail them again and again. The pleasure of it. It’s hard to explain. I know you’ll think I’m cruel. But ask around. You’ll see. Any skinny blonde lady would understand. Nin Andrews

( Gargoyle)





O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,

gimme a break before I die:

grant me wisdom, will, & wit,

purity, probity, pluck, & grit.

Trustworthy, helpful, friendly, kind,

gimme great abs and a steel-trap mind,

and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice --

these little blessings would suffice

to beget an earthly paradise:

make the bad people good --

and the good people nice;

and before our world goes over the brink,

teach the believers how to think.



-Philip Appleman

Free Inquiry

Events

Contingently we accept

the randomness of events—

a thought quick-lit

by dove flight

within a bluer weather

the atmosphere’s far gauzes

knitting auras of because,

supposing the small, immense

distance in pulling

a trigger. The lightning flashing

precedes our being aware

the thunder later

like a mind turning over

its might-have-beens,

inventing reasons—

as in talk we whisper

to ourselves in the wee hours

a hint of light in the trees

the paper on the drive

when sleepless we go out

on the gravel and pick up

the dew-wet object

a plastic wrapper full

of the sorrows of others

each a sand grain in

through the lips of shell

to be told into pearl

by the hurt that holds it—

movies seen together

then the same one seen

without her

the train station

the goodbye wave—these

conversations

with the Eumenides—

the wrapper releasing

a tsunami

that as we read brings

sufferings

like ours, in guises

we cannot imagine

and recognize.

-James Applewhite

.

Imaginary Weather

very like a whale Whither this weather these clouds

crowding on, following the curve

of air around the world? From almost

imaginary horizons, nearer-farther,

flat-bottomed, blue-toned, they sit

thermoclines of the upper ocean. Billowing

Camelot castles or sprouting

ineffable whales, sliding-unraveling,

they appear as if here while arising elsewhere,

updrafts of the Earth’s collective slumber.

They seem serene then storm, ramparts

from which Zeus imparts the shocking bolts—

flickering apparitions in almost-real horizons.

In blue themes of mood that suddenly whiten,

they avow transcendence, trailing skeins

of crystal-beaded rain, from under-domes

blue-blackened until cracked by the long spark

whereby the atmosphere reconciles its wish

for pure transparence with the heavy water

that falls in solid walls and encloses,

monsooning dark fits of turbulence

and gurgling the gutters. The wings of clouds

take form from our wishing, wiping clean

the dirty mind, the brooding forehead turned

earthward in August. They father and mother

our dreams of moisture, impinging in sleep

upon the distant houses of childhood,

making us praise in waking mumbles these

leaky roofs of memory whereby rain

can come through barriers of tin or shingle,

wetting us again in bed but so that we

arise in dry pajamas, grownups who

go out bare-headed and greet the shining day.

-James Applewhite

. The Two Towers The towering walls had mirrored

the Hudson River the harbor

then flickered a moment with terror.

No art of excruciating heights

had cast an italicized light about

these falling angel postures, learning

the air too late, caught on windows,

in lenses, their flight spirit-like,

yet missing a needed heart-sanctity.

Tragedy came as if special effects

in a movie. The country had seen two

jets toy-like across the Hudson’s

small stream, as if copied in

from a postcard, then humans plummeted.

Was it Lancasters over Cologne

was this Warsaw, Dresden was

this Hamburg or London was

this Hiroshima again were these

our own planes that attacked—

were these sunset chasers, aluminum

cylinders reflecting a westward horizon,

were they packed with women and men

were the jet-fueled explosions human? The towers evolved as they fell

their papers floating about elegiac,

gull-white, for this height sacrificed—

for these left to the air by fire,

in gestures by loss made holy—

reminding of the purposes of height—

of sun-topped pyramids to the gods,

of observation towers toward a star. These twin lacunae by the river

became eyes of the giant Albion,

who tramps his perpetual journey

invoking the bladed grass to

accompany hairs of his armpits

feeling the manyness of leaves

stiff or drooping in the fields

and the mossy scabs of worm fence

held close within vacuum by gravity—

knowing the spiritual kernel of light,

before a night passage of the congregation

Albion, restored on these shores.

Wounded but whole, aware of aging

work-broken but hopeful, gathering

himself he arose including his sisters

and wives, while a clear soprano sang

above the grieving, restoring the emotion

of belief. His vision dared to see far,

into the yearning of other women

and men, that their hurt remembering

be prayer-like, a meaning.

-James Applewhite

.

Tearing a tree down I split and stack its heat. Then strip the spirit of ice from the dungarees of my lost leg and huddle the flame with the water pouch frozen and stashed under my arm, far below the misting snow wind that gathers to blast the headwall. I fall asleep in snow and my mind retracks the trail climbing over trees into clouds that hide the wailing wall of Lion’s Head. Walking from wind into silence I stand face to face feeling the huge stone raise itself to a summit and swing the grappling hook like a pendulum before letting it fly over the bluff to strike sound. I tie myself in knots with the rigid rope and ascend the rock sinking my hands into stone whenever it opens, draining it of old age and strength. Picking I pull and scrape the surface until I reach the tree-line and break it into gusting wind that rips my face raw as frost runs the length of my leg and I lean forward shouldering the wind that hunches me in blindness. I bend over backwards and fall beyond the trees with my limbs outstretched spinning me wildly off the edge into wind that sucks the breath from my lungs as it races towards the sky leaving me stone-cold an acrobatic snowball speeding bursting with movement falling into the deep freeze of forced sleep. -Gary Armstrong Canadian Forum Delaware River ‘71 The river reveals itself in September, its many stones like jagged teeth. It is so shallow there seems no place to hide and yet, for weeks, we have dragged the dark pools and waded through the thinnest water without finding her. Barehanded like the trees we return home and dream what the river must know about the last lurch of a dying life. Prayerless and black with expression we are each haunted by the sight of her asleep in her bed, a child in the eyes of reflection, the leaves turning to fall above her, the riverbank kneeling to frost at our door. - Gary Armstrong The Irish Times

There are things I wouldn’t do

if you paid me. Too difficult,

dirty, dangerous. I wield a mean

chain saw, the motor spewing toxic

fumes, the blade hungry for my

bones. But something sly inside

me would rather die than pay

the price of heating oil so I’m

out in the cold, runny-nosed,

sweating under layers of old

clothes, cutting, stacking. If

I were compelled to do this job

I’d plot my escape, but

on my own I’m glad.



There are things we do we

wouldn’t tell a soul. Too seamy,

selfish or sad. I once burned

a book, but only after I took

too long to read it. Marquis

de Sade, with all his madness—

the suffering of men, women,

tormented children. I avoid

horror stories, having suffered

enough myself. If I were

assigned to read them I

would protest, but I’d fight

for our right to own them.



There are things we leave

undone, dangling like Damocles’

sword. Too troubling, too trying.

Procrastination is a guilty art

practiced by hand-wringers,

brow furrowers, but beyond

dalliance, some jobs should be

postponed. Debriding a wound

requires scraping but left undone,

chance of gangrene and later

amputation. Burial or burning

are better quickly done, but I’m for

letting nature take its course.

What we do can make things worse.



-David Axelrod

Deciduous Poems





MORNING SONGS



Songs through your windows

are tires on rainy streets

already rushing to where

you need to be, like a desk

in an office where you poise

all day at a keyboard.

But there’s your bed

and a fleeting thought

of calling the boss with

some song and dance

that you can’t come in,

a euphemism for won’t.

You sing in the shower,

let the towel whisper

to your skin. A damp

breeze from an open

window coaxes you

to leave. A glance back

at your pillow, still

impressed by your

sleepy head, and it’s off

to the song of industry.



-David Axelrod

Deciduous Poems







THREE DAYS



“There are only three days left,” she says.

She’s been moody, argumentative

for days, but now, she’s serious. Her

shoulders slump, dark rings around

her eyes, “Schools over in just three days.”

I remember busses full of kids throwing

their papers out, screaming from

the windows, summer a cauldron

called “freedom” and I could stew in it

forever—all the heated days on bikes

and freezing dips at Dane Street Beach

and staying up late for fireworks,

stinking of salty sweat in playgrounds

where dust was dessert after hotdogs

and beans. And she is sad—that school

will end? “Why is that bad?” I ask. “It’s

going by too fast,” she says and the fifty

years between us disappear. We are peers.



-David Axelrod

Deciduous Poems

I ask you for it. You look unhappy and surprised but lean forward to touch my lips with a reluctant brush of your own. I say: "That is the worst kiss I've had since I was seven." The moment veers toward a smile, we say goodnight. A night later by Grasmere in rain your mouth buries in my sweater, hiding. "The worst kiss?" you say, unwilling to part with another. But you do. Your kissing is tireless, expectant, as though you woke up from walking all day through London, still overflowing with its pleasure, and so loving every morning we nearly miss breakfast. The facts of our lives flow freely, we're guides to our own arrested pasts, wondering whether we still live there. We do. Our last kiss holds nothing back, except our lives, which empty of each other as slowly as rain dries from damp wool. -Robert Bagg Boston Review THE CLOSEST THING (Ginsberg in Paris, Corso in Rome) Poetry pardon me for having helped you understand you are not made of words alone. Roque Dalton, “Ars Poetica 1974” Without any exaggeration, I’m still, if not the best, at least the closest thing to what a poet should be. The more I read these Cambridge poets the more I’m convinced of this. These New England poets, apocalyptic crocodillions, the whole horde of them. They do not realize that poems are nothing without the poet. Why are Shelley, Chatterton, Byron, Rimbaud, to name but a few, so beautiful? I’ll tell you why, they and their works are one and the same, the poet and his poems are a whole. Gregory Corso, Letter to Hans, ca. May–June 1956 Heretical doctrine once, Gregory, more like gospel to me now. To that young Jersey crocadoodle you sang at in Paris, though, chanting “Marriage” to Sally and me off the Champs Elysées, poets’ lives could be thrilling but not works of art; poems came to life solely as words on a page, rising to no occasion beyond their own artifice. Amherst taught me that, which I had to unteach myself. Still, just who, what, is Corso’s wholly fused poet and poem? To this day I’m not sure. But when I heard Beat poets live their chattering bodies scribbled all over my skin psychic tattoos of invisible ink, to be developed over time. I was writing my name in the Transients’ Register at the Paris American Express––Ginsberg’s name lit up the page above mine! In the column where he declared his Final Destination, Heaven, to my chagrin I'd written, “Cap d’Antibes.” I sent a note, hoping to meet him. He replied! “Be there demain, à six heures, au Café Bonaparte.” He saunters into Gay Paree’s epicenter shouting “BAGG,” then spends the next hour telling me sonnets are poison, pentameter’s dead! Drop, he advised, out of Amherst, the Academic School of Uptight Verse, don't become a Merrillian poodle or worse, a Wilburnian loon. Go back to Homer’s pulsing hexameters, listen to Whitman––only lines with that kind of reach can take in any and all sensations flowing by, the deluge of people, of bed-fellows, butcher-boys, bathers, spinster voyeurs-- feel him breathing America, inhaling her, exhaling her on the smoke of his own breath. That's poetry! the smoke of your own warm breath realized in the chill of the air swirling around it. I didn’t buy his scary advice, but do so now— at least for today! Dear Ginsberg, no question, you spread yourself thin. Yet… even Merrill admitted, you spread yourself over the entire field of American verse like a good, healthy layer of manure. “Come see us in Rome,” I'd urged Corso the day he read "Marriage," his version of J. Alfred Prufrock, strangled by a tie on a third-degree sofa, should I say this, should I do that—a Prufrock ungelded, unbuttoned, word mad! “We'll pay our respects to Ovid Catullus Keats Shelley Byron Fellini,” I said, never dreaming he'd actually spring for such a pilgrimage, but by Ginsberg, he did––hunting me down in Rome deep in the stacks of the American Academy, me on my knees, with a catalogue drawer in my lap. We hiked up to my rickety study, plastered like a hornets’ nest to the old Aurelian Wall. There Corso made his mission clear: “Bagg, I’m gonna be Shelley, so you can be Thomas Jefferson Hogg. We’ll get kicked out of Yale together for mooning Bloom! You’ll be my best buddy, you’ll write my life, I love your two Gs. And I promise not to live long, a little less than Shelley, a little more than Keats, just long enough to slaughter Prose.” For nearly a week, we hung out. On via Veneto one evening he asked every tart on the street if she was the mom who’d left him to a bad dad, worse fosters, an orphanage, street crime and a prison with a library, unknown till Ginsberg’s wandering eye for lost souls spied Greg dealing down poems at a bistro in the Village. Soon Corso was camped out at Harvard, alighting in Frisco, made a fourth for Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Their wildcatting books hit gushers of thick black gold. I learned from him, from Corso, that making a poem of your life is hot sweaty work, especially in sweltering Rome. One morning at dawn in the Foro Romano he hurled himself, full length, like a visionary torn from a sprawling Russian novel, at the Oxford-shod feet of Lily Ross Taylor, Bryn Mawr’s Professor of All Things Roman, salaaming his gratitude for learning so much about bricks, baths, Caesars, and those Vestals he surprised in the gardens of Brattle Street, Cambridge. Lily tip-toed, barely breathing, past his dusty adulation. That very midnight we drove in my Volkswagon Beetle over the jaw-jarring stones of the Appian Way, me steering, Corso on the back bumper, one hand on the luggage rack, whipping those 45 horses past the crucified slaves, flaming fifty-gallon drums, orange faces of mini-skirted whores warming their butts. I wish I could leave you there, Gregory, a Delphic Charioteer losing your grip on those runaway Horses of the Sun. Except . . . there’s one more scene to this story, the grand finale, perhaps meant to show you in action taking down Prose, the Poetry Eating Dragon, or perhaps you're Percy Bysshe Corso, outraging your way to a noble expulsion. I did not witness what happened, but pieced it together, like Thucydides, from eyewitness accounts. They'd invited Corso to lunch, the Academy Fellows. He found their scholarly in-jokes offensive, their passion for trivia unbearable, brutish, insensitive to the demons driving the very artists they studied, unfeeling his need for "a young mad beautiful pope." To exorcise their emptiness, he offered up himself as everything they were not, climbing aboard the forty- foot-long refectory table, toeing soup bowls aside, strutting himself up like the Catullus Yeats imagined, denouncing the lot for never using “masturbate” in any of their writings, for never having slept, like him, in the Colosseum’s character-building chill and dirt. A burly Virgilian caught and lifted him aloft, set him off in the Billiard Room to cool down. Within minutes Corso was back, pounded open the doors, hailed the Classics Prof as his personal Caesar Augustus, knelt in prayer to be granted new life, miming thumbs up or thumbs down, to the crowd judging him from above. He had thrown himself on their mercy, thrown down one final roll of the poet’s dice, turning those Fellows to Romans holding this gladiator’s life in their bloodless, bloodthirsty hands. Caught in his script the scholars, chastened, voted him up, but when he vaulted back on stage, yelling “Truth Pyre!” they hustled him out to a cab that roared him away, back to Paris and the acrid fame he’d earned from BOMB, his poem cheering on the human nuclear deathwish. Forty-four years later, his wish fulfilled, he came back to Rome as ashes, to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery, his prostrate headstone nestled near Shelley’s charred heart bravely but gingerly seized from Percy's burning corpse by Edward Trelawney, pirate manqué, on Viareggio’s beach. Ave atque, Gregory, from we who believe but cannot commit Roque Dalton’s “Ars Poetica,” teaching us, as you did, poetry isn’t made from words alone, but inflicts itself on every soul within soulshot: an Improvised Enlightening Device, whose urgency we deny to our grief. -Robert Bagg North Dakota Quarterly AN ANCIENT QUARREL Within a Profession Shaken by Cultural and Political Agitation How would the world be luckier, Yeats' poem asked, if the proud clan at Coole Park went under, bankrupted by tenants threatening trouble unless sold back the land stolen from them? Yeats had named in his poem what Coole gave back to Ireland: "the arts that govern men... and gradual time's last gift, a written speech wrought of high laughter, loveliness, and ease." The tenants won, Coole Park was knocked down. But Yeats' own chanted speech survives nearby: Hear it resonate from loudspeakers hung in that neighboring Tower fused with his life: "image of solitary wisdom won by toil." Thoor Ballylee cost him thirty-five pounds; its value-added did not come from ease. In our own time I put another question to those who, in the next century, will teach Yeats and all the other Great White Males who offend––genius profiting mightily from privileges of gender and of class, whose poetry is punished resolutely lest its pleasures disorient the young. When you teach Yeats––I should say if you do–– what's vulnerable will stare you in the face: from his escapist "Innisfree," his smug boast that he recruited gunmen with a play, his loony world of masks and moons and gyres, his unrequited love of country folk, his praise of fascists European and homegrown, but most of all his fierce artistic pride that consciously insults all lesser minds–– declaring men of vision rightly claim the largest share of what their vision sees. "I thirst for accusation," he admitted. There is no doubt his cup runneth over. What does this flood of accusation do for you accusers? Something unforeseen. When you say Yeats is arrogant and crazed by turns––that he championed violence, magic, the unjust torque of wealth and birth, that he exaggerated what his friends achieved, wrote poems alloyed with so much folly they shrivel seething in your mind's sulfuric–– guard against excess passion in your voice. You might be stirring forces hard to quell–– that thrill exploding in your abdomen when a trapped quarry turns his fear on you. You go in flailing hand to hand, frenzied because your own survival's now at risk. His barbarous thrusting voice impales you deep in the place from which your war-cry soars. Now it’s the pure joy of battle driving your righteous censure and his bitter song–– you are Cuchulain hacking at the waves, Yeats’ music an invulnerable tide that keeps on singing from each mortal wound. -Robert Bagg North Dakota Quarterly







1.

This one wild enough to tame with enough

time, whose brown mane flicks to flame, and this one

roughed-up in the weather, winded, ruffled

and muscled, running like wind, hooves churning,

and two more, then three charging, galloping

over the blasted prairie hilltop grass-

burr-coated, mud-matted, nicked by hooves

in battle or mating's warrior moments.



2.

The thighs tighten-a canter in the ring.

The toe tips out to turn. Your hands above

the withers hold the reins, "as glass,"

lest the horse find meaning in a jostle . . .

The usual mode of taking the wild

horses is by throwing the laso whilst

pursuing them at full speed, and dropping

a noose over their necks-so Catlin writes-



3.

thus they are "choked down," until the horse falls

from want of breath, and lies helpless on the ground,

where it soon becomes docile and conquered.

Or "creasing." This is done by shooting them

through the gristle on the top of the neck,

which stuns them so they fall, and are secured

with the hobbles on their feet; after which

they rise again without fatal injury.



4.

I have loved you wild enough to hurt you.

I know this now. I have been docile, conquered,

dependent. The smallest movements matter.

Catlin paints the Mandan buffalo-men

-1832, upper Missouri-

flying, a few paces from the herd,

atop horses only lightly tamed by

a hand on the animal's nose, over



5.

its eyes, at length "to breathe in its nostrils."

Our love is furious and calm. Thus we

ride over the sweet-smelling earth neither

toward each other nor away. The horse, he writes,

yields gladly-. This one a flurry of dust.

This one nose down, tail flung, flying like foaming

water. And this one, the tame one, running

with the others, to lead them through the gate.



-David Baker

The Gettysburg Review

FAIR WEATHER



Past waffle cones, past tacos in a bag,

straw dust and grease blowing in a powder

over the center of the fairgrounds where

heavy metal thumps from Koaster Kids,



where Tilt-a-Whirl spins a small tornado

for a dollar, past the rabbit barn and

quilt show, past the dirt ring, hot-house sheds,

the horse girls tightening their cinches



and dabbing a little lipstick to their pouts,

past pickups, pig trailers, past barkers

and log-rollers and F.F.A. Parents

for Family Values, over bunting,



incumbents, a nine-piece marching band hooting,

over bean fields and woods still wild enough

for deer and small barred owls, out above

the county roads, the crossroads, the falling-



down barns, up and up, whirling, gray clouds are

flying, they are crashing together, swollen

and swelling--bumper-cars, lightning!--

then the storm.

-David Baker

The Southern Review







The pit of some fruit might be what I’m about

to bite on, speech lapsing to bitterness

that way. Or it might be that a cloud

is paring away from the sun, the sun striking

meaning on something that has to shine.

From a limited meter, Frost says, endless

possibilities for tune. And so I love how

do re mi becomes another nature in my book.

How Tom, Dick, and Harry are all the same

but what I sing about them different.

Tom’s little finger, let’s say, or Dick’s ear,

or that spare meadow of hair at the small

of Harry’s back. I know someone who thinks desire

merely taffies the mind’s one want, which is



to be free of want. But I don’t live in a bamboo

grove, can’t stare at the philosophical cranes

for more than a while. Clean paper only makes me

think of Tom’s name repeating itself there.

And the privacy of each face in the subway crowd

suggests that any story do might offer

is so distant from what mi has to say

that there’s no hope for the philosophical.

Someone might be speaking to someone in the dark,

a cigarette the only light between them.

Someone might be crying over a map.

Someone has just about polished a pair of shoes

to his satisfaction. I don’t know how dreams

mean, but it’s that shoe which often pulls



through to morning, the creases on its snout

like laugh-lines on a face. I think about it

while watching Harry’s face waking to its lines,

its breath and words. Its coffee and shower

and work. I remember my mother planting roses

as one way the mundane gets brought into

sacredness, though it was simply a thing she liked

to do. Dirt and rain. Leaves and thorns.

Nothing about the fascination with what’s

difficult. Nothing about how the soul, in its

limitedness, sings. Just one thing and then

another, Tom says, his tongue here and then here.

Each kiss different and yet somehow the same.

To one rose how many notes can you bring?



--Rick Barot

The Georgia Review





OCCUPATIONS



Astronomer to the ten Turkish moons

counted out on your fingernails.



Surveyor to the shiny silicate scar

of the childhood cut on your brow.



Geologist to the fault-line crack

your wrist has long since healed from.



Treasurer to the coin of vaccination

darkly minted on your left arm.



Farmer to the stubbled acreage

of your chin, to the nocturnal root.



--Rick Barot

POETRY





AUBADE



Scintillas of the anatomical

on the vines, buds opening—

make me a figure

for the woken.



On the vines, buds opening—

blue, little throats.

For the woken,

this different tin sky.



Blue, little throats

speak to me in the right voice.

This different tin sky,

the playground thawing.



Speak to me in the right voice,

only clean, sweeter.

The playground thawing

into its primary colors.



Only clean, sweeter,

briary as honeysuckle,

into their primary colors

the words come: bitter, astral.



Briar—as honeysuckle,

as attic webs, constellated

into their primary colors.

White, or whiter.



The words come: bitter, astral.

Make me a figure,

blue little throats,

scintillas of the anatomical.



--Rick Barot

Ploughshares









I suspect it’s not falling that people fear, it’s rising into a blue that breaks open

without mercy & without anesthesia.

I’ve been tempted to blindfold them, like horses led from a blazing barn.

I’ve been tempted to smack them,

or to open the door & push them out, abandoning them right in the middle.

But I don’t really blame them.

It’s eerie, crossing over, & the bridge sings & sways in the cross-winds.

All bridges hate stillness, long to break loose,

though it’s the secret ones that get to me,

the microspans between twilight & dusk; remorse & regret; slate & ash--

the smaller they are, the worse they vibrate & hum.

Vertigo or rapture of the deep:

it’s enough to bring you to your knees a hundred times a day;

I was raised Baptist, but I’m an Incrementalist now;

sometimes when I close my eyes I can feel the Holy Ghost

opening ever-narrower spaces for me to get lost in.

That’s when I remind myself of those rare riders

who fall asleep in my truck like babies in car seats--

they lean their heads back, & they’re out.

When I stop at the other side,

I like to watch them for a moment before I wake them;

I like to imagine them connecting the stars inside their bodies

or wandering through their childhood homes, amazed to find everything

so much larger than they’d remembered.



-Claire Bateman

Ninth Letter





I cannot find you now, alas,

poor creature, hiding in the grass.

You’ll meet your fate next time I pass,



Omnipotent, with my machine.

Annihilation, swift and keen,

will roar and devastate this scene



So peaceful, pastoral, and still

before I came to wreak my will

on what I did not mean to kill.



I hesitate, but do not halt

the grim advance of my assault,

to blame, though it is not my fault.



What is my choice? I’m here to mow.

I meet my obligations, though

it seems it’s better not to know



Who pays what price, when duty’s bound

to overrun and conquer ground,

scattering victims all around;



And prudent, surely, not to rue

what can’t be helped, except if you

desert, or do not follow through.



-Bruce Bennett

Iambs and Trochees

FULL DISCLOSURE



Were I to tell you what I truly think,

whether in prose or verse, in sign or rhyme,

aloud through words, or silently in ink,

all in a rush, or halting, over time;

Were I to lay all out: my heart, my head,

my deepest mind, my terrors, my conceit;

bundle and send them, to your care consigned;

for your eyes only, naked at your feet;

Were I to do this, and were you to say:

I see; I understand. It’s as I dreamed.

There is another being here who may

be just like me. If this were as it seemed,

and we held nothing back, would each possess

new life, or one more lease on loneliness? -Bruce Bennett Paintbrush

COMMITMENT





You need to write it till you get it right.

That is your job; what you were born to do.

It might not take a lifetime, but it might.



Sure, it’s a burden sometimes, but it’s light:

you make the rules, which then apply to you.

That’s how you write it till you get it right,



Having that goal, keeping it plain in sight,

yet easing up, or off, since that works too.

It might not take a lifetime, but it might.



At times the task’s a breeze, at times it’s tight

going, a maze, where every problem’s new

and you just need to write to get it right,



Write on, Hell take the cost, by day, by night,

alone, unknown, and yes, the perks are few,

but though it takes a lifetime (and it might),



What’s better than commitment to a fight

that brings your best out, focused on what’s true?

You have one purpose: Write it till it’s right.

It might not take a lifetime. But it might.

-Bruce Bennett

Paintbrush







the inventory came with the baby

1 three piece outdoor set

4 turkish Napkins

2 pair of socks

2 nightdresses

2 pair of shoes

2 vests

2 liberty bodices

2 pair knickers

1 cardigan

2 Jersey suits

1 pair rubber pants

1 pair mitts



it filled up the space

below the statement

which read

I will receive James into my home

feed, clothe and look after him

and bring him up

as carefully

and kindly

as I would a child of my own



below this and below the

inventory

was the familiar scratched

signature of my mother

who has always kept her word



-Jim Bennett

Caught in the Net

New England



I sit on Dean's porch

listen to him talk

about the trips upstate

to the cabin

as he tells it

I can smell the wood

hear water dripping

after the rain shower

here on the porch

by the road to Boston

as the birds call

I watch clouds

creep over from the mountains



shadows lengthen

the laughter is real

the wine cool

the evening

full of life

and the sounds

of life in a foreign land



then I talk about Liverpool

about the back streets

the two-up two-down

terraces houses

where families live

Clubmore and Tuebrook

distent names

that raise a smile

the jiggers

stinking of refuse

the poverty of politics

the power of football

and religion

rivalries and belonging



the Americans nod

“same the world over then”

they say

and they talk about the tenements

ghetto’s poverty

and the politics of war



later we talk about

Dean’s tree house

and the album he named after it

laugh and drink some more



but New England

is gone too soon

and although

I long for the old one

I wish I could stay



-Jim Bennett

Western Poetry Magazine



Somewhere near, a fruit bat is

grooming its flared

downy ear, while all the ears of corn in Iowa

are boosting their silky tufts skyward. Hearing thunder

on a sunny afternoon, an insect

resembling a large ant, with orange fur

covering its abdomen and thorax,

makes a dash for the ditch

across the asphalt. Late at night, after their owners

are asleep, all the earrings

in La Honda, California dream

of Grizzly Ryder, who lost part of an ear

when thirst drew him down

to Bear Gulch Creek. Like a tireless ear, the blue

canyon funnels a whistling gust

of wind, and again the old desert nods. In a sea of information, the sporting

dolphins may be thinking that a human ear,

like a small pink leaf, might make

a loving keepsake,

or pet. Tucked under the brains

of all living bipeds, there are

tiny paired drums, drumming,

drumming. Amongst the touch-tone

phones of France, there persists

a rumor that one of their ancestors

touched the ear

of Vincent Van Gogh.



-James Bertolino

Greatest Hits: 1965-2000

Pudding House

WISDOM "I wake up like a stray dog

belonging to no one."

--Jack Gilbert Some days I don't want wisdom,

don't want art, just need to have someone near

to hear my silences, my large and little noise. Never asked to be alone.

I'd take something as shallow as affection,

someone to ask me anything. Someone to love me a chance to answer. I mean give me

a chance to give. A poet I was

wrote that when a love dies you carry a heavy rock until you can't

anymore, and then mark where

you set it down. This is called "Carrying the Stone." What a poet does

is carry his mark. I've said we draw nectar

from the fractures but I know that's a lie. All love is one love

is another. I don't want all love,

I want hers. But I'd take anything as deep as her hands dipped in my shallows.

If someone touches you are not alone.

Take wisdom. I need someone near.



-James Bertolino

Greatest Hits: 1965-2000

Pudding House

SQUASH

When I went to India

my guru said "squash." So I came home, learned

my neighbor's handle,

and traded an old car for a plot of ground. Stan was his name, or Stosh.

He said for your dead-beat Chevy

you get one season. I dug and I hoed

and dropped the seed in rows. I planted crookneck, hubbard and spaghetti;

planted the colorful turban,

the acorn, the butternut and pattypan. They were my village, and to keep it democratic,

next to the exotic delicata

I planted a family of zucchini. Now the growing season's almost done,

and old Stan complains his Chevy won't start. Each crisp morning, when I hear him cranking,

I climb to my window and look out over

the unruly jumble of squash shape and squash color

arriving in the sun and have all I need: a life

of the spirit, and art.



-James Bertolino

Greatest Hits: 1965-2000

Pudding House





I don't know how they hand out incarnations,



but somebody got shafted with this one:



to be a handsome man without much brains,



bad heart, no money or position



in America in the depths of the cold war--



might as well be celery garnish or



a goldfish a kid's plopped in a vase



on the kitchen radiator. I guess



some feckless soul in Nirvana's holding tank



thumbing Brahmin mug shots must have finked



out the wrong guy, or maybe flunked



a Rorschach test, or just tumbled, drunk,



off some cosmic platform when the character



and fate of Edward Donlon roared



into him like a train and snuffed his bliss,



and set him on a life of accidents.



Or maybe that poor soul had a plan--



for, looking back on it, you can



follow his life's pattern as easily



as a glassed-in grid map of the BMT



after the graffiti's been scrubbed off.



And even if Donlon's life force got stuffed



into the hard luck carcass of a New York dick



with slattern wife, two whelps, and a thick



skull, he always dressed with style, strutted



his beat as if he knew where he was headed--



whether to the altar or the bar,



or down to the basement to wallop Eddie Jr.



In fact, right up to the Saturday he holstered



his service revolver, climbed the stairs



and locked the bedroom door



I doubt a single soul living on the block



thought anything was wrong--no shock



considering the cornice I grew up in--



Flushing, Queens--a post-war way station



of fenced-in postage stamp back yards,



row houses, unpithed hearts and T.V. dinners,



where the infirm of the hordes escaping Brooklyn



were culled on their stampede to the Island.



This was the true ground zero or ground nil



of scotch and casseroles--a lukewarm hell.



Our whole block hadn't enough prana



to incarnate an underfed amoeba.



There was Charlie Cast who b.b.'d passing cars;



Michael Stiefel, the owl-faced science nerd;



Leo Sarkissian of the pus-wet face,



Lu Anne Piazza, goosed by Jamie Wallace,



tough guy, who explained it all to us



on the front stoop after Donlon died--



(it being both sex and suicide).



He sucked his middle finger, cocked his thumb



and fired, moaning, a-bing-a-bang-and-a-boom.



It was just one dusk in an eternity



of fireflies and casual cruelty.



Even the Police Force looked the other way



pretending accident, so wife Joan



could get the full-dress funeral and pension.



But because Donlon lived next door and died



a wall from my bedroom, and because I wed



his daughter, Maureen, at age ten,



in a giggling ceremony in the basement



where my kid brother played best man



in his communion suit, and because



I got dubbed Ed Jr.'s godfather and because



my father's spirochettic sperm embalmed



me safely unmade till after Vietnam



and because my lover's brother hadn't yet



hanged himself, and her tumor brooded



in secret, and because no one had ever been



or ever would be lost, Edward Donlon's



suicide shattered some trajectory--



like the arc of the Pensy Pinky



rubber ball you imagine already homered



out of sight as you step up to the sewer



with a broomstick. Foul it off, it's gone.



We called it a Hindu--a do-over--when the sun



blinked, the physical world wobbled free



an instant, and no one saw or could agree



on what they'd seen. The moment



Donlon opened fire into his open



mouth, when his incarnation exploded



into ether, or fumes, or light, or spumes of blood--



I think I was the only one to see.



I didn't see it then, exactly,



And I was far from the only ghoul



to replay that scene in prurient detail--



The coifed, spiffy corpse sprawled on the floor,



the wife and children petrified downstairs,



and later Joan, at the wake, soused,



muttering, "I didn't think he had the guts."



And Eddie Jr. damaged as his father



saying to me, "I guess now you're my father."



No, what I saw developed slow



as a blond negative, slow



as a spectral x-ray of the splashy death,



the hum-drum life, and walleted beneath



Donlon's sharkskin suit, two secrets,



maybe the only valuables he kept,



and kept him separate from the sordid facts



he could not Hindu. The first was comic:



a rumor snaking through his drunken wake--



he wasn't a real cop: despite the gun



and badge and funeral and pension,



his fragile heart had failed the physical



and so he'd played cop as a transit mole--



a subway sleuth deployed underground to prowl



the detritus. And Donlon was not born



with a bad heart. That was the second



secret, second sight that cleaved him



from himself: a drunken night in the infinite



regression of lives before my birth that led



to his being next door, and that night led



to a car accident that killed his first



born daughter, Colleen, and nicked his heart



so that it wobbled, blinked. And this



is what I saw--Donlon wandering



the flotsamed, numbed unconscious of Flushing,



Queens, dressed to kill, searching



for the snuffed out essence my godson



was conceived in the upper world to clothe again.



-Philip Brady

The Laurel Review .

M endocino Blunt rusted haft of abalone knife, duct-taped, encrusted. Anglo-Saxon tongue portending fracture, or the slipping in between the rock face and primordial life before the sinew clamps. In the ur- version, I slept while hardier men in boots and wetsuits contended against dawn to braille-read fate in the shells’ rheumy whorls. Other texts diverge, establish we returned triumphant, bearing meat, to find the beach house windswept, desolate, wives and children vanished without trace. I dreamt of holding fast to all I knew. But memory’s a muscle letting go. . -Philip Brady Provincetown Arts

J’accuse

Here’s the dilemma: The adolescent boy

rocking on the toilet seat, arms clenched

around his concave chest to numb his pulse

and focus on his immediate need to choose

between medicine cabinet mirror or water glass—

which to smash and how to gouge each wrist—

this boy, although he hums, although a wave,

blood-red, wells up behind squinched eyes,

can never meet the man who wants to save him,

though the man exists, speaks now in riven voice,

haunting his tortured self from long ago.

The dilemma? How to blossom. Entwine

in self-renewing present, let the man

calm the boy’s wrists, whisper ‘accord’

into the ear of the continuum.

Moments at a time perhaps, they join.

Then the glass shatters, blood spurts.

And who has broken the mirror or the cup?

The boy, despairing? The man arriving

thirty years too late? No. I accuse

the forward rush and press of language,

applied like a shard of glass to the boy’s wrist.

I accuse myself for rhyming the tuneless hum.

I accuse you, who thought to remain hidden,

Reader, consisting only of eyes and nerves,

and a fan of fingers probing a bound spine.

You, Listener, I accuse;

though you are restless, caught perhaps

in bonds of collegiality or love

or trapped in auditorium folding chair.

You breathe with me; you yield to evanesce

into the scene, calmed by this voice—

this promise the boy lives—veiling

and sanctifying gore. Now you are named,

perched on the crest of porcelain

between worlds. Speak, my Reader;

you are no longer dark. Lift

a glinting fragment off the tile,

pinch between forefinger and thumb,

slice vertically along the bluish line

up toward the heart, toward God

whom I accuse—God whose name

is Blossoming in Blood, He who confers

on every incarnation implacable need

to wrap numb arms around torso,

and yet to be released into unknowing.

The dilemma: within is contained All,

but what’s needed to say All—

the loaf-warm palate, teeth,

the eel-like muscle of the tongue,

produces without meaning the word Other.

I accuse and stand accused of harboring

such sense as vouchsafes boy and man

forever separate. I accuse

the stream of time and self-fulfilling plot

of abandoning this boy who rocks uncradled

endlessly on the brink of blossoming,

the hum rising in pitch as he curls forward,

gurgling down the scale as he lurches back

to Original Unbeing, Primal Wound,

All-Encompassing Wholly Ceaseless Pain.

-Philip Brady

Wild & Whirling Words

.





Each morning the shining

ball lifts over the ridge

to warm my Subaru



where I dwell, where I live it up

in the between while

learning how



not to hurt the way

falling leaves surround

a wholeness of life,



not to see

fringes of the ocean

other than fresh and old,



not to sift the grains

of wheat and sand we are given

and given





overly carelessly. My smile

is too much backed by consciousness

for me ever to die.



So much for gravity!

hums the hummingbird

eyeing my eye.



It’s time

to adjust the hover-buckle

to the task,



loyally to repair

our Hubble

with all the other bees at work



on the starflower.



-Henry Braun

American Poetry Review

Shock and Awe



We burn cities.

With your permission

the only animal that runs toward fire

to save, to gawk, to liven up the night,

cancels with fire the quick networks of borders.

I celebrate, with your permission, the borders

of human beings, the profiles lifting and turning

in drivers' seats, the parallels that bend

and meet at the tear ducts of the eye.

No longer frightened of fontanels,

I touch the soft craters of the mind cap

and root my nose gratefully in whorls

of babies' ears. I celebrate the skin,

the curves of women, the straight hips of men,

my hand with its own life

and tiny Pavlovian memories

of cusps in the arms of chairs and handkerchiefs

drawn like cold brooks through the fingers.

I sing the damaged hands of les Eyzies,

and Friday's footprint,

triangles in tempera of the holy.

As over the hump of windowsill more evening

crawls, I contemplate full moons

of countdown, after nine of which we come

with hanks of cord trailing from our bellies.

I celebrate, with your permission, the bellies,

the treasure kegs of aging males,

big bodies coming out of showers,

and the taut ramparts of little girls.

The approaching sine curve of an elbow

gazed at and touched by a pregnant woman,

I gaze at, and also touch, then sing

the double string between the eyes of lovers.

Faces, known and unknown, delineate

like the moon suddenly in breaks of cloud.

I celebrate and sing

all the beloved faces, all, MOAB,

and tickle the cittern for the cloud as well.

I wave as if positioned for goodbye

and, at the same time, for hello

in the borderless shadow of the lingam.



- Henry Braun

American Poetry Review

In Memory of Benjamin Linder,



After a while with eyes

lifting slowly from the page,

one sees genera and kingdoms,

animal, vegetable, mineral.

Also, I

see the hair on my arm, fur

between kingdoms.

Twilight answers from its back.

I stand up in my room, yes,

to learn more than I know

from the news given away

by unfelt strokes of radar,

to hear

the voice of this

standing with bent head

under the stars.

On my wall the blue-

green cataracted eye, the planet poster,

hangs from its pin.



And so I ask again,

How much land, which land, does a man need?

Wherever green is worn?

Or blue and white, red,

orange? Yes.

Yes, when the little O,

this earth, wears the rainbow

raggedly, each man,

woman, child

needs

all.



After a while with eyes

returning slowly to the page--

yesterday's, today's--I say the names: Linder,

Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney, Rachel Corrie,

Marla Ruzicka....Yes,

our land with all its names.



-Henry Braun

Loyalty, New and Selected Poems,

Off The Grid Press, 2006









The assembly here tonight’s franchise is

For writers of all shapes and sizes

And styles in turn to take the floor,

Unleashing their divine furor.

So far so good; yet one deplores

Those narcissistic troubadours

Who sieze the chance – once off the shelves -

To freely talk about themselves,

As id and ego unify

To boost their buzzword; i.e. ‘I’!





“The sweetest syllable we’ve got”,

They say, “I use it quite a lot

To show how sensitive I’m being,

How wise I am, sincere, far-seeing!

Observe with what wry self-conceit

I spread my dreams beneath your feet,

Or how old memories I revisit,

In terms so touchingly exquisite.

A ‘specialness’ all mine,

taboo To uncouth scribblers like you!”





And yet this guff, to our surprise, is

Awarded literary prizes!

Enough! That mirror’s self-deceptive

That shows an object so….subjective;

This meeting needs to put in hand

A rule to get the ‘I’ word banned

Or, if too stern a turnabout,

At least let’s have it rationed out;

“Each work to use no more than twice

This egotistical device!”





And I would reason,if I may,

Yet more to poets here today:

‌If Homer hymned the Trojan fall

- An epic - with no eyes at all.

And Milton, with no eyes likewise,

Lost and regained a paradise,‌

So serious bards should rise above

These tedious tokens of self-love,

And firmly for all time eschew

Such ‘look-at-me’ as déjà vu.‌‌‌





But this bold plan, I prophesy

Is doomed to failure…..Aie, aie, aie!!!

Epitaph for an Ideal





He was a man whom some thought cold,

Yet some considered over bold;

Though nonetheless they must admit,

However they resented it,

That all the while one private whim

Persistently remained with him

– Half admirable, if half absurd –

Come rain or shine, to Keep his Word.





By which he did not mean what we

Might mean, of rent and guarantee

And such, but meant with all his soul

Something you cannot pigeonhole,

That One Great Word which every man

Was pledged to as his life began.





It was a Sacred Word, he said;

And through the storm-tossed life he led

He held it sure; he held it still

Despite the stours of good and ill

That strew whatever path we tread

Beyond that far-off fountainhead.





To Keep the Word, to Hold the Line,

To love the high, the true, the fine;

To guard them with tenacity

From all malign mendacity;

This was his grail, the shibboleth

He’d sworn to carry till his death;





Though round him, as he kept that word,

Today’s diseased and rampant herd

Might bay their estuary vowels,

And vomit or discharge their bowels

On his deserted trampled shroud,

Then, gross in triumph, roar aloud.





But where some might repine and groan

To find themselves so much alone,

And, weary, let the standard fall

– We’re only human after all –

Through his dark night he has not slept:

He Held the Line…..his Word was Kept.

CHAC-MOOL

From that wild shore, beyond the Caribees,

Where howler-monkeys shriek from ceiba trees

Hung with lianas – camouflaged retreat

For humming-bird or flaunting parakeet

– Lunges the phallic thrust of Yucatan,

Home once to god-obsessed barbaric man.

Half-crumbled ruins here identify

Famed Chichen-Itza, Uxmal, Lamanai,

Or, deeper in, Copan, Tikal, Tulum,

All captive in that rankly verdant gloom

Where orchids twine through tangled ferns, shikar

Haunts for tarantula and jaguar.

Down stifling trails where iguanas creep

Carved vestiges of vast constructions peep

Through thickets where, beside some shaggy mound

That sepulchres lost outworks underground,

Tall lattices of stonework still outsoar

The ravelled nests of toucan or macaw,

To crest worn temples on a stepped foundation

The Maya raised in praise of Procreation.





Friezed courtyards angled on an astral grid

Once clustered round this central pyramid;

Colossal works, aligned and built in fear

Of deviation from the solar year

To overawe terrestrial life, begun

Long, long ago, by edict of the sun.

Still from the top, vertiginously steep,

Prodigious flights of steps in one great sweep

Descend, with rough-hewn reptiles on each side

As guardians, who in monstrous writhings glide

Downward, transforming at the plaza floor

To feathered serpents, whose wide-open maw

Frames an anthropomorphic talisman:

Quetzalcoatl – sky god – Kukulcan!

To Him, at dawn, all pious Mayans pray:

‘Lord, let the sun come up again today!’

– Aware omission of this obligation

Invites catastrophe, annihilation

Of all that lies beneath the golden disk

– A stake too high to justify the risk.





Yet plenitude of sun commands a price

– Aridity – which human sacrifice

Alone can pay, so prisoners are marched

Across the intervening compound, parched

By burning rays, toward the towering pile

And dragged submissive up the stairway, while

The people gather, avid, in the square

Like famished termites as their lords prepare

The baneful rite exacted by the rule

Of life-reviving god of rain – Chac-Mool!



Step back in time, restore the status quo:

See priests above, a multitude below

Scanning the high-plumed celebrants, who fling

Down rush-plait matting, fit for priestly king

Alone to tread, when to the beat of drums

He in the guise of Huitzil’pochtli comes

– The Mayan war god – from an inner shrine

Where hieroglyphic calendars define

Celestial omens, never disobeyed.

His girdle hung with skulls, his breastplate jade,

The jaguar’s spotted pelt across his back

Spattered with symbols of the zodiac,

The crown of quetzal feathers on his head

Grimly displayed to be a thing of dread,

He like his suppliants knows that human pain

Alone makes rain to fall, the sun regain

His empire, an indemnity they choose

To render brutal gods their brutal dues.





This hierophant with catatonic eyes

Surveys the altar where the scapegoat lies

And, spurred by powers above - now locked in strife

- To conjure new life from the death of life,

He, less than god himself, yet more than man,

Plunges a blade of black obsidian

To split the sternum, tear the lungs apart,

And from the living carcase rip the heart

With ritual motion. Then the impassive priest

Holds up the grisly trophy to the east;

A sacral offering….raw….pulsating….red.

The victim twitches….bleeding….not yet dead,

Till an attendant from the altar tears

The corpse, and hurls it headlong down the stairs,

While acolytes chant mantras to the skies.

And from the horde below a roar replies,

Repeating and repeating the refrain:

‘Great Lord of Plenty, Chac-Mool, bring us rain!

…… Chac …. Mool …. bring …. us …. rain!





Herons are bigger than egrets, though they have the same long legs.

My father said one with an eight-foot wingspan flew over his boat.

I would like to be shadowed by something that big. It would seem



like poetry, just out of reach, moving and making a bare flush

of wings, and I would think of it long after, the way it was heading

away from me. My longing would not be satisfied even if I could



grab its scrawny legs in my hand, even if it nuzzled up to me.

I would be looking up the origin of heron with my free hand, and

when I read Greek, to creak, and Old High German, to scream,



I would wait for it to begin, but it would not say anything to me

in this boat which I am not in, but at my desk hoping for the heron,

a big one, as I said, so I can say, “Wow, look at that!” as if I were



getting up a circus. Out there are herons white and blue, not really

blue but smoky, with wings bigger than their bodies, dipping and

standing motionless beside lakes and rivers. Out there are universes



expanding until the space between atoms is too far to do anyone

any good. Thus, somewhere this minute one heron is calculating

the distance between his beak and a fish, the way it shifts. It is



as if he travels in space until heron and fish are swallowed into

each other. There is no heron at my desk. In fact, the absence

of heron is how I would define my study: no heron on the ceiling,



no heron on the floor, no heron on the wall, so that of course

I think of nothing but heron, how it floats its weight on one leg,

for example, flying that way even when it’s not.



-Fleda Brown

Kenyon Review

IN CHICAGO Index

In Chicago Calling early, I wake you

from deep inside a dream;

It’s weird, Dad, you say, you just came into my room

with an alarm clock and a doll

and you were wearing dark glasses. I used to think I could never be

as memorable to you

as my own vivid Dad to me, but now there I am in Chicago,

in your dreams, and such

good things I am bringing you. -Michael Dennis Browne

Things I Can’t Tell You

Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press In a Bar in Chicago I’m eating in The Winds, waiting

for my son to come home

from work, and let me in.

It’s a mighty steak they’ve given me,

the special, huge as a country.

I chew and chew. Up there on the screen, our leader

announcing the start of a war,

and yes, we have our “game face” on,

and yes, we’re going to “take them out,”

and yes, we’re talking “surgical strike,”

and yes, we learn soon, the Oscars

will go on next week, but “muted”

(the speculation is “less jewelry”). Dark in Chicago, dawn in Baghdad.

I’m waiting to see my boy. (I support my boy.)

The way home, says a young soldier

(somebody’s son), lies through Baghdad,

“we’ve a job to do,” he says,

“it’s time to rally behind the policy,”

a citizen (somebody’s Dad), stopped

on a sunlit street, says. Abraham, Father of Faith, could it have been

what you thought was God’s voice, commanding you,

then only with Isaac bound, the Divine hand

dragging down your wrist

to halt the war on your boy?

And Sarah, what of Sarah? Did the two,

did the three of you, speak again, ever,

of that or anything else again, ever? Dark in Chicago.

This steak goes on and on.

“Father. Father.”

“Here I am.”

He should be home soon. -Michael Dennis Browne

Things I Can’t Tell You

Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press For George McGovern I was sad to see his belly break up into stars,

to hear the wind under his eyes, so many

rivers streaming out of his face. I rode out into the foothills looking for him.

I passed sagebrush grievers silently scraping the soil;

I saw the dry soil of stars in the air. There were too many stories

spread across the sky for me

to be able to tell one from the other,

though sometimes I can still chop away

at the sky or, being human, pan

for even a little gleam of story. I didn’t want anyone to know the miles on me;

I’d rather they thought the stains were wounds,

not rust (rust itself being a kind of wound). Riding brought back the old times, when waves

of hair once roared across our heads

(you could hear the ocean in our brains). Now throw me off, old lion, and your mane

be cast about the sun to light us

anywhere we may yet dare wander.

October 21, 2012

Brush Creek, WY -Michael Dennis Browne

The Voices

Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press (2014)





A WORLD REMEMBERED Index . . . as if on a winter's night you sit feasting with your ealdormen and

thegns, a single sparrow should fly swiftly into the hall, and coming in

at one door, instantly fly out through another. . . . Somewhat like this

appears the life of man; but of what follows or what went before, we are

utterly ignorant.

--Bede, Ecclesiastical History

But what if the bird flies from fields

through the doorway, the shade of the hall

and into high rafters, pauses to nest,

to feed its young, then takes wing again

in dusky heights of the loft, past

timbers, the hanging bats, toward

light at the other end, exit

from its brief stay here

where men have feasted and sung

and lain down to sleep on their robes, and flutters into a wall

it cannot see? Like the sparrow

in my garage on Monday, taking refuge

in the dim cave while thunder raged.

It woke to the shadow of man, flew

toward light, beat wings and beak

on the vision of green and shade,

and the glass did not break. Sometimes the soul stands pressed to a place

it can see through, face and both palms against

the undiminished light, naming distant

leaves and fruits it thinks it knew --

but cannot go beyond. -- T. Alan Broughton

Mid-American Review Ballad of the Comely Woman

As I walked out one day

I met on my path a woman

ugly as sin and walking a dog.

She stopped me and said, "Young man, would you lie with me here

in this field where we're alone,

only my dog as companion?"

The dog went chasing a squirrel. I placed a hand most gently

on her arm and said, "Old woman,

I've a wife and loving son

dearer to me than my life. I could not betray such presences."

"Then," she said, "how like you this?"

and stepping to me her limbs grew slim,

her bare breasts brushed my chest. O love, more than my hair stood on end,

and the grass looked so very green

I could not resist lying down

with her beneath me. "What if," I said between our kisses, "you change

again?" "I'm always the same," she said,

and therewith I was left with my face

in the sod and my own restless heart. --T. Alan Broughton

Beloit Poetry Journal

Making a Mask I Fourteen years ago I held you as you bawled

against the light of birth, first heave of lungs,

but put myself into your hands, born

into a wholly new life. Now on my back

I lie on the floor, you hover above my face,

applying wet strips of plaster to make

a mask for school. How will I breathe?

I ask as water drips across my ears,

alarmed how my lips will soon be sealed.

Quiet, you murmur, you’ll ruin it. Still

as a coffined body, hands folded

on my chest, I try to stare at the ceiling

but can’t resist watching your pursed lips,

frown of imagination trying to see

what you hope to make. Close your eyes,

you say as the strip descends. Straws

in my mouth, I am sealed, buried alive,

trying to believe you are still out there,

working in the light. II Nothing is left but the muffled scuff

as you pace, waiting for me to dry,

sludge shrinking while my face hardens,

skin pinched in the plaster grip. I trust

your shuffling near my stretched body,

the mutter as you order yourself.

Your fingers move gently on the edge,

testing the line between bare skin

and dead impression of my life.

What border have I slipped across,

and is your touch enough to bring me back?

In the tightening I feel my bones rise

through withering flesh, and I cannot suck

enough air through these straws, fear

how flesh is turning to parchment, hands

will never unclasp, our bronzed dog

will be clamped to my armored feet.

III I remember how I would sneak

into the room where my father napped,

huge chest rising and falling slowly,

lips puffing in and out, to stand and hold

my breath for fear of waking the giant

I did not know because he was gone

beyond me now. Just tall enough

to reach his face, I held my fingers

close to his mouth, knowing even then

that if I ceased to feel air brushing

across the tips I should scream away

such sleep, should break the spell

that held us in the opaque and shrouded

afternoon, fearing the day when nothing

I could say would wake him. IV I sleep. The silence in my mind

when panic leaves is darkness of a cave

before some child with a torch lurches in

or falls to discover paintings on the wall,

naked men clad in skins of reindeer, heads

of buffaloes, and dancing as if they became

dead creatures they wore. If I come back

from this place you send me to,

will I ever be myself again, or will you,

as the aborigine fears, have captured

my soul in plaster, leaving me to wander

in the semblance of myself? Who was I?

Lying now in congealing darkness,

I slip down into that dream beyond

the stone or house or leafless tree we know,

as deep as space where it bends back

on its first explosion, beyond even that

to silence without a name. If some spirit

is in the mask, larval, ghost to be carried

with us day by day, then who looks out

through our own eyes, pretending to be?

The soul must have a place to rest, body

to identify when it returns each evening. V Done! you cry, plucking me back into light,

tearing the carapace of who I was

from my new-wet face. I stare at the ceiling

beyond you to sunlight dappling leaves

on plaster, kaleidoscopic shards the breeze

shifts into restless shapes. All color is gone

for a moment when I turn, blast of pure light

from the window, and I rise from the floor,

gasping as if I dove for leagues into

the cold detritus of eons. You laugh,

hold a mirror to show splotched white

in my hair, cheeks of a mannequin

powdered with a story I’d lived. I smile,

cracking the petrified skin, shattering

numbness, and you laugh again

as we see each other for the first time

in hours, trapped between dread and joy. VI All afternoon we paint the blank impression,

making my form into your creation, transforming

this death mask into a household god wild

with colors, and then, forming our own procession,

we prance raucously to your mother’s study

and burst the silence of her thought, parading

the fierce countenance of a man I was

or might have been, holding above us

a fragment snatched from time, moving

so quickly from sound to moving sound. for Nathaniel --T. Alan Broughton

Southern Review . Closer Index

Closer



old road dreaming me back home

through coastal plain into the Gulf



stunted pines along the roadside

dripping wth dark into night puddles



arcade of pecan trees into infinity

through which my memory roams



like spider webs over wounds

these bare branches over my eyes



maybe souls do flow into and out of the world--

that crow over corn stubble, scythe of light



off the truck’s chrome, swish of an icy

mare’s tail over the December sky

-Kathryn Stripling Bye r ( from Coming to Rest , LSU Press, 2006



Her Daughter



“ charred dove

nightingale still burning”

Mirza Ghalib, translated by W.S. Merwin



Baghdad, April 8, 2003





Four years younger than mine,

her daughter lies under the rubble.



She stands at the edge of it,

watching the men lifting one stone,



another, till out of the crater

they gently lift somebody’s



body, a body she now

sees is female. She tries to recall



what her daughter was wearing,

but no scrap of clothing remains



on it. Whose body is it? She sees

no face. She sees no head.



At the edge of the crater she stands

while they swaddle the body in blankets



a neighbor has brought. Through

the blasted streets she calls



a name that gets lost

in the rattle of gunfire, a name



no one hears as they pull

from the rubble her daughter’s



head, hair twisted round like

a root-wad, not blonde



like my daughter’s, not waking

up as my daughter will be, being safe



on this morning in Texas, beginning

to brush her hair after her shower,



her face in the mirror as perfect as

always I see it, the fair skin



she wishes had South Asian

dusk in it, not Southern



sun from the fields of her mother’s

line, as she examines



the scar on her temple,

the chin she believes looks



not quite smooth

enough, while her fingers



scroll over its surface

as if they are translating



Urdu, word after

unsteady word of a ghazal



that she must recite

today, all the while fearing



her voice will fail

even as she tries



to fill up the silence

with Ghalib’s desire



to see, lost in the blaze

of the mirror



that holds her,

the face of the Beloved. - Kathryn Stripling Byer

(from Coming to Rest , LSU Press, 2006)





Blackberry Road

Piney woods

where we played Fort Apache

oozed rosin.



Cow pies baked

in the dog day



heat while we picked

what our mother

had promised she’d turn



into cobblers

come suppertime.



Braving those

thorny hells, we risked an arm.

Then a leg. Half a torso



till trapped

we stood stubborn as martyrs



awhile before

we pulled our mortal flesh free,

praying hard



not to spill what

we’d gathered.



By then it was noon

and so hot we lost faith

and walked home,



scratching bug-bites

and snag-wounds,



displaying our blackberries

domed in the pot

the way church deacons hoisted



collection plates

while we sang Gloria Patri.



The gnats smelled us coming

and haloed our heads,

when we reached the backyard



where splayed in the cool dirt

they’d dug under lantana bushes



our daddy’s hounds

snored like the back pews each Sunday

before benediction.



- Kathryn Stripling Byer

- Shenandoah



BOJANGLES BACKWARDS Index . Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1878-1949), U.S. tap dancer and actor . . . noted for his ability to run backwards . . . set the world's record of 8.2 seconds for the 75-yard backward dash. International Dictionary of 20th Century Biography Bang of the pistol they burst backwards out of the blocks but strangely becalmed – the runners seem to be reaching, rearing in place, having no purchase, no power – it is all on the balls of the feet, all air being chopped, being clutched, claimed – save for one, who is stepping, is seeking and finding a sequence, a pattern that pulls him, that takes him ahead of the pack, and it’s Bojangles up by a yard, now by two, he is free, he is flying – see him cresting the tape – he is dancing Jared Carter Free Lunch _________ Moe Meditative . During World War II, the Allies so feared the possibility of a German bomb that they sent Moe Berg, a baseball catcher, linguist and spy, to attend a scientific lecture that the Nazi government allowed the physicist Werner Heisenberg to give in Zurich in 1944. Berg was instructed to carry a pistol and shoot Heisenberg dead if he gave any hint that he was working on an atomic bomb. New York Times, March 21, 2000 . I hear he’s got some kind of knuckleball, too. Indeterminacy as a function of uncertainty. Or the converse. Count is three and two. Come on, come on, stop kicking the mound. Two on, last of the ninth . . . S-matrix theory? What the hell happened to his curve ball? I remember Hugo Ball’s fast ball, it was a farm team, the Zurich Zephyrs – they had this rookie named Joyce, utility outfielder, always singing in the showers . . . Shoot him. Shoot him if he even breathes a word about fission. Or was it fishing? Now the wind-up, here it comes, low and outside, no, I could feel the bat all perfume no and my heart was going like mad and no I said no I won’t No Jared Carter Vincent Brothers Review Watching the Clock

A convicted killer whose execution was botched last year was never in any pain

and appeared to be straining to see a clock, not grimacing as some witnesses

said, the warden told a panel reviewing Florida's lethal injection procedures.

But the condemned man's lawyer said his client was clearly suffering, and he

mocked the notion that the inmate was looking at a clock. – Associated Press, January 30, 2007 At the center of each galaxy waits

that mysterious, unfathomable abyss –

black hole of unimaginable proportions

from which no illumination can escape,

into which ultimately everything falls

and yet there is no way of entering,

only a threshold to be crossed –

the event horizon, against which

each image, each body remains fixed

forever. The hands of the clock,

as they approach that boundary, freeze

immutably, and the prisoner, strapped

to the board with his arms spread out,

is transfigured for eternity, along with

the warden and his phone, the attorney,

the reporters, the witnesses – all shown

together, as it is written in Revelation,

along with “heaven, the earth, and . . .

the sea, and the things which are therein,

that there should be time no longer.”



Jared Carter

Loch Raven Review

.





- after New Orleans flood

In this plain box of a house, the tiny dresses are lined up in case I ever have another baby. The rack goes from one end of the room to the other, dozens of little outfits, pink smocked dresses with green stitches, a red and blue play dress with bloomers to match, the white sun suits, a yellow sun dress, three ducks embroidered on the front, and four dresses different sizes, all exactly alike, all blue, so soft I could not leave them in the store. I just didn't have the heart for it. After all someday I might have another baby. But now there is a warning. In a land of empty houses, It's time to pick them up from their hangers and carry them next door, someone will need them. Oh. No one is there to collect them. Perhaps every hour on the hour someone will come. No lights are on. Who will I give them to, little dresses hanging on hangers like dreams. No one is home. What shall I do with these beautiful things I've saved? In this land where no birds are singing, my only visitor is my friend Jan, back from the dead carrying an empty photo album for our future.

-Grace Cavalieri poetsforhumanity.com













How does, how does, how does it work

so, little valve stretching messily open, as wide as possible,

all directions at once, sucking air, sucking blood, sucking

air-in-blood

how? On the screen I see the part of me that always

loves my life, never tires

of what it takes, this in-and-out, this open-and-shut

in the dark chest of me,

tireless, without muscle or bone, all flex and flux and blind

will, little mouth widening, opening and opening and,

then snapping

shut, shuddering anemone entirely of darkness, sea creature

of the spangled and sparkling sea, down, down where light

cannot reach.

When the technician stoops, flips a switch, the most

unpopular kid in the class

stands offstage with a metal sheet, shaking it while Lear raves. So

this is the house where love lives, a tin shed in a windstorm, tin

shed at the sea's edge, the land's edge,

waters wild and steady, wild and steady, wild.

-Suzanne Cleary











At Hamilton Elementary we watched every Mercury launch

between the Pledge of Allegiance and our ration of morning milk

on the battered TV that janitor Geiss always lugged into our room,

trailing a whiff of the Lucky Strikes that somehow kept him going

in the humble boiler-room office he liked to call his very own

Mission Control. The entire class would count down together

until the launch-tower fell away, the rocket-booster fuel igniting

with the kind of brilliant firepower that in those days never failed

to lift our skittish hearts into our throats. We were suckers

for anything astronautical--the suits, the helmets, the very idea

of leaving the outmoded Earth behind us for a while. We'd come

to live for the chance of escaping the pull of preadolescent gravity.



So who among us would have believed we'd peter out

so quickly, even before Apollo? We ho-hummed our way through most of Gemini,

although Ed White's tethered space walk brought us briefly back.

The way he floated outside that capsule, doing exactly what,

we weren't sure, led Sci-Fi Rosenberg to say maybe he'd grow up

to be the first Jew on Mars. Benny the Ball kept asking when

do Current Events become History, and then would there be a test?

I made a brazen grab for Debbie Fuller's hand. I really didn't know

what I was doing either, but I might have been floating too,

until Mr. Geiss told us all to knock off the funny stuff, to show

a little respect--as if White could possibly look down right at us

and refuse to clamber back inside until he had our full attention.

Geiss was a Big-Picture guy: he saw the whole country being tested,

and this was the kind of lapse in judgment we simply couldn't afford

if we were going to beat those single-minded Russians to the Moon.



--David Clewell

"Home Movies of the Space

Race," published in Margie

.





How suddenly it happens--

the poem quits the lopsided house



where it was born,

walks out the front door



onto the avenue of a page,

and ends up in a public square.



How sad its forsaking

the home's dark sureties,



the privacy of a stairwell,

the sound of its father's voice.



It has chosen to leave

on a summer’s Sunday afternoon,



when everyone is out for a promenade--

a foot-cruise as the locals say--



the women under their parasols,

the men waving their walking sticks.



How discourteous of them to stop

and turn their barbered heads



to stare at the creature as it hastens by,

all queer and hairless,



a fly circling its ears,

a song buried deep in its baggy pants.





-Billy Collins

Nebraska Review

.

.

We hit the train we are sorry it was a mistake. . We hit those refugees sorry another mistake. . We hit the bridge there were people we couldn't see. . We hit the water supply not a mistake but we are sorry. . We hit the embassy sorry another mistake. . We hit the wrong country it wasn't planned. . In the past we have also hit the wrong things a passenger plane a school. . This time the reasons for hitting what we were trying to hit were good. . We were trying to stop the terrible things being done to innocent people. . Things got worse for those people after we started which proves we were right. . But of course we cannot think about what is right or what is wrong. . They call us smart but bombs are not made to think. . We are sorry there were mistakes but we ourselves make no mistakes. . We only follow orders. We do what we're told. . . . . . . . —Martha Collins Witness . LIKE HER BODY THE WORLD . hit and hit and hit and hit and fallen . getting up and trying to get up . now one part is hitting another part wounding its flesh . slicing its own veins breaking its bones . but wait we are coming help is on the way . now we are hitting the part that is hitting the part . now someone else is helping the part we hit . now it is arm against arm hand against hand . now it is eye against eye no one can see . now it is ear against ear there is no mouth . where is the up to get up to where is the body . where are the parts have the parts all fallen apart . we are part of the body we forgot . we thought we lived outside like a brain in a jar . we thought we were pure like thought with nothing to lose . but we are losing too we are losing parts . besides we were never that brain we were only a part . we thought we would never fall but we are falling . falling and falling and falling hitting the air . falling hitting ourself our own body . meanwhile the body the world will try to get up . or else the body the world will lie down will lie down

. —Martha Collins The Progressive .

FROM THE SKY





Snow is expected to fall from the sky.

Boston Globe, March 1999

Snow will fall from the sky

Snow will turn to rain

Rain will fill our streams

The earth will turn again



Snow will turn to rain

Blossoms will fill the trees

The earth will turn again

Petals will fill the air



Blossoms will fill the trees

Petals will fall like snow

Petals will fill the air

Green will fill the trees



Petals will fall like snow

Petals will fall to earth

Green will fill the trees

Where air was, leaves will be



Petals will fall to earth

Leaves will fall from trees

Where air was, leaves will be

Leaves, where there was snow



Leaves will fall from trees

Colors will brighten the air

Leaves, where there was snow

Leaves will fall to earth



Colors will brighten the air

Like hair and blood and skin

Leaves will fall to earth

Where we will fall from our lives



Like hair and blood and skin

Leaves will turn to earth

Where we will fall from our lives

Where we were, air will be



Leaves will turn to earth

Rain will fill our streams

Where we were, air will be

Snow will fall from the sky



—Martha Collins

Orion

.

From Everlasting all this came to pass.

Now, Christ come and gone, the world merely transformed,

you and I continuing the muddle of our days,

imagine with me how dark the sky those years

when all the prophets’ words looked toward this birth.

The sky was not this mornings’ bluest blue.

If I could only find my image for that blue,

this language all reducible to miracle.

Instead, my poor syllables re-tell what you know.

A simple girl, she thought the angel was a bird,

and turning to it, violated by the words announced,

questioned at first her own virginity.

Then she saw it: my sky, your sky.

And so she put on the sun, the stars, the moon

and all the planets and wore them for herself,

a fourteen-year-old, crowned and terrified. -Peter Cooley

Pleiades





TELEVISION Because we knew we were nearing the end

of our long term together, my parents and I,

this last year of their moment on earth,

watched television all day, drawing us closer. It was our camp fire when I visited.

Morning: the news of last night’s murders in Detroit.

Noon: the latest on the morning’s death count.

Evening: after 4:30 dinner, more bodies piling up. Of course, I was bored. Boredom was a balm

to watching them descend the long hill I’m still climbing.

We talked about my son,16: his car scoping out heights of the night.

Because he was theirs they loved him—the comfort of lineage. And after they both died, while I cleaned the apartment,

I kept the television on without ceasing.

I prayed the kaleidoscope of color would bring back

that ravening, the hollow in my chest I grew up with, always starved for more from them.

Dying betrayed that hunger, leaving me everything

in trust. Television worked: clamor and flash,

childhood in fast-forward, not the numb question of immortality. -Peter Cooley

NEW ENGLAND REVIEW

THE RAPTURE Beyond the window he stares out, oblivious

I’ve come back, my father is entering the afterworld.

I am still here, working Dad’s “senior residence,”

occasional nurse, valet, waiter and errand boy,

a pint of cherry ice cream leaking a slow drip in my hand. Out there, they are together in a first snow,

my father and mother, she nine months dead,

two tiny figures walking backward to Paradise.

This is before my sister and her madness, the war,

before I appear, then relatives demanding bed and board for years.

Snow dots his top hat; it mists her wedding veil.

Snow is all they know, and darkness for the blizzards

to fall across these decades they walk away from now. Soon in their backward amble they will enter

the gates, swung open for them, and begin to shed their clothes,

flinging everything skyward as their new bodies come together. -Peter Cooley

Commonweal





Consider this: a moth flies into a mans ear

One ordinary evening of unnoticed pleasures.



When the moth beats its wings, all the winds

Of earth gather in his ear, roar like nothing

He has ever heard. He shakes and shakes

His head, has his wife dig deep into his ear

With a Q-tip, but the roar will not cease.

It seems as if all the doors and windows

Of his house have blown away at once

The strange play of circumstances over which

He never had control, but which he could ignore

Until the evening disappeared as if he had

Never lived it. His body no longer

Seems his own; he screams in pain to drown

Out the wind inside his ear, and curses God,

Who, hours ago, was a benign generalization

In a world going along well enough.



On the way to the hospital, his wife stops

The car, tells her husband to get out,

To sit in the grass. There are no car lights,

No streetlights, no moon. She takes

A flashlight from the glove compartment

And holds it beside his ear and, unbelievably,

The moth flies towards the light. His eyes

Are wet. He feels as if hes suddenly a pilgrim

On the shore of an unexpected world.

When he lies back in the grass, he is a boy

Again. His wife is shining the flashlight

Into the sky and there is only the silence

He has never heard, and the small road

Of light going somewhere he has never been.

.

-Robert Cording

Image





Ode to Ordinariness



I.



Our little ration of things gone right, god of all that is

Too humdrum for our notice, you carry out

Your work under our noses, predictable as the weather.

When I open the door for todays paper,

There you are, unseen as always, in the manic circles

Of a neighbors setter that tosses a sunny

Cloud of goldfinches into the air and gives the giggles

To a first grader two doors down, waiting

Inside this mornings teakettle mist and her fathers coat

Covering her shoulders. And now the sky

Is turning blue over the city and the yellow bus rolls up

And the girl disappears in her seat, her father

Left waving to a window where the sun flares, suspended

For a moment while he continues to shout

Last minute consolations for both of them: Ill be waiting

In this same spot when you come back at three.





II.



And youre there with the mail, the usual bills and a letter

From a friend (whose marriage fell apart

A year ago), who writes now about what stays the same:

Still teaching and writing about X, playing

Some decent tennis; with a robin (what else) in the noonday

Sun that scurries a few feet, stops, then tilts

Its head and holds steady in the great alertness and purpose

Of its hunger. With the men eating lunch

Outside Linemaster Switch who soak up the good will

Of this first warm day of spring and dream

Of getting in a little fishing in Maine. And you are in

A conversation overheard at the supermarket

Thank God the doctors caught it so soonand in the face of

The wife who knew that just this once,

And only for now, her husband had passed through the eye

Of Fates needle. Our little god of reprieves,

Of the breathing spaces between living and dying, between

Disasters and raptures, you grant us the luxury

Of your dailiness, the nothing much we come to count on.



III.



We praise you: for the safe return of the school bus, for

Everyone home for supper. Praise to recurrence

And status quo, to the sun returning like a second chance

After this evenings shower, and for sparks

Of rain igniting the rooftops of the Rogers Corporation

Where chimney swifts that left with the sun

Have come back, soaring and banking now in the evenings

Tints of yellow and orange. And praise for

The moon rising like a clockface and for the small triangle

Of shadowed flesh where Ive unbuttoned

My wifes blouse and for the identical feelings I fi