ISSN 1542-3123 Jun '03 [Home] Poetry Between Strands of the Hammock — Editors' Preface

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B Memorial Day, Hull Village ~ Brant Lyon | Neither Sad Nor Joyous ~ Paul McGlynn | Her Young Death, Loose in You ~ Amy Meckler | Nuzzling Wind ~ Baruch November | A Radio Caller Praising the Revival of Drive-In Theaters ~ Ron Price | Waking to a Dream of Thunderstorm I Write to a Poet a Long Time Dead ~ Sam Rasnake | Souvenir of a Closed Rite ~ Houses Without Gardens Without Stone Walls ~ Laura Sherwood Rudish | This Season of Moths ~ Denise Rue | To a Canvas Painter:  If It Fits ~ Henry Louis Shifrin | The Poet Whom Language Abandoned ~ Zach Sussman | never read alone by the sea ~ George Wallace | Post-Nuptial Syndrome ~ Confirmed Bachelor ~ Jim Whelden A Apostle ~ Madeline Artenberg| Empty Music ~ Marisabel Bonet | The Magic of Cinema ~ surely this must be ~ Denver Butson | Corner the Dakota ~ Tobias Deehan | 'The Moon Lies Fair Upon the Straits' ~ Robert Klein Engler | Plot ~ Reprieve ~ Behind the Window ~ Joan Fiset | Foul Thunder of Moments ~ David Geer | My Longshore Captain ~ Patrick Henry | Blacksmith ~ This Close to Earth ~ Maureen Holm | Back Home ~ Nicholas Johnson| My Heart Disappears Among the Trees ~ Dave King | Tally My Life Against the Backdrop; Make Its Speaker Unknown for the Assembly ~ Bobbi Lurie    Photo:  Jacob Holdt ~ . ~ . ~ Memorial Day, Hull Village Brant Lyon Not envy, exactly—too many miles and years between you and not familiar enough to chafe your soul in rivalry, I think—more a shadowy pang of if only swept across your face like a cloud passing over the sun on an otherwise cloudless day looking down on the deck of the tug where Tom McDevitt and his boy fastened ropes to the dock, squinting up at you, not really bragging, just saying, Sure she's mine; the smaller boat's my brother's, and we've got four others, too. You dropped names to discover who had stayed behind, and Tom pretended he knew who you were, though it was only the names of your big Irish family that he recognized (each infamous in your own way, you explained).                     By then, the late afternoon sun was casting long shadows on the cool Kelly green grass of the field that dipped like a cupped palm or a cradle, nestled between the woods and the houses where you used to play ball and the kids were playing ball now, as you watched, briefly. Let's stop by your old friend, Liz Lyons, I suggested; but she died years ago in Mass Gen. Some tropical disease I presumed, recalling her Peace Corps mission in Burkina Faso back when it was called Upper Volta, and the time we moved boxes of books from her third floor walk-up in Charlestown, wondering, What does a freckle-faced redhead do in Ougadougou? Not malaria or blood flukes or yellow fever—something stateside and mysterious. Her mention reminded you of Colin—your teenage crush on drop-dead beautiful killer charm Colin—who crashed through the wooden railing of the Allerton causeway driving home drunk just a few years after you saw him with some older man at Provincetown, at the time thinking, Aha! I should have known all along. He wouldn't like it now, anyway, you suppose— the town taken over by dykes with buzz cuts and body piercing everywhere. It was always windy like today growing up here, you said, looking off toward Boston Harbor. I thought, It's still chilly in the shade—isn't reminiscence better left to summer's end? ~ . ~ Neither Sad Nor Joyous Paul McGlynn Two men arrived to take me to die, Men polite enough and quite correct, In suits of Sabbath black. I had to drown in such and such a sea, And that was that. As we went, I reviewed chapters From my life, a scattering of sights. Kisses in some cheap hotel; the smiles; View from the window of a park. Children. A woman in red, gold at her throat, On a white palfrey, prancing in April rain. Why those sights from smoky cities And dripping valleys? I've never learned. I saw my father bend at his workbench As though in prayer, grieving a loss; My mother at her stove, the angry sizzle. As I drowned, I drifted. Waters murmured. I saw the shape of my life, like an argument. Sandgrasses waved idly on the shore, Neither sad nor joyous, While I sank toward greater plausibility. ~ . ~ Her Young Death, Loose in You Amy Meckler Easy, she fell out undone, a good idea not written down. Two months later, when the due date came, you couldn't believe the grief. A simple idea, a bloat with a date, a weight breathing in bas relief riding you like a new part. To lose her you have to trace back to the start of a thought you thought you had sliding between your legs, a sense of wet then red then white table scratchy paper and a doctor's shaking head. Now your family begs come back like a false start kicking the chalky line on some round track but you think rip and wreck, no box, no ground, just water— not clean, not cool, just the sound. (From What All the Sleeping Is For, Defined Providence Press, 2002) ~ . ~ Nuzzling Wind Baruch November Only in sparse memories am I needless to replace you. While shingles pale below the moon's lamp, a dog laps the lake. She howls in lonesomeness. I wait for your umbrella to spring closed. Listen to the knock of rain on ochre leaves that lunge to the sill, only to sling back into the sway of their sisters. The walls hold, the stairs give under no footfall. The still-life returns, except to the wind-nuzzled eaves of which I am so jealous. (From Dry Nectars of Plenty, Headwaters Press, 2002) ~ . ~ A Radio Caller Praising the Revival of Drive-In Theaters Ron Price for John Waters      I don't break-dance, don't mosh. I'm country,      and I ain't been to one for years.      What with a wife and kids      I had to change my life,      but I do indeed remember them.      I got my first lay there—      it wasn't my wife,      but it was pretty good.      A cold beer in the heat, a little peace—      well, sometimes I'm an animal—      and now it's back in style. They still pass out vomit bags? ~ . ~ Waking to a Dream of Thunderstorm I Write to a Poet a Long Time Dead Sam Rasnake (thinking of Borges, Buenos Aires, 1960) One crow balances, high in the cedar, turns his head as if he believed the metaphor:  slowed undulations of summer in purple and thistle beside the highway above the airport. Nothing separates want from need like this. His is the silence of last words— "that patient labyrinth of line"—just before a favored book is closed and the universe moves in a swill of light from your chair, across all dark geographies, until you know, if only in that smallest moment, exactly who you are. ~ . ~ Souvenir of a Closed Rite Laura Sherwood Rudish When it rains at Stonehenge, the crows unfold. Their shadows tend the abandonment. They roost among plinth holes Pick at dropped crisps and soggy bits of ice cream cones. Lambs graze by a broken gate. There's something waiting beyond the corner Of my eye. If I could only catch a glimpse of. So clothed in hazes. White sheets snap on the clothesline by the kitchen door. ~ . Houses Without Gardens Without Stone Walls Laura Sherwood Rudish Stones and crystals mostly silent Love Our human show All our bodies so entwined By our never-ceasing minds We're infinitely needy here You For example Were you Ever happy? Even In your stillness some small ear Strains Then you ask Why can't I be a woman in a garden? ~ . ~ This Season of Moths Denise Rue A rush of wings, thrash and flicker— for weeks they have wanted in. Wings of rust with eyespots of ink strike the screen in delirious frenzy. Stiff legs tap a tarantella on my sill. Plush thorax, furred and fat, wings dusty and thin as sighs. Their quiver and flutter exhaust me. Persistent pulse at my window— I want, I want, I want. All summer I have saved them— unraveled from spider's webs, plucked from wet drainboards, lifted the screen, as now. A fury of wings, they seethe in, dip and gust—not in breathless frenzy to the light, but to turn and fret again at the screen's metal weave, their wings unsinged. I cup one in my hands, pitch it towards the moon. Later, in darkness, we lie, splayed and seared. I want my arms like plush wings to wrap you, leave a dusting that will not dissolve in the sun's light. But desire is its own echo and longing but a habit. What is this love but a beating back of death, the tireless trill of our hearts? I want, I want, I want. ~ . ~ To a Canvas Painter:  If It Fits Henry Louis Shifrin You see before you a soap dish that doesn't know war. Admittedly it doesn't know soap either. It's a miniature stadium of concentric ovals, each smaller and a step below the one before. But don't ride this metaphor too long; the dish has no mite gladiators or microscopic lions. It's just very plastic. In fact it smells like something plastic just torn out of plastic packaging—a petroleum plastic smell, the smell of the casing of a bomb. A bombshell? Yes, it could have been, but between bombshell and soap dish the manufacturer somehow chose the latter. This choice aside, you have what you have, so don't wax philosophical about a still life life has offered you. Instead offer the subject something; perhaps some backgrounding? The dish is on the edge of the counter top, so place behind it—a hand length (the length of your hand) behind it—a sink and on the sink rim, beside the faucet, a bar of soap laughing a hint of lavender. But don't you laugh (you must respect every object). Concentrate on your subject: only when you perfectly form a question, do you draw the soap dish. Now look there at all those ovals: what bar of soap in this world actually fits inside that dish? If you can't answer, you've painted the scene correctly. ~ . ~ The Poet Whom Language Abandoned Strolls Along the Beach at Dusk Zach Sussman The sea a ribcage cracking, he gazes shirtless to where the water welds to sky: in the stuttered light, the boats anchored in the harbor are smears from a used eraser, the surf white gibberish lisped at the shore. He eyes the yellow gash of the horizon, widens his jaw:  his tongue's heavy as an ax blade dropped, the trill of a stone bell. The tide, the sails, the gulls curdling in the scrapyard of clouds yield nothing. His back turned from the sawing wings, he envies their weightlessness; how in the chill dusk their silhouettes open like mouths. ~ . ~ never read alone by the sea George Wallace sensing vulnerability the bride of the ocean will run her white eyed bridle-high flag of betrayal and rush to your place on the immense shore of the world and no matter how she may have disguised with salt and the slight scent of lavender pumice the transparent scales of her intent or concocted like the singsong of sea creatures like the notion of sub- oceanic respite spilling from breath to green breath like a child's dream tossed like powder into the waves like a dog in his sad brown friendly way swimming out after his lost master one moist dead tired morning never read alone by the sea i say because then and without warning she will guile you with unimaginable soft waving motion of tentacles disguising all intent in the small folds of her crustacean wings and like vengeance poured fast from the rich diatomic tapestry of deep under- water veins of blood or seadrills with her tiny eyes built like murder she will take you eager for the soft dinner of flesh you always were the unanticipated puddle of appetite the lie of safety you always wore this cannot be averted not even given that hard shell or the sure claw you kept hidden behind an elemental veil of algae she will snap your neck in her jaws or like that smiling thing glimpsed beneath the impenetrable rockface lure you with her deceptive glances and her long hair she will take you up like bones in her hand she will crush you like words into sand ~ . ~ Post-Nuptial Syndrome Jim Whelden The young king with his young queen in his immense bed with its heavy bedposts and dense curtains in three courses lies naked as a slave boy pleased with himself and looking to please his only master, God. The young queen is gasping like a landed fish several flops away. Perhaps he has misused her. Daylight tints things. Stiffly lackey-lacquered he will chafe at royal toilet. She will have slipped from his fired empery to her own cinder estate. ~ . Confirmed Bachelor Jim Whelden Out of the refrigerator's mood swing a faint sound, like someone sawing wood I conjure a problematic child. He is making book ends for me for Christmas, going at it in mittens in the garage. It is warm here in the living room, cold, very cold, even for a dream child out there in the car's ice palace. He bends over his work bench, a tight fit. Why not imagine him a cellar work-space? Because I could not hear him there, as I cannot see him here. Because I want to hear him, figment from the refrigerator's grousing. There's his mother, damn her, telling him to stop, now. ~ . ~ . ~  A