Nov '03 [Home] Poetry Feature Intermediating Surfaces:  The Sk(in) Between Editor's Preface by Guest Editor, Laurel Blossom

.

.

.

A Elegy in the Flesh ~ Laurel Blossom | Then Again ~ Martha Collins | The Spirit Wars ~ Explication ~ Elisabeth Lewis Corley | Overture ~ Alfred Corn | Beautiful Orphans ~ On Being Called to Prayer While Cooking Dinner for Forty ~ Patrick Donnelly | Elemental ~ Kathy Fagan | Demeter Muses ~ Interpenetrate ~ Annie Finch | After the Picnic ~ Joan Fiset | Vanishing Twin ~ Amy Holman | Field Bandage ~ The Vietnam Memorial ~ Richard Levine   Image:  Bowl of Canosa B Above Half-Moon Bay ~ Deena Linett | We Said Good Night ~ Rebecca Newth | Dear Reader ~ Sharon Olinka | Le Pont de l'Archevêché ~ Paul Pines | Memorial Garden ~ Earl W. Roberts III | Fixing Fence ~ Implacable America ~ David Romtvedt | Humidity ~ Nicholas Samaras | Cabin Fever ~ Interior with Door ~ Barry Seiler | On Back of the Grocery List ~ Peggy Steele | After the Beginning ~ Sharon Thomson | The Body Beside Me ~ Rob Wright  Image:  Gold Glass, Roman Contributor Notes Special:  Glass Gilding Techique and History ~ . ~ . ~ Elegy In the Flesh (For L.C.) Laurel Blossom But when I saw you tightened around your skull as if your will were the one stretched thing holding you together and all your remaining life squeezed down into your swollen hand so that John Singer Sargent, painter of mortal flesh, red ear and forehead sunburn line could have gotten you to a T, Elsie, I remembered the body of my mother's mother laid out like wax at Madame Tussaud's and I said no, not you (Where am I going?), not you nor me nor any:  wood stork, mug wort — (Is this the journey?) — peonies neither in bloom nor out— (Aren't I supposed to be catching a train?) — cashew, lilac, snail darter, daffodils beaming in your so-called living room — (I tried to stay) — spring rushing in so as not to be too late —                               * I had grown so used to your being sick, long silences when you couldn't write or call. This could be one of those.                               * As if putting on your skin, changing into your new invisibility, myself an x-ray of myself, empty pockets, buttonholes like sockets the heavens can be seen through, surreal, electric. "Shall I say how it is in your clothes?" Like touch or more like the memory of touch, silken shadows through a yellow window, light falling short of the lonely sidewalk. I didn't expect to miss you half this much. What curtain is it, Elsie, tissue-thin, that parts (and cannot part) us, earth-colored blouse I bear like a trophy out of the dark interior, stuffed with my life? We have covered each other's bones, dear friend, we are one body. As if love, too, were a kind of modesty held up against the naked truth. (The line "Shall I say how it is in your clothes?" is taken from Maxine Kumin's poem to Anne Sexton, "How It Is".) ~ . ~ Then Again Martha Collins Wet line. Another to cross. That long time I was never not. Faithful to that shorter dress. Buttons all over that body. ~ . ~ The Spirit Wars Elisabeth Lewis Corley At the edge of vision a face, once beautiful, no color left, like a moth asleep beneath the night light. I know the bones, the wisps of fine hair the new anguish I have known all along. Danielle at eighty and afraid. Piles of ash in the shapes of diamonds or volcanoes, no fire left, a puff, a breath and the perfect form is a memory. The game worth the candle at the last. Now we come to it, the surface fading, the face beneath the face surfacing and we know its name. Danielle is afraid. And I am not. Something pulling for space like the water in the tables under the earth, the knot straining tighter in the well rope, I am thirsty and capable, the water rises. It is my own face I see reflected well coming nearer and nearer until it is clear. What the tables offer, the knots we won't untie but will worry at forever with some rewards and the constant fear dying of thirst. My face. I've earned the sight of it. The water I would offer to the dusty Danielle but she won't come any closer. I want to share. So the other comes, smiling, not getting any younger, not getting any young. But there. There. The comfort she offers particular as her periodic appearances. The periodic tables the struggles we live with — time, ebbing energy. I'd leave the distances to Danielle. She held out a long time glamour, train cases, the perfect detail. She was good to look at and now the casing crumbles. She is barely visible, etiolated, transparent. I would seek comfort for her but the other has taken up her sack, smiling into my well the face she has earned rippling beneath my reflection. I can live with that. And I will. Danielle who has never been heard doesn't want to be seen. I'll find out what that means or she'll tell me. Year after year the same surfaces willing us to know. ~ . Explication Elisabeth Lewis Corley Here is what happened:  I had been reading sermons. Could it have been Donne? Something about miracles? Someone gently chiding those of us who need them? There was an argument. He says, now, I was winning, on points but I was wrong. He said, then, despair then, of the truth you will never find it clever as you talk. And he walked away. Faced with the blank sentence I took out a razor and an ashtray. The clear glass was to catch the blood. All I recall was the shock air entering the bloodstream it seemed my flesh open and still no understanding. Then I went to sleep. There is a tiny scar. Barely visible. The line between the necessary and the air. ~ . ~ Overture Alfred Corn The warblers' startling alba at five a.m. through white and green square miles of pine and birch — a benchmark in the woodland record exceeded as the sun mounts a steep blue flight of stairs.                                    * Gazes sometimes lock and linger ages longer than regulation, no appeal so fateful as a mild question couched in dark but shining eyes. BEFORE:  a hand going out to rest lightly on parted lips; and a sigh breathes its lifelong AFTER.                                    * "Proceed as way opens," say the Quakers, and way with you is like being one with them, this trembling and protected meeting, an Inside Passage read by touch (spelunkers in prehistory), the juncture that spirit strikes, almighty, twice.                                    * Passion, reflection, speech, and action once covert, spill from the spout, a boost to spring seedlings. Fresh-kindled rapids have rinsed away this morning's sweat, their twined, downplunging coolant a spangled gown for Isadora freely espousing Egmont, Fidelio, sequence on sequence of splashing eighth-notes (CRASH) and a cymbal of fire meets its double in the rippled pool. (From Contradictions by Alfred Corn (Copper Canyon Press, 2002). Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. ~ . ~ Beautiful Orphans Patrick Donnelly A crutch in the trash: the age of miracles is not past. I took you piece by piece, checked your organs off my list:  mine, mine, mine. A slip of garlic skin rocks in the spider web: an animal has caught a plant. The "Neighborhood Watch" sign with its single all-seeing eye, is bent, hangs by one screw — My garbageman wears a diamond in his ear. A slab of bluestone leans in my neighbor's yard. His kids chalked a puppy, a moon, a bird; rain washed them away. I turn the comforter with the roses upside down. No one will see them, I need them next to my body. My neighbor — how does he sleep, I wonder, while his doorbell glows? ~ . On Being Called to Prayer While Cooking Dinner for Forty Patrick Donnelly When the heavens and the earth are snapped away like a painted shade, and every creature called to account, please forgive me my head full of chickpeas, garlic and parsley. I am in love with the lemon on the counter, and the warmth of my brother's shoulder distracted me when we stood to pray. The imam takes us over for the first prostration, but I keep one ear cocked for the cry of the kitchen timer, thrilled to realize today's cornbread might become tomorrow's stuffing. This thrift may buy me ten warm minutes in bed tomorrow, before the singer climbs the minaret in the dark to wake me again to the work of thought, word, deed. I have so little time to finish; only I know how to turn the dish, so the first taste makes my brother's eyes open wide — forgive me, this pleasure seems more urgent than the prayer — too late to take refuge in You from the inextricable mischief of every thing You made, eggs, milk, cinnamon, kisses, sleep. ("On Being Called to Prayer While Cooking Dinner for Forty" appeared previously in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 2002, Vol. 78, No. 4, and was featured on Poetry Daily on November 28, 2002.) ~ . ~ Elemental Kathy Fagan like light or dust like lit dust around a doorframe like vermin or water pressing round that door like oil or smoke or voices like a strong smell yes an odor like winter like hiding like stories with their edges glowing not gilded no but the glow before the page burns black that line where the fire is and was and is again that glissade like lightning a city come upon after dark that petal fold the peeling a blossom does until it is not a blossom blown they call it up in smoke yes light pressing inward from the brief burn then out that it's both at once the racing toward away a living thing they call it for its breath I think for that center which is not the center but a door or the movement through it from which toward which around and for its odor and for its carriage on the draft and for the cinders that will visit what is spared and what is chosen that dust that door that light ~ . ~ Demeter Muses Annie Finch I'm the edge of shadow, the edge of sun, the name that grasses muster in, that dirt sinks over, (I know my daughter goddess is a wedge) a knowing growing rooting at an edge, a subtle ground that sun breaks out before (between the tale of rising, and the fall). Here, in my shadow and in my sun, my poor (I know my daughter goddess is a wedge) cool daughter waits, till someone passes over (between the tale of rising and the fall) to lift, with hands that helped her back before. ~ . Interpenetrate Annie Finch Like the bleached fibers and their haunted ink, interpenetrate each other's solitudes, not penetrating, not dissolving; stay rolled with the single patterns of the days, linking through pages to burn with speaking lace and thread to bodies, evenly alive. (From Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003). Reprinted with permission from the author.) ~ . ~ After the Picnic Joan Fiset A small yellow cloth, white cups — the black wasps circling around and around, where was that town, the particular house I keep seeing all afternoon? Ancestors across the dark, something in their faces leading to trees, a doorway, lamp. They understand my urgency, how the house escapes me everywhere I walk. Curtains flutter, it is summer where I'm walking toward a field. The basket over my arm would weigh me down if this were a country or any time of day. ~ . ~ Vanishing Twin Amy Holman The miscarriage of a twin during pregnancy's first trimester is called "vanishing, or vanished twin." A brother drifting into blood, a small boy runs across a field, looking up. Mom, wait, wait for me. She woke. There's still one in there, Dr. Rule said. Is John like the blue and right whales or the Chinese tigers, struggling to go on in so much quiet? Once there was more. Where's my brother? he panicked, not yet two, as if Mom was hiding one, as if my new body reminded him. But, I was just another who took hold, another year. Some of his friends didn't know he had a sister. He was protecting you, his wife said. What is the seam between language and flesh? Away from home, others take form in stories, or drift. Who is the guilty one? Sometimes, we turn away too soon, shudder into hemorrhage, go. He was a runner of cross country. He said to Mom, I feel alone and will never have a friend. That's how he sees it. It's easier for him. ~ . ~ Field Bandage Richard Levine Your wound and a field bandage were sorely mismatched. Still, as if launching a raft could stop a river's hemorrhaging white water, I tried to plug the red tide. Morphine tricked your pain, as I held your intestines in place, irrigating and waiting for the stuttering air to pronounce your dog-tag rescue. I thought I needed to save you to save me. (Prior publ.: Medicinal Purposes Literary Review) ~ . The Vietnam Memorial Richard Levine I heard the air stutter. Dust and distance hovered near. If only you could wait. I stood up to wave, black face and red-flare in the fire. A dusty breath away. Now, where the sun explodes off memory's wall, I touch your chiseled name, and all I could not hold, I let go. I let go. (Prior publ.: Modern Poetry) [Poems:  B]