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

.

.

.

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 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 Contributor Notes Special:  Glass Gilding Techique and History ~ . ~ Above Half-Moon Bay —California, July '01 Deena Linett 1. From an E-mail to Sharon You'll want to know this:  we walked along rifts and splits in the earth high above the sea on a cliff- edge, climbed down, poked around a cove, the sand pink-beige and brown, scoured into folds like theatre-curtains. And the Pacific, marine-blue all the way to Tokyo, and wildflowers:  yellow, blue. Thistles I thought grew only in Scotland, but pricked my finger on one and it bled so I woke from my trance. No prince. Chris said the erratic branching fissures were made by the earthquake, so I slid a shiny penny in. It disappeared. No thud. 2. Notebook, Then: This is how my life goes, tilting, riven, episodic in ways unacceptable in a novel, long stretches when nothing happens. I dropped a bright new penny into a slit where the world pulled apart. That long fall to the heated fluid heart, scruple of copper melting into quartz. Found a branch of small brown pods, spongy bladders filled with air — animal or veg? Seaweed in long strands like thread from tapestry go brittle, as shells and stones lifted from the water lose their color — as we are stripped of language far from home. 3. Notebook, 1991: Tar Pits at LaBrea:  no metaphors about life blurting out, pitch, sludge thick as family trouble, or divinity breaking through the Earth's thin crust Chert brown-red like dried blood — Bubbles of tar in the grass not far from the L.A. County Museum, the welling up as if the Earth bled:  it gives us something of its hot black heart. 4. Notebook, Now: I knelt to taste new water from hot pools at Yellowstone, drank snowmelt decades old at a high cirque lined with fairy paving-stones small as birds' eggs, green and blue and yellow, the icy water perfect in its clarity. How could this fail to scald, swaths of fresh snow on raw earth, the hills black-green? Boiling mud from the time before we had been dreamed of, and the entire universe the size of a stadium, Roman, Christians and lions; football, twenty-first century; playing fields, and Afghan women shot, and all of us flecks of sentient longing adrift over the face of the Earth, starry dust, seed and spore. 5. The Space Between East and West the idea and the perfect sentence waking and sleeping, sea and sky, now and now. I returned a penny to the earth where a crevice opened at the verge of the sea, cuts and cracks ramified like root-hairs, like rivulets, as water goes to every compass-point when the earth rolls; design like silver tracks thought makes as it runs, tributaries seen from air, blood-flow, course of capillaries, cilia, scissures. Like nothing but themselves. Wind blasts color from plumy grasses, splays earth white with salt spray. Someday when I'm gone someone will bend to a streak of copper gleaming in basalt tossed up in a geyser of fire, mud and rock or found — not much changed — on a beach a thousand miles inland from the sea's froth now. ~ . ~ . ~ We Said Good Night Rebecca Newth It's very odd how all this came about But I had this portrait of Dorothy Forgotten when John Coldstream Wrote to say there is to be a biography And do I have a photo? No, actually, I don't. Just a dark oil, I answer. Too dark. A little dull, I think. Her lap is plum and the blouse a deep blue. I'll apply varnish, and proceed to make a photograph In strong light. "Dorothy Webster Gordon, at her Writing Table" By Mervyn Peake on masonite, and a poem by me On the reverse. It's a Christmas card, see, updated, not dull. The oil gleams a gift to each and every one Of you, and the poem is free. The only problem. Why I did so. She wouldn't have liked it Soft corners notwithstanding, and a cushion. The mind hasn't been spared Nor the old warehouse of mattering. ~ . ~ Dear Reader Sharon Olinka Will you hold this bone, feather, shred of skin? You are my ghost. Sweet tart fruit, dust on your lips. Always a new room in the museum of wounds. For once, be my interpreter. Unzip your jeans, tell me about art. I want to learn something new. As little flames burn up, when water takes me, wide and dark. ~ . ~ Le Pont de l'Archevêché (from "The Cry of Merlin") Paul Pines This evening I'm surprised anew by the way light alludes to an exile wherein a world of which I cannot speak is glorified (From Adrift on Blinding Light by Paul Pines (Ikon Press). Reprinted with permission of the author.) ~ . ~ Memorial Garden Earl W. Roberts III I. I find pulling weeds from this walk much preferable to pulling them from the garden. There's none of this wondering what's a weed and what isn't. If it's green and between the bricks, pull the damned thing out. It has no business being there, anyway. On the walk, there's none of this woolly-headed pondering of the different natures of flowers and weeds or wondering who presumed to declare the one a blessing and the other a blight. There's also no getting in trouble with those who'll know if you've yanked the wrong stem. On the walk, you pull all of 'em and let God sort 'em out. II. Nature has her laws and rules. Big ones like gravity, Life and Death, others about hot and cold, and reproduction, and food and water. But did you ever notice that she can't draw a straight line in real life? And she doesn't know anything about showing respect. Oh, she demands it for herself, but she doesn't give it. She plants anything she wants; anywhere it has the slightest chance of growing, and if it doesn't, she's okay with that too. III. Today, he's been gone five years. Relentlessly, the growing space between us is filled in with time's garden. I can't stop it. I can't even pull its weeds, and there is no path back through that garden. But this walk, so help me, this walk will not be lost. These bricks with their names, will not be overgrown. They will not be taken from me. ~ . ~ Fixing Fence David Romtvedt Nobody I know loves fixing fence, setting creosoted posts into ground hard as rock, stretching barbed wire taut to sing in rising wind and burning sun. In the fall when hunters come it's worse, wind drifted snow, gates left open and wire cut. They would make for themselves a straight line from kill to truck and drag the carcasses across the ground. Sometimes I miss these cuts and find weeks later a band of sheep far from home. Sometimes I find the cuts after a storm when the trail is clear and it is cold. Often enough it is a fence not solely my own but one I share with a neighbor and so I go and speak to him and we meet on a day when the cold will freeze our feet and hands. We wrestle with the wire and the come-along and curse together, grinning, saying "sonsabitches." And then again, for pleasure, "sonsabitches." We find a fencepost driven over and splintered and I go to the truck for another and we have to use a pick and a bar for now the earth is frozen — not rock but steel, sheet after sheet. We put our backs into it but it's no go and we decide to use magic — the levitation trick — instead of setting the post into the earth. It works! Though it sways, it does not fall, held upright by wire pulled tight from the posts on either side, floating above ground. Sometimes we stack rocks around such a floating post. We drink coffee from a thermos and say again, "sonsabitches." In the cold I pull off my gloves to set the fencing staples and drive them in, to release the come-along and start again. And my hands are so dry the skin cracks around my fingernails and I bleed. This happens every winter. I put bag balm on the split skin and wrap it tight using cotton wads from the top of the aspirin bottle and a strip of greasy masking tape I found in the jockey box of the truck. Gloves back on I complain but it is fine enough, the bright sun and glittering snow, my neighbor who I like plenty well enough and who does this work with me. He is a smiling fat man — cattle while I am sheep. When I say I'm sorry about the cut fence, he looks up and says, "Hell, don't bother me none. 'Sides, ain't your doing, damn Eastern hunters." I'm grateful he trusts me and believes it is the hunters and not me cutting the fence myself to let my stock onto his range where they can get more free feed. "What d'ya 'spose them assholes is thinking anyway?" "I don't know," I answer. "But I can bet not a one of 'em ever fixed fence." And I lean back and slam a staple into a splintery post so cold the creosote smell is gone. Even in this cold I'm sweating and I take off my hat to wipe my forehead, feel the sweat freeze there. "Fences." "Once upon a time," my neighbor says, "there weren't no fences in this country." I sigh. He goes on, saying, "My granddad can tell about it. How there was herders everywhere, every herder with his sheepwagon and dog, some of 'em with a horse. You remember that herder busted both his legs and somehow drug hisself up on a rise then got his horse to stand there on the low side and he slid onto the horse and it walked on into town. Resourceful son-of-a-gun." And he hits the post again with a hard blow of the hammer. "Fences. Always fixing 'em. Always will be. Makes me think of how a big storm comes and the wind drifts the snow over the fence lines and sheep'll walk right up and over, walk into the next county and on south. That's why I run cows even if I know them old time gods don't want no fences anyways. Knock 'em all down if they could." Again, the hammer blow and the smile and I look at my neighbor and realize for a moment that he's a friend, hammer in hand, a few staples in his mouth even in the cold. We work through the short near solstice afternoon. When the sun drops behind the rim of the mountains, the cold comes on. "Better go in," I say, and he says, "I'll just get this and we'll be done here." So we go on ten more minutes ­ snowbank and shade, ice and light. "OK, then," he says, "looks good enough for now. We can set that post when the ground thaws." I look at him and ask, "When the ground thaws?" "Yeah." He laughs. "Next spring. Be soon enough for me. I'll see ya then." "OK," I say, and "Thanks for your help." ~ . Implacable America David Romtvedt I lean back and fall into the crackle of cottonwood leaves and dried grasses — the gold, brown and gray. November day and the sun roars across the sky, burning a last hole in the clouds before winter arrives. On the other side of the fence, pickups slide by, engine sound disappearing into the distance of town, echoes and explosions, America close and coming closer, implacable America. Here and there along the ground are junipers, needles a faded green, blue berries, hard perfume of the woods, mountain mahogany bristling with spines. I throw a few leaves into the air and the wind, as it riffles my hair, carries these leaves away. Sun behind a cloud, it's chilly. There's a tangle of sound from the creek, a low hiss stumbling over exposed rock and bits of early ice that shine in shadowy darkness. When I close my eyes, the water surrounds me. The current doubles back on itself, carving away the earth until the creek forms an oxbow and this land is cut off from the rest. In winter, the deer cross the ice, going back and forth until spring thaw when they are caught on the island. They step into the water to swim home but some, as they bend down, see the wavering reflections of themselves and halt, momentarily confused. ~ . ~ Humidity Nicholas Samaras The air touches too intimately here. An East Coast air that is almost visible and smothers our skin like another wet skin. What we gained in the colonies, we gave up in seasonal intensity. But if anything existed west of Washington, I'd go there and breathe a spare air that is more transparent, mindful and keeps a polite, British distance. ~ . ~ Cabin Fever Barry Seiler Not the falling after All this is beautiful Erasure erasure But the witnessing At the window apart The wall of it all The deep accumulation The ceaseless flaking The words for it ~ . Interior With Door Barry Seiler The bed is thick with me Arrangement of flesh And benevolent pill The couch the floor the kitchen Chair do they care the weight Of me lifted and done But the door — the door — When the door asks Which side are you on How will I reply ~ . ~ On Back of the Grocery List Peggy Steele Between the sidewalk and the curb there's a narrow strip of ground. When you buy your house you pay for it — but it's not yours. If the city wants it, they take it to widen the street, to plant a huge splintery pole, or stand in yellow suits to shout before six a.m. Anybody can throw his beer can there. Big rains wash all the dirt out of it, and guess who gets to buy new dirt or get sued for someone else's turned ankle? You bought it but you don't own it. It's the dogs' outhouse, weeds' last frontier, crabgrass heaven. Someday it may be the only unpaved ground in America. It may be prized, it may be where we plant our corn. We step over it daily, hardly notice, yet like all margins, it means a definite something, usually a something we don't want to think about until it blurs beyond our ever knowing what it was we didn't really quite own. ~ . ~ After the Beginning Sharon Thomson So, we are in place: it's you and I pressing against space like glass between us; around us the Pacific is all blue crashing in as the California sun is beating on our skins, opening things up making fuchsia as big as a purple fruit, a red fist. And there's the other world in hidden pools where anemones glow and suck like slow claws calling us in. Now fifty birds — in a swoop off the cliffs, cutting sideways through those two monoliths, those rocks rising dark and dripping from the sea — one breath away from the waves it's a lift-off cawing toward the horizon. Remember how it was in the beginning? In the beginning I was in my room like a cell:  distinct, one unit with a door and a light switching off and on. Music and the night passing like centuries over the continent fixed in place     then shifting    something shifting a crack in the crust heaving up the ground I stood on. Oh love you, like a figure on the other side calling    The Promised Land you, that myth I carved in bas-relief shook loose and split from the wall into life. Through the dust of what was left, I saw your face solicitous; there were two blue stones like the ones you have in your hand this minute still shining from the ocean floor. I believe there's more to find. Scratch the sand. Remember how is was when there was no limit, no boundary; how things multiplied along the dividing line? Remember last night? That vast space, the distance of a star and light; all those years? The ocean's breaking, you can see:  rock, spray and the mad breathing of wings wrapping us in. Already we are more than I intended. ~ . ~ The Body Beside Me Rob Wright The body lying beside me starts, not awake, but as if a shock had run through it vertically and left it sleeping. The body's core: the breathing, mute dividing stuff, which I ignore, thinking it repellent, brutish or vulgar, is the power which drives the green fuse — not only through the flower — but the iron-walled cells of the Poet's brain and liver; sows follicles of hair, makes it sprout on skull and curl warmly around the pubic rise, knits sutures around the vast and bony ballroom, packed with gray-gowned thieves, mourners, and tragedians; makes the livered skin of a gardener blister in the sun, as if she were twenty and pushing fertile seed into furrows. No less ingenious than the hexagonal combs of a colony of stingless wasps building winter domes clustered on a strip of lath above a house cat's ticking bones; and no more brutish than a bass rising through last light to kill midges breeding on pockets of gas, then sinking to bury blood-soaked gills and panoramic vision in layers of frost-proof silt as the first rime skims and stiffens into a vast, disinterested slab of time-tight crystal. The body around me starts, not awake, but as if a shock had run through it, vertically and left it sleeping. [Poems:  A] ~ . ~ . ~