Poetry Feature

No. 3 in Series
Degrees of Apprenticeship
The Sarah Lawrence Program
With Introduction and Poems by Thomas Lux
~ A ~   ~ B ~   ~ C ~

A Restrained Thought Does Not As A Rule
  Return To The Mind
Laura Sherwood Rudish

The Esteemed Poet Gives His Student a List   of Forbidden Words
This Season of Moths
Denise Rue

Theft in the Morning
Dan Schneider

Ritual
Amish Girl
Driving on Ice
Elaine Sexton

Angel Twice Removed
Daniel V. Shea


After Chemo
Lisa Shirley

Ariadne
Louisa Storer

A Cave Where Fires Burn
St. Patrick's Cathedral at Night
Mary Tautin

Quitting You
Lisa Titus

Vessels
Byron Weiss

6 Girls
Hanne Winarsky

Who Needs Geometry?
Melissa Woertenbyke


~ . ~ . ~

A Restrained Thought Does Not As A Rule
  Return To The Mind
Laura Sherwood Rudish


I'm not the voice of a vast silence not
a wilderness bell

no more an ear than the night
though once or twice this dark-petaled heart
rose to a listening on the verge of speech no

the art of courtly love escapes me
I who woo what I cannot hold
a lost well
or a word unspoken
try to maintain a sense

a compass

but mostly christ it's I
a wobbly needle near to north then
veering wide-arced off the mark I mock my good
intentions there's so many of me here

and then there's no one

I who am so only

if I flash a light will I find
I contain a suspect poverty? This unnecessary
emptiness this warped reflection in the bent teaspoon
It's mine

The essential weirdness of this place I am
unfolds speaking yes

no one can love
unless compelled by the persuasion of love but there's no real
excuse for not loving Last night
I awoke to that part of me who watches and waits whispering
your life isn't safe if you go on this way


~ . ~

The Esteemed Poet Gives His Student A List
  of Forbidden Words
Denise Rue


'Soul' is the first to go,
followed by 'love,' 'longing,' 'desire.'
The moon is untethered,
sunset mashed under a boot heel,
all rainbows bled, constellations crushed.

Some animals must be put down.
Forget the firefly, dragonfly, butterfly, moth.
Singe the ladybug's wings, pluck the bluebird clean.
Uproot a few plants as well:
Twining roses, jasmine, willows that weep.

Restrict your palette. No alabaster or alpenglow,
nymph pink, madder lake or Wedgwood blue.
While you're at it, 86 the ballads of Berlin,
Gershwin and Kern, the late show,
flowered china, Irish linen, French perfume.

Day rolls into night, unquestioned.
There is Fire, Air, Water, Earth.
And Truth, perfect and terrible,
cut in a mirror which is no
longer a looking glass,
swallowed whole down my throat
which is not a golden flute.


~ .

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—
unravelled 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.


~ . ~

Theft in the Morning
Dan Schneider


This morning I thought about
walking off with the groceries
of the man with the black motorcycle helmet
in front of me in checkout.
He wasn't paying attention
and I could have easily swapped our bags.
Walking home, I imagined the meal
he was planning to cook that night—
boiled cabbage and liver—and pictured myself
eating every last sour forkful.
While he'd end up with my oat bran,
I could eat bowl after bowl of his fruit loops for desert,
and he'd never know who
had switched lives with his.

Tomorrow, I'd drink his pear juice, munch
bacon bits and onion rings.
Maybe I, too, would start to wear
a purple shirt, stop reading stock quotes.
I'd buy lottery tickets
bet on dog races in the afternoons.

When I board trains
I'll no longer find a seat by the window,
away from strangers,
but pour out my story to you, the unlucky one
who just started that new novel—
Put that down,I'll say. You'll like this better,
and tell you how I intend
to take this train and run for the nearest border,
the place farthest away from the neighbor's opera
heaving at midnight, away from the cars
cutting in front of me, away from the glare
of computer monitors, away from the crows
which, from dawn this morning, wouldn't stop cawing
from atop that tree across the street.


~ . ~

Ritual
Elaine Sexton


I stare at stained glass, the one clear thing in this church
by the sea. In our pew, my mother weeps.

The priest's murmurs are glib. The neighbors bow, genuflect,
gestures at odds with how we move on the street.

There is the other widow, Marie. The kook down the road
wanders in. His sweater slips as the Mass dips

to its ending. I said the last time was the last time
I'd come, not taking Communion as believers do.

They squeeze by between me and the red leather pads,
where we kneel when we're told. They are singing

America, the Beautiful(of all things) as a hymn.
And it is beautiful, even on this gray day.

We couldn't see the islands, driving in from the beach.
This usually means a storm's coming. Eel Pond

has yet to freeze over. It should be easy to hold my tongue
while the others put theirs out, in hope of redemption.

They are taking the Host, white discs of faith, as though
something light as snow had turned solid, round, knowable.


~ .

Amish Girl
Elaine Sexton


The land, mute and stitched into slabs,
is ochre, dotted with crows, mown

green, clouded by sheep. The corn,
hay, wheat, tossed into crates

and the bed of a truck, wait
by the hem of the road

where the Graves' barn burned,
and the path we normally take

caved from the last rain. Father
flicks his whip at the gelding

who drones on, old. We sit, stifling
in a black box. I don't dare

hold my hand out to catch a breeze
as we trot by the farm. The girl

in the red car behind us, going slow,
might think I'm waving.


~ .

Driving on Ice
Elaine Sexton


There must be a reason they call it a 'bolt'
of lightning. I woke with the sound

like a truck rumbling in my head, five a.m.
And heard it later, again, seeing this picture:

seven-ton trucks crossing four-foot-thick ice.
The drivers on lakes up north lean

out their cab windows, happy only when
they hear the road speak. Cracks and blows

say it is solid. Some days they swerve
to miss caribou in a herd on the lake,

tiny huts set up to sell goods. Silence is death
in the snow. When ice softens, it's quiet.

Cargo could sink without skidding, first.
A snap below tells the drivers it's safe.

The brave think they walk on the water
when they're driving on ice.


~ . ~

Angel Twice Removed
Daniel V. Shea


You know how in every major city there's a zoo
that always looks a little run down,
red bricks missing in places along the path.

If you go past the unmanned information booth
down to the left of the bird sanctuary, but before
the Arctic exhibit with the polar bears
in full winter coats even though it's 70 out…

well anyway, once you hear all the kids yelling
you know you're there: The Ape exhibit.
And you know how all the monkeys are hooting
and swinging around, like they were given espresso-Prozac
and chocolate frosted sugar bombs instead of bananas, and then

there are the lazy Orangutans with their wide leathery faces
looking at you like you're a tube of glue, and next
to them are the Gorillas, who sit in truck tires
and scoop up big handfuls of poop to throw at the dumb guy
in the red ball cap. Well, just past that are the Chimpanzees.

On his mother's back, the baby chimp stares at everyone,
how it looks so human, just like a people baby,
and the young chimps—the children chimps—
who can't sit still, and two or three of them spin
wild revolutions, making themselves dizzy
and the field-trip kids point and laugh.

Well here's the thing: In the back of the cage
there's one who will not turn to face us.
He'll just sit there like he's protesting something,
sit there showing only his silver back—and sometimes
looking up, slowly drag a stick across the cement stones.
That's the one. He's the one I mean.


~ . ~

After Chemo
Lisa Shirley


    for my mother


She wears her skin lightly,
just covering the brightness of her bones.
As she walks towards the altar,
her skull gleams through a halo of hair
like the relics encased in candlelight.

Alabaster Wednesday—ashes
lowered onto her forehead shining with sweat.

Later, awake while the moon sleeps,
she lies coiled in the heavy night,
she traces the swell,
the rise under her skin, still growing.

And she dreams
her fingernails longer,
sharper—she has the strength
to reach in and tear it all out.

This Lent, I will give up everything.


~ . ~

Ariadne
Louisa Storer


I thought I was hungrier than usual—
I took this as a speared sign and trusted my fate.
After you left me before dawn— (Don't lie. Eos

remembers black sails gracing the wind.) When you left
I didn't eat, but roamed this green island in cycles:
breakfast, searching for your hair tangled in branches,

lunch, picking bits of dried blood from your second-best
armored breastplate left in the bear's cave we loved in,
dinner, digging along the shore's sand for bottles

and cigarette butts tossed from the helm of your ship,
respat onto this beach-grave with the coming tide.
I thought I was doomed to crawl this land's strip, laden

with you. I thought the gods cursed my thread's filial
infidelity until Hymenaeus lost
his voice on my false-wedding night. Without his song,

he worried down to the sea to gargle salty
water and found me married, sitting on a rock.
I wed a fool's drunken god for a diadem,

he knew. He promised (patting my empty belly)
you would return to me if I bore your child.
He was certain as an oracle. So I shunned

my wedding bed. (My husband boozed lifeless among
juniper bushes.) Instead, I ate tangerines,
deviled eggs, fancied cravings sweet as abalone's

smoky meat skewer-roasted by bonfires.
I thought I grew fat dreaming of white sails
until I awoke this morning between bloody sheets.


~ . ~

A Cave Where Fires Burn
Mary Tautin


I chose Dante for his tutorial in descent—
the limp down to what is strange
and useful in ourselves. His sinners traveled

unrepentant in packs. Francesca groaned
of passion into hot, lifting winds. Brunetto promoted
his most recent book: an encyclopedia in French.

Back on earth, the end was not dictated by order or flight.
The end is my apartment, in New York:

An African vase of ilex berries that do not dry
gracefully, prescriptions piled up in the bathroom,
sheets of paper blank in a drawer. Creatures squat
beneath the kitchen floorboards, chewing celery bits
thoughtfully, and not without thanks.

This winter, the air never snaps
and we are confused into idiotic spring,
lurched into warmth that is not blossom
or passage.

I am desperate for water to rush from the vase, flood what is caught:
my mind on an unbeating page, my heart croaked
on too much time to think about it, the roaches
unwilling to move even when these rooms
offer too little.

Dante wrote a blue Paradise for the dead, which
I chose not to read. From my desk, I imagine
the blue between roof tops as lean runways, openings

to a freedom. Between sandwich bites, I conceive
a way to scale the spackled walls and sit there, maybe for weeks,
lank and quiet, sure of everyone dotted and moving below—

Their heat is certain and rising, their arms linked
in a lattice as they call me down. And there
I would fall, finally.


~ .

St. Patrick's Cathedral at Night
Mary Tautin


My mother and I separate at tiered votives,
bellyfuls of orange and red that refract
the crucifix at its angles.

There is no priest; the statues stare.

Tourists nudge our confessional spaces,
smug with the knowledge that art
and redemption are not the same thing.

And above,
anchored to ceiling archways
four hundred arm-lengths overhead,
there are red spheres of stone,
the size of bowling balls and red, the color
of a final day's menstrual blood
slung in careful cuts of vine,
properly geometric but conceived

high above ritual drone, suspended
more loosely
than the meniscus of wine
wobbled to our lips.

Drop down on us, my closed eyes will it.
Cover our heads and this floor and the tiny candle stomachs—
shock us in the grotesqueness of being human,
the humiliations, common gaffes, dirt and stench.

But whoever carved the form
also created the restraint.

My mother genuflects and joins me in the pew,
plops down the kneeler, lowers her head. My neck is sore,
and I lower mine, too.


~ . ~

Quitting You
Lisa Titus


You are slowly being erased
from the back of my eyelids
and sucked from the pit of my stomach.
I hoped to never see you again
but you stick to my skin
like the goosebumps
I get from hearing your name.

And here you are,
a little hazy from past drinking bouts
but looming in front of me
clear as the vodka I once spilled
on my shaking hands
as I poured my life into a glass.
Those drinks were my only sip of sanity
though I am not the person I was when I could touch
you—
I am sober.
You will never be sober in the memories
I have picked out of the trash
to consider once again.

And if only you could be as unreal
as you were then,
in my drunken dreams,
I could tell you how real I am now.


~ . ~

Vessels
Byron Weiss


A flashlight face down in my palm
reminds me I'm made of blood.

Not of it sloshing through pipes, churning
the flumes of aorta or pitching over

jugular's arch, but entirely diffused
within the body. How else to explain

the red that flares around the knuckles,
blazing between the fingers, as if the hand

were just a sack swelling out like a latex glove?
Yet, there behind the fingers, above their tendons

is a branching vein, blackened against the light.
I've read if we seamed them all end to end,

one body's capillaries, veins and arteries,
it'd run 60,000 miles—long string of red

spooled into the palm of my hand.


~ . ~

6 Girls
Hanne Winarsky


The six girls sitting around white linen
a wine glass, a wine glass,
a gin and tonic heavy on the lime a martini
a vodka please straight up
a simple whisky neat.
Across a mirror, the last of them
wears glasses and drinks the free champagne,
who watching and smiling while,
thinking of the girl across from her, with
whom there is a startling sameness,
they talk. Although it wouldn't
leave much of a mark, the girls right now
believe in a softening swim towards
the next day; will mean something tomorrow.
Legs and chairs, stockings,
fine arched wood,
a fine-boned handshake. These
symptoms and more. Adding.


~ . ~

Who Needs Geometry?
Melissa Woertendyke


Teach me how to fly-fish,
no words or connotations.
Stand me in a stream and
show me how to snap that
hook down with precision.

The Beaverkill, in wading
boots, standing still.
Waiting, boots in the silt.
At the shore, a slurping
sound around our feet.

It's always been a wish
of mine to hear the ratchet
of my reel, to whip the tip,
synapse-mosquito, or moth,
wrapped thorax, tied wings.

In the spring, chimes of water,
then a pool, removed
from the usual flow—
shy, patient, full
of ancient trout.


~ . ~ . ~

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