Poetry Feature:
The Dark (July)
Edward Hopper
Summer Evening (1947, detail)
Oil on canvas, 30 x 42 inches
Collection of Mr./Mrs. Gilbert H. Kinney
Across the River, In the Dark
Gordon Annand
Disappearances
Madeline Artenberg
Where Late the Sweet
Dave Brinks
The Breakdown
Jay Chollick
Is Edward Hopper Here?
Paul Espel
Midnight Freight
Allen C. Fischer
On the Inside
Tiffany Fung
The Sun Was a Trumpet Then
Daniela Gioseffi
Study in Black
George Held
Lame
Maureen Holm
In the Dark
Nicholas Johnson
A Steeple of Light
Richard Levine
Elegy for a Bird House
Diana Manister
Seizures
Catherine McArthur
The Dark Is What We Wait For
Phil Miller
The Warning
Tim Scannell
Wherever it is We Are
Tim Scannell
bodega
George Wallace
Bijou
Francine Witte
These are Pictures
Rob Wright
The Idea of Snow in Japan
Rob Wright
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
Across the River, In the Dark
Gordon Annand
You will find yourself walking at night
down the burnt brick Water Street
to sit on the rough greenish wood
of the floating dock at the base of Market Street
to your left will be
the double towers of the sectional drawbridge
staining the night river orange
and the trucks trucking across
into the marshy south
Beyond that band-length of light and sound
the cargo ships too massive
to push further into the land
will set high their lights
and appear to be floating cities
You will think
everything is moving away
beyond that bridge
even the moon
even the stars
at the speed of light
But the Battleship U.S.S. North Carolina
is stuck in the sucking muck
sinking deeper with its weight each year
a fallen Cypress
its branches of flagpoles and towers
waiting for the Spanish moss
And you will sing low
to yourself
and the dock
and the bridge
and the battleship
I had nothing to live for
Listen.
Someone is whistling
in the dark
across the river
(Prior publ.: Annand, G., You Write Your Life Like Fiction (Pathwise Press 2001))
Disappearances
Madeline Artenberg
Cowboy man in navy, striped suit
eyeglasses and pointy-toed boots
offers me a ride,
then whips my head around,
hammers my mouth into his lap...
I float out of body above the white Chevy
watch him slide the knife across my throat.
After he's done, I'm pulled back to myself,
dumped onto the roadside;
red neck above his suit collar
fades from view as the car plunges ahead.
I swivel on a stage to "Lady Marmalade,"
see only the pole my red heels clank against,
flashes of sheer black bikini underwear.
I can't make out the audience below.
I hear their breaths hasten
the rough moving of palms beneath table tops.
I miss the last step off the platform;
they clap anyway;
I forget my name.
You kiss me I close my eyes.
Your head rotates faster, faster.
Blue light spirals from your face
its lines crease like tributaries.
I open my eyes:
you can't read my mind,
you can't read my mind.
Where Late the Sweet
Dave Brinks
the juice knife has its cut arm
and the eventual sex of its death
so how we too have loved
slaved on this tendency
toward forever
from both ends I practice
looking out through the top
of my head
the aperture of a felt hat
makes pictures of my moods
hair hung black to the floor
unfolds into roads
swollen or sad
with the amnesia of being
I picnic my hammock of heaven
in the garden sun
praising avocados & chickens
I am too tired for sleep
and the wet funerals
that rake mud over our heads
and soup our bones into a cold roux
I am more blue than violet
a little weather that traces the bodies
of water I would sail over
if I tripped from new orleans
to the atlantic ocean
brief hands form the mouth & face
and drag the moon
by its feet
beyond any miracle of lies
when all the lights go out in cities
this funeral is from the eyes down
The Breakdown
Jay Chollick
"Your lungs seem fine--
but hard to breathe?"
the doctor asked, perplexed,
and pushed his chair
and glasses back.
I, facing him, was silent.
"Your heart sounds good
and all the tests are negative.
What bothers you?"
I knew but couldn't say,
at least to him.
Half-hoping that by taking tests
there'd be some sign--
not one to point my fate
into fatality--
but written on a form
some minor malady appear
to disappear with pills,
some back-up tests
and end up OK-rosy.
But deeper than his written notes,
behind my eyes
my coward mind's unsettled
and despondent.
And there's my ache, my malady
and there's my sadness in a lump of tears
that can't dissolve and flow to
sweet amnesia.
The world is sitting on my chest
and I can barely breathe at times
dear Doctor Fool
I feel I'm choking--
on savageness, hypocrisy,
the bleeding times
malignant and duplicitous,
the sewer-side of man,
his bestiality
goes on and on,--a livid dream--
the slimy pack
of demagogues who profit
from divisiveness--
they will prevail, and we of course
will not,
will never never not,
will not prevail the brutish world,
the absolute uncivil,
the swollen tongue
self-rant of leaders,
the omnipresent face and voice
of goading,
of things to buy and what to see
and where to go and how to look
and feel and what to say
and who's safe to say it to
I cannot live, my heart's wrung out
I'm breaking and in pieces--please--
blind the eyeball, end its seeing--
burst the eardrum, end its hearing--
rip the tongue out, end its speaking--
break my fingers, end all writing.
Is Edward Hopper Here?
Paul Espel
I'm thinking about that Edward Hopper painting,
the one with the deep woods at the edge of a
neatly pressed small town. That dark wildness
pushing right up to the windowpanes,
almost breaking in.
Maybe the woods are like him. And the town
is him too. Variations on a theme.
Different versions of Ed.
I went to his house in Nyack. He wasn't home.
They said he hadn't lived there in years.
Moved to those woods maybe--a wild place where
he could stare into something green and permanent
when he didn't feel like mixing paint.
I picture him as still around, somewhere in the woods,
having a beer after a good day's work. Blending in,
part of the landscape, part of the town.
Midnight Freight
Allen C. Fischer
Half asleep, he heard
the distant train whistle probe
his mind like a spelunker.
Usually, it fathomed nothing and faded
but that night, the whistle
called out like a sad cadenza
and suddenly he began to dream
he was running for his life.
Or was it his father he saw plunging,
voice trailing, off the horizon?
Like an intercepted radio signal,
the whistle transmitted events,
then bore them away. What never happened
appeared with the intimacy of love;
what happened betrayed a warp of memory,
surreal freight so strung out and strange,
its story line sent him spinning and falling,
while the whistle hovered like a night nurse,
her feather duster flicking away death,
yet stirring up all the fears bearing him,
trumpeting last rites.
On the Inside
Tiffany Fung
Some of you are happy, some busy,
Some of you are happy, some overwhelmed;
We are not afraid of what you are
But have witnessed clay on the wings,
The assaults of a few daylit hours
One for each still-working sense.
Between the body and the light
Squeezes the self, the hesitant clam foot
Slowly emerging to slag its buried
And crooked shell to the shore,
Dense with the dead lines of seaweed,
Bulbous in stranded error.
Tonight even the tide is cramped
Too interested in the tremendous
To notice the telltale bubbles.
Our footsteps are trailed,
Our consciences quartered,
Rock fracturing to more rock.
Thus split, we scurry uncovered,
The sun staining our shoulders;
We leave behind our coins,
All confirmations and corollaries;
We owe only the dust,
Clay left in a ridge of mouth.
It is dark here in this corner,
Darker than in yours;
We think we know we doubt we see.
These images go unglossed:
Horses, lemons, dulcimer,
Even the imperative, 'Let'.
Don't look for us up there;
We are suited only
To suck on a grain of sand.
The Sun Was a Trumpet Then
Daniela Gioseffi
Mornings were treaties like mysteries--
the sea, a hand on the library!
Cold, restless, I touched you with peaches;
then we left our footprints in smoke.
Wet night, rubbery raincoats of ice!
We were rivers, opinions,
silver ink, paint on the nickels,
your eyes grew alarm clocks.
We retreated in fires like candles.
Our toes were as tired as rock.
Rum was the rain like a symphony.
The heels of our shoes were chalk
Nursery rimes, children and history,
the bed smiles gently, frivolous cock!
Lullabies can be sinister.
I loved you. White boots in the mud
Beds, pencils, and mystery!
Now, a dog's chain rattles the city.
Study in Black
George Held
I
Vine-choked trees drop
withered leaves into the black pit
of incest.
II
The long corridor calls--
crawl to the black at the end
of the tunnel.
III
The bell jar descends--
the black vacuum
nature abhors.
IV
Deep psychic wounds
seep black blood--
corpse blanches, blackens.
V
Beetles kiss corrupt skin--
the black pit after the last swing
of the pendulum.
Lame
Maureen Holm
Why does the bay colt limp?
Three nights beside the tapers,
lavender and mint,
melted in the glow and trickle
of stymied understanding.
Your hands are so beautiful.
Spoken slowly,
his tiger eye in profile
polished calm with golden grit desire.
Three mornings fingertips palpitate
barefoot hoof and cannon bone,
too fragile to resist the ache,
the handicaps that Nature gives
to things so fleet.
Don't leave me.
Stubble-nuzzled cheek and shoulder blade,
abraded arms and flanks.
Linen chin to barbicel jaw, I swell
and suck out his mollusk tongue.
Fracture or bruise?
Smooth down the fevered leg,
moist and foundering on the grass,
to discover the subtle hurt.
But who ever knows how to treat it anyway
before it's too far gone?
Tell me your fears.
That I will drown in the ocean.
That he will weep only that once
over Rilke and gigot.
Whether three days or months,
I could account no better
for wanting this man so
who gambols through the meadow of my body,
than for images of injured yearlings
that limp across my mind.
In the Dark
Nicholas Johnson
I'd be the last to point the finger if
I were you. You don't feel like
a lover. More like a wasp
circling a bowl of ripe pears, full
of stinging assertions and needing
to do something with all that mud.
What's done is best left undone.
Let's leave it that way. What
a picture--wheelchairs, braces
of pronomial spite, handfuls
of resurrected dust and all those people
howling and beating their eggbeaters.
When I said I love you, there was a tic-
tac of tears. Your eyes or my eyes
spun through the revolving doors
on the way in or out, confusing the already
confused invalids pinwheeling
their way down the Avenue. Then you held up
the x-ray of the kiss to the light
for examination: Shadows and bone
scuttering together their lattice
of teeth with the promised land smudged
in the background. Who wouldn't
feel immortal, booted and zipped up
in their Darwin jeans, ready to survive
even the conservationists who insist
on turning out all unnecessary lights?
I didn't need a light then.
I used to believe I could see in the dark.
Now I think there's not enough dark
to go around. I open the windows
at night even though it's winter
just to let more dark in.
The dark is welcome and swarming with starlings.
The starlings are like you when I kiss you:
All useless lights extinguished
and all crippled wings atwitter.
(Prior publ.: Epoch; Mind the Gap)
A Steeple of Light
Richard Levine
In every forest there is a place
where it is dusk all day, and light
rakes and furrows the dusty air.
Does the plowman who sows this field
give reverence this tendrilled shape,
and the snap of a twig the speed
to outrace a startled snake?
To know the answer, I stand just
as still, as a sign that so little matters,
because so little matters.
Mere miracles emerge from this
physics: I exhale, trees grow
giddy, a canopy wind sighs, my blood
blushes. I am wood, green.
With every unmowed angel
in this steeple of light, I stand
cathedral-steep in silence.
(Prior publ. Rattapallax #1)
Elegy for a Bird House
Diana Manister
I loved a man
who built a bird house on Staten Island,
a radiance that now has disappeared.
The hands of the man were a worker's hands,
containing in their muscles and nerves
memories of wires twisted,
boards sanded,
pipes turned
and motors taken apart.
O house-maker, seed-giver,
builder of bright particular things,
did the shadow fall here as well
on Staten Island?
Did our day end like an old man dying
in a rented room?
And will the bird house go under the sea,
and the man go under the hill?
Will the heart break and the heart fail
and the house go under the sea?
And will the light that was given be taken again,
and the heart go under the hill?
What do we do when there is no consolation?
In darkness, how are we to see?
My father too was a maker,
builder of bird houses, doll houses,
transmission-fixer,
valve-adjuster,
a radiance that now has disappeared.
What can we do when there is no consolation?
When the sun falls into the landscape,
how are we to see?
All the madness and innocence of my love
could not save him;
wrenches lie on his bench;
nails of different sizes
are organized in bottles in a row.
All the madness and innocence of my love
count for nothing.
When the shadow falls,
the father will go under the hill
and the man who is like the father will be taken in darkness,
and the light that was given will be taken again,
and the house, and the madness, and the love,
and bright particular things,
will all go under the sea.
(Finalist: Lyric Recovery Festival™ at Carnegie Hall, 2000. Prior
publ.: Water to Wine to Waterford® (Headwaters Press, 2000))
Seizures
Catherine McArthur
Father, your face moves without you --
puppet-grimace I don't recognize.
You disappear on a dark street.
You've lost something: a hat, a key.
I look for you. Glass pane
between us: cold breath
on a storm window. Living room
lamp off while you're out
running through passageways,
blocks of night. I'm keeping
a place for you. Bring what you own:
photos, thesaurus, map;
take what you can carry.
When you open the door
we'll know what you've lost.
The Dark Is What We Wait For
Phil Miller
Bone-gray sky,
settling/unsettling breeze,
the landscape rearranged,
whittled light and shadowing.
Then morning seems a dream,
its medium flashing in the mind
a strip of brilliant Kodachrome,
catching us as we run toward
some plan, as we enter,
merge, rejoin, clicking
like a pair of dice,
rolling.
But the dark, the negative,
the near, day captured
in reverse, this we come home to;
the hour that fits
where we get back what's ours:
lamplight, moonspill, silverings.
Light sinks, cools, covers,
and like lovers we readjust
our eyes, begin to praise
what we've waited for all day.
The dark is what we have.
The Warning
Tim Scannell
In the uncertain light
Of dawn and dusk,
A poem is purple or is orange.
The body quietly yawns and shakes
And mind, exhausted, will yearn and wait:
Day opens and shuts on vague fantasy.
There is mind time and body time
Reversed with the gods now dead
(No bowing and scraping in delusive dust
To propitiate Dread). Dawn’s
Digital sun, digital seed, digital
Harvest and flood will be all right;
And night fails to raise spirit or specter
(We embody what once encompassed us)...
Spear and ropy thigh gather dust
Below hordes whose body language
Bushwhack for hegemony (dream-dream).
Plugged in, the body electric
No longer feints a phalanx of grim muscle
At Scamander’s ford – or any battlement.
Violet dawn wakes the body,
Amber evening wakes the mind:
Tasks of knowledge and allusion
Hazard authenticity.
Wherever it is We Are
Tim Scannell
We left, against anonymity, a car on the moon,
A tin flag furled to flutter forever
(Clever phrase to limn the collective soul).
More, perhaps, than Ahab – to inspire,
Whose tumult left nothing tangible:
Red flag to drag a sky-hawk down,
A weary voice pushed and pulled apart
(White whale swallowing more than Art).
More, perhaps, than Ahab – to conspire,
Whose soul shadows ours with its fire:
My own eclipsed, your own eclipsed by
Worming questions for which he gave both
Answer and a life; which we, here, will not give
(Will not – paunchy Hamlets – dare to try).
On those nights, then, with him,
We long to leave a sign of grief
For anonymity: more than a car,
More than a chip-shot
Between a shudderingly impossible star
(And whatever else it is we are).
bodega
George Wallace
village of slow
motioning women
metronome of the valley
more fly ridden than i remember it
but empty this morning
i have entered the black bodega of your heart
in search of a tin of oatmeal
dark cavern with no sun in it
proud dominion
of field mice and scorpions
this place of musty boxes
cans and green bottles of beer
a small man running here and there
with nothing in his hands
but rain shattered time
no conversation to offer
three times now he has stopped
at the suspicious shelf
pretending not to examine me
i walk along the aisle in half light
touching this and that
picking up nothing
fixing my damp collar
eyes locked straight
in the narrow length of a place
in which i will buy nothing
and which i will leave empty handed
while the man who remains in it
stands still watching me
through the cluttered window
from the inside
under a ceiling fan
rolling the black snake air in on itself
Bijou
Francine Witte
In the cooled hush of the movie theaters,
the films hum, spinning clockwise,
the only true direction.
The films are never run backwards
by mistake
like when we were
children and there was just
a man, a solitary man
in the booth.
We don't see the muscles
jerk in reverse across
the screen or hear
the chipmunk chatter
of Saturday afternoons.
The projectionist threads us
forward and we are grown,
still waiting for the sweeping gowns
and the close-ups that show us
the murder weapon --
just another cruel trick
that is one day exposed
because we are just too old.
Being adult is the slow
spinning out of what you
can't do anymore
Or maybe it's the realization
that forward is the only door that will open
and turning back would be
like searching the wall for a secret panel
and hoping to be breathed back in,
which is why we cringe
when some runaway train
hurtles too quickly
across the screen,
moving towards the final credits
unstoppable as seconds sliced away
and steady as the slap
of stray film left turning
at the end of a reel.
These are Pictures
Rob Wright
They stand in rows, pressed against the fence, twisting
their fingers through crossed wire. On their faces
are shadows which don't shift as the faces shift
but remain fixed, as if the sun had stopped in one degree of arc,
as if too many things had gone wrong
and the old poxied earth had given up
and closed her eyes in half-shadow. These are pictures.
I'm seventeen and sitting in a classroom of Quaker plainness.
The Shadows wear cloth of such a thinness
that as the wind blows, the architecture of bone
(because that's all that's left) shows.
The fleshy parts have been given
to keep the Shadows ahead of a beating or the cold.
Exoskeletons shivering on a parade ground of slush.
Feet wrapped in rags or nothing.
If I put my hand up, a miniature death camp appears on my palm.
I'm seventeen and sitting in a classroom of Quaker plainness.
The projector's light looks animate, zapping dust.
Light beams divide, unite. In the row behind me, a girl weeps.
On screen, a bulldozer pushes tumbling dead ditchward.
Fat men and women watch at rifle point. Ash or snow
settles on their Homburgs, shoulders.
In the row ahead, two heads dip together, exchange laughter.
Good, I think, you'll survive this century. Someone has to.
I'm seventeen and sitting in a classroom of Quaker plainness.
A soldier passes a bowl to one of the Shadows.
It quivers as it chews. The soldier looks through the dancing light,
the dust, the scratches from which he's made. Our eyes meet.
He's embarrassed. "Marched all over. Lice. Snow. Europe
spreading her legs to any lunatic. But this beats all."
I notice the unmoving shadow on his face
the one I'll notice later on my own.
I'm seventeen and sitting in a classroom of Quaker plainness.
The Idea of Snow in Japan
Rob Wright
At once strange and perfect, snow drifts
on iron ships and temple thatch
as if an army of ghosts had sifted it
all night, clean, exact.
Rime crusts on powerlines
the weight bends, cracks
like pistol shots, echoing
across roof tops
pleasure gardens, scaffold thickets.
A traveler puts his clogs
into the tracks of someone, who
may have walked
the same route
a thousand years before.
Like every day, apes wait at the zoo
for the ring of keys, unlocking doors,
pushing their noses through the cages.
Nostrils flare, breath condenses
on iron bars, mixes, fades.
Rail points close under snow,
as through the night, empty trains
roll. Wipers move, stroke by stroke.
Stations flicker by in flashes.
Robotic signals switch: green - yellow
- red. Doors open. A lone traveler
boards. While on the platform
he'd seen the tracks of foxes,
but realizes, it was only snowmelt
from the roof. "Miracles," he says, aloud
to no one, like a child, above the motors,
the galvanic hum. No one. No one. No one.
| ~~~ |