Jan '04 [Home]

Poetry Feature

Guest Editor's Preface
by Martin Mitchell

. . .
A
Urban Incident ~ Kurt Brown
Homily ~ Graham Duncan
Everything in Quotations ~ Mervyn Taylor
As Is
~ But Instead ~ Michael T. Young
Black and White ~ Rachel Hadas
Like a Mantle, the Sea ~ Gardner McFall
Parachute ~ Robert Wrigley
Resolutions for a More Meaningful Existence ~ Clifford Browder
Goodbye ~ Stephen Stepanchev
First Books ~ Andrea Hollander Budy
Up Late at a Dark Window ~ Peg Peoples
The Ghost Takes a Look at Himself
~ What We Have ~ Philip Miller
Desert Island Disc ~ Lorna Knowles Blake

Images:  Meredith Miller


B
Fountain of Blood ~ Patrick Donnelly
Rosary ~ Margaret Ryan
Shelter ~ Suzanne Parker
Elementary Physics ~ Deena Linett
Landscape in October ~ Bertha Rogers
Florence, Morning to Night
~ Stormbirds ~ Eamon Grennan
Historic Towne Centre ~ M. A. Schaffner
Zenology ~ Dick Allen
Salvavida ~ Rachel Dacus
Arthritis
~ Evergreen Boughs ~ Charlie Smith
Van Winkle Awakens to a New Style of Jazz ~ Richard Frost
The Load ~ Maria Terrone
Tether
~ Wooden Tulips ~ Alison Woods
Side Show
~ Grenadian Gothic ~ Gabrielle LeMay

Contributor Notes

~ . ~


Urban Incident
Kurt Brown


Two street jays, thick feathered
thieves, dive into our yard
to attack the old ailanthus,
flying at it boldly, now here now
there, crying out in savage voices.
Withered, defenseless, half its limbs
already dead, the tree makes
a perfect victim, branches
splayed against a wall of air.
They go about it like professionals,
picking the tree's pockets of bugs
and delicious flakes, rubble,
seeds, anything concealed
in the cracks and convolutions of its bark,
hapless grubs and slow beetles,
discs of manna small as coins.
I watch from my window, not daring
to move, witness their squabbles,
the way in which they strip
the tree with little loss of time.
Having frisked it from root to crest,
they shift away over the roofs,
still squabbling, screeching to themselves
of their tremendous audacity
and luck.


~ . ~


Homily
Graham Duncan


You say you know the sun
will rise tomorrow?
I think you mean expect,
believe, surmise, or hope,
just as you're confident
you will see it happen —
eyes in working order,
lids still able to part,
optic nerve still sending
its coded messages,
brain's receiving nexus
open for business,
the engine under it
purring ably away.

And just as surely you
yourself expect to be
among the expectant
living at the first call
to rise — still there, caring,
ready to watch night's deep
shadows shrink and lighten,
ready again to think
you know what can't be known:
guessed at, yes, surmised
or hoped for, but each twitch,
blink, or flutter of pulse
a reminder you'd better
drink to the bitter lees
whatever's in your cup,
whether it's nearly
drained or running over.


~ . ~


Everything in Quotations
Mervyn Taylor


Everything in quotations means
Someone said it before, standing
In uncertainty as you are now,
Believing the tide was close
To sweeping him out.

And as he blew dust from
Some old page, the words came
From someone in the same predicament,
Calling with such authority
It made the winds imagine we
Could speak their language,

Just as you could call out now
From your sinking center something
You never said before, some pregnancy
With consonants like hot towels,
Ready to take it from you
And give to the next needy person

Who turns, and tells another
His story.


~ . ~


As Is
Michael T. Young


Although, for a moment,
the man peeling an orange
appears to cup a mouse in his hand,
its tail dangling in a coil,
and three pigeons flying in the distance
briefly look like bubbles
glinting arcs of sunlight
as they drift down the avenue,
even before I recognize these things
for what they are,
everything is
as it should be.


~ .


But Instead
Michael T. Young


To wake, to hear rain,
to hear drops break
on screens, on leaves, on streets.
To be thrust from dream
no hint emerging, but instead
to linger by windows,
to smell wet petals,
to recall some moment
so old, so yellowed, so scented
by chlorine and hyacinth
it brings to mind a book,
a passage, a theme,
a point to it all.


~ . ~


Black and White
Rachel Hadas


Peering at the page, I squint at what
even as I get it down in black and white
goes bumptious, boldface.  Can all these be lies
twinkling among the figures as I write?
Call it a self — whatever I would seal
under the surface like a living soul
beats its wings, frantic to get away
from two translucent prisons, one per eye.
One blinks Tell, the other winks Distill.
Reach out, Tell says.  Build a suspension bridge
of narrative experience can cross,
the daily paper tucked beneath its arm
so one hand fingerwalks along the railing.
The listener meets the teller in the middle,
each ending where the other began.

The world sways, the bridge trembles.
Suspense, crosscurrents:  fragile or defiant?
Spontaneous?  Planned?  Cistern?  Overflow?
The dear dead hand that touched this very page?
Caldron of exclusions simmering,
humming heat of all that's in the pot,
the letters looping and the panes steamed up.
Recipes for ellipses, for contractions,
hiatuses that fill the book of days.
Some words bully other words, but all
in their own way subvert the power of silence—
clauses subordinate yet not left out,
pulled from oblivion, rescued on the page.
Bracket, blacken, snowbank, or delete:
the act of writing fights the drift of white.


~ . ~


Like a Mantle, the Sea
Gardner McFall


Between the parentheses of birth and perishing
I am halfway, in a sentence whose meaning escapes,
nature's pattern not indiscernible, but hard
to accept, at least on this morning when I feel
unprepared to greet the other side of what little
time and space I occupy.  Sustaining is the knowledge I have
embraced already what I thought myself unequal to:
a father's disappearance, the birth of a child,
a mother's death.  How can she not be here,
I often think, walking along, dying to telephone,
her number long since disconnected.  How am I
the mother now?  I wear the robes loosely.
I am like one of those figures in the narrow boat
in The Great Wave off Kanag'awa by Hokusai, only
I don't know if they bow in heart-chilling fear as the breaker
curves like a funeral awning over their slender backs
or in mild assent, there between water and water,
skimming the earth, like a mantle, the sea.


~ . ~


Parachute
Robert Wrigley


The word parasol would have seemed an affectation
to my grandmother, whose skin, by the time she died,
could have been wounded by the moon.  She preferred to call it

a "bumpershoot," hearing, I like to think, the same structural rightness
in the dactyl:  that primary force of the handleshaft,
the useful, subsidiary delicacy of ribs and skin

in its quiet negotiations with rain.  In fact,
I never heard her say parasol or umbrella, either one, though once,
still metrically consistent, she let me call hers a parachute

and watched me jump from a man-high stone wall with it
all one hot Midwestern afternoon.  The night she died
in the nursing home, I knelt among the sad commingled scents

of disinfectant and dying, and in the hall light dimness
peered through the bars of her hospital bed
and down the long dark gateway of her left pupil

(the right eye already was closed) and felt myself flying
and falling with her for one moment more, before
her eye closed, and I came to rest again on my knees.


~ . ~


Resolutions for a More Meaningful Existence
Clifford Browder


To brush spring azure's wisp of blue flutter

To ignore dust-prone surfaces and nagging clocks
In quest of high nirvanas

To attain mathematical grace:
My checkbook balanced

Beset with leaky pipes
Mice, warts, roaches
Bird shit on my windowsill
Dandruff and societal malaise,
To smile with sweet reason
And not greet computer glitches
With poundings of the screen and keyboard
Kicks, oaths, shrieks

To be a quiet little worm,
Let silence listen to me

To wallow in fields choked
With mustard and mint
Till summers juicy with caterpillars
Suck my seed

To discern
In thick rock
And my own taut flesh and bone
Vibrant nonsense
Frozen light

Each day, mindful
Of the lengthening fingernails
And black swollen tongues
Of the coffined dead,
To walk in the sweet-grass hills.


~ . ~


Goodbye
Stephen Stepanchev


All farewells are permanent —
Your lover walks out of your universe
When he goes to the bodega on the corner
To buy beer and a chorizo.

You are right to feel abandoned —
Who knows what beast waits
For you on the bottom stair?

I apply a mental tourniquet
So as not to bleed to death
Just thinking of claws.

The landscape holds its breath
As I lurch along
In the kick of light
From death's opening door.



~ . ~


First Books
Andrea Hollander Budy


Splashes of color on the cover,
lettering in wedding invitation script,
the name of the writer infinitesimally small
or so unreadably fancy it's clear
the designer is first-time too,
a novice at computer graphics
volunteering her services, an initiate
auditioning, hawking her wares.

But first-time authors keep
their disappointments
to themselves, preferring to believe
readers will pull them anyway
from bookstore shelves, will order
from Amazon, will forgive
their obviously first-time looks
the way first-time lovers forgive
the fumbling of belts, eyelets, straps,
happy enough to have finally
gotten this far, breathless
at the wonder of the other's
nakedness, sacred places
exposed, clumsy even in their
humbleness.  And afterwards

the relief of having
the first time behind them
for the first time, filled
with forgiveness, and later,
alone, giggling at themselves
in a bathroom mirror, spotting
mascara on a nose, curious
if the other noticed a pair
of pimples on a chin —
then suddenly stricken,
afraid this first time
will be the only time
it will ever happen.



~ . ~


Up Late at a Dark Window
Peg Peoples



Often I have seen him:  monk on his solitary journey —
his raft strung with hemp, the rag
sail of his endurance in my dreams, the long, splintery
bark stripped from the redwoods — an upper
story in the eaves — and the moon
shipwrecked in clouds, its burnt smoky light
barely visible on the sea. No

courtesans for him.  No veiled face
on slippery nights when the rain pours down
in sheets.  Look at his countenance:  I go.
You stay.
From a long way off his single staff and bowed
head, the knapsack peaked on his back,
resemble the profile of a mountain, a waterfall
gushing down a page.

And just when I think, he's gone,
Here, he says, these are the strong roots:  the ashes
of an extinguished fire — what the wind said
to the darkening leaves.
And there's the forest
with its trail narrowing towards the sea, the boat of arrival
once more along the beach…


~ . ~


The Ghost Takes a Look at Himself
Philip Miller



I take a look at myself
As through an inverted mirror,
At my old life in the looking glass
Altered as in a dream.
My face, at this new distance,
With its fresh symmetry
Is the way the world saw it
And the scenes — there's my first birthday
I hadn't the memory to catch.
I'm in my father's arms
As Mother peers down at me
Neither one of us smiling;
And here I am embracing
My first wife
A big smile on my face
My eyes closed
Though now I can see
Her looking out the window
Wistfully,
Then stifling a yawn.
And here she is with my old friend —
I'm sleeping off the gin.
In this scene
They're only holding hands,
I even watch the time of my own death
But I just go to sleep;
No trumpets, no spirit flies
Out of my mouth, and the mourners look
Relieved, and so do I
Though not one of us conceives
Of what comes after,
And it's not heaven
All this looking back,
finding the answers to old questions
I wish I'd never asked.


~ .


What We Have
Philip Miller


So we end up where we always were.
Our home away from home is home,
and what we want and have concur.

When we have an itch to roam
we take along a little window:
our home away from home is home.

Part of both of us stays when we go.
We watch a river as it runs along
through a little window

of the mind.  Words of an old song
keep repeating in the head.
We watch a river as it runs along.

It's what we have instead
of immortality:  moments captured,
that keep repeating in the head,

almost immortality:  moments captured—
the way you turn to me and stare,
and what we want and have concur,
and we end up where we always were.



~ . ~


Desert Island Disc
Lorna Knowles Blake

          Kind of Blue. It's my desert island disc.
                                   (overheard in a bar)


Could anything be lonelier than this?
Scenario:  You're on a desert island,
surrounded by blue:  ocean, air and mist.
Could anything be lonelier than this
scenario?  You wonder if you're even missed
by anyone, or if you could have planned
a situation lonelier than this
scenario.  You're on a desert island,

but not alone beneath brushed satin skies;
though you may be all blue, or kind of blue.
You have your music, and it never lies
or leaves you lonely.  Under satin skies
a trumpet plays from sunset to sunrise—
the air itself turns Blue in Green in blue.
You'd never be alone beneath those skies
though you might be All Blue or Kind of Blue.

~ . ~

[B]