T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Issue # 23 Winter 2011
Virgens de Guadalupe by Lynda Schor
Hamilton Stone Review #23
Poetry
Roger Mitchell, Poetry Editor
Witness Tree
I walk a shaky cyprus bridge and feel cool
night air, moonlight near the casino
with fretless guitar glowing orange
over the river in national jive.
You can see white specks and float
for seconds. Where men have been hanged
cottonwoods touch themselves in moonlight.
shuck down, dive in. What is it to witness,
to walk into a voice self-assured
lost in a cloud of gnats, to go
where music goes, speak shame.
Someone or -thing is motioning. Come on in.
No, not this time.
I've sat in a place where people nod
after hearing sentiment so true
it's too true. You have too.
Just follow the sight and sound
as summer chill rises from the swamp.
To find the witness tree, walk a half mile north
from the highway. Surveyors
spiked a beginning where fighting cocks
adjust their spurs. Deer go nuts
and herd in hundreds. Mhoon Lake
sends a semi-quaver up past slots.
Come back. It starts at ankle level.
Something calls and calls
No thanks, sweetie, not this time.
Taking off, Landing
Walk into the hospital, take the long hall
past crayon drawings by school kids,
ask someone where it is, the room
with the mother, her mouth open,
her eyes half shut, her dry wind seeping,
her life leaving as she sleeps. Pray
she sleeps -- if she leaves her body,
her tuft of white hair.
Ecclesiastes says for everything a season.
A time to lift one foot then another,
a time to sit in an airplane and note
the clouds streaming underfoot,
red ants in transport, planet agleam,
commerce. . . and now it's reappearing.
All the young stricken marriages fall down,
get back up, stay with aunts
and uncles, listen to fights on the radio,
walk the red brick streets,
hear on yellow days the voice
of Nat King Cole, so silky
like a raiment of the air. Do I believe?
Yes I do. Do I doubt? Yes oh yes.
The people look out of the plane.
Their faces like little zeros.
They float over Pontchartrain, they smooth
their hands imaginatively over alligators,
who yawn for hours simply because
they forgot what they were doing.
Would you like a Dr. Pepper? Some
pretzels or peanuts? Because this
will be a long trip. Those lands and waters
tipping under the wing just that.
That bank building you left sticking up
like a tulip in downtown night
keeps changing colors, and the big clock
leaking a point of view ticks money.
When you move through space in a room
with so many lives the sun and moon
advance on the chromium content, a storm
dissolves in the west, an angel reaches
toward you but nobody sees – they see
their own significant setting, they see
what everybody sees, a willingness
to land, a ready disbelief stumbling forward.
Biopsy
Sometimes beauty comes with bad news—
voices floating far downhill, laughter
the size of a walnut, malignant growth half a pinkie wide,
that hypnagogic state aware of its blood.
A community sweeps through a life. So
listen to other people, measure chill
by its assertion, its metastasis in the trees.
Time to grow up, you say to yourself,
over sixty now, over some of the silliness
which fueled ever after. One
way to recover walking stick art from sand
is to include tide and moon, starfish
at equinox, when earth interferes, refracts, when one
undergoes procedure which leads to knowledge but not yet.
Seeing It
Not seeing it that differently since Dr. Marcus gave me my short-life
sentence (metastases) last month, although going to a Christmas
concert (Jew or not, what's the difference) at the Methodist church
downtown, all the office buildings and restaurants (like ZOOP) (soup
with lots of garlicish, exotic cheeses zest), past the state capitol
building, all sorts of memories begin to surface from my deepsea
memory depths, similar streets in Brooklyn, L.A., Berkeley, Philadelphia,
Chicago, Buenos Aires, all my restaurant and zesty babe dates, all
the blossoming Debussy and Schuman pianos and tubas, if only I
could call my never-get-along-with Mom or made-out-of marble
Dad, the old babe-friends, too-long-dead pals like Bukowski
and Jorge Luis Borges, Neruda, memories almost becoming
incarnate, in-stone, in-brick, want there to be an infinity of forewards
that never
end,
end,
end.
Humming
Our father taught us
music too—
Saturday evenings,
the tubes grew hot
as the turn-table
ran across a needle.
Steady low strings
held the cut of high
strings, in the air
around the room.
We listened;
the hiss and hum
of Copland's
Spring, resonated
the speaker gauze.
We lay with him
on the carpet;
one of our hands
in each of his,
while notes pulled
new meanings
of what it meant
to be a hard-working
man, overcome
with such sound.
In free fall, the gang at Deutsche Bank threw him a wedding
to end all weddings. One microcosm after another
dedicated itself to abstract thought, gave up
"voluntarily" (according to reliable reports) its benefits,
its annual bonuses, its blackjack winnings.
Mukarribs on horseback swept through, leaving
predominantly Jewish sections of Brooklyn in a state
of disarray: portraits of Warren Buffett dashed
to the floor, babies skewered like
lamb kebabs. Plausible theories spring up all along
the perimeter of our municipality, bursting
the dam of our estrangements.
On Getting Home Early for a Change
Walking music to my ears, half-discovered anchovies
speak well of pizza, pal. Bring me tablet of water,
I sequestered. This is likely to be an illusion, as I often
said, hypothetical statements, always the first to go.
Failing to glide, the airplane plummets. Delicious
ending in contentment at the edge of far-flung fields.
Some friends stop by, but just to say hello, and,
having said hello, are on their way.
On Not Getting to Second Base
I met a traveler from the old country who said, "Two men down in the bottom of the ninth and no one left in the bullpen. A broken-bat single and we were alive again, ready to do some damage even though the baseline seats were nearly deserted. On the mound near the rosin bag, a pitcher's foot, half off the rubber, twists and paws the dirt. Over the shoulder, a wrinkled lip and cold mocking glance toward first. He stamped the rubber, shook the sand from his cleats, and nodded to the catcher after shaking off three signals. A passionate glare from the one who squatted behind the plate, and the wind-up began. Another glance at first. Beyond the pitcher's mound, beyond second base, beyond centerfield, the batter could see the statue and the words that appear at the base of the statue, below the pointing hand that mocked us: 'My name is George Herman Ruth, Sultan of Swat! Look at my work and despair.' Nothing left now of our season. Around the decomposing year, only that sinking feeling of one final failure: the crack of the bat in my hands, and the run, the tear around first and the final out, trying to stretch a single into a double. The long, slow walk to the clubhouse."
The Red House, Indiana
Aunt Gladys leads me to the house at the far end of the property, next to the radish garden. Bright red bricks of the tall two story house, the corn and soy beans bend in the rapid summer storms threatening to tantrum. Did I mention the air as thick as flannel sheets; the humidity like oxygen perspiring between teeth? Aunt Gladys educates me on why the window sills are as low as my knees. The narrow doorways—4 leading to the kitchen alone—remind me of an awkward teen I once met who didn't care if he survived the apocalypse. Later, I will be shown a pile of wood hiding in the grass which used to be a shack they lived in 60 years ago. When grandma's not around, I will be told of a shot gun barrel placed into a husband's mouth, the trigger pulled in front of his wife. In the morning, Gladys shows me how the horses bow their necks to her, lift hooves off the ground for her. I am introduced to 'Barn Cat,' the cat that lives in the barn. Were you aware Grandmothers squirm when their sisters tell their granddaughter stories about them that involve shotguns and snakes? In the kitchen, I am accused of being a vegetarian. Did you know, lettuce screams when you poor bacon grease over it? At night, I am handed a ledger her father brought home from work one day; I could tell one of the sisters—her cursive precise, tense, embossed—wrote songs to get her way, crooning about who she wanted to marry. I am told about the half naked girl running through their property in the middle of the night to escape boys in a blue pick-up. I notice the gun with a long barrel leaning on the bathroom doorway. After lunch, I'm given some white lightning from a mason jar in a locked cabinet. After a week, I begin to liken the house to an air conditioned coffin. I look forward to the bugs that light up at night, a temporary immolation. In the back of the red house, I find a room with floorboards missing. Aunt Gladys pulls open a small, square door on the side of the wall, revealing a crawl space that emits the smell of mold. It leads to a tunnel that opens to the road, she says.
The Born Again
My uncle calls to tell me God kills people because he hates them. Ever since he died for 2 minutes after his motorcycle accident, his God's become a vengeful God, a sniper with the best firing position in the universe. His God's out there right now getting revenge: unlocking doors, sneaking through living rooms, gliding knives over throats. My uncle's pissed God hit him with a mail truck and then kicked him out of eternity a couple minutes later, like target practice, leaving him breathless and bloody, with someone shining a light in his face, asking do you know where you are, Mr. Nelson, do you know what happened? and he did.
My Father's Wife
Now that I'm done putting her shoes on the proper feet, it's time to get her shirt on. Her left arm gets stuck, her eyes close, she whimpers. "It's ok," I say, guiding her wrist to the sleeve. I gave up on directive cues days ago; it's not like up means down; down is just the right shoe on the left foot; up is all dressed and time for CNN. Manerva is living proof that if you drink yourself to dementia and then want something done, I will have to do it for you for the rest of your life. On my way to the kitchen to do her laundry, the TV tells us a hurricane is blowing Texas into Ohio. I'm so glad I live in California. Why don't people evacuate when they have the chance? "I love you," Manerva says.
Taps, 5pm Sharp, Monterey Presidio
Everyday, 5pm sharp: Taps: a whisper creeping
up apartment windows, ocean front properties,
a thick mist curling like a question mark.
In case we forget, the military reminds us
it was here first: our land's worth in beauty
is only second to its strategic placement.
We live not on a bay with prehistoric pines
jutting from mountains, but a hill on which
to mount gun turrets.
Everyday at sundown, soldiers are saluting
like a psychic is predicting, only with less doubt
that somewhere a bullet took up residence
in a skull, a heart; shrapnel drilled a jugular.
Everyday at sundown, I know a soldier's
caught outside the mess hall, stuck saluting.
I'm not so sure what they think us civilians
are doing: setting our watches, I suppose.
I Study the Sky
how it changes,
a cloud, bursting, its colors,
fierce at first, fast disappearing.
Another brushes in, this whisper I can hear
forming and reforming,
silken mesh dissolving,
unraveled, rewoven.
My self is kin to this cloth,
these shades of pink, purple,
lavender, gray.
Then night sinks over
my cigarette's ember.
Its ash glows red in the wind.
Suppose Death Came,
a visitor through check point.
They'd strip search him,
ask his name, not recognize
the curl of his lip,
the waxy skull with no hair,
not know who he was—
his papers were good—
come for a look around,
a chance to greet
the weakest among us.
We welcomed him
as best we could,
someone with news,
someone from outside—
journalist, doctor, lawyer.
Later we learned
he was all of these and more,
face a kaleidoscope,
mouth a slit, a curl, an "O,"
full of lies we'd already come to know—
they came with the food,
the beds, the clothes.
These poems are from a chapbook titled This Whisper that is composed of selections from the journals of an imagined inmate being held without charge at Guantanamo Bay.
Landscape with Mower and Roses
I'm half in love with the girl
two houses down, pecking at her cellphone
while she mows the lawn.
As if someone might want to hear her
in this state: drowned by fumes,
her voice a small noise among noises.
But she'll locate someone, I'm sure,
do some talking at 95 decibals,
then hang up, do some singing
no one can hear. That will take an hour.
Then quiet will fly over like a cardinal
and her hands will tremble
because if there is a God
this is his ringtone, this shaking
and trembling and then quiet.
And heaven is a green, level place
at the end of the spiral she's been mowing.
And the day will go the way of cellphones,
the way of roses who run
to the end of their beautiful lives
and are left there saying what? What?
An Answer
after Ou Yang Hsiu
And no, spring continues
no matter what you've heard.
Last night a hard, March gale
grounded a flock of grosbeaks,
and now six males
with snaggled beaks
and red target throats
wrangle at the feeder.
Only force could have
brought them down.
We hope they are gods;
we hope they will hear us—
or at least grant us something
for our hospitality. Maybe
our skewed chimney
could be less skewed?
Truthfully, we would welcome
help from even minor gods,
even these drifters we know
will take advantage and then
leave. We are not dead yet,
but we will be buried here.
Korean Echoes
My turn had come;
Billy Pigg, helmet flown
lost, shrapnel more alive in him
than blood free as air,
dying in my arms.
Billy asked a blessing, none come
his way since birth. My canteen
came his font. Then he said,
"I never loved anybody.
Can I love you?"
My father told me,
his turn long gone downhill;
"Keep water near you, always."
He thought I'd be a priest before
all this was over, not a lover.
Morning Fog
Its dalliance with the earth
almost spent, the sun-disc
floating like a hole in a tree—where no one
is left sleeping
after a night like that—
its fingers lifting from what it touched
(to cure? to injure?) rooftops, fence posts
the shadow leaves of autumn—
it lifts up and away
as if late for the lecture of oceans,
this fugitive caught in the act
trailing lines of web, smoke, particles
grayed yellow by the scion
of age: milk-scored umbrella folding
back into its handle...
The Oyster Hills
I want to see the halved,
the looted,
the irregular,
the ones with perfect pearls
& those that house inclusions.
I want to hear gulls
screaming
in a hard wind,
pushed inland by the front.
To touch with my hands
that pat down linens
and fold
towels—
touch the sharp,
toothy old
houses for creatures
who were harvested
in droves.
Most of all I want
the smell of salt breeze—
to hold that hollow
in my chest
where air
rises and falls without
my consent,
& the flesh house
agrees to wear
and be worn down.
I want the pile
to grow
like a pyramid—
its yellow
truck having carried
one and another useless
treasure
in its incessant jaws—
the bulging meal
of empty shells
cursed
by the man in glass,
who knows a few things
about nacre.
I am aware that I am carrying whole family members, old friends around with me, psychologically speaking, and the concept of the "natural" me is probably a little ridiculous
Your assignment is clear
One day a man approached you on a city bus and stuck his penis into your hand Following proper procedure, you were completely still and sure not to put it anywhere
near your mouth. Eyes straight ahead.
Rabbits are prey so they must be very fast jumpers
You swing only one arm when you walk and whenever you want to kick the shit out of
someone for practical, instructional purposes or for the mere joy of it, you always
snap the rubber band on your wrist until the urge passes. You imagine eternal
walls of fire
You never ooze or excrete. You smell like polyester
When you arrive in hell, you'll pretend to have gotten there by accident; perhaps faulty
public transportation or inaccurate online directions
People often think it's okay to touch pregnant bellies, as if something that stands out so
far must be public property
When you were young, you rolled around with your friend, practicing being
heterosexual.
You grabbed and tickled each other coyly. When she fell asleep with her head
on your lap, you hoped she'd move a few inches to the right.
Some of them are white to camouflage into the snow
You always use a washcloth
You danced up close in the den; she promised not to tell
Rabbits have eyes on the sides of their heads
When you arrive in hell, you'll acquaint yourself with the locals like new neighbors on a
suburban street. They must have filed down their horns
Rabbits are always female in that way people assign gender to animals. Alligators and
dogs are male. Cats are female. And then rabbits. Although females don't
necessarily have eyes on the side of their heads
You didn't even move when the bus stopped
You ripped out the hospital corners
You love hierarchy
I find myself with very full weekends although socializing is never as comfortable as it is with people I've known several years
You have limbs like curling cigarette smoke—androgynous—that bitch wooden floor
beneath you
Your pride sleeps past the alarm, you drool, you don't get the joke. Time is not running
out, it's running away
You once spent 150 minutes banging your head. It was in fashion then
They say people like you compare your insides to other people's outsides
Outside a man masturbated while watching you trip on cracked sidewalks
You snap your hips like you're fucking. Not then, but now. You don't know what to do
with your arms; you wish you had a handsome carrying case for them. You touch
no one despite the fact that they sometimes touch you. You move to your right
better; your ass has an audience
You startle easily; the man didn't care you were not old enough to masturbate to in public
Getting help makes you tired. Birth control is a burden
What do you say to the neighbors when you run up to their door because you just saw a
man with his dick in his hand? You can ask to come in or you can ask to borrow a
cup of sugar or you can say, "This man out there has his thing in his hand and he's
sitting on your car. That's your car right? The dark blue one in front of your
house? He's there." And then you turn and he's gone
You must have been important; he didn't want to be without you
Your head is a dozen Tonka trucks being banged by petulant children. Undiagnosable.
It's never bright enough through the fog and night visits longer than expected
No one really borrows sugar in real life
As you become smoke, you know your skin is forming a shell, making you solid. Your
time in gaseous phase is short—sublime that way
While driving home from a lover's house, you remember pictures taken in the bathtub
you choke on an Altoid and pull over to Heimlich yourself over the edge of the
open car window
One day your skin will crack if you try to move
You'll let yourself stay in bed because nothing outside is as satisfying, a long life will be
a testimony to your intellect, caught, not irrevocably but possibly permanently
You drool out the Altoids. That man's penis is more real than the sugar, more real than
the diagnosis
You won't give them back
