Hamilton Stone Review #30

Poetry

Roger Mitchell, Poetry Editor

 

 

 

Gale Acuff

What God's Good For

 

I do love God but it's not easy--He'll

send me to Hell if I sin too much, says

Miss Hooker, my Sunday School teacher, so

I've got to get saved is what she says or

I'll die in my sins and then wake up dead

in Hell and if not in Hell directly

then standing before God's throne to be judged

and His judgement will go against me but

Miss Hooker says that's fair, I had my chance

to repent and now it's too late, too late

 

in the future that is, after I'm dead

and don't really have one, not much of one

down there in the center of the earth, in

Hell where Satan's in charge and where I'll burn

with all the other sinful souls, if souls

can burn. I guess they can. I guess I'll find

out unless I change my wicked ways, which

aren't that wicked to me. I just want some

fun and if there's anything good about

sin then I guess that's it, it keeps me from

being bored and making some real mischief

like robbing banks or assassinating

 

Presidents or reading those magazines

with naked people in them and I mean

women, women without any clothes on

which is what marriage is for, Miss Hooker

claims, even though she never said so but

I know the way she thinks so I can't be

all bad and in fact I'm in love with her

and if God is good for something then it's

for praying to, which I do, I do my

 

damndest every night and pray that He'll keep

Miss Hooker single until I'm 16,

I'm 10 now to her 25, and then

I'll pop the question. It just has to be

so--who says I don't have any faith? If

she turns me down I'll have faith enough to

wait for a few days and ask her again or

maybe even when I'm 18 to her

33--the patience of Job, that's what

I have, without the boils all over me.

Miss Hooker's big on Job and told us dope

 

about him. In Little League I just ride

the bench so I can understand what he

went through. Coach put me in for the last out

in our last game and I popped up but got

to first base anyway because the kid

lost the ball in the sun. I could've had

second but I'm not in the game enough

to recall what the Hell to do. Coach was

sore and said that's why he never played me.

So I'm proud of that. Next year I'm quitting.

 

 

 

Gnash

 

Miss Hooker's my Sunday School teacher and

she's going to die one day and so will

I but at a different time unless God

wants us to go out together, not date

I mean, or don't mean, but expire. That's good

if we're married and even die together

so that the one of us left living won't

miss the other. Miss Hooker's 25

and I'm 10 so chances are that she'll go

first, she fifteen years older, but at least

she'll go to Heaven so I'll have to sin

less than ever if I want to join her

when I'm dead, too, or else I'll go to Hell

and burn forever and gnash my teeth and

I don't brush enough as it is and in

our family nobody flosses, that's

for rich folks and people in commercials

as seen on TV. And I'm practicing

asking Miss Hooker to marry me when

I'm old enough, 16--18 tops--when

she'll be 31 or 33, not

young but I think that when you're in love you

don't really give a damn, you just go with

it, like a lot of the rest of living.

Then, Miss Hooker says, God sends His angel

of death to take you out of life, at least

the one you're living here on earth, and puts

you in Heaven or Hell depending on

how much you haven't sinned, or have and if

you got your soul saved or you didn't. So

far I didn't--I mean I haven't--but

I'd best or I'll be without Miss Hooker

in the next life, too, the life to come. I

sometimes wonder why I was ever born

--I guess so that I'll die but really won't.

I wonder what I stand to gain from that

--wouldn't it be easier just to live

forever? Easier on God I mean,

Who wouldn't have to spend His precious time

judging all those dead souls. He must get tired

and He's God. Me, I get tired just thinking

about it. Maybe I can help Him out

when I'm dead. I've got some experience

judging others, though Miss Hooker says that's

sin and God's job only. Oh, poor baby. 

 

 

Kevin Carey

From Another Day

 

I play a Tony Bennett CD

I bought for her birthday,

ninety-years-old this May.

She is reading the paper

beneath the arched glass atrium,

stained with pollen and inch worms.

It’s a sunny morning, a slight breeze

from the beach a few hundred

yards away, and I look at her,

her foot tapping slightly,

her gaze far away

as if she has already crossed over.

She blinks and her eyes fill.

Are you okay? I ask

and make a joke about choosing

different music next time.

I give her some water and a tissue.

So many memories, she says

and I put my arm around her

thin shoulder, We all meet up again

someday I tell her and instantly I

feel a heavy lump of shame

in my throat, like I’ve given

her directions I’m not sure of,

a second hand story disguised as the truth.

 

 

 

Michelle Disler

Which are almost always tingling

 

His belongs to brows, chest, eyes, face, and gaze, which are almost always arching, rock solid, knowing, lean, and dark, and hers belongs to hips, elbow, eyes, lips, mouth, spine, and throat, which are almost always slim, guided, hungry, swollen, throbbing, melting, and tingling. There are also earlobes for nibbling, eyes for narrowing, lean fingers for tapping, strong hands for gripping, resolute jaws, jaws clenching, the twisted corners of a mouth determined, hungry love, and a smile so bright, so complacent, so stiff there is only almost tingling, only and almost.

 

Doug Draime

Gertrude Stein Has Been Cursed Properly

 

Her hair moved 

before she spoke.

 

Everything was under water, except her feet.

 

State street, Northside Chicago,

was a flood of neon

(this was a picture she held

in her right hand).

 

I read her lips:

she was cursing Gertrude Stein’s corpse,

cursing Gertrude’s spirit,

cursing Gertrude’s sense of priorities

for not feeding Henry Miller

 

when Henry was starving in Paris,

when Gertrude was living there high on the hog

on her family’s money;

she was cursing Gertrude Stein’s

bull dyke ways.

 

The picture of Chicago in her hand

became a sheet of fog.

 

She stopped talking and

flung her hair around like tall grass in a tornado.

 

All the water drained away, and she stood on her feet

and disappeared like the sun at dusk

into the fog of her hand,

satisfied Gertrude Stein had been cursed properly.

 

 

 

Name Dropping For A Deceased Wife

for Beth Partlow-Draime

 

I never thought I’d look back on

her in memory.  She seemed so

fastened to her being and her

extraordinary perception

of the world!   I watched her joy when she 

read Joyce and Kafka,

Chandler and Hammet , or James Cain ...

and even William Morris

and Lovecraft.  And the times she appeared

to be mesmerized by

Erik Satie and Brahms, Van Morrison,

and Leonard Cohen,

playing on our

boom box

as she tended

the tomatoes

and squash in

the garden behind our house in Echo Park.

 

And the many passionate and lazy afternoons,

her red hair entwined

through my fingers as I 

held up each strand to

the sunlight 

steaming through our

bedroom windows.

 

There were her cryptic

post cards from

across the U.S.

on the way home to see her folks

in Kokomo. The one from

a bus station somewhere

in Texas said simply,

“I’m just listening.”

 

There is no getting away

from her courageous and

passionate struggle

to get the oppressed

Soviet Jews out

of Russia; and there

is a tree planted

for her

in Israel.

 

She made the big time

when her friend

Si, published an article

about her in

the L.A. Times

Boris Penson and Mikhail Baryshnikov are in her debt.

But mostly I remember the way she held a 

drinking glass full of Jameson’s whiskey 

like it was a China tea cup.

 

Every moment of those

three years

are somewhere in

my memory

like soft gray rain

falling

inside

a perfect

white cloud.

 

Susan J. Erickson

Advice from Miss Nancy

 

Never speak in that sick voice

monotonous as a rocking chair.    

Keys corrode atop the bureau.

You are not in thrall to Bluebeard

 

go outside every day  Give up

biting your nails  Never let anyone

see you slip the hypodermic

into your thirsty vein.

 

Your pant of relief and skill

with the needle—its aim sure

as William Tell—make it obvious

the syringe is a lover

 

more demanding

than a sonnet’s turn.

 

 

Note:  Nancy Boyd was the alter ego of Edna St. Vincent Millay and a pseudonym she used for prose pieces.

 

 

Before Her Round-the-World Flight Amelia Visits with a Psychic
 
I’m licensed in the aerodynamics
of death, have fought its drag and thrust
when the double face of up and down
clouded the horizon.   Now do I taunt death?
           
                        The sharp tang of whiskey
                        slurs the vision of the man mapping
                        your way around the world’s waist.
 
People imagine fear as a parachute
to keep one safe.  They are wrong.
When I was seven I took my new sled
to the top of the hill, belly-slammed down,
 
slid under a horse and wagon, then waved
to my sister, frozen at the crest of the hill.
 
                        Luck is a mirage on a hot runway,
                        a ripple-splash of water
                        which never quenches thirst.
             
If this flight is my time to pop off, luck aside,
I could crash—wings crumple—
 
in some pasture fragrant with spearmint
and fuel oil where a  black-and-white cow
will wash my abandoned calf face
preparing me for what comes next.
 
                        You’ve mothered a mother, Amelia.
                        Would you accept the tenderness
                        of a rough tongue?
    
Perhaps I’ll descend onto a field
where ghosts greet me with a handshake,
no medals hung around my neck,
I’ll wear only a string of pearls. 
                                               
                        Again and again you’ve launched
                        into headwinds.  You know, don’t you,
                        your name means work and effort?
 
But my plotted course may swerve
like the Lost Star of the Pleiades,
and my Electra may disappear
into a vastness beyond the earth’s grip.
 
                        For now, hold my hand.
 

 

Note:  it was Amelia’s practice to write what she called“pop off” letters before any major flight.

 

 

 

Kate Falvey

Quince Goes On To Say

 

Arden is such a burden,

rather like a busman’s hol,

trees as teases begging to be nicked.

But I am more refined than that and all;

besides, it is taboo to hack an oak

in this delirious wood; it might just, godforsaken,

flap its wings, moon-bleached branches

hovery with moss and mists as green as goblin spit.

It might have eyes.

It would, therefore, be wise, to take our trouble to the verge

where lights shut out the wee folk’s tricksy gleams.

Not that I believe.

I struggle with the urge for atmosphere

and do not want to seem an ass with such

rough and rustic fears.

Yet murmurs do I hear that loop in echoes

like garlands of enchanted flowers

and whisper stage directions and undermine

my hempen shreds of dignity and power.

The words are mine

but gruffer voices make them less divine.

 

 

 

The Actor

 

The flower circlet round her eager

rhapsody of teenage hair shuddered

a tiny warning and flounced a snowdrop

into the staunch sincerity of her gaze.

 

Nothing was more amazing than

this ancient alabaster play.

The words unknotted on her tongue

and streamed like swans of visionary light

into a pool of breathy need.

 

A greedy flick of accent tossed

with just the right insouciance

gave her part a beggared wantonness,

the maiden dozy and shaken, her habitual

enchantments foiled by fairy intervention

and for the first time, questioned.

 

She was never bested, her challengers

fuddled lines and smirked their awkward inhibitions,

clipped or snippy, overplayed, or ponderous or drippy,

all of them unradiant, all of them indifferent.

 

She, as through a waterfall, saw the world transfigured

into misty glades and verges, tremulant with hope

and hesitation, cliffsides of effrontery, crags of wild

convergence, moonlight spilling over irony and ire --

an Arcady of words glimmering in the drear and stuffy black box.

 

Through gangs of hustled call-backs she became a source

of regal sorcery or flickering impiety or,

as her voice grew sore,

a flustered and bedeviled delicacy – a slip

of a girl unhinged by manic mystery

and churlish buffets of uncertainty.

 

Since all the world’s a stage

with heavy, opaque, draggled curtains,

beleaguered, harried crew

and frustrate, feckless, dim directors,

she was cast as meager ruffian

to reward her trim and pretty know-how.

 

Her sweet wings shrivel, proudly

 toughen into waspish flippancy.

Her tiara tilts sardonically,

its petals gimmicky, a nuisance.

She studies her self-pity and parses her illusions

for showy later usage

and repurposes Lysander’s moony recognition:

so quick bright things come to confusion.

 

 

 

Incidental

            For Jessie

 

I.

The world creases sometimes

less like the brittle page of an old paperback

(one with a moon on the cover – and the soft

eyes of a girl peeking over a mess of creepers riddling

through a neat fringe of boxwood)

and more like a bed sheet busy with violets and snow drops

slept on fitfully and dragged into a stealthy dream of

a constant hand, smoothing, rumpling, smoothing.

 

II.

Settling: sediment, plans, down, for less –

and sometimes a disaster comes snuffling

through the startled dawn and the troubled

trees close ranks, flimsy wings shuddering with

whatever ways the winds blow.

 

III,

Times being what they always are – delicate,

ponderous, no-account,  pressed – there

must be will, decrees, assertion – just

to keep the fireflies brave enough to burn.

 

 

 

William Ford
Russian Tanker Update: 2013

                         Stanwood, Wa

From a local memoir and one
grainy picture just published,
half a tanker was all there was
to the one we war kids used
in the landscape of our play.

The Aleutians, not a Jap sub,
broke it up, 1946, the year
after the war ended, the ship
a leased Russian registry
named The Donbass,
built by Kaiser in Portland,
one of many Liberty designs
the war made cheap to build.

Bow only had been dragged
and left to rot in the low tide
muck off Kayak Point, its stern,
still all of a piece, turbine
perfect, ending up way south
at a dock in Eureka,
California, powering, it’s true,
the lights of a city.

After two years of waiting
for the salvage of its metal,
the bow tanks began to leak
what oil remained, spreading dark
rainbows into the shingle
and sand of every beach close,
killing much sea life.

The night watchman learned
to hate this ship for the slippery
and smelly passage ways and ladders
he slithered through, dangerous
especially in the dark
though the mast’s one light blinked
night after night all night
keeping our war games alive.
Only the front gun tub,
tilted high up, was safe,
its gone cannon its only defense.

 

 

 

Benjamin Goluboff

The Vegetation of Wisconsin

 

August corn

grows right to the doors

of the Adult Superstore.

 

Burdock and Mullein

live among the

Ho Chunk burial mounds.

 

At the Aviation Museum

in Oshkosh,

where they keep a shrine

to the Doolittle raids,

Loosestrife and Chicory

blaze by the parking lot.

 

A well-kept lawn

covers the landfill.

At its base,

and at a little distance,

they fly the flag.

 

 

Howie Good

We Are All Cosmonauts

 

Just imagine

the bargains available

when God held

a going out of business sale.

 

Human bodies,

he startlingly announced,

are made of stardust.

He pointed to a photo of a nebula.

 

“If you give this cloud

another 10 billion years,”

he said, “it will go to school

and chew gum.”

 

 

NB: The quote originally appeared in The New York Times 2014/01/22

 

 

 

Symptoms of Late Capitalism

 

1

 “Why the hurry?” the woman leaning out the window teases. Because of Columbus’s first steps ashore. Also what happened to me in California. I still get emails, ridiculous emails. “No,” I reply, “I don’t want to.” Women, take note: sunshine is overrated.

 

2

I call the repairman. In fact, I end up calling two, both named Mike. The tip of the first Mike’s nose is red and pitted, as if it’s been gnawed by a small but vicious animal. Skin, he explains, is just a kind of mask. The second Mike leaves with a signed check for three-hundred dollars and a promise to return soon with the right part. I scroll through my messages while waiting. “Do you love music?” “The Bible has a way of making life clearer.” “Must leave your information with Lisa in the Math Dept. office.” “Free T-shirts for participants.” I feel a promiscuous grief, as I often do. Cars kill approximately 25,000 Americans a year.

 

3

How many of you know that a pack of sharks is called a “shiver”? Probably not as many as know that Vincent would have died in obscurity if it weren’t for his brother, Theo, the art dealer. Butterflies need the warmth of the midday sun to be active and aren’t seen at dusk. Birds are often active then. The Golden Oriole, Yellow Hammer, or Goldfinch have yellow-and-black wings that can look gold and gray in the setting sun. I remember punches being thrown, children being trampled, everyone fighting for a better view.

 

 

 

The Lively Arts

 

1

Solemn music reaches us from an adjoining century, like blast waves spreading out in circles. Can’t breathe. The firmament all worms (this last, according to Mandelstam). Rescuers rush up the stairs without seeming to get any closer. And we’re the people who trusted in secret attics to keep us safe. Before my very eyes, the Christmas trees burn.

 

2

Forensic investigators scoop a mound of monster droppings into evidence bags. Back in the lab, they sculpt the stuff into a sort of ziggurat. Millions watching at home laugh hysterically. The force of laughing is such that it can dislocate jaws, cause asthma attacks, trigger the rare but possibly grievous Pilgaard-Dahl and Boerhaave’s syndromes, and make hernias protrude.

 

3

Can’t quite get things in focus? Some perish before they ever can. One small hint: if birds start talking Dutch, don’t interrupt. It’s the birth of the impossible, something just for the elderly tourists pointing camera phones. Why perhaps Venus remains yellowish and pockmarked, but, after dark, easy to mistake for a star.

 

 

 

Hannah Greenberg

Deconstructing Literature’s Intercultural Mythos

 

Academic, or otherwise “refined,” educated at Oxford, Harvard, Zürich,

Those parvenues pride, ride shrill on conversant roles in attenuated doxy;

Self-liberated moralists, such sorts complete “major” horked undertakings,

Embrace questionable quirks, accept, as peers, lots of stumblebums, onagers.

 

In balance, when choices matter, gauche would-be leaders seek novel brevets.

(Literary works provide limited sustenance in light of rationalizing dead end jobs).

Thereafter, postilion aided or not, power addicts suck support from jarts, vultures.

The salacious kind enjoys food while people starve; they pine just for paparazzi.

 

So, new media campaigns, beyond existent, churlish intelligentsia’s inventories,

Make impossible, for verbal artists done with cultivating patrons: omitting corteges,

Skipping perpetually scantily clothed states, sitting on cow patties, shooting flechettes;

No amount of dolmades, despite pedigree, bothers writers with twine, tape, or glue.

 

Rather, high flying malapropos social artifacts, other mummery, insist on fallacy,

Provide individuals, otherwise neutral or friendly, with purely exculpatory praise.

For scrittices striving to square perspectives on private communications with public

Language usage, no heuristic exists that promotes beyond pandering or penning pulp.

 

Heaping measures of hope, sanity, even vexation, remain insufficient to create legerdemain.

Word play successfully deconstructs mythos only when equally applicable to all venders.

Once regularly saddled with subaltern commitments, editors’ ripostes ripple, slush builds.

The business of authoring insights falls to censor by susurrus, liminality, adumbrative rants.

 

Shagreen mentors’ promises notwithstanding, finding erudite welcome gets reduced

To coping with shameful walks, elevated social entitlement, dishabille manuscripts.

Publication destinations morph into cochineal-dyed texts, extraneous thoughts, waste.

Backers carry on disporting ways, fill CVs, hire publicists, gather to celebrate “fame.”

 

 

Michael Hettich

Cocktail Party

 

After a few drinks, my new friend explains

that the rain can be dissected for the microscopic dust

inside it, and that sometimes we discover the remains

of lost cities there; he says we can study

this dust for the texture and flavors of lives

otherwise perfect as silence. He claims

 

the mind of wind can be listened to now

for the voices folded up there, languages spoken

before we were even smidgens, the sounds

of strange people’s bodies moving through rooms

and houses we’ve learned to gather from the air.

On a calm day, he tells me, heartbeats can be picked up

 

by our finest instruments, of extinct species

who walked right here, and their breath. And if we could listen

more deeply to stillness—which we’re learning how to do—

we might detect time itself moving back there,

the sound long-vanished animals made

 

as they grew old. Then he whispers: his hands

are able to touch again, caress again, hold things

gently as they did then. Do you remember

the good old days, before all this science

revised us into the merest animals

 

who measure our own barks against the full moon

turning in the darkness, do you remember

playing hide-and-seek in the near-dusk with a girl

we both had a crush on, hearing her breathe

as she hid from whoever was it, and the stars

were peeking out above us, and our parents called out

 

as fireflies rose from the damp grass. You were there

whether you remember or not. Then he turns

and walks off into the crowd and the too-loud

music seems to be coming from the mouths

of the others I’m standing with, people I don’t know

 

who nod toward me like flowers heavy

with the ache of their fragrance, their pollen.

 

 

 

The Masters

 

I wondered then if I could weave myself

a suit that would make me look like a painting,

a group portrait by an artist who’s well-known but hardly

famous, a Flemish painter, let’s say,

whose name I won’t mention here so I can stay disguised

in there. Then maybe I could move unnoticed

through that antique city, free to explore

as I pleased. And maybe I could feel the minds

of the men and women standing with me in that portrait,

could intuit even the life of that lapdog,

that little yapper, as I  tasted the ham

half-carved on the table in its shaft of light.

I’d certainly drink from that gleaming goblet,

taste those dewy grapes. The inner life goes on—

most people never learn this—behind the physiognomies

caught inside a painting, if the painting captures even

a smidgen of real life, though most of those minds

begin just to buzz, after a few centuries.

 

When I was a boy, I loved the Abstract

Expressionists that painted like my father’s music sang,

Franz Kline in particular, Joan Mitchell, and both

deKoonings. I thought of them as saints—I was

that innocent—and sometimes I dreamed I could ride

the subway to a part of the city I’d be lost in,

then find myself again by wandering all the way

back home without asking directions; and then

while my father sang bebop with strange chord changes

I’d enter our house like an animal transformed

into the perfect snowfall, the kind that makes silence

absolute, even in a city like that,

at least while it’s falling, and sometimes even

long after it’s covered the ground.

 

 

 

The Animals

 

The mouse inside my guts is just a mouse, and an ordinary one at that. I could say I love him, despite myself, for his sleek fur and the way he sniffs at the seeds and secrets deep in there, where I don’t even realize I’ve hidden them, which will grow now into sunflowers or flowering bushes inside me, since by nudging and chewing he’s dislodged them from their dormancy. The sunflowers may even grow larger than my body, which scares me a bit, to be honest. And they’ll attract bees and small birds, and they’ll sway in the sun until, nodding, they’ll drop their seeds, or whatever is left of them after all those birds. And what kinds of birds are they, after all, that eat those seeds? How far do they migrate; what songs do they sing?

 

When I was a child we owned a boa constrictor that needed to be fed only once a month. He ate rats and mice my mother collected from the cancer research institute downtown. These rodents had been shot full of toxic chemicals, cut open and sewed up like the patched jeans we wore then, and most of them could barely walk. My mom would place them gently in the terrarium and they’d stand there shaking or tottering aimlessly around—until the snake got them into his mouth. Still alive when he swallowed them, their tails moved around like bendable conductor’s batons beating time to a spastic music we couldn’t hear, until they were just a lump in that silky-rope body.

 

I never took much pleasure in that snake, or in watching the rats disappear there—or in any of the other exotic pets my mother collected, tortoises which moved so rarely we only knew they’d died when we smelled them rotting, piranhas which banged against their tanks when we walked by, yearning to take a nice bite of our faces.  I wasn’t even that fond of dogs in those days—they seemed always to get hit by cars or to disappear into the neighborhood somewhere, and my parents would ask me to go out on my bike and search for them, in the chilly dusk. I’d ride up and down the streets calling “Tippy!” calling “Otis!” without luck. And when I returned we’d have dinner, by candlelight, while the hamsters in the kitchen ran on their wheels, which made a halfhearted creaking music, like an old door being opened and closed, over and over, to let nothing in or out, or like our lost dog somewhere out in that darkness, trying to call out our names.

 

 

 

Charlene Langfur

Too Big To Name                                                                                      

 

We all walk fine lines

without thinking about them,

rarely

counting up what connects us

here

singular love,

flowers opening overnight,

dreams

so ordinary

no records need to be kept

 

but here they are

breaking open

touching us in the ways of delight

on earth

 

a brush of the wind on the cheek,

a giant blue sky,

auroras we cannot see

exploding in space,

protections,

predilections,

what elates, missed only

when gone.

 

I want to collect them,

sit with them.

It takes so little to remember.

I sit with my black dog

for a lifetime

collecting light, looking for crows,

who knows what else,

perusing horizons,

great acts of life

 

too small to mention, too big to name

 

 

 

Catherine Morocco

A President's Wife

 

"She danced for her husband," My mother tells me, stunned.

"A president's wife. Sarah, moving in a silver dress. Like that."

 

She moves a little. Like Lauren Bacall, I've seen her. Arms out,

knees in tight, rippling her hem at Bogie sitting smiling.

 

We don't usually see that kind of thing. "The faculty all

staring. And the punch napkins pleated into swans."

 

Then two years later mother tells me Sarah's gone.

"To school, to be a linguist. Left him." I forget Sarah until

 

one Sunday I'm putting out the Wedgewood serving dish.

I'm folding napkins, also blue, under the forks.

 

My mother says, "You know, you could be a president's wife."

Her voice sounding like, here's your graduation gift.

 

I hollow out. Like I'm an empty pen. Not just thinking

mother is longing for the wild things Sarah did.

 

And not just wishing I would ask what parts of Sarah I could be.

It's suspicion. That it isn't Sarah's dancing or her get up,

 

get out of here that Mother sees in me. It's pretty. And

napkins. And even if she does mean all of Sarah (I think

 

Mother wants me full), there's something in "wife of" that

I can't see. Some insult frozen in her generosity.

 

 

 

Keith Moul

Malice

 

A man came to my door

to say directly to my face that I

had chosen him alone to malign

in places he was still known, often

where he had established good will.

 

He wore prominently a patriarchal cross,

like a sword, apparently very weighty,

and when he worshipped, my atheism

insinuated an added burden.  He shopped

as if lost among goods in the shopping center:

my new tire preference made his own car

ride noisily and roughly, even on macadam.

Certain in-laws, trusting his wife’s liberalism,

and aware of his aversion to me, questioned

his judgment and her tolerance of it.

Almost all New England was now polluted.

 

He could kill me at my door.

(As yet I saw no weapon.)  I said “Hold on!” 

 

That I used an exclamation point, apparently

armed with grammar was finally too much.

 

For discerning readers of poetry

I don’t need to say

what happened after that.

 

 

Star Matter at Work

 

A man came to my door

saying that he, like I, had questioned

unsaintly scientists’ good faith, i.e.

bona fides.  He proffered to me

science as corrugation, obfuscation,

bent imagination, curving space, “realities”

much too recondite that I might pinpoint

unquestioned azimuths of authority

for any path through human space.

 

“Why choose me?”  “Out of the blue.”

“Why tell me of things I cannot know?”

“Hey, doesn’t Goldman, Sachs do the same?”

“Won’t I bump into my steel table

when I know the atomic configuration?”

“Get used to ephemeral realities, hug no box

but scientific thought outside the box:

we are the “stuff” of stars; repeat

we are the “stuff” of stars.

 

Since that day, probably coincidently,

notice has appeared in selective media

confirming allegations in obscure works

that we are star matter standing to order

for new purposes and unlimited progeny.

 

Although long-gone, the man imbues me.

Excitedly I marry all debarking visitors

(Embarrassed, I conceal involuntary erections),

I want for nothing, but hope for everything,

including progressive taxes by the legislature.

 

My neighbors seem troubled by star matter

as it compromises community rules and by

my space rigid in salute of scientific discovery.

 

 

 

Frederick Pollack

Downton Revisited

 

They’ve left me behind.

They’ve gone on an outing.

In their long cars, with picnic baskets,

silks, tweeds, lawyers,

repressions like matted veins

of ore, will like coal

mined and exuding slag beyond the hedges.

I think I was invited.

It may have been a dream. The tone,

a sweet entreaty lacking condescension,

certainly was. But now, with the place to myself,

I must organize my own

 

breakfast and bath, because they took

the whole Staff with them. Amazing!

How did they all fit?

Were cars commandeered

from the constabulary, the Army, the middle classes?

And how did flour-specked and brilliantined

guilts, needless brains,

and endlessly attenuated cunning

react to the light? Did they merge

at last, just beyond

the last rackrented village

and last tugged forelock, with their masters?

 

The sinks are full of dishes.

I eat some English thing,

then wander, before flies settle, through the house.

Those precious linens, long immaculate,

lie crumpled. By a crib,

a teddy bear has wandered in from Waugh.

Between the uncut pages of books

on a high shelf that justify the world

lurk scrawled and folded

secrets that everyone knew anyway,

including the dark portraits

of men released by one or another war.

Half-ravished, half-asleep,

I curl up in a window nook, pretending

I own that infinite green

and am as innocent as its sheep.

 

 

A Savage Servility

 

On Wednesday, on CNN, he’s asked

for evidence to back his latest

speech about terror babies. (Their mothers

come from Moslem countries

to give birth here, then after twenty years

the kid returns, a US citizen,

“no waiting, no problem,” to blow up buildings.) The word

“evidence” means his word and

intelligence are being doubted, and he

takes off after the famous

media figure (“It’s easy to change the subject,

it’s easy to pick on me, but you’re

better than that, Anderson – ”); wonders

if he can cite the latter’s confessed

gayness but there’s no opening; talks

righteously, till the break, over

interruptions.

                       

                        On Thursday he meets funders.

On Friday he leads visiting

constituents on a tour

of the Capitol. Recites

the history of corners, statues, plaques, some

paintings. Lingers on duels,

and places where noted

figures (they sound like the Founding Fathers) knelt

in prayer. The retirees

murmur and smile as he says goodbye:

he really talked to them.

 

That night he flies home,

thinking (with particular logic;

the rest is a sort of art) about

the primaries. The funders

don’t like the preacher-dentist

and former Kleagle probing

his right. Still it’s important

to make appearances

in the towns at either end

of his carefully-shaped district. In churches.

At a gun show, where he will weep.

At the Game. How he talks

depends to some degree

on where. If, for instance, a black

colleague is there

to analyze Obama’s hatred

of whites. But on the square

before the County Courthouse the Congressman

can freely, at length, with his trademark flush,

decry immorality and tyranny –

applauded by his people, round and eating,

sun-drawn, or office-pale,

employers and employees

(from the oil-supply and silicon plants,

the hospitals, prisons, and Base)

together. (If it’s cold,

he’ll mock the climate hoax.) Then go home

to spend quality time with his family,

for which he says he has a special flair.

 

 

Drone

 

Just possibly, a pilot

evades at the Academy

the relentless, licensed

fundamentalist proselytizing;

keeps his cool, his soul,

his own spare rhetoric.

He regards himself as,

and is, a sophisticate:

on leave seeks Indian

relics and, in Vegas,

inexpensive enjoyments.

Reads. It’s a double life

that can, with care, be pursued.

No love of battle made him fight,

only the squalor

of home, and an aptitude

that had its own vector

and rewards. Full-bellied,

impeccable, he confers

with his sensor tech; is authorized,

and looses a Hellfire

on five louche figures

glowing in infrared beside

a road – they, too, perhaps innocent.

 

 

 

Mary Ann Rockwell

For My Father, in His Terror                                                                     

 

At midlife, he began to wear maroon

bell-bottoms, long sideburns, 22 year olds.

He seemed to me suddenly a cartoon.

Moods came linked to booze breath odor.

 

He would point things out: “You shuffle your feet”

or “Schizophrenics are brilliant, so don’t

be ashamed.” He couldn’t hack my needing

a father that happened to be him.

 

Where were the little tykes he could put down

when he tired of playing piggyback?

Where was the rising sun? He made dumb shows

of worthiness.  He ran from the beaten track.

 

I find him in the mirror now.  I’ve learned

his polyester grief,  his actual dread.

 

 

 

A Few Rhetorical Questions

 

Did my brother really write our names on bombs in 1967?

Why was my family charmed by this?

Who did my bomb kill?

Or is it smiling, silent, a nobody in a rice paddy, still?

Was Viet Nam just an extension of the family drama?

Paul goes AWOL in Saigon.

My father two-times with a 22 year old.

Susan elopes with a fellow librarian.

U.S. soldiers massacre the village of My Lai.

Is my brother, in whatever bright pocket

of heaven he claims, laughing softly at us?

 

Is there a heaven for the innocent led astray,

the American farmboys and homeboys

drafted to be killers?

Does this heaven have a wait list, or an antechamber?

Will I see some version of God there?

 

If Emily Dickinson had been alive in 1967 

would she have explored new methods of omission,

shaved her head, doffed her white dress for flame

robes, led chanting at peace rallies?  Instead of stalking

hearses in envy, would she have

set herself ablaze in Times Square?

Is there a tiger-lily heaven just for her?

 

 

 

Gerard Sarnat

Highway 17 Revisited With A Hearse Full Of Grandkids

 

5 AM, chopper skids

front of the draft bus,

scooters smash out headlights,

 

my trigger finger

curses at the driver’s brain

so Marines won’t reach

 

Oakland’s Induction Center 

then Nam.

Fender mind-bending Shut-It-Down

 

insurrection, amazing

that gun didn't land me jail 

or worse. 

 

 

 

Terrified By Everything, Absolutely Everything

 

Dreaming my telomeres fray

like dinosaurs fried in the Twin Towers,

 

finally, finally it seems clear

what's panicking me about death.

 

Not mine, no, no. Rather the kids’

tangle of crutches, blind, insane …then

 

I'm woken from deep deep sleep

sobbing – the very time since Dad passed.

Infinite diabolical opaque choices

foisted and finagled,

 

my once-upon-a-time’s chill wit

reverts to the macabre we observed

 

in Pops as he aged.  Memories

of what’s-their-names lost in some cul-de-sacs,

 

dementia unmasking scares me

much much more than latent oncogenes.

 

Cancer’s a lot like terrorism –

one attack gets through, poof you’re toast.

 

 

 

David Trame

What We Are Left With

 

Crumbs, for example, just after. And kaleidoscopes of specks

stuck on the skin, or floating away, looming, thinning or bloating.

Crusts and rust, dust, sand and caliginous clouds in the air,

or filaments like feathers, like a debris of stares.

On the ground a scattering of the pips of things,

forgotten fragments following here

their own harmony of the spheres.

Following or forgetting us. Or staring.

With the laziness and absent-mindedness of a king,

with all the impassive persistence of the nonchalance of being.

On my dish I see crumbs and pips and, for a moment,

I don’t remember where they come from, they look like

props after some antics in a pantomime,

then I remember that I have just finished

munching my grapes and biscuits and drinking

my precious goblets of Chardonnay, I have been

spitting the pips straight onto the dish, pellets on target,

my reign the dish, which is always right here

this great gatherer of spheres, and friend,

because what welcomes any trash at the end,

preventing you from drowning in its trends,

is always a friend.

Anyway, most of the time life leaves us

a quietly quite scattered mess,

remains we have to deal with, reminding us

of the manifold remains we shall ourselves be.

After the end a body to dispose of and what it leaves:

a tossing loss, its skies and seas,

its not being alive any more

that we can’t accept but we must,

spreading desolation

like circles on still water

after a stone is thrown,

then the circles become larger

and slowly blur.

Or stay, like the fearful symmetry

of a heart’s vacancy,

or like a hole in the sea of your eye,

ineluctably present in the retina

and you can’t erase the transpiring light.

Like the train of this monologue running

to your ashes, which in your mind’s eye

must be bright and rise like a sky in the sky.

But what a fuss before we are back

in the blue, our native hue,

what we really are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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