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Hamilton Stone Review #32
Spring 2015
Poetry
Roger Mitchell, Poetry Editor

 

 

Billy Cancel
brine zone imperial drag

 

     brine zone imperial drag     a slither     from plate
of fists     means     crumb lunch     in scented headlights     looped
host echo triple     asking asking as king     watchmen
prepare to unload their hours     with listless countenance
light hearted verse don’t     fog this mope yield         when
   they deft sift my nest for limbo     we’ll ride nuclear horse its mouth aglow
to laminated sea board formerly     bleak     unfrequented
shore     many strange guesses will be     made as to our business     as we ride & i 
gloom out at     my pale    
thin best         etching 21 DISTURBANCE AT MARKET
                                     GREY walled square-GREY
                                     crowd writhing-WHITE
                                     figure-BLACK hair torn           against a capital
    breeze getting     dragged by incorrect paddling mites through
slurry cascade dried things because     root eating bugs their
zero day exploits     i dabble in shards     from busted
valve due to     entangled fools lords mend chop         one
day shall     cast a net across     White Star Mat to     clear it of all manner of
    weeds & stones why can’t we all     just have a morning bracer some

kidney wax       & insert a back door?

 

 

 

 

Darren C. Demaree
Emily as More & More Often

The stone has a name

we never use out loud

because rarely do we hold

a stone long enough

that a name matters

more than the way the cold shape

rests in our hand.  Emily,

the only blue stone I’ve ever seen,

has become worn in my hands

& though I’ve caught time

chipping at her, most of all her

form seems to be welcoming

my heat, my pressure.  She is

different than the first permission

& she is different

than the first refusal.  I call her

many, many things.  That part

we consider a union.

 

 

 

Emily as I Get to Hold the Masks

Roster of lost faces, lifted

& all of them our own,

Emily has made me our gamekeeper,

our deep pool of other people

we can be for each other.  All of mine

are famous men that have drowned.

All of hers are women that have lived

forever.  We’re working on

our gender roles as well.  She has

yet to find a woman she loves

as little as she loves my actual face

& though I’ve yet to ask her

to be a man, she is willing

to walk into the water

with a tumbler of whiskey

& a cigar if I want her too.

I’m not sure my sobriety

is turning her on anymore.

 

 

 

 

Howie Good
The Z Train

1

You glance down the tracks, first one way, then the other, the only prospective passenger for that terrible train, the Z that doesn’t stand for anything.  Alone in a quiet nowhere, you begin to leave your skin, and as if huffing glue, catapult up and over the moon, considered to be the ultimate act, more than just suicide. Thereafter, the seasons pass in no particular order, yellow and black, like wild bees in a wildflower field.

 

2

It was a Sunday, four days before Christmas. He presented himself at licensed brothel no. 1, asked for a girl named Rachel, and handed her his ear (or, more precisely, the lower part of his left ear) as if it were a small painting of a wheatfield with crows. “Guard this object carefully,” he said. Then he disappeared. The blood showed up as black in the black-and-white news photos.

 

3

I felt like I missed something I had never known. Ever feel that way, too, like an empty sleeve pinned to a shoulder? No one knew anything. No one had anything. You could make, however, a lovely hat out of used tinfoil. That’s why I cried.

 

 

 

Still Life With Firearms

 

1

Tucked away

in a monastery

in the Northeast Kingdom,

a monk sat

in the lotus position

for 200 years,

 

counting

how many ways

there are

to kill a man.

 

2

“Shoot me in the chest!”

Mussolini demanded,

and the firing squad did

before he could take it back.

 

3

There are

276 million guns

in America.

 

A full clip holds

30 bullets.

 

Do the math.

 

4

They say if you meet your double,

you should kill him. I could

lie by the side of the road

for hours bleeding to death

without anyone knowing.

 

 

 

The Murk of Evening

Amid the pops and gurgles of a decaying carcass, a probable suicide, we break the law merely by laughing. The razor must have severed an artery. There are bloodstains strewn over the walls and blood going up the stairs. We have been told that things like that aren’t all that surprising around here. And it’s true. The boys drink the kerosene from lanterns and the girls suck the paint from paint tubes, while we take turns picking bits of dreams out of each other’s hair, darkness the only light by which to see.

 

 

 

 

Nels Hanson
Moments

Young woman’s perfect swan

dive tender arabesque of secret

 

love or swallows’ dip and rise

tracing particles for physicists,

 

or quick transit of shooting star

geese descending from tulle fog

 

skidding on water, pale umbrella

flaring open in rain the anxious

 

dove’s abrupt approach to land

on looming branch, or dry fallen

 

November leaves again alive in

spiral of whirlwind or thigh and

 

eyebrow’s curve the swift river’s

folding eddy, vortex for a silken

 

wish, all things born an instant

and disappearing instantly as we

 

blink to remember the lost world

we awakened in far seconds ago.

 

 

 

 

Nora Iuga

               translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Diana Manole

terente takes care of sam

on the weekend terente takes me to the river

places a fishing rod in my hand

hooks a fish on the rod

winds me up with my key

and makes my mechanism work

then he takes back his fish

takes back the rod too

and leaves me by my lonesome

with the flies

and the good lord

terente takes care of me

he treats me as his child

doesn’t let me watch tv

doesn’t let me cross the street

doesn’t give me pocket money

however in the morning

he makes me shine his shoes

then i love him

because he needs me

the way a church needs beggars at its door

 

 

write sam, follow your calling

a chocolate angel comes out of nowhere

sticks his willy to my lips

and tells me:

write sam, follow your calling

i’m baffled about what my calling looks like

is she fat is she slim

and what if i can’t rise to the occasion

i’m the most docile guy in town

i put my pen on the paper

and i start to tickle it

“how beautiful is life

a white mare with tassels on her forelock”

what a poet am i

a little cucumber

in the shadow of young girls in flower

from high above

the nile’s riverbed

is an illusory baby-crib

 

 

hey sam, a salesman calls to me

i browse through the market looking for buttons

because it’s turned cold

and i’ve got to walk around with my jacket open

like a bat in its own altars

hey sam, a salesman calls to me

be my first sale of the day

but my feet

sled down the hill

to the crystal lake

where swans dwell under blankets of ice

and purr but i forgot to tell you

that ice is the world’s skin

seen from an airplane

in the beginning was the poplar tree

god’s stallion

then the waters waiting between the shores

like an empress’s vagina

 

 

 

Seth Jani
Lantern

We are full of hidden fires.

The autumn of the body

Is the birth

Of another light,

Another self,

Hinged to this one.

When the wick is snubbed

The other lantern is roused

From dust.

We have been carrying it, all along,

Year after year:

Cold candle,

Patient fuel,

Loss, the sure ignition.

And what we thought

Was the end

Of a dwindling circuit

Proves just a catalyst,

A spark floating

On through darkness.

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Lewis
Insomniac

Same is always.
Unless. You already know
the names (the cat, for instance,
sleeping under the sofa). Mother
is nowhere to be found. Even
anybody knows that. Like
licorice. Cars in the street
all night in spite of the snow. Color,
this one—is it green? No, more
grey, like morning in the
airshaft and someone down there
hollering, come home, dammit
but you can't see anything. At
some point it will dawn on you,
gradually perhaps, that no-one
is writing the story.

 

Instructions for Building a Greenhouse

Cut out deliberate
pieces of sky. Remember
the world has a
history. Every color
there is, is filtered
through time. Make
the edges true. Join
the panes with great care. Etch
the joints with your tears. This
is the room we will
inhabit, warming ourselves
with the remembered dream
of light.

 

Pastorale

I always thought I could
start over—get up, shake
the night from my pillow, stride
out into a new-made day. But
there's a horse in my bedroom, blocking
the door. Sturdy steed with flaring
nostrils, he bares his teeth when I
make a move. And worse, I hear
a commotion downstairs—furniture
toppling, huge lumbering footfalls.
I think everything is breaking now. Maybe
I can get to the window, swing out
onto the oak, slide down onto
the back of a zebra and
escape. Except of course that there is no
oak and I don't remember anything
about riding zebras. All of which proves
one day is not
as good as
another.

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin McLellan
About / Save / Face 

you recall feeling visible

/ exposed / smelling

 

like woodstove ashes

 

in a steel bucket after

rain / hid in the gold-

 

colored grass listening

 

to them call and call your

child-name / most every-

 

thing was make believe

 

so you won’t mention

your early memories

 

of it / tie on a fix-cage

 

by asking others / he

speaks about his celibate

 

brother / your impulse

 

is to ask him again about

himself / she wants to

 

remain anonymous / tells

 

you promiscuity began

for her just after trying

 

licorice and not liking it

 

 

 

In Sunglasses

a mother and her grownup daughter

confabbing as they zigzag

 

the prototypes / a yard of headstones

on this overcast morning /

 

you realize you shouldn’t be watching

 

 

 

 

Kat Meads 
Miss Jane Repurposes

And surprise? The least complex fulfillment. (1)

Thursday’s child Jane declares herself done,

Grown brutal under a vocabulary of love /dissent. (2)

 

All those boys and girls and farms and fields she bent

Toward illusion, losing more than she won.

And surprise? The least complex fulfillment.

 

All those trees and brooks and dogs and bullets she lent

To dullards unmoved by speed or run

Grown brutal under a vocabulary of love/dissent.

 

The archness of modesty, the falsity of compliment.

Connivers depend on the stunned.

And surprise? The least complex fulfillment.

 

Miss Jane feels she’s lived for centuries, sent

Into battle without mercy or might or gun

Grown brutal under a vocabulary of love/dissent.

 

But she is young, Miss Jane, still young and pliant.

The young take up; the young abandon.

And surprise? The least complex fulfillment

Grown brutal under a vocabulary of love/assent.

 

 

Miss Jane Repurposes

What right has the present to speak to the past? (3)

Miss Jane is in a mood.

Does the present hold advantage over the past? (4)

 

Back when: best friend Sara fast-

Tracked now, now houses a brood.

What right has the present to speak to the past?

 

Honestly? Miss Jane? Ever miscast

As careless youth. Frownless, the girl felt nude.

Does her present hold advantage over her past?

 

Here at Sara’s table, sticky with cereal blast,

Miss Jane tries not to analyze hunger(s), food.

What right has her present to speak to her past?

 

Any woman need only last—

Survive decades of divine and crude.

Does the present hold advantage over the past?

 

These two? At this table? Sassed

Desire but never booed.

What right has the present to speak to the past?

Does the present hold advantage over the past?

 

 

Miss Jane Repurposes

A little madness is a wondrous thing. (5)

Miss Jane is ill.

The dry husk of an eaten heart brings (6)

 

Chills, fever, revolving

Bedsprings. Must. Keep. Still.

A little madness is a wondrous thing.

 

The ceiling: a static wing,

The drugs: a waterfall spill.

The dry husk of an eaten heart brings

 

Imitators. Mouth drought. Brain drain.

Will a mind collapsed refill?

A little madness is a wondrous thing

 

Larking

Body to body, thrill to thrill.

The dry husk of an eaten heart brings

 

Hunger for something, anything

Beyond gray light on a windowsill.

A little madness is a wondrous thing

The dry husk of an eaten heart brings.

 

 

Miss Jane Repurposes

It’s easy to invent a Life—today Miss Jane portrays (7)

Miss Jane, feigning interest in others.

Never to be yourself and yet always. (8)

 

Visiting this week’s dying kin, Miss Jane stays

Behind while others vanish. Cousins, uncles, brothers.

It’s easy to invent a Life—if one exults in displays,

 

Repackaging what it pays

To say, motion and manner stripped of druthers.

Never to be yourself and yet always.

 

But wait: the dying are not dead. The bed-bound brays

At bedside Jane, insulted by artificial blubbers.

It’s easy to invent a Life—if life’s a phase,

 

A shuffling off, a trying on, an excuse to assay

Who and where and how many the truer lovers.

Never to be yourself and yet always.

 

As this week’s dying roars, rallies, plays

Scales on a veiny wrist, Miss Jane straightens covers.

It’s easy to invent a Life—if one delays.

Never to be yourself and yet always.

 

 

Miss Jane Repurposes

Nobody young, anymore, anyway. (9)

Miss Jane resists another pour.

The fuss, of course, is death. (Inveighed.) (10)

 

A woman with boxes overstays

Her welcome, becomes a chore.

Nobody young, anymore, anyway.

 

Cup a keepsake, delay

Sleep, that time-sucking whore.

The fuss, of course, is death. (Inveighed.)

 

Postcards, promises, duplicate keys. Stay.

Go. Follow. No. Remember, or…

Nobody young, anymore, anyway.

 

Desire’s perpetual relay

Fucked with afters and befores.

The fuss, of course, is death. (Inveighed.)

 

Miss Jane splayed

Upon the floor

Nobody young, anymore, anyway.

The fuss, of course, is death. (Inveighed.)

 

 

1. Kenneth Burke
2. Kenneth Burke
3. Roland Barthes
4. Roland Barthes
5. Michael Mott
6. Howard Nemerov
7. Emily Dickinson
8. Virginia Woolf
9. Lester Bangs
10. Janet Frame

 

 

 

 

 

Simon Perchik
You lean against the way each evening

 

You lean against the way each evening

fills this sink waist-deep

though the dirt smells from seaweed

 

and graveyard marble –the splash

worn down, one faucet abandoned

the other gathers branches

 

from just stone and rainfall

–by morning these leaves

will lift a hand to your face

 

–you drain the weatherbeaten

the mouthfuls and slowly the mud

caresses your throat –you go

 

shaved and the gravel path

sticks to your skin, flowing

half shovel, half trembling.

 

 

 

Both hands and this ink

Both hands and this ink

the way the dead are sheltered

–you fill the pen

 

with slowly behind

loosen those tiny stones

you still drink from :you write

 

as if this shovel

had carried away the Earth

into moonlight where mourners

 

appear underneath your fingertips

as words and rain and lips

–there’s always a first time

 

–the ink would overflow

rush through the lines

left helpless on this page

 

–you hold on –why not!

–already a fountain

digging for the sky

 

its unfinished grave

and every evening

is an everywhere her heartbeat.

 

 

 

 

 

Erin Redfern
Live Oak

If I knew my own dear dead, the last thing I’d do--
      summon them.
Rotted roots on this tree, bud drop again.

 

      Grew up in this Valley of the Heart’s Delight,

knew a girl who lived on Cherry Glen Way.

      On Blossom Hill Road watched the spring’s pink snow stick

 

to the windows of Mrs. Mill’s minivan,     

      played summer league at Live Oak.

Cement around the community center track,

 

      still wet, was pressed with split prunes.

Crossing the tracks by the Del Monte factory

      on the way to Orchard Supply Hardware

     

wondered which stone fruits in their ringed silver cans

      rode the conveyor belt over Auzerais Ave.

From my father learned to save

 

      old nails, my mother not to fish

for compliments. She’d drop me at Oakridge

      Mall. Burnt-orange glazed brick,

 

cement planters spouting improbable tropics--

      peace lilies, Areca palms, crotons glossing their green

beneath recessed can lighting. It’s been renovated

 

      in mirror-slick marble, granite, a thousand shades

of stainless beige. Under the expansion

      I can find the old footprint,

 

one more Yeti that needs tracking, along with my ancestors.

      And maybe they are there, after all,

circling the displays at Claire’s,

     

      fingering the earrings that wink and shine

like minnows under alien light,

      the jelly bracelets that wave noiselessly in the duct-warmed air,

 

wondering how far their allowance will go,        

      wondering how long before

they’ll be picked up, taken home.

 

 

 

 

 

Margaret A. Robinson
Farewell to Eden

After they left, perfection just wasn’t the same.
Not that any plants went missing; they didn’t
dig up their favorite roses, or lay claim
to the figs.  But the garden fell silent,

the sudden quiet after the guests go home.
Under the new order, the season
turned a corner, for though the sun shone,
branches stood bare, empty of reason.

Then the animals up and fled.  Beaks
made off with seeds.  All they’d given
care to followed them on their trek
toward a less constricted heaven.

Despite her pain, his sweat, they rejoiced.
Expulsion wasn’t loss.  It was choice.

 

 

Keeping an Eye on the Neighbors

A large tan mass wears
branches on its head,
glides over fences,
complacently munches
what we planted for us.

A plump gray snuffler
rattles through dry leaves,
points a pink snout,
trailing behind
a hairless afterthought.

Overhead, feathers press the air.
Like a weightless bomb,
a wide-winged appetite drops.
Something small shrieks.
And stops.

Along the sidewalk, a masked
thief scoots to escape,
gets caught in a porch light,
a silhouette humped,
as if toting a bag of loot.

And a dainty-legged elegance in red,
shakes its plumed prey like a rug,
eats the brain, carries the remains
in its mouth, as it trots past
the pink chrysanthemums.

 

 

 

 

 

Terry Savoie
Holding Draft Lottery Ticket #87, You Lose Hope as the Vietcong Move ahead with the Tet Offensive

Not yet five & already the garbage truck

backs up the entire length of the alley

with rancor & a surly, ill-tempered outlook on life,

 

so you tell yourself this room's at least clean & dirt cheap,

eleven bucks cash on Sunday or else you'll find yourself out

in the alley with the rest of the trash when the week's garbage

 

haul pulls around again.  Moreover, this is nothing more

than a brief layover, & you've got a desk, lamp & that used

copy of A Yankee in Canada marked up in red, the last reader's

 

scribbles in the margins.  You couldn't ask for more.

On either side of the cardboard-thin walls, two

single rooms with no shame whatsoever in their all-night,

 

gleeful springs bouncing.  Across the hall, a two-room suite for

the Japanese graduate students near the floor's only shared shower,
wash basin & toilet.  Early Tuesday morning, you chance upon her

 

lipstick-smudged tissue paper & gilded cosmetic case lying

open on the yellowed-stained porcelain sink.  Showing formal

deference, you surrender her treasure at the foot of their door,

 

bow & back away.  Later, as you bump into them in the entryway,
the two bow deeper still.  Wednesday, the husband hurries out
early for his morning classes & soon after his wife’s cello

 

begins – Elgar, you're thinking – filling the hall with sadness. 
When you pass by to kill a couple of hours before the mail arrives,
their door's cracked a few inches, letting you catch sight of her

 

in that long, yellow silk kimono.  She sits there, centered,

in their small kitchenette, her cello braced between her thighs,

the bow sawing away at a fever's pitch, sending her black hair

 

whipping against unblemished skin & flying with an ecstatic
dervish's dance up & out in hundreds of wild directions. 

As she glances up, she sees you eyeing her & a deeper sadness

 

shadows her face.  Friday, no mail whatsoever so that

by Saturday morning, you're already gone a hitchhiker’s 

hundred miles north, on the road & aiming for the Northwoods

 

then beyond to the Canadian border.  Sunday morning,

somebody else’s rent will come due & another week's worth

of caskets will find their way into wide mouths of cargo planes

 

bound for the States from 'Nam.  In the meantime, your arm will ache
unless you hit it lucky again heading on up north, Thoreau tucked in

your duffel bag, the two of you sailing with a prosperous wind.

 

 

 

 

 

Elaine Sexton
About You  

There are so many of you:

the lover you, the “ex” lover

you –  you, the best friend, you,

the neighbor, the doctor,

bus-driver, co-worker,

 

the hover-mother you,

the alarm ringing,

trouble making,

finger wagging, never-listening-

to-a-word-I-say you. All the you(s)

 

who are stand ins for the many me(s),

as referred to in the Second Person

or Third Person, the you I’ll call

the “she” I can’t stand, I can’t live with,

or without, the group “you,”

 

the sick, and dearly departed,

the dying and

paralyzingly alive you, the one who

disappears when needed,

the you that goes by another name

 

as in when “you” are a dog,

or a tree, or the sea,

or an implement disguised as a plane

landing, or a pen, or the ink

that leaves clues when it dries;

 

the Rorschach you: blotted, sobbing,

exposing the all-or-nothing you,

the self-conscious, unconscious

trace of you, the you

when the two of you met, fell in love,

 

settled for less than expected,

got more than you bargained for,

the you who cannot spend another day,

another minute, another lifetime

of this bliss together,

 

the you I expected, regretted,

ponderous, careless,

the never-look-back you,

the curious, perseverating,

deal-making, deal-breaking

Pollyanna, sky-is-falling you,

the you who is siren and barker, both

sweet and silent, sometimes

humming a tune no one will ever hear,

or want to,

 

the you so few would ever understand

because that you, the real you,

the original, authentic you

who can only be read in translation,

who is always an approximation,

 

cross-cultural, cross-gendered, ambi-

everything, all purpose, visible,

irreplaceable,

admired, abandoned only-to-be

recovered,

 

the you who appears

in every poem I ever wrote

or ever will write, the one I love,

am devoted to, the you who needs no

introduction – that’s you – just you.

 

 

 

In Memoriam

Engaged, embraced

all afternoon

 

by salt water,

we sailed between ports

 

over a colony of scallops,

past buoys, nets, fish,

 

to a new slip, splintered docks,

unsteady pilings.

 

In that sun-drenched

but dry climate

 

I find peace

with you. You,

 

weary and watchful

the whole time quiet

 

minding the centerboard’s failing,

minding enlisting the motor,

 

missing your dead father,

leaving his slip,

 

his just-sold home,

his Gull Pond, his fixing things

 

now over once and for all.

This was not the way

 

you wanted to leave, not the sail

you imagined this memorial

 

afternoon to be. Even so,

even with me, your sole

 

companion,

your mate,

 

you were present,

calm, weary,

 

but loving me

and what you were doing,

 

equally, with grace

without drama.                               

 

And I was watching you,

minding you, loving you,

 

the air, the sea. Love:

one of those lost and found

 

words I hate to read

and can’t stand overused,

 

and lately, can’t stop

weighing and saying,

 

over and over: Love. Love.

Love. I can’t stop

 

the words engaging me

the way the bay can’t stop

 

holding this little boat.

Caught in a surge of

 

syllables I stutter love,

love like a thing

 

made to impede breathing.

You have to spit it out.

 

You have to breathe.

You have to let go.

 

Love’s in my lungs,

and I hold it

 

afraid of having too much.

In this I do not exaggerate.

 

Maybe this was the last sail

we’ll sail, the last time

 

we’ll say the word sail

together. How will we know?

 

A great day sail is all air,

beauty in gusts.

 

It offers too much.

We gulp as if air

 

is in short supply,

as if there’ll be no beauty

 

after this. There is

an end to beauty. Is this it?

 

 

 

 

 

D. E. Steward
The Carolina Road

Looking up the big-sky Keys, sense the continent is way out there off to the north but it seems to be nowhere near 

 

As the pre-spring melt moves farther and farther north, ducks shift north to nest in the long-light post-equinox days on northern lakes, coves and inlets

 

Anatidian wonders, near the end of February on the Atlantic coast’s ice-free ponds, black ducks, ruddy ducks, mallards, American wigeons, northern shovelers, lesser scaups, buffleheads, hooded mergansers

 

Dietrich Buxtehude’s stirring Ciaconia of BuxWV 137, firing reverential seventeenth-century awe

 

High on a wire exotic white-crowned pigeons, slate-gray striking

 

Off into the mangroves in their big-pigeon up-angled flight

 

The Lower Keys in February resplendent with large orange sulphurs (Phoebis agarithe)

 

A few even larger yellow-angled sulphurs in from Mexico

 

Enormous Mexico

 

Agape at a pile of tigre skins in the tiny thatched factoría on roadless Jalapa on the coast of Jalisco way back when

 

Packed down from Cerro Desmoronado, 2733 meters, locally Cerro La Tetilla, all over Mexico there are mountains called La Tetilla because tetilla means nipple, teta tit 

 

The big cats tracked, shot, skinned, hide brought back to the hunter’s settlement with gall bladders, hearts and livers for his family to cure and dry 

 

By burro into Jalapa, sold for zilch to join the thick pile draped over trading post racks waiting for the Guadalajara dealers to arrive

 

That Mexico gone now, and jaguars on the edge of North American extinction

 

Like the Carolina Road, the settlers’ route from Pennsylvania through Virginia in the 1740s and 1750s

 

Creaking axles, grease cans swinging, whips and goads, wagoners shouting and whistling, oxen moaning and splatter shitting, ice-crystal ruts broken to mud and dried out to dust 

 

The road for a fundamental eighteenth-century North American commodity, deerskins, those not shipped out from the port of Charleston

 

Later the Carolina Road was called the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, and its southern trace is followed now by US220 south from Roanoke

 

Farms in the snug hollows, some with their original old outbuildings, the highway riding the ridges, stream valley to stream valley, hamlets where they have been for almost three hundred years 

 

Across Virginia’s Franklin and Henry Counties, US220 is a Blue Ridge road still feeling like the Carolina Road

 

To become unrecognizable after its next transformation when Carolina business capital lays in the “I-73 Corridor,” Roanoke-Greensboro, on top of it

 

Greensboro on the way to Winston-Salem is a New South matrix of overshot onramp-offramp-overpassing-underpassing-outlet-motel-fastfood lined-out parking slots

 

Piedmont North Carolina of tobacco barns, flatland cabins, mules and bib overalls gone for two generations now

 

Headed down onto the coastal plain to the lowcountry Spanish moss bald cypress Indian-dugout Congaree National Park along the Congaree River south of Columbia

 

A working cotton gin between the derelict train station and the courthouse in St. Matthews, county seat of Calhoun County, shaggy 500-pound bales piled beside

 

Quiet like a Faulknerian Depression-era town deep in the winter Sunday afternoon 

 

Here where racial identity had quite a run  

 

Hernando de Soto marched through South Carolina in 1540 with two hundred horses and herds of hogs for provender

 

Brought along with his horses from Huelva and Cadiz, some hogs went wild and still thrive in the blackjack oak and swamp forests of the Deep South and East Texas  

 

Beaufort that night in gentle rain, ultimate low-country Beaufort River’s water bird and night heron gray-dawn wonder 

 

Then the Savannah of off-tourist coffee houses where the cohorts of educated, demi-artistic, tolerant, dog-friendly, regulars go

 

Neil Young, Harvest Moon, Cortez the Killer, Heart of Gold

 

That time tumbling away

 

Something about the South where geographic determinism holds valid within cultural imagination, and is problematic otherwise

 

Florida’s extra-latitudinal stretched dimension that has the quality of the extended spatial power of Norway and Chile

 

All the way there, down to the end of the road

 

And all the Conch Republic stuff, the Hemingway lookalike beard-growing, the Cuban coffee, the gay exhibitionism, Fantasy Fest’s goofy schwarmerei, the spring-break alcohol grind, the southern-mostism, the mostly shallow literary reverence

 

All of it works 

 

The AIDS horror slipping back into the collective archive as thoroughly as Hemingway’s suicide, Elizabeth Bishop’s ho-hum take on the Keys, and T. S. Eliot’s secretive gleet 

 

The aluminum shipping coffins waiting at the airport for transfer back home to Minnesota, Iowa, Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, are no more

 

The quiet hushed-voice Solares Hill cemetery burials are not there these days

 

The sad, short cortèges headed for the crematorium on Stirrup Key in Marathon moving over Cow Key Channel from one of the hospices on White or Williams Streets, or from a deathwatch at home, are rare now

 

Many fewer urns are brought back to town from Stirrup Key with ashes for spreading out on the Florida Straits

 

The willets, sanderlings and ruddy turnstones continue to work the beaches

 

The tarpon rise and heave in the marinas, the amiable sunrisers continue to show up on White Street Pier each morning on either side of seven o’clock to group, talk and gaze due east at sunup

 

People arrive in Key West from everywhere in this dangerous century

 

To fumble and blunder in effort to perceive as we stay smug and comfortable hurtling through space, riding our time alive

 

Back and forth and up and down

 

Everyone everywhere is savvy

 

 

 

Bog People

 An eerily mysterious crab spider, flower spider variety, Misumena vatia, five or six millimeters across, fluorescent green

 

And a summer solstice narrow-shadow creep later, a three-millimeter green beetle, redolent of a flatter, faster ladybug but with curved, quivering antennae

 

The rasping buzz of an eastern kingbird, Tyrannus tyrannus

 

High in a tulip poplar, eerie, primordial-tropic suggestive

 

Dapper flycatcher extraordinaire

 

Fruit-eating after meridional migration while gathered in vast winter flocks in southwest Amazonia  

 

One of the thirty-two tyrannids that breed in North America, there are three hundred and sixty-seven tyrannidae species altogether in the Americas

 

The spread of our Iguazú cataract of complex historical and escosphere lore

 

Viz. white-tailed deer were hunted effectively and provided more than half of Mayan protein and much of the rest came from puppy farming

 

Viz. el Camino Inca, the roads of the Incas, altogether over twenty-two thousand kilometers, some climbing to five thousand meters, the system had roughly two thousand post houses

Las Américas  

 

Europe’s flux and flow for five or six thousand years that most often has had to do with mass death of various sorts

 

Caesar ordering that whole Gaulish tribes be put to the sword

 

The Black Death

 

Verdun’s ossuary

 

The Great War’s trench warfare

 

Auschwitz’s Arbeit Macht Frei gate

 

Srebrenica’s psychopathic martial murders           

 

Spastic Euro violence

 

Local, general, chronic

 

Near-universal wars

 

Every mother’s son

 

As with the leathery Jutland bog people

 

Hundreds of these Iron Age execution victims uncovered in the peat 

 

Many from the days of Roman rule

 

Most hanged, drowned, many with their throats cut

 

“Into your virtual city I’ll have passed” – Seamus Heaney’s “The Tollund Man in Springtime”

 

The interesting un-violent European lore has most often been un-exotic

 

Royal celebrity and biographic fluff    

Like still another of Napoleon’s hats under glass 

 

Hannibal and the elephants this, Hannibal that, a catch-all Washington-slept-here

 

The ditch-irrigation systems in the Vallais often misattributed to the expertise of Hannibal’s Moorish soldiers who never got close

 

History as rumor, imagination, exaggeration

 

Bonae litterae

 

Jet-lagged, strike out from Givrins above Nyon, the big road for Martigny

 

Swing off into lakefront Lausanne and nap in a turnout on the water

 

Grey heron, white stork, mallard, wood duck, mandarin duck, coot, mute swan, ruddy shelduck, red-crested pochard, little gull, great-crested grebe 

 

Keep to the slow, low lakeside road for Vevey, downtown Montreuz and Chillon

 

Château de Chillon’s Burgundian roof tiles show best from the autoroute above

 

Well into the Alps by Aigle with two-thousand meter bare-granite peaks both sides

 

By Sion, the bad weather’s early darkness closing in with stratus-cloud fog scraping in off the heights

 

By Charmignan d’en Bas, quit, leave the switch-backing, narrow Crans sur Sierre road at nine hundred meters in the fog

 

Montana still way off above at fifteen hundred

 

My brother’s haunt in the fog here years now from his dying

 

We passed once down the Vallais toward France

 

With very little savvy about where we were and what we were about  

 

Driving point-to-point, Prague to Paris, as if there was nothing between

 

Our brash self-confidence, at the top of our game

 

Brothers as only brothers can be

 

And dumb as lug nuts

 

On a hot, clear, spring morning down to St. Leonard on the Rhône

 

A brass band festival led by flower-bearing little kids and teenage girls 

 

We stopped here in St. Leonard to gas up and didn’t get out of the car

 

My brother’s magnificent wrists and hands

 

His kinetic awarenesses

 

In Bacchylides’ underworld, “the souls of wretched mortals… like the leaves that the clear-blowing wind ripples on the sheep-grazed ridges”

 

Hus essence off somewhere over sheep-grazed ridges in the wind

 

Bacchylides’ mind pulsing away twenty-five hundred years ago

 

Bonae, bonae litterae

 

Bacchylides’ brilliant descriptions, “dazzling sea,” “woman with lust-inspiring limbs,” “gleaming headlands,” “thighs of oxen and fleecy sheep // burning in a blond flame on decorated altars”

 

Up above Crans-Montana hiking toward les Violettes below Mont Bonvin, spot a chamois on the graze before it sees me

 

But not close to catching its hircine scent

 

Extremely goatish, more goatish than dingos or bat-eared foxes are doggish, more goatish than Swiss kids marching with horns and a tuba are girlish  

 

More goatish than hovering parids are flycatcheresque

 

Chamois evoke stone tools, spears, being garbed in animal skins

 

The unsettling wild

 

In the Alps wildness is feral, semi-, ersatz, sometimes staged

 

With whistling marmots trucked around into roadside colonies for the summer tourists

 

As with the reintroduction of lamergeyers and brown bears

 

And like the startling presence of yaks on the other side of the Vallais above the Mattertal 

 

A silver-gray bull, two dark cows, two calves in a steep fenced paddock behind Embd just off the trail to the twenty-nine hundred meter Augstbordpass   

 

All shag-hanging low, lyre horns, forehead fringe dog-muzzle heads, angry eyes

 

Unbovine fast, peculiar rapid gait    

 

Probably stressed here below yak-normal Himalayan thirty-five hundred meter minimum 

 

In the Alps through imaginative Swiss entrepreneurial diversity
 

Swiss alpine with phone booths on the summits, fire plugs in the high hamlets  

 

Up the Turtmanntal toward the Forcletta’s 2876 meter passage to Val d’Anniviers

 

German to French, French to German Valais-Wallis linguistic hinge

 

The Forcletta on the western Latin-side becomes the Furggilti on the upper German-speaking slope

 

Then French and German share names along the high, naked ridge all the way back down toward the upper Rhône

 

German sprache from here on out east all the way to the Slavs

 

Weisshorn, Bishorn, Tête de Milon, Les Diablons, Frilihorn, Point de Tourtemagne, Meidpass, Bella Tola

 

Down the steep-sided valleys to Visp and Sierre 

 

May nineteenth so the sun is high, and the snow line is a soggy meter and more deep at about two thousand meters

 

Blocking the trail up the Turtmänna to the Turtmann Glacier below the Weisshorn-Bishorn language crest

 

The last plank bridge far back below in the gorge looks as small as a scissor-tailed flycatcher’s (Tyrannus forficatus) bill glimpsed through Amazonian foliage

 

Bare granite peaks flanking the Turtmann Glacier path 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Young
A line from Gary Snyder

Put one foot in front of the

other. Take in the whole

of the room. Move towards

the metaphors of science.

 

The software shows how

the behavior of touchstones

can be conceptualized. Un-

expected acts keep giving.

 

 

th'object of desire

he thought
that

whatever
was in it
for him

             was
     in it
     for him

until he
discovered

it was
     in it
     for 
itself

 

 

manoomin

 

Some of the African slaves brought by Columbus to be used on the sugar plantations of the West Indies carried the smallpox virus.

 

Wild leeks are an extreme food. Tens of thousands of stems congregate each fall on certain lakes.

 

Trade in coffee brought prosperity to the Arabian peninsula.

 

If the flowers bend over, how do the bees hold on? It’s one of the oldest puzzles in physics.

 

History let go of its box-kite.

 

She wore blue Destiny denim, gathered wild rice, made maple sugar. Little else is known about those years apart from the fact that the sword of love pierced through her.

 

The State of the Union is becoming a huge night for social media.

 

What a cabdriver told me

When fish turn

blue, the ocean

decides that spring

is just around the

corner. Cinemas

elope, the currency

of music devalues—

 

save for a South

Sudan reggae band

which sings plain

songs of farming.

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa Zimmerman
An Abbreviated Tour of Tantrums

Not your everyday end-of-the-world

with its hatred of celery, the bread too dry,

one pink and blue striped mitten, frilled

sock, tiny horses, lost, lost.

Not the sister’s cold ankles outside

the picture, not the picture itself

ruined by black marker, not

the whole day a ruin of  small

wooden blocks, not even sleep

unwilling to light softly down

on the sobbing ribcage and finally,

finally mean something.

 

 

 

A Beginning        

      After Lynn Emanuel

 

 

I want to get born so I invent the cool woods

 

at the edge of the military base in Belgium,

 

a carpet of spring moss, thigh high lily-of-the-valley

 

and their thousand little white lanterns. I invent numberless

 

bluebells, forget-me-nots, daisies, a pond in sunlight

 

where I scoop tadpoles into a jam jar to take home.

 

 

I want to get born so I invent friendly horses

 

grazing a pasture I can pedal to on my red bike,

 

my pockets packed with carrots and sugar cubes

 

stolen from the Delft blue dish in the cabinet

 

with the good china and the bottles of wine.

 

 

I invent afternoons of disappearance, bike or no bike,

 

far from my mother passed out on her bed,

 

 

the tadpoles growing tiny legs in the stale water

 

on the sill in the empty kitchen.