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Issue # 40 Spring 2019

 

Featured Poet:

Roger Mitchell

From Reason's Dream
published 2018 by Dos Madres Press

 

 

 

 

BLIND SEED

 

I can’t remember what they were
anymore, but I may not have wanted
all those things I said I did.
I just stepped forward and took one.
Or stood there and let whatever
it was take me. I know the past
is gone. A strange exhilaration
takes its place, like flying over
a country where you lived once.
You see it all, and yet see nothing.
Summer coming to an end,
leaves about to change, a blind
white-haired seed floats past the window.

 

 

 

 

 

DOG MOON TURKEY

 

The thick gristle of the wing bone of
the wild turkey lifting its gaggle off
the ground, the dog in a hopeful ecstasy
of chase.   
               That’s what I’d arrange to be
tomorrow if tomorrow were to choose
me as target.
                  A spill of bluets
on the grass now, dropped last night by a moon
carrying more milk than its bucket holds.

 

The turkey thinks it’s beautiful. The moon
plays Jackson Pollock on the grass.
The dog chases what it knows it can’t catch.

 

 

 

 

 

THIS IS MY HAND

 

On the way back, it rained. Wind blew
the rain, in regimented gusts,
across the asphalt, shivering
the car. The road, gray as the river,
kept to the river, led as though blind.

 

It was on this drive back in the rain--
I say that it was on this drive,
since these things rarely, if ever, know
where they come from–that I thought again,
as if for the first time, headlights
of an oncoming car sprinkling
into view, the slithering hiss
of the downpour turned up by the slash
of passing, and the wipers whacking
back and forth, spreading the water
like Vaseline on a piece of toast,
that I thought again, and hopefully,
for the last time, that I might drag
up from the bottom, shovel-mouthed
and scaley, squinting at the light,
some creature equal to the way
life happens on an afternoon,
flooded with sensation, but
with nothing on its mind to tell
where it came from, what it wanted,
other than to keep us rafting
this waterfall of urgencies
in a storm of interrupted calms.

 

Red thread, circle of flame, small noose,
I wear a string around my neck
these days. It’s supposed to protect me.
From what, I forgot to ask the man
who gave it to me. I knew I would need it
someday, so I took it and thanked him.
I may have always needed it,
but I had gone about the perilous
intricacies of being afloat
in the world without it, without
even suspecting I might need it,
not knowing such a thing could be.
And I had survived. I was still here.
This is my hand.
                        The little knot
at the front won’t stay at the front,
so I tug at it from time to time.
The perils I thought would be mine
were not, and the little string with the knot
that won’t stay at the front of the neck,
fraying, tied there until it rots,
reminds me of my ignorance,
that I will never exhaust it,
that the sun rises somewhere, always.

 

The charcoal greens of the white pines
wet down by last night’s rain packed tight
in cloud. We could be out in that field
counting the footprints of a vole,
the number of wings on a dragonfly,
how long it would take to forget
who we were, long enough to come
up with an answer. The fog hawks
slowly over the river stones,
lifts off when it has seized its meat.

Reading Durrell again. Exotic
isolation, exiles from
the ordinary, prisoners
of exquisite ripples drawn by the wind
across the sand. No past except
the palimpsest all pasts have scratched
faintly on our breath and breathing,
like the glacial markings on the bare
stone of the mountaintops I look at
each day. And floating through my mind
that line about the crow I wrote years ago
but couldn’t find a home for, and so let
rattle about at the back of my mind,
an idea stumbled on
in thinking, one that imitates
the hidden movements of the sky,
the crow perhaps, the crow itself.

 

Late May. The glower of the clouds
low in the shallow valley, river
trembling in its banks. The tall candles
of the pines begin to flare. Never
has grass been greener or the dirt
more lovely to turn. It falls with a sigh
back to the earth. Worms are ecstatic.
The beetle shouts, Come see, come see.
I bang the clods against the tines
of the fork. Dirt drops on the dirt.
I pick a stone from its teeth and take it
up to the house humming something
unrecognizable but true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

MOUTH

 

Maybe nothing is meant to be seen so,
but when I saw your mouth, your mouth alone,
neither in sleep nor silenced by thought, fear,
astonishment at our selves, for we were
alone, at last, in bed, not far from sleep,
I thought I saw the consequence of things,
the having to prevail over the hours,
in your lips, thinned by a nameless straining
after bliss, lips, as the poet says, I’ve kissed,
and not known then whether to abandon
what’s gone already or seek in the small
sag at the corner of your mouth where you
park your sadness, or your incipient moustache,
treasures, as I have, I will always find.

 

 

 

 

 

 

UP EARLY

 

Up early, out on the city streets.
Nothing open, a cold gray wind.
Someone’s walking up the block.
We agree to ignore each other.
A garbage truck throbs at the curb.
I look up into its compactor
to see what I’ve seen before,
what I know is there already,
but want to see again.

 

I want to see what a day is
before it is a day, a city
before it disappears into
its own enormity, the sun
a grid of orange glare off thirty
floors of glass, where even the first
siren, hollow, three blocks away,
sings the song of rescue, wail
of breakdown, cry of breaking dawn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BALLAD OF CHARLEY FELL

 

It might have been pitching that over-stuffed chair,
the one we were given, called Charley Fell,
into a hole in the ground.

 

I took it out to the edge of town
and tried to talk the attendant, Joe,
into leaving it next to the hole.

 

Someone might want it, someone stuck
with a board for a bed or a case of ague
or unreliable hair.

 

But Joe said no, just pitch it in.
So a perfectly comfortable gift of a chair
went down in that hole on its side.

 

It lay there, flowers all over its hide,
with the rest of the county’s trash beside.
I nearly cried.

 

Had I known how to put the world in reverse
that day, I’d have gone down into that hole
and dragged it back to the air.

 

I’d have taken it somewhere, anywhere,
side of the road, the taxi stand,
where on a slow evening

 

the drivers compare their fares and their tips,
introducing, now and then, quips
of a sort I could mention, but wont.

 

Though I can’t get that gaping hole in the ground
away from my mind, the getting and giving,
the cabbage and rind,

 

nor the laughter I used to hear from the porch
in the summer when they thought I was sleeping
upstairs, that hole in the darkness.

 

I got up this morning and went to the window,
and there were the comfortable, over-stuffed,
lumpy mountains again,

 

trees all over them, fishers and bears,
yodeling grandmothers, skimmers and pears.
Well, maybe not pears.

 

You may think I’m crazy, you may think I’m blind,
but something came up from a hole in my mind
called Charley Fell.

 

I’ve heard you can go to the moon in a shoe.
And, tell me, if you got an offer like that,
wouldn’t you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

PEOPLE WERE SURE OF IT

 

After two days, That’s it, they said, he’s gone.
No one survives that long out of our range.
A husband and father, as the papers
began to say. Fliers appeared in stores,
on church doors, as people readied themselves
for a truth they more than suspected, 
and started locking their doors against.
It’s never far off in a place like this.
The towns are small, but for some, not small enough.
There’s a splinter of hermit in most of us,
though we all know everyone’s business.
Stories fall into place quickly. The woods
are ripe for imagining. The roads, as well.
See how that house lurks in back of some pines.
Someone’s left a light on upstairs. What’s up
this dirt road, we wonder? Some secret door
to the world? A signpost says it: Keep Out.
That may mean you and me, but it means, too,
what comes up the driveway anyway,
what can’t be kept away.
                                     A week later
they found him at the bottom of a cliff.
Strange how few wanted to believe he just
stepped too close to the edge. Agreeing,
others wanted to know: the edge of what?

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRETTY GOOD DAY

 

Turned the compost in the compost pile,
broke back the creepers threading
the rusted chickenwire fence. Took out
the garbage and the year's first leaves.
Split wood and dusted the whole inside
of the car, deciding now was the time,
this year, to take it as far back as I could
to the way it was the day I saw it first.
Then eating in the Deli with the sweatered
Homecoming crowd and flipping through the paper
and the ads. I felt like I wanted to
come home, too, like I wanted to buy something.
I wanted to go somewhere, Indianapolis,
Chicago. I wanted to be in the biggest store
around, and look at things I couldn't afford.
I wanted to be left alone to make up
my own mind or talk with a friendly clerk
about things we don't know very much about.
And the clerk would be called away just
as we were beginning to wonder how much
cheese goes into a Chicago deep-dish pizza.
We would part, wishing the other the kind
of day you'd remember years from now
as the day you decided to live forever.
Later I would call a friend on the phone
and get his advice, something purely
mechanical, the thread on a bolt,
and thank him and hang up, and stand there thinking
of the friends I've dropped and not picked up,
the life I've come so close to, the life
I've ambled down the middle of in May.
Then, as the afternoon began to stir,
sun spilling lazily out of the trees,
going upstairs to take a nap, but instead
lying there thinking these things,
the words appearing suddenly and slow,
and the quiet of the evening coming on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SWANN SONG

 

I can’t watch Swann too long,
except out of the side of my eye.
Even now I want not to be
cantilevering down this line
to see the scales come off a fish.
I’m sure I have some email
I’d much rather complain about
having to read than watching
this rickety construction bleed
through the pores of his abject
but deeply manipulative need--
to what? Bed some equally
infantile member of the tribe
in hopes that love might emerge,
full-formed, out of the froth
of his fevered member? He would
shudder to hear such talk. I do myself,
watching him fumble, not only
with Odette’s diaphanous bodice,
but with the language of stammer
and sweated confusion (how can
it be so terrifyingly unclear which
emotion is real or comes first,
ardor or the narcotic of needing
to dine at a fashionable address?).
I don’t yet know how it will turn out,
but know from the movies the yowl
of hounds that have caught the scent,
the scrambling for cover under a bush,
and from a moment or two in the past,
the smell of there being nothing
inside my shirt, not even me,
just that stuttering muskrat, the heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

AT THE JOHN BROWN FARM

 

I do not know John Brown, but think of how
John Brown became John Brown and how it cost
John Brown his life, his sons, his wife, from whom
Higginson could wrest no more than a slur
of incomprehension visiting her here on the Plains
of Abraham. Abraham, of course, who would have drawn
a knife across the throat of his own child
to please God, had not God seen that and said,
your love mystifies even as it gratifies,
stop what you are about to do, and he did.
John Brown did not stop. What brought him to that brink
brings us still. We are camped below its cliffs,
again, still, our faces lit with its fires,
this time in Nablus, Tel Aviv, New York.

 

 

 

 

 

 

LETTER TO A THIEF

 

I am a little late with this,
but here, let me give you my big
lightweight 10-power Nikon
binoculars with 50-millimeter
openings to each eye-barrel.
Aside from making you seem to be
captain of a naval task force,
they let in extra light. You can see,
as if they were right there, things
that look like other things, things,
in fact, that look like nothing.

 

Many birds have flicked up suddenly
into these twin pop-bottle-bottoms.
Kestrel and crow, indigo bunting.
And only last week, a reedy bittern
stalking through the swampgrass
down in the draw. He looked silly,
I admit, with his neck slung down
like a snake low to the ground.
He thought no one could see him.

 

Now you have an implement
to assist you in your work. (Be sure, though,
to wipe the lenses after each use.)
And I, I have something, too.
Those things I mentioned, the ones
that won’t come near, except by stealth:
I see them a little better now.

 

As for that old Hewlett-Packard
286 laptop that I rescued
from a catalogue as it was slipping
into technological oblivion
eight years ago, it has all
my poems on it, good and 
not so good. I did intend
to get them out there, it’s true,
though the means of distribution
I had in mind was less, shall we say,
experimental, less complete.

 

I accept your offer, though.

The terms may be a little imprecise,
but the thought of them passing
from hand to hand in a dark room
or back alley, as though they were
a threat to the social order,
illegal in fact, contraband,
as though they might explode
on impact, snatch the breath
right out of the body, is as good
as a true, tight-fisted review
in a magazine with a few
dozen readers, kept afloat by a U.
with outriggering from one,
maybe two, local arts agencies.

 

I hear the critics singing a
capello: “So good, his work
was stolen.” “The only poet worth
a copyright.” “A poetry, at last,
for the hungry and dispirited,
the lonely and disinterested.”
People I have tried to reach,
in fact. And now, it seems, I have.

 

 

 

 

 

STORIES HAVE NO MANNERS

 

I'm listening to the words, but as usual,
watching something else. I hate myself for this,
but who could not watch as the tip of his cuff
nicks the top of the egg yolks smashed in the grits.
Some day next week he will take out the coat
and see the yellow scab and think how little
keeps us from drooling, even in a tie,
drooling when we should be driving, drooling
when we should be keeping the crazy bastard
at bay. It's the crazy bastard story again.
He doesn't want to tell it, but, like listeners,
stories have no manners. They track mud in
no matter how much you scrub, down on your knees,
and remind them, this is my tongue and groove,
my bunched little rug in front of the fire.
Is that running water, a bird up the flue?
You start making noises behind closed doors.
Friends think you probably ought to be watched
or at least let go. Though no one knows where.
There's no pasture out here for horses who
break down and cry. Horses who say on the sly,
I'm expecting a call tomorrow.
Horses who just want to sit under a tree
and look at a cloud. Horses who think too much.
You've decided to eat your grits and not
smash up the eggs and leave them dead on the plate.
And you're watching your cuff, for the first sign
that the story won’t lie down, won’t stay told.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE QUICKEST WAY TO GET THERE
            for the tenth annual Lotus Festival of International Folk Music,
Bloomington, Indiana, 2003

 

That’s Jackson Creek sliding down
into Yellowwood Lake, mumbling
to the stones it finds the sides of,
weeds it likes to lick. It’s quiet there
but never silent. In the reeds
at the north end, red-winged blackbirds
scrape their untuned fiddles. Turn left
at the eight-stone graveyard, and you take
Tulip Tree Trace up into places
so local only the maps know
their names. Sol Pogue Hollow for one.
When you reach Scarce of Fat Ridge,
look back. That’s Dubois Ridge
on the other side. At the north end of it,
where a nameless feeder creek
cuts a clean arc along the bottom
of Pattys Garden Ridge, a steep slope
of shagbark hickory, sycamore,
musclewood, green bramble and grape
spreads like a bolt of the woven earth.
The quickest way to get there, though,
is some version of a jig the Shenandoah
brought from Scotland that a Mongol
taught a Turk in the Dardanelles.
It’s apt to have the rasp of a cross-
cut saw, a catbird’s fiery clarity
and jump, but you won’t mistake it: song
that wraps the globe in un-mowed field.