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Issue # 45 Fall 2021
Poetry
Edited by Kevin Stein
Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing it’s not
the fish they are after.—Henry David Thoreau
He slaps the heaving body against a plank of pine.
The flared tail flops, beats. But he holds it firm, centers
the nail against the skull and drives the hammer down.
The blow stuns them, he says. It doesn’t feel a thing.
With pliers he peels away its glove of skin, slits
the belly wide, and with thumbnail rakes the guts
and soft organs out. Meat purse, meat sack,
emptied now—and empty too the hand he’d held
for hours, cradling its weight, his father’s hand,
its calloused fingers, dirt-embedded, manicured
by work and worry, hands that answered his
with slightest pressure, almost tender, until
there was nothing more they would say.
Released from that duty, he hacks
gutted meat with dull blows—once, twice—
and drops the slabs into salted water.
Taking the hammer’s claw, he rocks the nail
and wrenches it out, and pitches the spade-shaped
head into the growing heap: slips of skin,
barbs, offal abuzz with green-butted flies
and gnats, and one milk-colored eye.
He hooks his fingers into delicate gills
and lifts another body—heavy, thrashing,
sucking horribly for breath, the tail beating
frantically against the plank: the hammer’s
hard note. It feels nothing, he says.
Bluebells, bloodroot, trout lilies
beside an oxbow of the Salt Fork,
in a wood of shagbark hickories,
oaks, and sycamores. 200 years
ungrazed, unplowed.
Yet near the southern edge,
from midden waste, I pry Horlick’s
Malted Milk Lunch Tablets,
doughboy vigor and succor
for Hoover’s children. A mud-slicked
bottle no larger than my palm
and inside: a seed—palest tendril,
root hairs unwinding an inch or so
into a knot of mud. What boundary?
What restraint? What contains or binds:
the Salt Fork’s winding, the well
of a stump rimmed with mushrooms
no larger than an infant’s fingernail,
the trout lilies and their flowered flasks
slowly, slowly widened as if to pour,
squander, release. Every step here
bruises some striving, doesn’t it?
Some insistent and stalwart green.
The walnut that falls atop black sod is pah! and swa-swa
the broom’s insistence. I have not heard my father’s voice
in over forty years. I have only his whistle—a short note
followed by a long note—the shape of his breath.
Sounds too go extinct: the Latin Mass at St. Mary’s
(circa ’64), the click-tick, click-tick of a Royal Typewriter.
But still I listen. There is a jar fly and a hissing kettle
in my right ear. Ten thousand cicadas screech in the coils
of my cochlea. What is more musical, Cage writes, a truck
passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
Or maybe he meant the truck that dragged a man three miles
down a Texas road, or the delivery van aimed
at the middle of a crowd. In my left ear, starlings sharpen steel.
Passersby stop to listen to a pear tree. The blossoms hum.
Resonance. Echo. Doppler effect. The rap rhythms
in the movie soundtrack before the explosion, before the gun
or just after it. The nurses told us that hearing was the last
to go. Beside the corpse, a radio played the top ten.
Silence and then a small metallic click. But then no sound
is repeated, no word, no vowel, no sigh of breath. A carp leaping
from the waters of the Wabash. Armstrong inventing scat singing
when his sheet music slipped. Chaos first, invention after.
Who knows why the dead make you repeat everything. Come back.
Oh, come back. Maybe they no longer understand.
Maybe they just like your voice, that slight reverb.
The way words set in motion, drone, refuse to end.
Love
Find a man or a woman
and tell this person
who you truly are
and have this person
tell you truly
from the gray essence
of his or her heart
who he or she
truly is
And that -
if you survive it -
will be love
What I talk about here
is nothing more
then smudges
on a page
On turning 52 and thinking about sex
My vagina speaks to me now.
She hums in the shower,
counts sheep in the bed.
She has her own dreams
of being emancipated from me.
She wants to go somewhere
without a phallus or tampon.
She yearns for bubble baths
& massages.
I tell her, “You are not my pet.
You are my memory.”
Because she remembers
the violations of youth,
the stains of shame.
She knows the fulfillment
of choked life, unhatched eggs,
unborn children
who would have broken me.
vertebrae by vertebrae.
She knows the stench
of men & dancing.
She has spoken in oceans,
thrown her voice through the Atlantic,
consoled the ancestral spirits
at the bottom
who never knew new dry lands,
women who knew Yoruba,
yelled out to Yahweh, yet
died with their ovaries still intact.
This vagina is aware
that she has dry bones
in her center,
that her core is shrinking
inside me,
that my gray head is not as strong
as her gray-haired shield.
She has seen me shiver
from the inside.
Bore witness to
my strength in silence
as unfed youth ate itself
while sleeping. Chewed slowly.
What little divas do in the summer
when we were little, we ate orange push up sherbet
that melted down our forearms like a muddy river
in the Rio Grande.
Aunt Bunny’s Pomeranians circled
our sandaled feet & barked & yelped until
heavenly drops fell where they could lick
the uneven concrete that tripped us daily
when we played double dutch
or hula hooped; the grass was easier to navigate
we were chastised for crushing Chrysanthemums
& falling into garden patches of snap peas & tomatoes
or turnip greens (the most bitter greens)
when our play got rough & we became tired
only the orange cylinder of cold sweetness
could calm our exhaustion, leave puddles of pleasure
for little dogs and curt words from aunts
about not feeding those dogs or killing the garden.
we paid Auntie no mind; stepping lively over foliage
& canines, we graced the backyards of Chicago’s south sides—
little orange footprints showed our tyranny.
we know that the best dessert is a frozen sunset,
befitting little black city goddesses,
before counting calories & managing time
mattered. Before we became mere women.
I Lie Down in Bugleweed
I lie down in bugleweed.
Grass yet uncut.
Not seeing the apple
tree blossoms.
Too early for hickory
leaves. Leaves of bur oak.
Somewhere on this farm
chives mixed in the grass.
Somewhere glass.
Old metal. Barbed
wire made with sharp deltas.
Not with spines.
Iron working its
way down toward shale.
Frost driven. On its coldest
days, this
has been a frogless
spring. Wet
or dry, cloudy or bright.
Songless, silent
but for wind.
But how to describe
the tiny bugle flower's
bright blue? Its throat
like panes of
sky waiting for their crows?
Its many-notched
leaves? You lie on
a bed of cilantro! You'll
be served with bees!
Or to the bees.
For Honey? What wouldst
they make of thou?
You reach
under the rusted Dodge truck.
Tail pipe end
resting on
the bugleweed and grass.
You want to
pull the truck backwards
from where it's rolled.
Loosed from
all its moorings. Almost
up to a black walnut
trunk, but without
collision.
What, if going backwards,
the pipe would
anchor in the ground?
You tie the dangling end
up to the frame.
What if you could
tie up memory, too,
with bows of baling twine?
And how about
those births of memory?
The first lying on the grass.
The rolling into ditches filled
with orange day-lilies. Unmolding
from a cup, towers
of dampened sand.
The crayfish scuttering away
from the rock
your wet hands lifted.
Stroking mosses
more vivifying than God.
Branches rubbing.
Wind in the forest.
A spirit speaking, creaking.
Places you put your
cheek against.
Smooth dead wood. Patches
of cool earth.
Colophons of lichen.
What purpose drew you
to those places?
To calm your heart?
To fill it?
What was there...
but not at home?
There are
questions which both
should and
should not be answered.
Oh no. Oh no.
But, finally, Yes.
The layers of a life.
More than blades
of grass. More than
the crenelations rimming
every bugleweed leaf.
And so a morning comes
when our child-self
steps out of
our relentless eldering.
Spreading fingers, digging
fingertips into
a lifetime of strata.
Hunting with a cheek,
or forehead,
for that coolness
we once
searched for. That
welling up
from far below which
stanched our fear.
We know it's here.
We knew it well before.
Its creaking
reassurance. Its
unchurchy hymns.
Arias falling like leaves
from tremulous clouds.
Its light.
Its shadow.
Its flowing stream. We
recline an ear to
small blossoms made of sky.
Crossing Paths
At a big hotel in some forgotten city,
at a table of free drinks and snacks,
I loaded up a plate of shrimp cocktail
while you refilled your coffee cup.
We mocked briefly
the suited side of poetry,
its secret reptiles
and squabbling birds of prey.
You spoke with urgency,
as if I’d always been your pal,
then laughed and launched yourself
back into the swirling party crowd.
I’m sure you’d not remember me.
We never met again.
Had I the gift of prophesy,
I could have told you this:
the world is small, Jack,
and sewn haphazardly together,
accident by accident,
until a landscape is revealed.
You will marry someone I know.
A handful of your dearest friends
will one day be my own.
When sickness takes you early
from your Texas home,
your wife, in honest grief,
will bring your ashes to Vermont,
and I will help spread them
in a campus field
beneath a summer of stars;
and because my room there
had once, by happenstance, been yours,
our brother David and our brother Mark
will bring a remnant of you to my door,
and we will hide you in that room,
where I will sleep for years, soundly,
at an intersection of timelines
that defines our common home.
Not just for you and me, Jack,
but all of us,
begging our small way forward
on a short and rocky road.
for Jack Myers
every blade
unsharpens
over time
color fades
fruit drops
drop dries
strength falters
every breath,
light
goes out,
memory,
good or bad,
is lost
I am now here
I am not here:
one letter,
one infinity
of difference
which
to celebrate?
which
to mourn?
Eagle and Commercial-Grade Self-Propelled Leaf Blower
Some nature program showed me
eagles in Alaska
fighting over salmon in a stream.
Thirty below, and there they were
snatching frozen shreds of fish
from one another, squabbling on
the river’s brittle bank.
One tumbled in--
a fatal dunk for you or me.
But instantly it rose,
the ice balls on its feathers
failing to keep it down.
In the end
it was survival for them all.
I’m familiar with
degrees of cold myself.
I spent the afternoon maneuvering
my new commercial-grade
self-propelled leaf blower
around the cluttered acres of my yard,
cleaning up, or trying to,
the winter’s wet debris from forty oaks.
Of course, my only rival was myself,
but still I understood the stakes
as well as any eagle on a bank.
We’ve all struggled to stay aloft
amid hungry assassins.
I’m of an age when strain can force
a feeding frenzy in the blood.
Just yesterday my stroke doctor
died suddenly of a stroke;
we may be more endangered
than we know.
It’s true, no river rages through my yard,
but there’s a gully
slashing through the wooly slope,
and when it rains
the narrow bed clogs fast
with everything the storm brings in.
These fallen leaves are one more sign
of my undoing,
and I can let them rot in place,
or I can feed them to a whirlwind
of my own making, hoping
they will clear the fence along the highway,
and never blow back.
for David Jauss
Sally Zakariya
Rembrandt’s Elephant
He must have marveled at the sheer bulk,
the leathery gray, the long-lashed deep eyes.
Sent halfway round the world as a present for a prince,
Hansken the elephant drew Rembrandt’s gaze,
enticing him to draw her from life – the folds of her skin,
the pads of her feet, the curve of her trunk.
He immortalized her with charcoal and chalk
and etched her in the garden with Adam and Eve,
a symbol, then, of chastity and grace.
An elephant alone in long-ago Europe, paraded
from town to town, what did she make of him,
this earnest young man who seemed to peer
into her very soul as he captured her essence
line by line?
How did she bear the loss of her world?
They taught her tricks – to hold a flag, fire a gun, pick up
coins with her trunk – but not how to find the herd
they seized her from in far-away Ceylon.
She died too young in a plaza in Florence –
her last moments recorded in pen by a lesser-known artist.
But it was Rembrandt, scientists say, whose sketches
first portrayed Elephas maximus in all her weighty
anatomical perfection.
Beverly Hills
in Beverly Hills
restaurants leave water dishes outside for dogs
offer them complimentary biscuits
while hundreds of people sleep on the street
life’s not fair says everybody
but it doesn’t have to be so extreme
in Beverly Hills
I fell in love with a man with large brown eyes
and a smile that unties his whole face
he promised not to hurt me
the first red flag I chose to ignore
now I’ve collected enough
to sew a king-sized blanket
eight inches thick
in Beverly Hills
there is a clock repair shop that fixes dead watches
he emphasized his lack of time
his clock face stuck on not enough
there are clean white department stores
dripping in diamonds, fur-lined black holes
we disappeared inside
money can’t buy happiness
but it can buy a pair of Balenciaga sneakers
and Rolex watches security cameras
in case someone knocks, God forbid
we keep our doors locked
in Beverly Hills
there are tarpits where dire wolves
and saber-toothed tiger bones
bubble up from the depths of the earth
we puzzle their bones back together again
like I puzzle my heart back in my chest
button it up with iron clamps to close it tight
in case he comes back
in Beverly Hills
there is a man who sits on a wide white couch
folding his laundry and scrubbing his hands
he can see germs crawl up his arms
consume his skin
I can’t help but feel like I’m one of them
there are mansions and gardens and
hipsters drinking kombucha beer
I don’t feel at home here, on the streets
in the mansions
in the arms of a man
who dispassionately kisses my cheek
leaves me craving a taste I can’t yet name
there are palm trees blinking at the setting sun
a man full of fire and broken love
I thought I could change, a fool’s game
rolling dice down Rodeo Drive
hoping to turn a quick buck
I’ve run out of luck and this town
is a bad storybook ending
shattered glass slippers
frogs that don’t turn into princes
kisses that can’t wake me up
in Beverly Hills
there are clovers
peeking through sidewalk cracks
a man left wondering where I am
folding his laundry
and washing his hands
this is dig-to-the-bottom-of-the-coffee-pot work
drink it up and chew the grounds
look around
you’re gonna die someday
so am I
and it’s terrifying, right?
the preacher-man who baptized me
dropped dead of a brain tumor
rumor said he had a mistress
and the whole damn town ignored it
smiled at his wife in the grocery store
their Christmas cards
had all four of them splayed
across the page
a mother a father two daughters
and a mistress not pictured
but boys will be boys, right?
and the women who raise them
will look away
and the women who marry them
choose to stay
after he died a new preacher arrived
she was anointed in holy water
kind, a big smile, big heart, big arms
the better to hug us all with, but
half the congregation left
fled like sick sheep dodging a lion
my family sat in the third row from the back
singing and swaying amazing grace how
sweet the sound let’s admit out loud
a woman isn’t good enough
I grew up and moved away
but the church aged in place
stained glass collecting dust
collection plates rusting
last Christmas I yanked out my heart
and bit off a piece for my mother
who wanted to lift up her hands and sing
oh, come oh come Emmanuel
pushed a ten-dollar bill in my hand for collections
hoping they’d dust the stained glass
wishing the season would pass
the church makes me sad
I don’t know about God, but I know
he’s not angry at me for leaving
for having sex, battered relationships
guarding my heart
against the men in church walls
who wait for foundations
to crack and shatter
so they can save us from sins
we didn’t commit
I found a Christian in my bank account
squeezing it dry so I gave him my tithe
and now he’s a stained-glass winder duster
in this cluster-fuck called life
I’m not afraid of dying
when I lay down at night
more afraid of dreams haunting me
the Sunday school teacher
who breathed down my neck and caressed it
who complimented my developing breasts
who might read this poem someday
and cringe at the word mother fucker
not knowing I wrote it for him
the preacher man moaning and wailing
as the holy spirit coursed through his veins
afraid his humanness would show its face
it’s all a brigade
we can quit marching anytime
quit this fistfight with ourselves
nobody else
can get to the bottom of our coffee pots
dig up the grounds and swallow us whole
look shame in the face
and it’ll disperse
but that’s not anything
I learned in my church
poor white America
loves 23 & me
I am 10% Irish
22% German
18% Cherokee, and half
Norwegian, I hold onto that
know half what I am
can map out 50% of my family tree
on ancestry.com but here’s the messy thing
about poor white America
my father’s father was a rough, raging farm boy
who planted a child in a teenaged mother
and abandoned them both when my father was three
that rough farm boy stole half of my history.
When I look at my past
I see a great grandmother
who sang Norwegian lullabies
read me nursery rhymes
bjornen sover bjornen sover
i sit lune hi
she lost her hearing at 33 and
lived 60 years wrapped in silence
I see a mother whose own mother died
of breast cancer, back before medicine
held any answer, her chest
turned black from radiation she spit
faen helvete at nurses and patients
who couldn’t understand the foreign words
dripping from her angry tongue
I am from a strong and fiery past
but most days I’m not certain who I am
we are a nation of immigrants and refugees
who scratched and clawed and climbed
our way up out of muck
some of us less lucky than others
now, poor white America wonders
what happened, how did we wind up
in dying coal cities and farm towns
the rest of the world has forgotten about
we look for our history anywhere we can find it
America isn’t a heritage, yet
our nation is six generations thick
and our people long for identity
for full family trees
but poor white America has
fractured our edges
unbuttoned our seams
fucked and screamed
and beat each other to death
looking for answers
to questions we haven’t asked yet
so we give each other DNA kits for Christmas
add up percentages: I
am 10% Irish
22% German
18% Cherokee
and half Norwegian
I hold onto that
at least I know
half what I am
Spirits
I’ve just read that a typical Yalie downs at least four shots
of spirits before heading out to party. “Spirits” brought
me up short—neon word humming blue alongside the crimson
“Beer” in Al’s Liquors’ window, milkshake residue glazing
my lips as I craned around to verify, then asked the fifty-third
question of the day, my father’s rumbly answer conjuring
all these centuries later the piquant slosh of witch hazel
in the green-labeled bottle taken down from a high shelf
for growing pains or bursitis or what remained of her corns
once my mother had filed them smooth. What about
the spirits in the kitchen cabinet, shoulders dusty, caps black,
motley troopers grabbed by the neck after Sansalone
healed the transmission or Totossian cadged kerosene to warm
the shed where he carved ducks & otters all winter?
Did the The Last Pinochle Party consign the spirits to silence?
Drain the convivial Manhattan the best uncle would sip
before driving to Tuckahoe for midnight eels? Kill the schnapps
that tickled Rose? Banish the brandy that numbed
our blotchy throats? Was the brown one scotch, the gold rum,
the one we thought water vodka or gin? Crammed
in our attic room, my brother & I breathed smoke as we tuned
the transistor to the Big Boss With the Hot Sauce—
the Del-Vikings, the ubiquitous Supremes, scrapple ads, fire sales,
call-ins pledging precious love as “Unchained Melody”
swelled in the crackly background just right for the night
of tinkling ice & braying joy that distilled hours later
into our parents’ glass-shard fox-trot—mother’s shrill purr,
father’s baritone wheedling, then silence thickened
in yellow lamplight till syncopated slamming tucked us in.
Some Yalies shoot eight or nine shots, numbers that jam
my head deeper into the pillow doubled under my neck, a stinkbug
dabbing across the skylight, cat staring atop the bookcase.
The dewy scholars settle on strategy, agree on tactics.They prepare
to let loose as they liquor up, primp & pose with the fierce
commitment they bring to everything. How quaint the swigs
of cherry vodka that first laid me out! In my winsome mind,
I belly up to the bar on the Stagecoach set & demand that bottle
of tea right back of yer head, pardner, less’n you’d like to eat
the blanks in this here six-shooter. The article calls it social bonding,
pack behavior, primate preening unaltered since humanoids
first roamed the savannah yet detects a new variety of sorrow in it,
adventure become despair. I can taste the sour paste the spirits
leave behind as scions & hyper-literate orphans verify haunch-tilt,
pec-clench, perfect fall of hair across brow.I’m no ostrich,
no latter-day Carrie Nation, no chest-shaven talking-head lying
about that threesome in Boulder with Eros & Thanatos—
but four shots? Before keg fee, tubing, chants, funnels unrelenting,
the veering to the commode to make more room? Why prepare?
Way back at The Bird, I may have breached five shots a few times,
but the sum mattered less than the gestalt of muzzy philosophy,
lust, quarter-a-game pool & peanut shells crunching underfoot
as couples wobbled around to “The River,” “Crazy Love”
& every last Bob Seger slow song. After closing, sweet melancholy
over-brimming my heart, mind a licking flame of weary gnosis,
belly laden with the bar’s get-home-safe eggs & hotcakes, I’d walk
the frigid streets, the clarity of things beckoning, a hushed
immanence huddled close. I thought a Norse god the whiskey
my students use for their rev-up grog, thought oracular
the retsina soothing the swelter of July, 1979, crossed with the gold
tequila of Medford the threshold of the sublime. Spirits crowd
around me now, wraiths perched on the railroad watch, the heirloom
baseball, the Masonic sash & Rotary pin. A New Haven friend
I’ll call Jane once recited Yeats in a phlegmy brogue halfway down
her third glass of brandy. Yale awed her not, the Ivies a stew
of straw & slave blood. We sautéed scallops, told tales of East Texas,
mooned over Nina Simone, the cigar factory & Stein’s halvah,
drank ourselves wise. Yale holds no Friday classes, so things rev up
Thursday afternoon as thousands of whip-smart chemists
saturate solutions soon to precipitate three days dazzling enough
to blind Dionysus. Oh sylphs of cul-de-sac & scholarship,
post-industrial anchorites breaking free of stacks & digital array:
carnival will kill, masquerade exalt, appetite gnaw,
gristle & bone. May spirits remain risen seems a deluded wish,
but visions have drenched me & mine, abandon’s truth
deep-rooted, no matter how long dormant or expertly poisoned.
Declaration at the gate
a garden gate
a gate halfway down the drive
a gate air passes through
an ornamental gate at first sight
a gate with a padlock I notice only later
a gate secured for the lockdown to keep strangers out
a gate to stand either side of 5m apart
a gate to stand either side of wearing masks
a gate preferable to texts, calls, email and Zoom
a locked gate keeping out hugs
my friend has the key
keeps it in her pocket
we stand at her gate
our words pass through masks
between metal bars
we leave small talk behind
I get straight to the point
my declaration at the gate
I have breast cancer
I read her face above her mask
Chopstick Commandments
1. Avoid one chopstick longer than the other in a pair
That would recall what a coffin is made of
2. Don’t plant them in the middle of bowel of rice
Or dish, like a scent burning for the dead
3. Never use them to poke around in a dish
In the way a tomb raider works hard in dark
4. Put them strictly parallel to each other; or you
Would have yourself crossed out as a deplorable error
5. If you drop one or both of them on the ground, you
Will wake up and provoke your ancient ancestors
6. If you use them to beat containers like a drum player
You are fated to live a low and poor beggar’s life
7. When you make noises with them in your mouth
You betray your true self as a rude and rough pariah
8. Never point them towards any one if you
Do not really mean to swear at a fellow diner
9. Make sure not to pierce any food with them while eating
When you do not mean to raise your mid-finger to all around you
10. To use them in the wrong way is
To make yourself looked down by others
Self-Addressing: A X-Cultural Poem
In English, the speaker always uses
A proper pronoun to address self
In Chinese, the speaker calls self
More than one hundred different names
In English, there is a distinction between
The subject and object case of self
In Chinese, there is no change in writing
Be it a subject or an object
In English, the writer spells self with one
Single straight capitalized letter
In Chinese, the writer adds to the character
‘Pursuit’ a stroke symbolizing something
In English, “I” ask for democracy, freedom
Individuality, rule of law, among others
In Chinese, “我” is habitually avoided in making
A reply, either in writing or in speaking
Assisi
the church my father visited
in wartime has partly fallen
in a subsequent earthquake
its frescoes now on three-
dimensional jigsaw pieces
scattered over the ground
almost saints themselves
for their fidelity
in rendering sacredness
the painters who depicted heaven
on these walls and ceiling
have almost made them so
the voice of the spur-wing plover
eldritch and dissatisfied
breaks out over the cold park
these June mornings
as if everything we’ve done to the planet
is coming now to haunt us
after the dog has been walked
the outer coat and another layer
shed and hung up
and the kettle chugs in the kitchen
all is as well as always
within our cramped attention span
yet it’s like mourning a loved one
distant but irreducibly dear
to sit sipping tea at the paper-strewn
so commonplace table
and ignore what the colour
at the corner of the sky is telling us
APOLOGIES at a certain age
I apologize for opening a suspicious email
I apologize that my password list is not updated
I apologize for my erroneous bank sign-in and getting locked out
That I forgot to order new checks on time
Losing the safety deposit box key
I apologize that I tried unjamming my printer before making a call
I apologize that I reached for the crystal vase without using a step stool
For dropping an oven mitt on the hot stove top
For leaving the oven on overnight
I know I misplaced my credit card, and for that I apologize
I apologize for not muting myself during a live music program
For not realizing that I was unmuted
For answering the phone and talking
For my unconscionable disruption
I apologize for the slip of my potty mouth
I apologize for crying to my grown children
For crying
But I found my credit card
Please / allow me / to introduce myself
The display tray outside the
bookstore is filled with works
on war & death. Sun Tzu is
there beside The Egyptian Book
of the Dead. So, too, are pictorial
histories of the Second World
War, books on the Nazis & their
occult fixation, aircraft anatomy,
& The Way of the Samurai. I am
slightly puzzled where the book
in a corner of the bin fits in, the
704 page The Rolling Stones: all
the songs. The taxonomy seems
off to me, but then I never rode
a tank, held a General's rank.
How Spring 2020 Arrived During the Pandemic
Faint tap of a woodpecker on the pine tree, chatter of squirrels
as the old cat passes below, gray fur a sagging garment he wears now
over his narrow bones, his spine like a zipper.These days there’s less whoosh of cars
rounding the curve of road on the far side of the lake, less drone of aircraft overhead
when you leave your quiet house to walk the path down to the water, hand shading
your eyes to follow a pair of geese flying in tandem across the pale green expanse,
the creak of their wings like the sound of a door softly closing in the room
where someone you love is sleeping.
Dead Tree
It fell apart in the strangest way,
a thing of infinite bone that never
stopped, that courted fire, that remained
a home base for hide and seek, for green vines.
I am trying, these days, to redefine,
to redistribute. The bat has a bell-
shaped heart, and the doomed young man has a heart-
shaped box. The dead tree will not be distracted
from its long goodbye. I am trying, these days,
to tell the chocolate from the rabid wing.
That sounds a bit dramatic. Perhaps, I am
falling in love with the idea
of a tree being replaced by its shape,
a shape emerging from what’s no longer there.
ghost shoes, solidly
finally, a person I recognize
it’s me, age 12, 1983
you need a note from a doctor
saying that you can’t remove your shoes in public
without a note from your doctor
trash was the daily diet of the people in the city
they had purple hairdos like the sun
the sun and its tentacles
the sky opened up and rained fish
buildings of the future will be made of cheese
haha! earth will eat itself
wow from the first
dirt
Center Pivot
The One I Love is a Pilot
Reading outside, I underline this line,
Joy Harjo:
we are here to care for each other.
She means humanity; I mean you.
A plane flies overhead.
I am not an intellectual -
never let me claim to be one.
I am a superstitious woman.
That I live by the airport, that the air
schedule is regular means nothing.
Tea leaves, give me tea leaves.
When I see that plane, that plane is God.
And she is speaking to me,
nodding her medusa-haired head,
saying in her smoker voice,
yes, hon,
you are here
for him.
Look for the Girl with the Sun in her Eyes
It’s one of those brilliant days in the fall
when you can see the leaves float down from the sky.
My daughter is holding her new pup for me to greet.
The dog looks a bit lost, and she’s afraid of me.
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly–
a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
My daughter is saying something kind and perceptive
about rural life. About healthcare and poverty.
I have a hard time focussing–
as if I’m immersed in some thick substance.
Yesterday, I learned that my friend died.
How can you talk to a person one day, and the next all goes silent?
Her last text message was “Gd night” and a smily face
with exposed teeth–more like a grimace.
We knew each other since we were young mothers.
First I worked for her, later she worked for me.
Money would change hands, then we’d hug goodbye.
During our breaks, she’d sit in her beat-up truck, having a cigarette.
I’d resist the urge to give her a hard time about it,
and she knew that, of course.
One time, painting the floor in my house,
the two of us launched into singing along–
Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
In the hope of winning over the pup as a friend,
I strip out of the worn shirt I’m wearing and offer it as a token.
The dog seems pleased, chewing on my scent.
On the lawn, red maple leaves stir under foot.
Her smile was contagious–upbeat and brave.
Its largess would straddle our town’s unwritten divisions
which are much like any small town’s unwritten divisions.
People would stop by at her place with a six-pack.
When her late mother’s house became unlivable
with black mold, she moved into the garage.
Someone brought over a load of wood.
Her bathroom–a bucket, a bowl. And that was that.
Next fall she put a rickety camper in the yard.
She beamed. “Best purchase I’ve ever made.”
Things too-good-to-toss started filling up the garage.
Marihuana plants grew tall in bins on the rotting porch.
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers…
The last time I saw her, she was in pain.
Seated in the afternoon’s pale sun, she was trimming buds
and spreading them to dry on cardboard.
She was pleased: “That should last me all year!”
Waiting to take you away.
She told me once she was scared.
We were clearing out the attic of my barn,
and she hung a crystal in the window.
“In my family,” she said, “no one gets old.”
My daughter’s tiny house is as neat as a flower.
I imagine the young dog will bring a bit of disorder,
gnawing furniture, yipping at strangers.
Our town–barely fastened
to the edge of this continent–has room for it all.
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes,
and she's gone.
When I’d stop by on my bike,
she would emerge perfectly radiant
from her cluttered porch to greet me.
And now–who will remember the two of us together?
For Patsy
Crazy is an understatement.
I’ve always felt a fixation—
that I have to immerse myself
in something other—and it used to be you,
when I could stay up past midnight.
Now it’s a mid-life compulsory
need for excess and I find myself walking
away not only from you but from me.
I turn you on and am back
in a baby blue canopy, a bright green cassette tape—
my first—playing on repeat,
when I had no one to mend the pieces,
and part of my crisis is I don’t want to run
into you but me.
I’ve been spackled
and repaired but it’s women,
who’ve helped put me together.
I hear your throaty voice,
and rather than hang onto sentiments,
I’ve returned your bracelet for a sapphire necklace,
and I wear it to remember
that I was myself once.
I’ve got a picture of a woman painted in blue,
her face the whole front surface of crumbling cement,
her hair curling down into the trellises,
her eyes casting upwards,
no need for cloying words or empty intentions.
I don’t want anything more
than to consummate with something new,
to feel the high of doing wrong.
I am the weeping willow—
have always been—
and I’m tired of posturing.
I want one lucid evening
where I let you accost me.
I do not need a bannister—
you forgot the name—what is it?
A railing.
I’m done being a railing for you.
Allison Thorpe
Upon Reading that Annie Oakley Kept a Flower Garden outside Her Tent While Working with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show
What a business
Resuscitating history
Day after day pumping romance
Into unbridled aggression
Every performance
A lingered stink
Of smoke and horse sweat
So deep in the lungs
It fashions another heart
Man and beast stampeding
Earth into one dusty bruise
The onslaught of settlements
Daring stagecoach skirmishes
And in the wings a silver haired
Cowboy waits to save the world
In the midst of such hardness
She wraps her evenings
In primrose geranium hollyhock
Like a fragrant shawl
Her fingers a throbbing ache
Of triggered exhaustion
Now gently caress blooms
Filmy as a moon’s whisper
Before she releases the tent flap
A BEGINNING
Thoi gian van can do
--Ngo Tu Lap
Time is, indeed, still there
and for the ghosts of veterans
time is getting more reflective
decade after decade.
They will sit on the grass, share
sandwiches and bottles of wine,
not one thinking of using
the word enemy.
While the peach blossoms swirl
around them, they will ask
“How could we have been so foolish
in those times?”
Suite of Cranes
Lifting off
Her first steps toward flight
are the hardest:
she has a heavy body
and predators lusting
after the sweet oil
of her skin—
she needs to split her dangers
into smaller things
with her powerful beak,
twist her long neck
into surprises catching
hunters up short
in order to free herself
to the sky.
Soaring crane qi gong
This is where you get the feeling
of flying.
Inscribe your movements on the air
following the bent wings
and long legs
of cranes,
soaring.
Steady your eyes
to level your qi.
You were not born
knowing how to fly
but crane can show you
how to balance your
weight with your breath--
how to fold your wings
to your heart
trusting the earth
to catch you
where you land.
Crane music
Their voices flow
into a pond of sound--
throat-singers
talking over the night
in your dreams.
Crane prayers
Sadako Sasaki was two years old
when the bomb hit Hiroshima,
irradiating her with poison
that made her blood lose
its sense of direction.
She was a child
with an eclipsed future when
she began to fold cranes
like those navigating the wind
in origami strings
on temple walls
honoring the birds said
to live a thousand years—
long enough
to carry our prayers
to heaven.
Fences III
When the ground is yielding but not muddy,
we gather locust posts,
a giant spool of barbed wire,
a pail of silver staples,
and that tool that twists or pulls out mistakes.
My head unravels last night’s dream:
a strange man, a river, a city I never lived in.
Newly married
I’d pack a thermos of coffee
and homemade sour cream cookies,
as if it were a holiday to work with you.
Now I bring water, some pretzels.
The Massey Ferguson mutters
and black clots belch from the tailpipe.
Our good dog runs ahead,
ears and tongue flapping like laundry.
You gave him to me when I was sad
and couldn’t say why.
You stand in the bucket and instruct.
I sit in the driver’s seat, try to listen
without shaking, my hand on the lever where
up is down, down is up
left and right level and spill.
At your ideal spot, I hop out,
hold the post steady while you drive it down
with a black rubber mallet
big enough to crush my skull if you miss.
This is trust,
and I do,
despite those teenage girls you jog with at six a.m.
I don’t run anymore
and I lust for things I never used to,
hammered silver and green turquoise rings.
You say I don’t need them; I should let my hair go grey,
be natural, how I used to be. I don’t say,
there are scars across my belly
and my skin is loosening.
I need something shiny.
You come to all my readings,
ask for a poem as prayer before meals, before company.
But there’s no money in poetry.
You want me with a real job
so I won’t get bored or become a hermit.
I want you with a real job, too,
one not related to the church or the poor,
one that would give us health insurance,
let me stay home to write similes and metaphors,
but you won’t work for the evil empire.
After each post is planted, I squint one eye,
look down the line.
This fence work never gets done—
storms will loosen and crack it,
tree limbs will fall,
a ram will reach his neck through the wires
to nibble a briar leaf,
a ewe will leap over—
still we stretch the barbed wire
as if we can keep anything from wandering,
the coyotes from slipping in.
A Women’s Suffrage Protest Flyer at the Bodleian Library in Oxford
It’s dated 13 June 1908, printed on Japanese paper
(washi), delicate yet strong, made from kozo bark;
the flyer is printed with flowers all along its border.
But this is no tea party announcement: in the center
are mug shots—twelve women—fierce, stark—
the protest will be 13 June 1908 it says on the paper.
This is when The Mikado is in revival in the theater:
women’s protests, like Yum-Yum on stage, are a lark
to men—like a suffrage flyer with flowers as a border.
London shops display Japanese paper lanterns, umbrellas—
but Mrs. Burgess warns this won’t be a walk in the park,
though she’s printed the protest flyer on Japanese paper.
(Emmeline Pankhurst wants deeds to match words on paper—
including bombs and assaulting a young Churchill at dark—
so this flyer means business, though flowers are its border.)
The twelve mug shots might have appeared like theater—
but England’s on a powder keg, and this flyer is a spark.
The flyer, dated 13 June 1908, is printed on Japanese paper.
Mrs. S. Burgess has printed it with flowers along its border.
GEO-GENEALOGY
The old churn on the front porch came from Johnny Oxford on Rte. 70 who said it came
from the back porch of a farm on Startown Road near Lincolnton where they said it came
from some old-time Catawba Valley potter who couldn’t remember where the clay came
from but he bought it off a guy who got it from a bank near Granite Falls and then came
from there to sell it to potters like the Hartzogs or the Reinhardt brothers who both came
from Vale and sold their farm to Burlon Craig whose son said that the wild clay that came
from the Catawba banks is composed of compressed particles of cosmic dust which came
from the stars that exploded billions of years ago but everything I learned about clay came
from textbooks that said most of our clay comes from silicates and aluminates that came
from the earth’s crust and that even the tobacco spit alkaline glaze on our old churn came
from earth’s minerals such as lead or manganese and the ugly name, “tobacco spit,” came
from when it was fired the glaze ran down the sides of the churn in golden brown rivulets.
The Long Drive
The burning orange sun in the morning,
white cloud like a shark on the
bottom of the black sky threatening,
a gunmetal color that made me think
of lawmen and outlaws, what I
saw on the long drive to go to
work, and the transformer blowing
up white sparks, eating fast food,
a man in the backhoe digging a grave
in the cemetery in the night with
the yellow lights by the turnoff,
coyotes, a bobcat, the black cows
in the black shade on a hot day,
news, hard rock music, the horses
on the fence post watching me
drive by, flat tires, gas stations,
on the weekends my daughter made
the drive with me, we talked,
I tried to give advice, a little sad
about the situation, hoping that
she knew that I tried to do my best,
the white egret eating fish in the
pond with the tall pines bordering,
the bridge where I hit the deer
next to the little Baptist church,
the riding lawn mower on fire
and the man watching it in his
front yard, road work, delays,
the red cow dead on the side of the
blacktop after getting hit by a car,
and the truck stopped waiting for
the train to pass by with graffiti
on the freight cars by the feed store
with the windows rolled down,
I had to move in with my parents
after the divorce and it was leaving
in the dark and returning in the
dark, long days and long nights,
the barn owl in the oak tree above
me early in the morning, all the stars,
the wild hogs, the bluebonnets,
Indian paintbrushes, buttercups,
boys playing baseball at the field,
the bloodshot eyes, the red moon,
blue heron, the sun going down,
and the orange fox that I saw near
the house, the hard dirt road,
a good Merle Haggard song to listen to.
Essential Undertakings
The failed and foreclosed farms
all over the north, the Anabaptists
are saving them with their economics
of sweat equity and simplicity,
webs of supply and support
spun through the center
into our cold deep winters,
our dark waters that will take
whom they can get. Last summer
two Amish farmers sank their boat
to a depth of eight feet while fishing,
even shallow lakes still ache
with the grind of the glacier, this
close to Canada. By the second
day, divers brought both up
from the bottom. Their wives
had a question for the funeral
director who wanted to know
whether he could correct the men’s
coloring with makeup. The women’s
question was, what is makeup?
How My Master Taught Me to Write
I was nine when I knelt before him
and pleaded,
please, Master, please,
tell me which way I should look to write.
Close your eyes.
Close them, he ordered.
Oh, look within, sure, he meant! I smiled.
He had already taught me metaphor.
Instead, on the cheek,
he gave me a hard slap.
Now, you tell me, child, if it matters
which direction your head turns to.
All you can think of is your pain
and where it acts.
My cheek!
But where’s the loss?
Where there’s loss, there’s poetry.
What’s your loss?
Your ha-hand,
I stuttered.
He hit the other cheek.
You’re after gain.
Look for your loss.
Pain’s gain. Your loss,
where’s it? Listen. Listen
to the outside.
I did:
a buzzing nothing.
Listen deep.
I heard,
I thought,
a pile of papers flapping,
a door slamming shut,
key chains jingling,
a car’s horn,
the asphalt humming.
Get up.
Get up and look outside.
I saw a boy’s back
in Barcelona jersey—
on it written 10 Messi—
a blue ball under his arm, being retrieved
to his friends across the street.
When I felt my hot, throbbing face,
with him, all else was retrieved from me.
That indifferent area, outside the window,
is your loss.
Both around and away.
Both tranquil and savage.
It always pokes you,
but never touches.
Never does. And never,
never be that vulgar
who writes about the thorns of life.
Great ones never do.
Now, apple!
He pointed at the fridge,
sitting down to his newspaper.
I gave him the apple.
He ate.
I watched.
