Big City, Little
Prague
The
Hunger Wall
James Ragan
Obscurity
James Ragan
Ice
Storm
Viktor Tichy
Pillar
Maureen Holm
Praha
Photo Exhibit
Kimberly Burwick
After walking to the bridge at Karlova,
We were just about to treat our hunger
well
for only moments, then again, the
impulse
The feed the hunger wall, the waitress
points,
we found the river where at dusk
the swans
dipped their beaks into the falls
for sanctuary.
The trees closed in for shade. We
gazed
through willows to the opposite
hill, a single
light from a room growing thick
with sadness.
Solemn smoke now cooked the evening
meal.
when, out of sunlight, undeclared,
a shaded mass of stone began to
stretch
its neck along the slope.
It would scan the water for a quarter
hour
before the foliage rubbed its throat,
some internal hunger now assuaged
thumbed like whalebone on a drum.
The poplars began to rustle. A hawk
spiraling, like an aspen deep in
chatter,
betrayed its nest to block the sun.
The dam below rose up to boulder
water
as if to show how easily wars are
won.
the fingers in her skirt rubbing
coins
her hand is shoring up to feed the
past.
I don't want the poor to endure
me, she says
King Charles said to those he paid,
as he watched
their faces, building borders, hunger
for a wall,
as she faced the smoldering Vltava,
watching hunger well.
(Prior pub. Trafika
and The Hunger Wall, Grove, 1997)
Pulitzer-nominee,
James Ragan, has read for four heads of state, including Václav
Havel.
He was born in Slovakia.
for Jan Zajic (1950-1969), the second human torch to protest the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague
There goes the night not knowing
what
He must have forgiven the debt his
teacher
He might have counted as redemption
he must have known were saved at
Ty'n
He believed it is the found wisdom
of an age
Here comes the imitator echoing stolen
words.
saying there goes the wind not knowing
what
There goes a noun, unpronounced,
into obscurity.
it is seeing. A boy has cut his
lip shaving
and rinsed the basin free of blood
his hand had salved into the mind
for no thought
in particular. At dawn he shot a
heron.
owed, perhaps, the promise of the
moon
above his head forever, or a noun
his erratic tongue had failed to
annunciate.
each lace of breath the girl had
stroked
into his wailing hair at St. Vitus
Lake.
He must have known. There ring the
bells
for Palach, for the first to run;
the pact
to torch imagination remembers only
one,
no matter what the name, what the
home.
not to forgive the sins of a nation,
how the catacombs at Staré
Me?sto
age with molding chalk of poets'
bones.
Here runs the conspirator across
the cat heads
of Karluv most, every rib
of stone
a memory of loss, a birth into the
every tongue,
it is hearing. There crawls a leaf,
a moon,
and flames. There trips the clock's
second hand,
which every moment tumbles deeper
into everywhere like a cough into
a lung.
(Prior pub. Bomb
and The Hunger Wall, Grove, 1997)
Pulitzer-nominee,
James Ragan, has read for four heads of state, including Václav
Havel. He was born in Slovakia, where he lived until the age of five.
A salvo of cracks every five minutes.
Do the trees suffer
Incorruptible poplars bow their foreheads
Waterfalls of light cascade off the
cedars.
The tether ball with four icicles
looks like Sputnik.
My neighbor grimaces like a frostbite
amputee,
An enormous maple by the pond split
in half,
"A squirrel will plant fifty times
more trees
"Are we worth less than squirrels?"
"For sure, if you ask an oak tree;
when they fall?
I recall the barking Soviet carbines
in Prague, August '68
only this time, the casualties don't
bleed.
lamenting the frigid bite of frost.
The lightest breeze plays a requiem
on glass xylophones,
as I stride through the zircon land,
a hooded knight in a white parka.
Heaven spilled into the lake
and froze. The adolescent sun conceives
a million babies skating on inch
long crystals.
The red bud longs for the yellow
bud
in the prophylactic ice. Instant
Christmas ripping overnight
out of an empty box.
The pine trees are lathered by my
father's shaving brush,
but God, look at the birches I planted
with my children!
Their trunks bent to the ground,
freeze-frame fountains.
My whole generation grew up bent
or crooked.
Is this the fate of any disposable
nation?
a Nazi surgeon in Siberia cutting
bones with a chain-saw.
Even the ancient cedar in the cemetery
broke its trunk in half over a granite
gravestone.
Is all beauty a deadly freak of
nature?
a squirrel den in its crotch turned
inside out.
"That was their home, Dad. Are squirrels
useless?"
My son stares at the nest in the
maple corpse.
than the average human, but will
not cut any down."
I sense the first-grade god behind
his eyes shrinking.
probably not, if you ask a general.
And I would eat squirrels alive
before I would let anything happen
to you.
That's why your tree has roots in
America."
A native Czech,
Viktor Tichy lives in Iowa.
Is it like this
-- T.S. Eliot, "The
Hollow Men", III
In death’s other
kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when
we are
Trembling with
tenderness
Lips that would
kiss
Form prayers to
broken stone.
Prague, castled hilltop,
The flag flutters up
I submit to the stones
There should be a bridge here closer
on,
Is it silk or is it wool,
I run my nails
The mouth withheld,
Was it silk or was it wool?
I should have known,
Maybe I’d know if I touched it again.
Praha Photo Exhibit
Someone has staged
a Russian death
It is memory in transition
It was the thrill of
revolution
(Reprinted unedited from Paris/Atlantic,
Fall 2000)
the floodlit haunt
of wanton and ascetic.
to show the president home,
pouring over Sanskrit love poems
or the belly-felt polemic
of peasant sons,
who cinch their pants up
once they’ve delivered,
and grope themselves
when left alone.
at Hradc?any,
the Slav-façaded romanesque
of cheekbones,
the chiseled lips of pebbles
sloughed off the chests of boulders,
the heel-eroded, toe-dipped steps,
the sloping shoulders
of wrinkled drainpipes,
the rain-bent royal windows
of indigent third-floor lawyers
left unlatched and flapping,
furloughed and unattached,
in Budapest or New York.
hard on to this wistful, windy bastion,
but there is none.
There should be a kiss.
that quivers along the shoulder
seams,
the button-stippled ribs and wrists
of this tilting pillar, half-erect,
I hold flexed against my knee,
leaning into me, willing me
to bend it to my whim?
over the mortared tongues of bricks,
the cornerstones, the hipbones,
that tip to me like redwood chips,
yearning for singe and fire,
for flicker and collapse,
in the slowly embering aftermath,
whetstones cast
for treacherous renewal
in the urban-burgeoning overflow
of a random river’s three-year burst
of early estranged desire.
its martyred tongue still flicks,
spits out the hearts,
eager and once true, but too young
of couples,
still aches to lick and split
the long-limbed shafts
of seasoned, imported lumber,
awkwardly caressed, then left
to warp and wonder,
to anguish and reflect,
under the sudden, too-narrow marital
bed
of the circumspect adulteror.
I should have known by now,
known by the feel by now,
by the feel, by the drape, by the
fall,
by the shimmer and sheen,
by the imperceptible shuddering
nap of it,
the bias, the weave, the wrap of
it,
that closes like teeth
around a shoulder blade.
being practiced in the art;
I should have known,
being skilled in the design,
of fabric,
that best suits willful men.
Maybe I’d know.
But grim-façaded Hradc?any
breathes a Slav-erotic moan
and crumbles bodily,
as I turn and walk away,
fingering the lint,
the unintended, open-ended questions,
remnants from this precipice
of yes or no,
the tilt of pillars
in monogrammed sleeves,
the tip of hipbones
under pocket seams,
the wisps of love,
the wisps of greed,
that willful men deposit,
heedlessly,
when faced into the wind,
into the vented mesh,
the lace, the texture,
of my breath-embroidered skin.
Kimberly Burwick
and the only path
the iris takes
is the attempt to
define patterns.
Les fauves, the ones
who stood in the path
of the carnivore at
the kill.
This is not a European
poem.
This is not a European
death.
a country's path of
the iris,
the camera swept debris,
the virginity of a
photograph
black and white and
blue with bruises.
that made me swell,
my swollen belly in
flames.
It was the need to
be swollen
with something other
than ex-patriotism,
something so human,
half-eaten and raw
shocking the American
out of me.