Poetry Feature Lyric Recovery™ 2002 Finalist Poems Photo: © 2001 George Kunze Arachne Unstrung Gyorgyi Voros Archaeopteryx Alfred Dorn Cuccina Martine Bellen Dutch Interior: The Artist and His Model Gyorgyi Voros The Harvesters Mark Nickels Khyamm's Q & A (Ghazal) Roger Sedarat Lentils Pete Wolf Smith Rhomboid Bertha Rogers Tango: Zero Hour Denise Galang Variation 11: Moon in water Alice B. Fogel Contributor Notes Semifinalist Poems ~ . ~ . ~ Arachne Unstrung Gyorgyi Voros      …that most sordid of all havens, the corner…                —Gaston Bachelard Falling, but not fallen. Limp amid the purples and golds of her ill-conceived potboiler, Arachne rises from a cage of limbs, a clutter of tentpoles, and hangs out her storied flytrap digs to dry. Arachne-famous-throughout-Lydia for-skill-in-weaving, now unhoused, hunkers in the tangle of her gossamer novella all unravelled down to its essential storyline—dishevelled filament of plot twist winding from her spinneret like spit. See where a boast will get you? the gods always in disguise, the mortals cornered. Hemmed like the see-through nightgown that is home and hearth, her déshabille. No flirtation in a spider, though. No mercy and no need. Warp, huddle, shuttle and comb bartered for arachnid fingertips, the gaze itself on tiptoe, not human, a gesture like scuttle and a crimp in plexus until she opens like a parachute in a sky half box, part walls, all door. When the newborn spiders spill out of their linthouse egg, do you, dear Dustmote, shoeless on your gauzy trampoline, scurry to mend the glaucous underworld, exile your loom, or cast out yet again, freefalling in webby darkness, filigreed, undone? ~ . ~ Archaeopteryx Alfred Dorn What was the sound you made? Hiss? Cackle? Shriek? Nothing like you had ever been seen or heard in the primordial swamp. You were a bird, your feathers argued, yet you seemed half snake deformed by wings. (Had wings been a mistake that weighed you down, you would have disappeared.) You were, as reptiles large and small concurred, the Mesozoic's quintessential freak. Creature undrawn, undreamed by Audubon, within your eggs waited the nightingale and lark (until all dinosaurs were gone), the peacock with its eyes-of-Argus tail, and that white solitude of lakes, the swan. In you their future slept. You did not fail. (Prior publ.: Orbis (England)) ~ . ~ Cuccina Martine Bellen I. The most beautiful order is still A random collection Of things insignificant in themselves: II. Cranberry rosettes and candied Violets, frosted thumb plums Sweating midday, and gingerbread Shaped in stars and bells. III. A buck, doe, and fawn dunk Apples down near the pond where Blue heron stalks rainbows That dart while light recedes. IV. Under feather comforters and tea-rose vaults, We sleep smelling of last night's Spices. Outside, trees shed quilted leaves. ~ . ~ Dutch Interior: The Artist and His Model Gyorgyi Voros Silence, he knows, is always pregnant. The wife at the window, the maid asleep in the kitchen, the daughter languishing at the virginal with a suitor, these tableaux cheer him through the Northern afternoons, yet pain him, too, since he can only look. The mahlstick braced against the canvas steadies his hand so the kindled brushtip swaggers through blue and halts where it needs to pale. Perfect; pluperfect. He couldn't have dreamed the difficulty to touch the objects of his love across the distance of a room, an expanse as of a continent of obstacles: chair, credenza, tile floor, viola. The richly napped carpet flung across the table maps a pattern of desire. Birds in the garden of a Southern land, fruity light, not blue, a maze and clever topiaries along the footpath wending, after all, to love or at least the way to a clearing. Here the scumbled air unveils itself layer by layer, yet always beneath lies more ground, gessoed thick as though the scene outside the mullioned panes— a skittering on cobblestones, bricks needing pointing, a tinctured sun—could never satisfy. Down below, just beyond the ivy scalloping his window ledge (orthogonal, handhold, his perspective) a woman in a red raincoat smokes on the corner. It seems to him she is always there. Eventually she casts her burning ember into the canal, turns and disappears. Where to? Not into another century, not, as he might hope, into some country or condition of Being Always There. That's for him to create. His attention returns to his own suite of rooms, two flights up, not far from the street or the street noises he loves, not far from the sea, not even far from the things across the sea—all these at least as near as the footwarmer, the copper bowl, the woman at the threshold of the next room. He breathes and looks, his look a glaze on air. The air curves around and gathers him as a lens does light, enlarging every visible thing, bringing it near and nearer. ~ . ~ The Harvesters Mark Nickels From a painting by Peter Breugel the Elder The jug of water shaded in the wheat sits in an island left uncut, preserves the turf-steeped well-draw of the morning, chill, alluvial, and flecked with straw. Faun, slippery and dry, like loaves, the halting round that spins among the scythers, when on the left hand someone sings, begins. I break the circle with no words for it, my shoulders weighted with the habit of a morning's pull, core-empty, with a chaff-raked tongue, and softly catch and cut last threshings severed here last year. Bone colored bonnets own a nimbus in the haze, and someone tips you, boy of three, into my lap, my nose tilting to your hair. It has a smell that leads me into unknown tablatures of gentleness: not adult sour, but like brakes of drying reedmace rocking in a midday thermal—on their shafts the mirrored volume of the silver bay. You are drifting in and out of questions, buzzed by gnats, your features cast in something knowable, but with an effort only. Not the must of low and cytogenic fires, of horseshit and the animals we live with, but how, in any moment, we don't stay, but search the side world, where the spirit slacks its thirst for something apposite but lateral, not just ahead, or back- in hot wheat thinking of the black pines stacked and leaning on each other, crossing in the twilight, barring snow; one in a knot of hunters coming home who think of this—sheared einkorn listening to vespers in close stillness, not the hollow tick of hanging antlers like a kindling hearth. We're all away, most times. Meanwhile, my choice, to follow with my mind the homeward- turning painter, waving off your mother and my wife, who wants her picture drawn. ~ . ~ Khyamm's Q & A (Ghazal) Roger Sedarat Scholar, a sheet-wrapped Muslim in a grave Learns his worm-wisdom forsaking the grave. Segment the worm and divided he'll squirm; Solomon knew the measure of the grave. Wisdom you want? Cut your attachments, move Out where the city ploughs an unmarked grave. If Solomon were city folk, he'd work it rich downtown, turning his back on the grave. Modernity's an armless boy, roses For sale in his mouth stolen from a grave. Evenings I peek in my neighbor's window. She lies sheet-wrapped, ready for the grave. Mornings a wise man delivers lavash. He never smiles; his voice is always grave. This man tells me secrets of my neighbor; I'll try my best to take them to the grave. If you smile at the man who bakes the bread That broke your tooth, you're close to the grave. If bags of bones are ripped apart by dogs At night, you're even closer to the grave. Death fills my eyes with X's; I cross Myself on each road leading to the grave. I ask the armless boy for directions, A rose in his mouth stemming from the grave. And Solomon's out cold in an alley, Struck by a double ax, facing the grave. A garden for love, for death a dry field. (Chiasmus is the main trope of the grave). I saw an armless boy weed the rose Of Sharon with his teeth at the Queen's grave. I cracked my tooth on star-baked bread, jagged Light pouring on an old man digging a grave. I rolled my body into a sheet, let Dogs tug my head and feet over the grave. What worm-wisdom came from so much digging? What woman arose to a rose from the grave? I live alone save for the morning bark Of bread in hallways. Alone, I'll make the grave. I eat my bread with broken teeth, rolled up Into my bed to make a living grave. I sit and smell the dying rose, not caring To reach the state that truly knows the grave. I am Khyamm, a man going to my grave Alive to lay a rose upon my grave. ~. ~ Lentils Pete Wolf Smith Thus Esau did despise his first-born right. And what if I did? The buck, my arrow in his side, bolted, reeking blood on the wind, hooves skidding on rocks, dragging his hind legs along a ridge; his front legs buckled, and he fell. I finished him off and slit him down the line from breast to penis, gutted, and threw the stuff to the vultures, emissaries of a god I liked—my own, and not my father's— and set aside treats for the old one, kidneys, balls, such as he loved, the savory bits, and took the kill on my shoulders and carried it back. It was late. The roasting would not be done until coins were flung from the god's bag across the sky, and the jackal at the edge of the firelight slunk, and the moon sang. I came into camp with the falling sun in my blood and a subtle iron of springwater on my tongue, dusty, bloody, the buck hot on my neck. My brother was squatting at a ring of stones and a kettle on a little fire in front of Mother's tent. He was useless on the hunt, but like a woman for stews. I told him, Give me some of that, smelling the wild onions he'd gathered, and the beans; and offered to beat him, when he refused and started with his guff about the birthright, if he continued to be impudent. But he stirred the red stuff, and would not hear any word but birthright, birthright; and I wanted lentils, bread. The word he kept repeating— I didn't know what it meant. (Prior publ.: Big City Lit, Apr '01) ~. ~ Rhomboid Bertha Rogers Always in a hurry, that shape—its parallels boxed yet propelled, navigating an unresistant deep— The '59 Chevy, Flamingo Pink, sharply finned ship, belonged to my boyfriend's father. And wasn't it unique?—bench seat angled back, just the right petting pitch, brazen windows cracked to let in Iowa's 30-below cold (we'd heard sad stories about other winter lovers who, heater on, forgot). The midnight road, frozen flat, north to south, silently aimed at Orion, his burning belt. Our farmhouse was axis-bent, like Dorothy's, by a long ago cyclone, the lean-to kitchen precarious. Upstairs, our bedroom walls inclined to eaves, and the coal shed, out back, graded itself in slanted ranks. Was that where I learned momentum (I was startled, once, to see myself in a city window, head ahead of torso, diving into the noisy sidewalk); was this the source of my rush to the end of things? That boy, sweetly flat topped, Old Spiced, pinned willing me to the herringbone upholstery while I, craving his Viceroy kisses, upleaned at him. Our breath flared like Northern Lights on the audacious vehicle's windshield. But that boy wasn't enough: I was in a hurry, on course, requiring distance. He—no doubt a fine upright citizen in some Midwestern town—seems to lean against the car's tropical sheen. He drags on his cigarette, stubs it out, and, opening the sloped door, waves goodbye; unlined eyes calm, eternally smiling. ~ . ~ Tango: The Zero Hour Denise Galang      to Astor Piazzolla This is la hora cero               the final hour before   divided by continents          split into hemispheres            we condense—                wisps of white cirrus               disappearing into violet       stratospheres of memory.               In this aerial hour               suspended in midnight          soñando y bailando                dreaming and dancing upon ledges      we sip vino tinto                 tune our strings prepare our ensemble          of breath, touch, heat. In this hour of steam           button by button      layer by layer                     we explore           topographies                     with our tongues                wander sierras                  of muscle and bone.                Our bodies fuse                 into black and red           bandoneón                          expanding and contracting    spreading octaves                 over Buenos Aires— tonight all the porteños       dance to our tango. Climbing like mercury          five Celsius degrees at a time      we humidify                        spill rain over the city           water hyacinths                    in La Recoleta                glaze yellow and orange     walls of La Boca.                This is the zero hour          arousal of sweat and sound           brief whirring rainfall        before sun resettles sky      hour of absolute end          absolute beginning our bodies dissolving          sliding into aurora. bandoneón—instrument similar to accordion; essential instrument in tango porteños—people who live in Bueno Aires ~ . ~ Variation 11: Moon in water Alice B. Fogel Out in the center, canoe and I no cause for interruption (only wingless here while hovering), deep into water's overlaps the moon's fractures fold and flow, fold and flow and fracture. Look down long enough, out here on the lake afloat, surrounded by (and on) the dark lap lapping, the long wet folded fan moon, stippled length of twine moon, broken linked moon hanging its white chains down (as if down) into depths only visible horizontally, and all that dripped thick liquid ellipsis seems its own true form. Pierced by lunar rays, by turns the ponderous bass diminish and flash bleeding upward from beneath into the gleaming reach of lit glissando. Opaque, steady above all, the cool sky scoops all that soaked, unskeined light up into one flat coin, one disk like a wrist flicked stone I once skimmed like this from shore that left no trail of white. Fixed, dry, nearly untouched, still that full moon pulled down here across the waving layers of slick lake slapping and licking the gunwales skips downward, through and through, illuminating water's (buried and drowned) ground by ruse. ~ . ~ . ~