Jan '04 [Home] Poetry Feature Guest Editor's Preface by Martin Mitchell

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A Urban Incident ~ Kurt Brown Homily ~ Graham Duncan Everything in Quotations ~ Mervyn Taylor As Is ~ But Instead ~ Michael T. Young Black and White ~ Rachel Hadas Like a Mantle, the Sea ~ Gardner McFall Parachute ~ Robert Wrigley Resolutions for a More Meaningful Existence ~ Clifford Browder Goodbye ~ Stephen Stepanchev First Books ~ Andrea Hollander Budy Up Late at a Dark Window ~ Peg Peoples The Ghost Takes a Look at Himself ~ What We Have ~ Philip Miller Desert Island Disc ~ Lorna Knowles Blake Images:  Meredith Miller B Fountain of Blood ~ Patrick Donnelly Rosary ~ Margaret Ryan Shelter ~ Suzanne Parker Elementary Physics ~ Deena Linett Landscape in October ~ Bertha Rogers Florence, Morning to Night ~ Stormbirds ~ Eamon Grennan Historic Towne Centre ~ M. A. Schaffner Zenology ~ Dick Allen Salvavida ~ Rachel Dacus Arthritis ~ Evergreen Boughs ~ Charlie Smith Van Winkle Awakens to a New Style of Jazz ~ Richard Frost The Load ~ Maria Terrone Tether ~ Wooden Tulips ~ Alison Woods Side Show ~ Grenadian Gothic ~ Gabrielle LeMay Contributor Notes ~ . ~ Urban Incident Kurt Brown Two street jays, thick feathered thieves, dive into our yard to attack the old ailanthus, flying at it boldly, now here now there, crying out in savage voices. Withered, defenseless, half its limbs already dead, the tree makes a perfect victim, branches splayed against a wall of air. They go about it like professionals, picking the tree's pockets of bugs and delicious flakes, rubble, seeds, anything concealed in the cracks and convolutions of its bark, hapless grubs and slow beetles, discs of manna small as coins. I watch from my window, not daring to move, witness their squabbles, the way in which they strip the tree with little loss of time. Having frisked it from root to crest, they shift away over the roofs, still squabbling, screeching to themselves of their tremendous audacity and luck. ~ . ~ Homily Graham Duncan You say you know the sun will rise tomorrow? I think you mean expect, believe, surmise, or hope, just as you're confident you will see it happen — eyes in working order, lids still able to part, optic nerve still sending its coded messages, brain's receiving nexus open for business, the engine under it purring ably away. And just as surely you yourself expect to be among the expectant living at the first call to rise — still there, caring, ready to watch night's deep shadows shrink and lighten, ready again to think you know what can't be known: guessed at, yes, surmised or hoped for, but each twitch, blink, or flutter of pulse a reminder you'd better drink to the bitter lees whatever's in your cup, whether it's nearly drained or running over. ~ . ~ Everything in Quotations Mervyn Taylor Everything in quotations means Someone said it before, standing In uncertainty as you are now, Believing the tide was close To sweeping him out. And as he blew dust from Some old page, the words came From someone in the same predicament, Calling with such authority It made the winds imagine we Could speak their language, Just as you could call out now From your sinking center something You never said before, some pregnancy With consonants like hot towels, Ready to take it from you And give to the next needy person Who turns, and tells another His story. ~ . ~ As Is Michael T. Young Although, for a moment, the man peeling an orange appears to cup a mouse in his hand, its tail dangling in a coil, and three pigeons flying in the distance briefly look like bubbles glinting arcs of sunlight as they drift down the avenue, even before I recognize these things for what they are, everything is as it should be. ~ . But Instead Michael T. Young To wake, to hear rain, to hear drops break on screens, on leaves, on streets. To be thrust from dream no hint emerging, but instead to linger by windows, to smell wet petals, to recall some moment so old, so yellowed, so scented by chlorine and hyacinth it brings to mind a book, a passage, a theme, a point to it all. ~ . ~ Black and White Rachel Hadas Peering at the page, I squint at what even as I get it down in black and white goes bumptious, boldface.  Can all these be lies twinkling among the figures as I write? Call it a self — whatever I would seal under the surface like a living soul beats its wings, frantic to get away from two translucent prisons, one per eye. One blinks Tell, the other winks Distill. Reach out, Tell says.  Build a suspension bridge of narrative experience can cross, the daily paper tucked beneath its arm so one hand fingerwalks along the railing. The listener meets the teller in the middle, each ending where the other began. The world sways, the bridge trembles. Suspense, crosscurrents:  fragile or defiant? Spontaneous?  Planned?  Cistern?  Overflow? The dear dead hand that touched this very page? Caldron of exclusions simmering, humming heat of all that's in the pot, the letters looping and the panes steamed up. Recipes for ellipses, for contractions, hiatuses that fill the book of days. Some words bully other words, but all in their own way subvert the power of silence— clauses subordinate yet not left out, pulled from oblivion, rescued on the page. Bracket, blacken, snowbank, or delete: the act of writing fights the drift of white. ~ . ~ Like a Mantle, the Sea Gardner McFall Between the parentheses of birth and perishing I am halfway, in a sentence whose meaning escapes, nature's pattern not indiscernible, but hard to accept, at least on this morning when I feel unprepared to greet the other side of what little time and space I occupy.  Sustaining is the knowledge I have embraced already what I thought myself unequal to: a father's disappearance, the birth of a child, a mother's death.  How can she not be here, I often think, walking along, dying to telephone, her number long since disconnected.  How am I the mother now?  I wear the robes loosely. I am like one of those figures in the narrow boat in The Great Wave off Kanag'awa by Hokusai, only I don't know if they bow in heart-chilling fear as the breaker curves like a funeral awning over their slender backs or in mild assent, there between water and water, skimming the earth, like a mantle, the sea. ~ . ~ Parachute Robert Wrigley The word parasol would have seemed an affectation to my grandmother, whose skin, by the time she died, could have been wounded by the moon.  She preferred to call it a "bumpershoot," hearing, I like to think, the same structural rightness in the dactyl:  that primary force of the handleshaft, the useful, subsidiary delicacy of ribs and skin in its quiet negotiations with rain.  In fact, I never heard her say parasol or umbrella, either one, though once, still metrically consistent, she let me call hers a parachute and watched me jump from a man-high stone wall with it all one hot Midwestern afternoon.  The night she died in the nursing home, I knelt among the sad commingled scents of disinfectant and dying, and in the hall light dimness peered through the bars of her hospital bed and down the long dark gateway of her left pupil (the right eye already was closed) and felt myself flying and falling with her for one moment more, before her eye closed, and I came to rest again on my knees. ~ . ~ Resolutions for a More Meaningful Existence Clifford Browder To brush spring azure's wisp of blue flutter To ignore dust-prone surfaces and nagging clocks In quest of high nirvanas To attain mathematical grace: My checkbook balanced Beset with leaky pipes Mice, warts, roaches Bird shit on my windowsill Dandruff and societal malaise, To smile with sweet reason And not greet computer glitches With poundings of the screen and keyboard Kicks, oaths, shrieks To be a quiet little worm, Let silence listen to me To wallow in fields choked With mustard and mint Till summers juicy with caterpillars Suck my seed To discern In thick rock And my own taut flesh and bone Vibrant nonsense Frozen light Each day, mindful Of the lengthening fingernails And black swollen tongues Of the coffined dead, To walk in the sweet-grass hills. ~ . ~ Goodbye Stephen Stepanchev All farewells are permanent — Your lover walks out of your universe When he goes to the bodega on the corner To buy beer and a chorizo. You are right to feel abandoned — Who knows what beast waits For you on the bottom stair? I apply a mental tourniquet So as not to bleed to death Just thinking of claws. The landscape holds its breath As I lurch along In the kick of light From death's opening door. ~ . ~ First Books Andrea Hollander Budy Splashes of color on the cover, lettering in wedding invitation script, the name of the writer infinitesimally small or so unreadably fancy it's clear the designer is first-time too, a novice at computer graphics volunteering her services, an initiate auditioning, hawking her wares. But first-time authors keep their disappointments to themselves, preferring to believe readers will pull them anyway from bookstore shelves, will order from Amazon, will forgive their obviously first-time looks the way first-time lovers forgive the fumbling of belts, eyelets, straps, happy enough to have finally gotten this far, breathless at the wonder of the other's nakedness, sacred places exposed, clumsy even in their humbleness.  And afterwards the relief of having the first time behind them for the first time, filled with forgiveness, and later, alone, giggling at themselves in a bathroom mirror, spotting mascara on a nose, curious if the other noticed a pair of pimples on a chin — then suddenly stricken, afraid this first time will be the only time it will ever happen. ~ . ~ Up Late at a Dark Window Peg Peoples Often I have seen him:  monk on his solitary journey — his raft strung with hemp, the rag sail of his endurance in my dreams, the long, splintery bark stripped from the redwoods — an upper story in the eaves — and the moon shipwrecked in clouds, its burnt smoky light barely visible on the sea. No courtesans for him.  No veiled face on slippery nights when the rain pours down in sheets.  Look at his countenance:  I go. You stay. From a long way off his single staff and bowed head, the knapsack peaked on his back, resemble the profile of a mountain, a waterfall gushing down a page. And just when I think, he's gone, Here, he says, these are the strong roots:  the ashes of an extinguished fire — what the wind said to the darkening leaves. And there's the forest with its trail narrowing towards the sea, the boat of arrival once more along the beach… ~ . ~ The Ghost Takes a Look at Himself Philip Miller I take a look at myself As through an inverted mirror, At my old life in the looking glass Altered as in a dream. My face, at this new distance, With its fresh symmetry Is the way the world saw it And the scenes — there's my first birthday I hadn't the memory to catch. I'm in my father's arms As Mother peers down at me Neither one of us smiling; And here I am embracing My first wife A big smile on my face My eyes closed Though now I can see Her looking out the window Wistfully, Then stifling a yawn. And here she is with my old friend — I'm sleeping off the gin. In this scene They're only holding hands, I even watch the time of my own death But I just go to sleep; No trumpets, no spirit flies Out of my mouth, and the mourners look Relieved, and so do I Though not one of us conceives Of what comes after, And it's not heaven All this looking back, finding the answers to old questions I wish I'd never asked. ~ . What We Have Philip Miller So we end up where we always were. Our home away from home is home, and what we want and have concur. When we have an itch to roam we take along a little window: our home away from home is home. Part of both of us stays when we go. We watch a river as it runs along through a little window of the mind.  Words of an old song keep repeating in the head. We watch a river as it runs along. It's what we have instead of immortality:  moments captured, that keep repeating in the head, almost immortality:  moments captured— the way you turn to me and stare, and what we want and have concur, and we end up where we always were. ~ . ~ Desert Island Disc Lorna Knowles Blake           Kind of Blue. It's my desert island disc.                                    (overheard in a bar) Could anything be lonelier than this? Scenario:  You're on a desert island, surrounded by blue:  ocean, air and mist. Could anything be lonelier than this scenario?  You wonder if you're even missed by anyone, or if you could have planned a situation lonelier than this scenario.  You're on a desert island, but not alone beneath brushed satin skies; though you may be all blue, or kind of blue. You have your music, and it never lies or leaves you lonely.  Under satin skies a trumpet plays from sunset to sunrise— the air itself turns Blue in Green in blue. You'd never be alone beneath those skies though you might be All Blue or Kind of Blue. ~ . ~ [B]