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

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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 Salvavidas ~ 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 Images:  Meredith Miller 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 Contributor Notes ~ . ~ Fountain of Blood Patrick Donnelly           Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres Sometime last week, in my neighbor's yard, whoever it was, with whatever tool, broke up the concrete, arranged the shattered slag around an oval of soil that last looked at light and drank rain circa 1894, and plunged a plant into that barely breathing dirt. I hate to say just plant; I've known men and women less alive than this ornamental grass — "ornamental" a slander unless a tiger is an ornament, a leaping zebra, a striped fountain of blood, a great grass-gush seven feet tall jetting panicles like foxtails over the fence, soft to the touch, weeping rye, oats, millet, wheat, bread and the broken host of love to the pavement, to be licked up by deertongue and the ghosts of our long lost Brooklyn sheep and stock. How will it live, in these ruins? How will I? ~ . ~ Rosary Margaret Ryan Sitting in her chair in the living room under the stained glass window, the TV on, but muted, my mother watched the priests say mass from dawn to dusk on the Eternal Word of God Network. At three, they said the rosary.  The camera lingered on the beads. When we were children she kept our eyes on the eternal.  The odor of sanctity clung to everything, even our underwear, even the sheets. Sometimes in winter clothes froze on the line, and had to be brought in, thawed or broken back into cloth that could be touched without chafing our skin. Those last years, she was almost always alone. Eileen, Anne and Tommy gone.  No raised voices tearing at the edge of dreams, no splintering glass. No trips to the ER in the black sedan or blue cruisers askew on the small front lawn. Jesus, Mary and Joseph she used to call down from the top step into the dark.  St. Michael the Archangel, protect us in battle.  Be our defense against the wiles and wickedness of the devil. You could hear her rosaries, horn or crystal, one Ave becoming another, wearing her fingers to the bone. ~ . ~ Shelter Suzanne Parker To fit a house into a car, live lightly. How many pairs of jeans are needed? The mole people build homes from garbage. Trash houses rats.  The backs of rats harbor lice.  We anchor where situation drops us and sleep can be its own room to settle in, trusting the door's latch will hold.  In Cannes, I crash on the grass in a park, wake to rankness as a bum spoons me, his hand between my legs poking, trying to burrow.  Such an intimate violation.  The sour wine of his breath washes my cheek.  His knees shelter behind mine, startle when I kick away. We all seek our own protection, huddling against the back of the cave when the flame flickers out.  I sleep with my city windows open, a knife beneath the pillow.  Every now and then, morning shows scratches on my arm, the thinnest traces of red, and I feel safe. ~ . ~ Elementary Physics Deena Linett Everybody knows this now:  light is particle and at the same time wave.  Therefore when you died I expected a momentary crushing of the light, paper in a giant fist.  No.  An astonishing want of sound.  How could nothing happen? Surely there are rearrangements of the planes, a little pull on the fabric we don't have instruments to measure.  I stood before the Einstein statue in DC. Face familiar, perhaps three times life-size, he slouches at the edge of a bronze universe in metal sweater and jeans, holding — naturally — a book.  Whose thoughts bent even art in the 20th century (most of my time here) is said to have been brutal in his personal life.  How will such matters affect the nature of our regard?  How do they bear on the relation of light to dark, particle to wave, infinite cold skies rushing onto absence? ~ . ~ Landscape in October Bertha Rogers Let us go forth into what waits — white sky, red moon.  Let us embrace each rickety breeze as if it were a new lover, all pheromones askew for this right moment. Each heretofore unknown river wants us; each tree wishes our flight past every rent petal, cold-emboldened insect. All piebald horses stand ready to cheer. Why, then, do we hesitate?  Even the coyote running the ridge knows the repose of butchery without recompense. This hooped October morning, ground clouds squalling, leaves plummeting, offers its own complex answer.  Give over, it says; give. ~ . ~ Florence, Morning to Night Eamon Grennan A flock of pigeons brushing your ears.  Two lovers on the Bridge of Grace. Morning brings the city back in bits and pieces:  dark hair, eyes coming in On the tide.  Always to know the place at risk.  No matter how high the walls You keep going back to the ghostly moment of breached dykes, floodburst And the element heaving up, sweeping all away.  But all day you see lovers Two by two, and strangers, making the place safe.  Now, under a salty half-moon The city is a million sparks, its river all shadowglow.  One bat sweeps about And about, all ears, on its blind tours of inspection.  And just as you yourself Are about to fly asunder as a flitter of mist over water, the soft sweet weight Of bells sings out and you see what it means, holding the whole thing together. ~ . Stormbirds Eamon Grennan To be taken and tossed like a handful of seed the way a flock of finches Or mottled starlings is by the big wind that's blowing an ocean of noise Among the sycamore leaves; to be a particle of that great breath, helpless Except to go where it lists, the wings of your will tucked in, watching The world spinning under you, being whipped away like that so you have No say at all in the matter, your feelings shelved, your bared body At the mercy of something you can know only as the nature of things: Or else to stand up to it as that sea-going gull does, beating inch by inch Along choppy whitecaps, aiming his whole self where he wants to be and Will get to by zigzag angles — taking, in the teeth of the gale, his own way. ~ . ~ Historic Towne Centre M. A. Schaffner The Museum of the Ideal City lies just beyond the municipal garage. A brick mall and flagstone pavers lead through a gallery of witty boutiques and national chains of the better kind. The coffee tastes good and the sidewalk seating receives a daily scrub at ten-fifteen when the beggars retire to adjoining streets. I like these places better than bare highways blotched with used car lots and burger troughs, but not more than the accidental street, not yet redeveloped, where an ancient man and his aging son fix manual typewriters and sell just enough ribbons and parts to survive until the day you finally need them. ~ . ~ Zenology Dick Allen No answer is also an answer, my Zen Master said. The color of life is magenta but most people think it's red. I pleaded, I begged, I implored him to show me some proof, but all he did was look broken as an old wisdom tooth. "My life," I told him, "my life has gone down the drain. What can I do about it? Please, Master, explain." He smiled and he smiled and he smiled and then raised one hand to brush a fly from the air before it could land. No answer is also an answer, he told me again. Why should I turn a locked doorknob or pluck a bald hen? "Idiot Master!" I shouted. "Go screw yourself!" He proceeded to do this.  Amazing, what Zen can engulf. ~ . ~ Salvavida Rachel Dacus Salvavida bajo su asiento. It took me a while to translate:  Lifesaver Under Your Seat.  Under this fragile body of lofting steel, our tennis rackets and rain coats, our bathing suits, and below that, thirty thousand feet of turbulent pockets and updrafts. And under that, what no lifesaver can cushion:  land.  But on this vessel they soothe in every lingo:  salvavida is below your asiento, and that's all you need. That, and at the press of a button, everything in featherweights — the five-ounce can of tomato juice at ninety-minute intervals, two cookies and twenty chips, a pillow small as a horizon cloud measured with fingers on the window.  They float up the aisles to keep you warm and half-asleep, fed and amused. Journeying is hard and someone should double-check switches and seat-backs, make sure that salvavida is handy. Someone like the mother you ought to have had, who holds up the plane with her pinned-on wings, who salvas your vida while it hurtles at five hundred per, someone who says, in case you speak English — and only up here — Salvation is at hand. ~ . ~ Arthritis Charlie Smith …slow hitch and up pull of the hip, the swing, knee barely flexing, the curve like a sabal frond bent suddenly by wind, the foot flashing, in a sense, forward, extended like the hood of a Bonneville, turned slightly outward to catch with the face of the foot the breeze, the great Magellanic clouds, to balance all there an instant, the body upwardly following, appended, rising from the side of itself like an architectural folly or former city of light rising from the excavated marl, the barely covered bones aching all night, radiant like beacons of a slow decay continuously occurring near us in the woods out behind the mall where boys with nothing else to do run wild on Sundays, bellowing and lashing each other with bicycle chains. ~ . Evergreen Boughs Charlie Smith The year I admitted I was lonely I didn't know what I was saying           I said the nights are rough here they have minikins & clowns old postulates taking out the trash and you           get lonely sometimes. I didn't know how one thing leads to another like a smell under the house           and then you're talking about the payoff when you don't even want to you want them to listen like people with taps on their shoes           who later as they heavily, roguishly dance, think well of you. ~ . ~ Van Winkle Awakens to a New Style of Jazz Richard Frost Free-form, no definite beat, like tripping on a beard, even the drummer freed of the old pulse — little explosions, then a wide landscape across the cymbals. The tenorman with a hard political edge. Where to go now?  All the new changes, his modern ones, slept away, to tumble down a waterfall of grunts and thunder, a keyboard beside him in air with boxes of wired noise, hands caught in the strings, in the cold plunge. And up to a flat pool?  Underneath and up, and at last to breathe? To steer to the shore and its garden where the moldy fig drops its seeds until a tree begins to sway again, begins to dream? ~ . ~ The Load Maria Terrone A rope has appeared outside my office window. Sometimes it zigzags across the pane like window wipers in a storm that say Look harder or you'll die. But then it drifts away and back as if tied to a tree far below, where a child sails through summer on a rubber tire. They say fall arrived a while ago, but from here, the season is a mere abstraction.  The only trees in view are hulking evergreens on a rooftop terrace, lined shoulder to shoulder like Secret Service agents, eyes trained on the street. Now the rope shakes as it lowers a bulging, man-sized sack. The trees, intrigued, lean forward, then shrug, stinging the dusky air. A stranger phones to gloat Bodies from the top-floor suite. But Muzak from the ceiling sings Christmas gifts for the child. I've looked hard, but I can only see so far, and there are no clues — not out there, where clouds scowl shadows across the face of white brick. And surely not in here, where the rooms next door, around the corner, across the hall have long been locked and emptied. ~ . ~ Tether Alison Woods Sometimes I forget I am a mother; the earth in turning night to day illuminates my home, my life, its cover, turns my eye away from hover- ing around my child's eager display. Sometimes I forget I am a mother looking to love's other possibility, and it is okay to illuminate my home, my life, its cover. Sometimes fearful of regret's deep shudder — life being judged by those who stay — I sometimes forget I am a mother, yet being one, we are each other's lover reveling in our own play which illuminates our home, our lives, its cover. Then it dawns — she is my tether, my next right step, my right of way. That I sometimes forget I am a mother illuminates my home, my life, its cover. ~ . Wooden Tulips Alison Woods She wants me to admire them, these hand-carved tulips stiff on their stems.  Sadly they speak of faithlessness saturated with color.  They keep vigil in primary brightness. Is it natural that a mother should adore what is complete, without need, or want, or fragrance? Oh, I know it isn't personal, decoration a lesson in self-sufficiency.  But beyond their manufactured bloom I see they too are burdened, their sorrow perpetual. I've given my wooden tulips away. Wilted freesia in a vase greet me, the cut flower with tender leaves a testament to love made insoluble. ~ . ~ Side Show Gabrielle LeMay Come and see the albino raccoon! The earless goats! The bearded lady! Miniature steeds from Andalusia whose hearts beat in time with their hooves… Step, now, through windswept balloons; through hamburger wrappers that dance to the cries of the elephant in the Mason jar torn from its slaughtered mother like tar — and win, if you can,           a velveteen cowboy hat           in ghastly shocking pink! Wear it to visit the vacuum hose that houses the Moray eel; to the seahorse school where dart-eyed curlicues coil as if starved around each other — See the sword-swallower's eyes water! Hear him gasp as he gulps at a yard-long, sharded rasp; see, too, the lady dressed in pythons unpeel them, revealing her tattoos… And you, Lady: See your thick left breast being torn from your body by the O.R. team: For the rest of your life you will gasp at the scar that rips past your heart like a scream — But you've stepped right up to the months you've won in this place that everyone fears. Stunned by the din of the stock-car race and the whacking of horror-house doors, you've entered your house of mirrors. You with the beautiful face. ~ . Grenadian Gothic Gabrielle LeMay I am not white, you tell me — not even my skin. I am peachy beige, tinged with moments of a faint dull green that varies in tone as it travels like smoke along a vein. You say I am the color of the sand at Grand Anse, though by now I am starting to tan. You tell me my eyes are the blue of the sky that breathes down on Grand Etang. Nuzzling my froth of beer-colored hair, you stand by me naked as a tree. And I am not white, and you are not black when the footlights slip into the sea. ~ . ~ [A]