Section 2 [ Section 3 ] Section 4 [Book reviews ]
| ..... |
CONTENTS - Click on blue title to read Dick Allen +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This Is Just One Of Those Days when you want to hide away in a little upstairs room with a mug of hot chocolate, when you want to think out things like highways to Wichita, and Planck’s Law, and the mysteries of evergreens. It’s not a day for rolling out your life on a red carpet, but for the smell and tiny flame of a votive candle, for you to look at your ring finger seriously as you haven’t done for years. If you relax enough you might let into your mind a few old favorite songs, Hey There , or Blueberry Hill or Mountain Greenery . And this is one of those days when politics are far flings on distant hills. Stretch. Twist your shoulders, do at least one knee bend, make a face in the mirror. . . . In a mountain greenery where God paints the scenery. . . . This is not that other day when the phone started ringing at seven a.m., emails came at you like swarms of bees, and two as buzzards, everyone but you had a new joke. Nor is it the day before that, when no matter what you were doing you could always hear yourself screaming inside as if something had slithered loose and begun dragging itself toward you. This is not one of those days. This is a time when you want to take an idea and calm it down, caress it, smooth it out on a plywood clipboard, engage a new quantum problem. Today, you want to stroll back and forth, hands behind your back, humming, “ You with the stars in your eyes” and “the wind stood still.” You want hot chocolate to have a slight froth—and its container should be thick with a wide thick handle. From the questions you’ve let into your mind, on this day you should find at least one answer and then take a nap on the single bed beside the chair with the soft plaid comforter, pulling the blankets up around your neck as you settle your head into the goosedown pillow and sleep, utterly relaxed. This is a day like this. This is just one of those days. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dick Allen Effrontery Bad but fascinated Press follows its doings, leers at its conical bras and its ballet codpieces. Shocking to the Max, blatant, presumptuous as a mirror on a Wheaties box, it squares off with its timid enemies, shouting, “Who cares!” like the Presley mansion, like a hump of wound spaghetti in a silver spoon, Lenny Bruce of the Fifties, cellophane, spangles and glitter. It parades itself around itself. It’s shameless, bold. It never knows when to stop and holds nothing back but how afraid it is that we won’t notice it’s performing for us, impudent, arrogant, taking up our slack, giving us completely of its gaudy self. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dick Allen “Snap out of it,” my best friend always said. “There are whole other possibilities, the way the tongue lingers over indigo, for instance. The hue of indigo’s nanometers, the country and the river it evokes. But don’t fight with lilies.” He was like that, always taking conversations into corner drugstores or onto a chessboard, where he followed bishops and rooks roaming green pastures, and then, inexplicably, parachuting into lands of galloping horses. In the years I knew him, the Kennedy years, followed by the Johnson ones, snap , he was here; snap , he was there. Following him was a fantasy obstacle course. Targets would pop up before us, high fevers, cliffs to rappel down, and then a Mickey Mouse statue in a deserted wheatfield, a miniature gift shop on the head of some rocker, ten dancing lobsters. “Life is suspicions,” he’d say, “most of them bobbing just below the surface, the few coming true defining who we are. For instance, you know that book of poems you’re always looking for, the one that will change your life? I think it exists. Right now. It’s on the bottom shelf in the back of a Saratoga used book store, and a second copy’s in Texas, gathering dust. But you, you’re still standing here. Go. Go. Go. What are you waiting for? . . . . the ability to take off my shoulders, to stare at a plain white bathroom tile for hours, that swift brushstroke, that kicked soccer ball, V-8 juice in a Coca-Cola glass with its wonderful pale green and its corseted ribs, “No. No. No. Snap!” he said. “Snap out of it” and off we’d go again, to Washington, to Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, Dallas, New Orleans, from protest to protest to protest to protest until his death on the Long Island Expressway, Snap, and the 80s and 90s dragged on like nobody’s business and the century ended, awash on a sea of hard cash. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Nor Is 82 Forty isn’t bad at all. Nor is 82. e-mail birthday greeting and her fingers are strong as the vines that seal our shutters in the northeast wind. Iron is no match for her steel-gray hair. Her voice, when it cracks, is a bedrock fault, and when it holds, it holds like a trestle. Her body’s been refined to one straight line breasts to hips, and her mind to acupuncture koans to be followed at risk. Nor cries, laughs and moans as if there was no difference, sleeps like a curtain descending, may live to be a hundred or might die today, dunks her toast like a lady, takes her sweet tea in a snifter and her whiskey in a stein, supports two churches, a temple and a mosque-- when Nor prays, Nor prays soft, and when Nor curses, God listens. Her husband Neither’s been gone for a while now, so if you visit, bring tobacco. That’s what he smelled of, and thyme. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ L. N. Allen The Matrushka Maker Tradition is an egg, he used to tell his Sasha, break it, even crack it and it’s gone. First he carves the seed that doesn’t come apart, and puts its silhouette upon a second block of wood, then cuts like making shadows. He does the same to another and another. Each fits inside the one who came before but is not the one who came before, as a glove in winter air is not the storm. When twelve are carved, he starts to paint dark eyelashes so long they reach to circle cheeks so pink they’re almost setting suns. As size goes down, some things will be left out—bits of lace, curlicues, the high points of a smile, eventually the smile itself. One will be a ghost of what she was, a seed. Then skin, flesh, muscle, bone-- he’ll peel back layers of himself to find the man he might have been--the men he might have been, if not for the cold, the drink and this damn small talent. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ After the Honeymoon After John Singer Sargent Painting, Landscape with Two Figures and Tree , 1897 Long before the fall she must have felt alone so static—the landscape barren —and
her shadowy husband turned crow-like and massive cradling an instrument she believed would fell the tree she indeterminately stood before. But what did she know of crow the shimmer of plumage soft and something concealing that tempted her from the tree his dark form desiring flesh and darker still his human heart wanting only to pluck and eat her proffered fruit. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Pole of Relative Inaccessibility Before he died, Harry Houdini told his wife, “After I-- Harry Houdini--die if I’ve escaped death I’ll send you a message from the afterlife. I will sing 'Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die' backwards, in Hungarian, so you’ll know it’s me, Harry Houdini.” Each Halloween on the long flat roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel his wife waited. And sighed. One Halloween she extinguished the candleflame, saying, “Ten years is long enough to wait for any damn escapologist.” Actually, she said “any man” but surely you, Harry Houdini, slipped the grasp of so small a word. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Some Mornings Rain on the roof, a sudden downpour flooding the gutters, gushing over the eaves, flattening the grass, and washing away the childhood bruises you felt again last night. Some mornings the gray light says it’s okay to go outside looking like this. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Grendel in the City He’s always run hot and this summer evening finds him slumped in front of the open window of his cramped second-story apartment, lights out, dressed only in his underwear as he stares down at the patrons spilling out of the pizza joint just across the street, the voices coming to him alien and unintelligible. “What kind of monster am I?” he mutters to himself over and over. “What kind of monster?” thinking of the girl he’s lately pursued, the girl who kept trying to flee, delicate and pale, so beautiful he could just devour her. And did. Now with the off-shore breeze bringing no scent of the ocean, he belches a wet belch of regret, scratches himself, and trudges off into the kitchen to see what mother’s dragged home for supper. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Strangler Fig* At this turn of trail, a eucalyptus: upper torso smooth, ashen-barked, arches away from a gripping fig. It seems the Sabine Woman--her arc frantic, surging from the rapist's clasp. Her branches, entangled with that spoiler strain, still, to bear green. The fatal seed fell with figbird guano, bedding in her crotch. Rootlets sprouted fingered air down month by month lengthening toward their ultimate connection with forest floor. She serves as scaffold, he drains nothing from her yet his trusses thicken, sinews braid, fuse on her trunk. All clad by him, she vanishes inside that vestment. He will flourish centuries, his drape about her phantom form. *the "curtain fig" found in Queensland forests: a massive fusion of trunk sinews enclosing the space once inhabited by a supporting host tree. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Funny-Looking Man There is a funny-looking man climbing up to the capitol, or a sequence of steps that look as if they lead to a capitol. He has short hair because it is straight and would be monstrous were it long. His nose is French like Cyrano’s. He is a funny-looking man because he is not from our town, or at least not ours; he is like a man in the murder scene of a movie before we know the plot. I am a funny-looking man and you, too, are a funny-looking man or woman to someone, not everyday, of course, but at least once when you were walking up some steps or making angel’s wings in the park, someone stopped to think, How awful that person looks, oh god! Perhaps it is something we need to make us feel that we belong somewhere, that there is one person at least we’re glad we don’t look like. He is one we know we should give a chance, but won’t, like that one from our youth whose laugh broke our heart, who wouldn’t have touched us with a cross. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4 a.m. in Gravesend A simple peace has overtaken the night. The fading light of the very last car is gone. Soft winds talk, of where to blow the papers that skip about an empty sidewalk, move gently on to waken the shapers of a new tomorrow, stealing the dreams they can not borrow. Keen ears can hear a milkman’s words and soon, the whistling of the birds. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Testament from the North Forty When you find me waste no fanfare. Save your sweat for the corn. Toss me in a fruit cart, fertilize the field with me if times are hard. Wash my smell from your hands. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Senescence Your back, slightly bent under a whispery blue shirt, will ache a little, you’ll say, but not too bad and my knuckle ball big fingers, unaware of their curve, will calm it. Your eyes, barely breaking through the folds of skin will gray and cloud your perception into believing mine are still green. Your lips will heal and chap, thousands of times, the lines deepening until your kisses are like cotton balls, only wet. Your voice will hoarse around without your consent on good mornings but will still utter the same remarks about table saws and snow. Your will will work hard: Loving me is as simple as chewing nails, as dainty as stealing a car. My hips will groan as I make coffee. My voice drowned by the grinds grinding, I will shout about how much it hurts. In truth, it will only ache a little. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Ground Zero It is the image, over and over, the towers collapsing on flickering television screens, like the children who build tall thin towers, a delicate balance, until an angry fist sends them tumbling down. It is the hand lettered signs, Have you seen my mother, father, daughter, friend ? The hours of waiting, the brooding silence below. It is the river of names, first a stream, then the rapids, names bobbing up and down in the swift current, drowning out the cries of the living. It is the shroud of silence that cloaks the ground the zero, a void, gaping wound, open mouth, silent scream. . +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Fall of Troy is All Your Fault: A Message to Hector Nobody listens to poor Cassandra— “Oh no, the face that launched a thousand” Angry men against us “is too beautiful to be so dangerous, as you say, Cass”— I should contradict you, but you won’t care, because Nobody listens to poor Cassandra. I’m just your younger sister, not overly troubled by the comings and goings Of my brothers’ girlfriends (and believe me, Paris has had more than he can even remember), Because nobody has ever listened to poor Cassandra, and therefore when I point out the rift growing in our family—and all of Troy—over that woman so blatantly disrupting our family life, you will merely think I’m acting jealous. But whom do you think Helen came to when she was homesick for her ladies’ maids and the scented baths of Menelaus’ court? To whom but the younger sister—“she’ll never tell, because nobody ever listens to poor Cassandra!” But maybe you would hear me if I told you she came into my bed, and curled up like a kitten among the cool silken sheets, doing her best to find comfort next to the one whom no one ever listens to: Poor Cassandra. But nobody will ever listen to poor Cassandra, even when she says “let Helen go home!” And Helen agrees, mewing so meekly that you and Paris will scoff and admire her more than ever. And that is why the fall of Troy is not Helen’s fault. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Guantanamo I will open my mouth in a parable. And it came to pass that we were set upon By a people of strange language, And I fell into a pit of their device. And one among them came to me and said, “I have come to free you. But I cannot free you yet, For you must open your mouth And pour forth praises of the Lord.” And I could not praise the Lord, For he had placed me in the pit, And I languished in the pit for four years. But after four years, my mouth was empty And my heart was dry, And I opened my mouth to praise the Lord That I would no longer languish in the pit. And one among the people of strange language Came to me and said to me “You are free, and thus you are delivered From the snare of the fowler,” And I thanked him for answering me and being my salvation. But he did not release me from the pit. And I was captured in their snare. And the pit closed its mouth over me. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ So Death In the lull between idle brains, is it possible to avoid the topic of weather? Is it that hard to listen? Is silence so bamboo and white sand, so death? Why do we want our pets to talk, then? Is their wordlessness too detached, too otherworldly? What could possibly be gained? Words come from inside. They are always revelatory. “You’re the best” stands for “I like that.” “Thank you” is “Do it again.” Pets don’t speak because they can’t lie. All words are about begging not to die. I love you means don’t leave me. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Jack Coulehan The Five Moons of Venus My married sons, who went out on a whim with a telescope that neither of them had figured out, set it up in a spot near the barn, where the leaves were thin. There was lunacy about their game, but not mine. I was in a daze from chasing children when they came in— We’ve sighted the five moons of Venus! I pulled on boots. A crescent hung among the stars. With the scope I could demonstrate Orion, my only trick, and they showed me an orange unblinking orb shining in a gap between the trees and around it a spoke of four white specks— Jupiter! And its four moons that didn’t fit the scheme and set Galileo thinking that God might be more complicated than we imagine and less like a larger version of us, and how much of the known might be wrong, and the truth hidden. Anyhow, I said, you can’t expect to see the five moons of Venus the first time. But you can caress them. My sons laughed— as usual, convinced I was teasing. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Backwash Holidays float to the ends of months. I turn the clock back, then ahead, forget my ex-husband’s birthday, the date of the divorce. Night comes, then day with its yellow roses. My friend the accountant knows the tax on each mistake. He asks how many books I buy myself, how many days I spend alone. This happens in many lives – passion fierce as a wall of dark water crashes in, carries the body, then dies in quick rough breaths. I burn candles scented with lavender. Taut wicks hiss, lighting the backs of rooms. Someone has to look out at the ocean All the time. It might as well be me. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Fooling the Angels A six-million-dollar roller coaster,The Shock Wave, goes 65 miles an hour carrying people upside down and backward over a 170 foot hill and seven loops. The New York Times The Shock Wave spins through; our necks snap in a noose of air, eyes flatten like nickels placed on the tracks. Hair lifts into space like a curtain parting. On I-95 a Volvo skids; a Ford truck rams the driver’s door. A half-mile back cars slow. By the time they pass, the driver’s wife holds the lightness of his body in her arms. Aaaaahhhh! Our throats lift into themselves; words swell and are swallowed again. Dry, deaf, blind, our bodies move into the loop like gliding into sleep or dancing. The man is dying, and his angels fly up from the fuming debris, lift him above the park. From the Shock Wave we see them, their gauzy ribbons, their lovely wings beating above us. We imagine their blank faces joyful, caring. Our souls ascend into our throats with a soft rustle, and they think we are calling. The loop falls away like a soprano’s last note. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Cortney Davis “ Do they want us?” the angels ask, resting in a nearby tree, watching the seventh loop and our faces that stare up with longing. In the street, EMTs arrive and thread the man with strands of tubing, force oxygen into his throat, squeeze his heart between breastbone and spine until the angel catches her breath and lifts her skirt, pries his arms from her arms, his mouth from her mouth. The Shock Wave grovels to the gate. We file away, silent with the silence of divers rising. Air hisses into our lungs. Lights flare, radios play again. We recognize our friends and kiss them. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Cortney Davis The Flower Vendors Flower vendors assemble in the empty lot across the street to wait in the spring’s green mist with the portion of roses they will spin in tissue paper, sell from their roadside stands. Here in the clinic, I wait for the lovely Maribels and Kims, Shaundas and Jennifers. They arrive shaking off rain-glaze, small shoots of children trailing at their feet, still evolving from the simple beginnings of fused limb-bud, fish spine. In the street, roses are so abundant they overspill the vendors’ arms. In the humid exam rooms, Miranda and Aida and Luna trust me. All around me, lush petals open, my gentle hand always in awe of the transient, fragile bloom. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Notes On Another Generation Our mothers wore aprons over their housedresses stuffed bags with rags boxes with buttons grew stringballs jammed leftovers into their refrigerators Just in case, they'd say You never know They could fix anything hems cars hearts and when we unravel or our bright lights dim or our lovers bolt we find a recipe a photograph or a memory to help us hang on. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3rd place - 2008 Connecticut River Review Contest; Judge Kim Bridgford Lot’s Wife for Anna Akhmatova Autumn is surely the crust of the year, Its pieces scattered for chickens that Lurch like matrons with cranky hips. Anna, you are understandably morose In a nation of fried and boiled meat. In the pantry of your cottage in exile, Old potatoes have the obstinate eyes And callous skin of your ex-husband. Outside, the cackle of falling leaves may be White noise or the very message you desire. Meanwhile, for dinner you dream of foie gras And a smuggled morsel of hope from the city Of your sentiments. By morning the coop may Produce a few eggs which some say contain the Biographies of martyrs, for they taste unbearably Sublime when accompanied by a pillar of salt. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Alan Elyshevitz Visitation Shake the rain from your clothes before entering this room. Sit in a chair; submit to the drudgery. Sit in a chair and await detonation. Consider now your many regrets: failing to park your shoes on a doormat; feeding bread to invincible pigeons; discussing alternatives with the surgeon, then forgetting each one in an instant. Outside, the sky spills a rainbow of grease upon a restaurant known for cheap Oriental lunch. Your car squats in the brick shadow of an abandoned school in which alert pupils once glowed with an amber glow. Half-awake in a sturdy chair yet half-asleep in a stiff-legged moment of tedium, you finger the sleeves of your own fatigue. There is someone else in this room, ticking, wrapped in a thin husk of cotton folded into the umbra of electronics. Who is that figure lying there as frail as disposable chopsticks? Who is that man in bed with a plastic fuse blooming from his punctured throat? +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Pause En Route You open your eyes: it’s the middle of your life. Morning manifests itself with flimsy light, a rain grows monotonous. Last day of your vacation. You can’t recall a memorable moment of your stay in this city you chose by looking away and jabbing a finger on a map. “I just wanted to go someplace,” you’ll explain too often to people who haven’t asked. In the Greyhound station the paraplegic girl in the wheelchair ignores the man who keeps staring-- the one in the exterminator’s suit, SLUG-A-BUG printed on the back-- by perfecting pirouettes in her imagination. A bus pulls out and there’s something infinitely sad in the shifting gears, the deep thrum of motor. You wonder whether you’re arriving tblares out over the loudspeaker. You must change your life “Yeah, sure,” you mutter, dropping coins in the broken vending machine, humming lines to poems that haven’t been written, while someone, disguised as himself, waves to you from the crowd dispersing in all directions to pursue those solitary engagements, the ones we call our lives. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ How Many Ghosts Can Gather in One House? Late afternoon, five p.m., that half-light when night is about to fall but hasn’t yet. That’s when loneliness creeps in. Even in a houseful of people, loneliness is like a scarf that wraps itself around my neck until I cannot breathe. My house now is full of nurse’s aides and wheelchairs, walkers and medicine bottles and handymen tramping up the cellar stairs and through the kitchen in their heavy boots that leave tracks of dirt and plaster across the floor But even with all these people, the clatter of pots, the splash of water in the sink, the clinking of plates and cups, at five p.m. I am always beset by loneliness, those moments when I count off all that I’ve lost—my mother, father, sister, all claimed by the big hand of death and without them, these people whose love and care always kept me safe, how can I keep these dark shadows from creeping out of the corners of the room, how can I keep from shivering? +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Maria Mazziotti Gillan Imagine 1974 There we are caught in a color photograph. Jennifer at seven, thin and rangy , her hair recently chopped off by my sister has lost all its curls and now hangs straight around her face. After that haircut, her hair went from platinum blonde to a darker color, like honey. Jennifer never forgave my sister, still mourns those ringlets springing off her head. I am thirty-four, wearing the fake leather jacket my neighbor sewed for me. It is a deep chocolate brown. I am thin and curvy at the same time; my hair the color of burnished mahogany, is piled on top of my head. I look like my daughter does today, but I don’t know it then. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see only dark skin, dark hair, nothing beautiful, only a face like a wound. If I could, I would go back and tell that young woman how I came to plant my feet solidly on the ground, to claim my place as I never could have then, who saw myself as fragile and easily broken, an outline yet to be filled in. I try to tell my daughter now grown and older than I was then, to find what you love, what defines you, what turns an insubstantial girl into a woman certain she knows where she’s going and where she’s been.
|
