The key to the tower

There was never
There was never
A key to the tower

There was never a key to the tower, you fool

It was a dream
It was a dream
A mosquito's dream

A mosquito dreaming in a cage for a bird

It's October
It's October
The summer's over

Your passionate candle in a pumpkin's head
And the old woman's hand in this photograph
Appears to be nailed to the old man's hand

And the sky
And the sky
And the sky above you

Is a drunken loved one asleep in your bed

And the tower
And the tower
And the key to the tower

There was never a key to the tower, I said

And this insistence
This insistence
It will only bring you sorrow

Your ridiculous key, your laughable tower

But there was
There was
A tower there

I swear

And the key
And the key
I still have it here somewhere

Laura Kasischke

Gulf Coast
Winter / Spring 2010

Signs

by Larry Levis

All night I dreamed of my home,

of the roads that are so long

and straight they die in the middle—

among the spines of elderly weeds

on either side, among the dead cats,

the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase

thrown open, sprouting failures.

2.

And this evening in the garden

I find the winter

inside a snail shell, rigid and

cool, a little stubborn temple,

its one visitor gone.

3.

If there were messages or signs,

I might hear now a voice tell me

to walk forever, to ask

the mold for pardon, and one

by one I would hear out my sins,

hear they are not important—that I am

part of this rain

drumming its long fingers, and

of the roadside stone refusing

to blink, and of the coyote

nailed to the fence with its

long grin.

And when there are no messages

the dead lie still—

their hands crossed so strangely

like knives and forks after supper.

4.

I stay up late listening.

My feet tap the floor,

they begin a tiny dance

which will outlive me.

They turn away from this poem.

It is almost Spring.

Larry Levis, “Signs” from The Selected Levis. Copyright © 2000 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.upress.pitt.edu.

Source: The Afterlife (1977)

Monkeys
by Matthew Rohrer and Joshua Beckman
In another jungle the monkeys fret. Vibrations are tremendous. Terror begins. Mist dissipates. Monkeys alight in unison while beneath them nothing sexy happens. From within one mangrove a monkey flutters helplessly, another watches. Noise like refined alabaster drifts across our monkeys. Human intellect dwarfs only that first tear. Everything else excels. Intellect is nothing to savor. Monkeys know. Monkeys see. Monkeys do. As monkeys follow nauseated foresters across wet walkways they announce their intentions. Mankind savors variety. Monkeys savor mankind. Poachers came and grabbed the monkeys. In disturbing circumstances they thrive. Our satellites saw lilacs. Nighttime. No one wanders forever.

The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God's love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

The Opening

For Connie Fox and William King

Everyone arrives later than everyone else,
taller than expected, the gossip anthropological
in nature, turning clockwise. Stubborn,
the art doesn't seem to mind being the center
of its own attention. Death remains in fashion,
while delight appears to be making a comeback.
Art, the conversation claims, is: "an assault on time,"
"a currency of doubt and opportunity," "a cease-fire
with calamity." Uninvited, it keeps on coming,
its mouth filled with intuition, such lovely feathers.
Ah, the white fluorescent walls, the landscapes grateful
to have survived their own stillness. Everyone seems
to want something, dogma, truth, a context, politics
is not out of the question, but passion twists the ephemeral
into perception, urges the phenomenal to confront
the merely mysterious. You know what I mean—all that
endless standing, stepping back, squinting, sighing, doing
and undoing, the middle torn out of its own beginning,
the pleading to be finished, finally, the fiery binge and hoist
of the impossible ingested, flattened to nothing, the honed figure
walking out the door, alone under the night's vast umbrella,
the hat complaining to the rectangle about its lack of grammar,
the hilarious despair of the square, the aluminum shiver longing
for the simplicity of the lowly nut and bolt, canvas stretched
across infinity, the disappointments, unbearable happiness,
beckoning for the feast to begin.

Philip Schultz

Five Points
Vol. 13, No. 1

Arms

Arms make good hammers.
Doorboards know them:
nut-lustered, unabundant triangles
that crack in an inch,
that rattle the dangling brass
and loosen broad doors.

Arms are a heart's clock
(not pocket watches, knocking—
more a tock attack, or lack in tick).
Danced to a twelve-step,
arms drop to armlets—
fingers—they love to mingle
in the secondary minuets.

Arms make good legs.
Less to lug and lagging less—
in tag, such an army honorific
terrifically adapts. Plus a player
gets another lap, with hairy handles
(not to mention, complicated jumping jacks).

Susan Parr

Pacific Shooter
Pleiades Press

Eirlys

Running down to winter the vines
put on a last spurt
tendril towards the sun
light harvesting, scrape October's
thin sky soup onto their green plates
and gorge before the first chill breath
fills their veins with dried blood.
Up with the larky radiocaster
I drive through morning twilight
past women statuesque at bus-stops
knowing I can't give a lift to them all.

Up betimes our foremothers, cycladic
thighs thickened by childbearing
and buttocky suet pudding
or spry draggletails, gran's army
of widows and those whose old men
weren't up to much, waited for trams
dreading winter's onset, out in the frozen dark
with stockings over their boots
to swab and flick a duster
before the office boys blew in
shooting their paper cuffs.

All over the world they are still rising
to slice snow from pavements
under my hotel window on a Moscow morning
clean carriages, polish boards for money
to walk over, wipe the seats
for other bums and flush, polish
the city's sole with elbow grease
and beeswax, holding back disorder
and the silting down of dust, time's
and weather's fingerprint on sill
or handle, forerunners of that last
slide into all our winters.

And I think of how we laid one in the earth
on a summer morning, celebrating the four kids
she raised alone, her five jobs to keep them
and how her tall sons' tears acclaimed
her membership of those secret
battalions that might sweep the old
order away. She was called Eirlys.

One Sunday dinner time she spelled it
for me on the pub table in spilt beer
that old name of a white flower
from her native mountains and woods.
Slim still as an asphodel
poking up through the dust
she would have taken pan and brush to.
Her life held up to the light
seems full of bright motes dancing.

Maureen Duffy

Family Values
Enitharmon / Dufour Editions

Lines for Winter

by Mark Strand

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself

as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself—

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back

and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

Three Poems

XIII

If you ever travel to the prosperous land of Ambrakia, score a boar-fish if you happen on one, even if it costs its weight in gold—otherwise, the immortals will rain down on you a good dose of the harshest rancor. Take care not to overlook it since this fish is the finest kind of nectar.

But be forewarned: Mortals are not permitted to eat this fish, or even cast their eyes on one. The only exception is for those who carry a certain type of basket woven from hollow marsh reeds and who are adept at whirling small bones in their hands before casting them, and those who lay gifts of mutton legs on the ground.

(Note)

XXXII

You have got to get your hands on tail meat from a female tuna. Not just any; I mean the mothers of all tunas—ones that hail from Byzantion. Cut her up into steaks and grill them after giving them a light dash of finely powdered salt. Baste with olive oil. Eat them hot, dipping pieces into seasoned brine. If you dare eat them without dressing, as the immortals would, nothing would ever be as good. But if you dish them out drenched in vinegar, you'll render the divine vile.

LXII

At a feast never neglect to adorn your neck with garlands of all sorts of blooms from every quarter of the earth's bounty. Mete out drops of the finest perfumes to dress your hair. Cast upon the fire's silken ash Syria's fragrant fruit—frankincense and myrrh.

While you drink your fill someone should bring you such delicacies as sow's belly or womb braised in tangy vinegar, cumin and silphium—or whatever roasted bird is sweetest in season.

Don't follow the manner of those folk from Siracusa, those people who act like frogs and merely drink without eating a thing. Ignore them and dine on what foods I've been telling you about. All their side dishes evidence the lowest sort of culinary destitution—boiled chick-peas, fava beans, apples and dried figs. Yet I'll make one exception and praise pastries from Athens. If you can't go there and get one, next best is to hunt around for Attic honey since that's the dressing that makes those flat-cakes so exquisite.

A free man should live no other way. Or else be condemned to rack and ruin buried miles and miles deep underground beneath the bottomless Pit, beneath Tartaros.

Archestratos
translated from the Greek by Gian Lombardo

Gastrology or Life of Pleasure or Study of the Belly or Inquiry Into Dinner
Quale Press

Grapefruit

by Ted McMahon

My grandfather got up early to section grapefruit.
I know because I got up quietly to watch.
He was tall. His hairless shins stuck out
below his bathrobe, down to leather slippers.
The house was quiet, sun just up, ticking of
the grandfather clock tall in the corner.

The grapefruit were always sectioned just so,
nestled in clear nubbled bowls used
for nothing else, with half a maraschino
centered bleeding slowly into
soft pale triangles of fruit.
It was special grapefruit, Indian River,
not to be had back home.

Doves cooed outside and the last night-breeze
rustled the palms against the eaves.
He turned to see me, pale light flashing
off his glasses
and smiled.

I remember as I work my knife along the
membrane separating sections.
It's dawn. The doves and palms are far away.
I don't use cherries anymore.
The clock is digital
and no one is watching.

Then too there is this

by J. Allyn Rosser

joy in the day's being done, however

clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists,

the packages nestling together,

no one home waiting for dinner, for

you, no one impatient for your touch

or kind words to salve what nightly

rises like heartburn, the ghost-lump feeling

that one is really as alone as one had feared.

One isn't, not really. Not really. Joy

to see over the strip mall darkening

right on schedule a neon-proof pink

sunset flaring like the roof of a cat's mouth,

cleanly ribbed, the clouds laddering up

and lit as if by a match struck somewhere

in the throat much deeper down.

The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God's love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

Alicia Suskin Ostriker

The Corner Grocery Store

by Walter McDonald

Slope-shouldered, thin,

disabled by the Bataan

death march,

my boss sold

whatever he could stock

on meager shelves

in 1946. Mornings

after fits of coughing

he scouted ads,

sent me for specials

to what in ten years more

they’d call supermarkets.

Shaking his head

he marked each item up

however much he thought

would sell.

Once a day

he called his ex-wife

long distance, ended

slamming the phone down,

screaming at me.

Always his crotch

itched from jungle rot.

Halfway through a sale

he’d motion me to ring it up

and rush out scratching wildly.

He had a trunk of souvenirs,

Japanese coins and teeth

and paper bills thick

as parchment. He doled them out,

bribed me to settle

for fifty cents a day.

Within six months his souvenirs,

his jungle rot, his customers

that never bought

more than a dollar’s worth,

drove him to bed,

wheezing for me to ring

exactly what they bought,

called me thief, one morning

hissed You Jap

you murderer get out.

How to Make Armor

Wear your bones like cold-rolled
steel, skin hammered
in brigandine sheets.
Pound leather and shadow
to a stiff segmentata.

Be corset-pinched.

Clad in devices,
night will rise like a wound,
duty bronzed to paldrons
hulking your shoulders.

When your bad decisions are fused
with chain mail and you're dueling
in the silence of thieves,
go at the world in stone.

Fear is a long-revered tradition.

In the carbon-dark, language
is harnessed in its helm
as "order" from the Latin ordo
means closed circle.

Be plate-sealed,
protected as a priest's halberd
wielding against a cauldron
of medicine.

Or lie naked in the dandelions,
pained with sensation.

Jennifer K. Sweeney

http://www.gspoetry.com/

She Dreamed of Cows

by Norah Pollard

I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she'd worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything—
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief—
until sleep captured her and bore her down.

She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.

When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.

The Welcome Chamber

In the welcome chamber
somebody is always waiting to help you
with your hat or your coat. Somebody is always
handing you a cold drink, if it's warm outside,
or a warm drink, if it's cold.

Somebody offers to shine your shoes.
Somebody else offers to babysit the kids
for free, if you want to go out sometime, at night.

There are beds in the welcome chamber,
but you never see anybody sleeping in them.
If you spill something on the furniture,
nobody minds. "We'll get it later," they say.

Each time you go to the welcome chamber,
you feel a little guilty. Like maybe this
is something you shouldn't be doing, or should
be doing for yourself.

You offer to help the women
with their cooking, their sewing,
their legal briefs and Gaussian equations.
"We're fine," they insist.
Instead, you make small talk
about commodity prices and the weather.
Everybody agrees with you.

"Sit anywhere you like," everyone says.
You're so terribly afraid
somebody is about to disappoint
somebody else,
and that everybody will be nice about it.

You try saying "Hi." Everybody
in the welcome chamber says "Hi," back.
It shouldn't be so easy, you tell yourself.
There should be money involved.
There should be sirens, the almost surgical glare
of TV cameras. Somebody should be crying.

There should be dark shapes in the snow.

G. C. Waldrep

Antioch Review
Fall 2009

The Sum of Man

by Norah Pollard

In autumn,
facing the end of his life,
he moved in with me.
We piled his belongings—
his army-issue boots, knife magazines,
Steely Dan tapes, his grinder, drill press,
sanders, belts and hacksaws—
in a heap all over the living room floor.
For two weeks he walked around the mess.

One night he stood looking down at it all
and said: "The sum total of my existence."
Emptiness in his voice.

Soon after, as if the sum total
needed to be expanded, he began to place
things around in the closets and spaces I'd
cleared for him, and when he'd finished
setting up his workshop in the cellar, he said,
"I should make as many knives as I can,"
and he began to work.

The months plowed on through a cold winter.
In the evenings, we'd share supper, some tale
of family, some laughs, perhaps a walk in the snow.
Then he'd nip back down into the cellar's keep
To saw and grind and polish,
creating his beautiful knives
until he grew too weak to work.
But still he'd slip down to stand at his workbench
and touch his woods
and run his hand over his lathe.

One night he came up from the cellar
and stood in the kitchen's warmth
and, shifting his weight
from one foot to the other, said,
"I love my workshop."
Then he went up to bed.

He's gone now.
It's spring. It's been raining for weeks.
I go down to his shop and stand in the dust
of ground steel and shavings of wood.
I think on how he'd speak of his dying, so
easily, offhandedly, as if it were
a coming anniversary or
an appointment with the moon.
I touch his leather apron, folded for all time,
and his glasses set upon his work gloves.
I take up an unfinished knife and test its heft,
and feel as well the heft of my grief for
this man, this brother I loved,
the whole of him so much greater
than the sum of his existence.

Diagramming Won’t Help This Situation

by Kevin Brown

Grammatical rules have always baffled
me, leaving me wondering whether my
life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the
subject or object of my life, and no one
has been able to provide words to describe
my actions, even if they do end in –ly.

But now the problem seems to be with
pronouns: I am unwilling to be him
and you are unable to be her, so we
will never be them~the ones talking
about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for
dinner tonight; the couple saving for a
vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a
museum tour of Europe; the two who meet
with a financial advisor to plan their children's

college fund while still managing to set enough
aside for their retirement~and so we will
continue to be nothing more than sentence
fragments, perfectly fine for effect,
but forever looking for the missing
part of speech we can never seem to find.

Gravity

by Louis Jenkins

It turns out that the drain pipe from the sink is attached to nothing and water just runs right onto the ground in the crawl space underneath the house and then trickles out into the stream that passes through the backyard. It turns out that the house is not really attached to the ground but sits atop a few loose concrete blocks all held in place by gravity, which, as I understand it, means "seriousness." Well, this is serious enough. If you look into it further you will discover that the water is not attached to anything either and that perhaps the rocks and the trees are not all that firmly in place. The world is a stage. But don't try to move anything. You might hurt yourself, besides that's a job for the stagehands and union rules are strict. You are merely a player about to deliver a soliloquy on the septic system to a couple dozen popple trees and a patch of pale blue sky.

The Speaker

by Louis Jenkins

The speaker points out that we don't really have much of
a grasp of things, not only the big things, the important
questions, but the small everyday things. "How many steps
up to your front door? What kind of tree grows in your
backyard? What is the name of your district representative?
What is your wife's shoe size? Can you tell me the color of your
sweetheart's eyes? Do you remember where you parked
the car?" The evidence is overwhelming. Most of us never
truly experience life. "We drift through life in a daydream,
missing the true richness and joy that life has to offer." When
the speaker has finished we gather around to sing a few
inspirational songs. You and I stand at the back of the group
and hum along since we have forgotten most of the words.

Department Store Fictions

by Jason Whitmarsh

The mannequins are all in love with you
and too depressed to say it. The cashier
flirts with another cashier, who eyes you,
who eyes the sales rack of wool pants.
Behind each mirror hunches an old man
watching women adjust their skirts,
their sunglasses, their hair. Small dogs disappear
on the escalator. Everyone leans forward
at the perfume counter, asking to be touched.

Nothing in That Drawer
by Ron Padgett
Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer. Nothing in that drawer.

i like my body

by E. E. Cummings

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which I will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh...And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you quite so new

How It Will End

by Denise Duhamel

We're walking on the boardwalk
but stop when we see a lifeguard and his girlfriend
fighting. We can't hear what they're saying,
but it is as good as a movie. We sit on a bench to find out
how it will end. I can tell by her body language
he's done something really bad. She stands at the bottom
of the ramp that leads to his hut. He tries to walk halfway down
to meet her, but she keeps signaling Don't come closer.
My husband says, "Boy, he's sure in for it,"
and I say, "He deserves whatever's coming to him."
My husband thinks the lifeguard's cheated, but I think
she's sick of him only working part-time
or maybe he forgot to put the rent in the mail.
The lifeguard tries to reach out
and she holds her hand like Diana Ross
when she performed "Stop in the Name of Love."
The red flag that slaps against his station means strong currents.
"She has to just get it out of her system,"
my husband laughs, but I'm not laughing.
I start to coach the girl to leave the no-good lifeguard,
but my husband predicts she'll never leave.
I'm angry at him for seeing glee in their situation
and say, "That's your problem—you think every fight
is funny. You never take her seriously," and he says,
"You never even give the guy a chance and you're always nagging,
so how can he tell the real issues from the nitpicking?"
and I say, "She doesn't nitpick!" and he says, "Oh really?
Maybe he should start recording her tirades," and I say
"Maybe he should help out more," and he says
"Maybe she should be more supportive," and I say
"Do you mean supportive or do you mean support him?"
and my husband says that he's doing the best he can,
that he's a lifeguard for Christ's sake, and I say
that her job is much harder, that she's a waitress
who works nights carrying heavy trays and is hit on all the time
by creepy tourists and he just sits there most days napping
and listening to "Power 96" and then ooh
he gets to be the big hero blowing his whistle
and running into the water to save beach bunnies who flatter him
and my husband says it's not as though she's Miss Innocence
and what about the way she flirts, giving free refills
when her boss isn't looking or cutting extra large pieces of pie
to get bigger tips, oh no she wouldn't do that because she's a saint
and he's the devil, and I say, "I don't know why you can't admit
he's a jerk," and my husband says, "I don't know why you can't admit
she's a killjoy," and then out of the blue the couple is making up.
The red flag flutters, then hangs limp.
She has her arms around his neck and is crying into his shoulder.
He whisks her up into his hut. We look around, but no one is watching us.

Intake Interview

What is today's date?

Who is the President?

How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?

What does "people who live in glass houses" mean?

Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the
avalanche?

Name five rivers.

What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?

How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?

If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you
say to him?

What should you do if I fall asleep?

Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps?

What is the moral of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"?

What about his Everest shadow?

Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one
else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination
of indigenous populations?

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent
absence?

Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an
even to those of the underworld, or vice versa?

Would you visit a country where nobody talks?

What would you have done differently?

Why are you here?

Franz Wright

Everything Is Beautiful from a Distance, and So Are You

by Michael Blumenthal

The young clarinetist, playing Mendelssohn's Sinfonia #10 in B-minor
in back of the orchestra may be exceedingly beautiful, it's hard to know
from here, just as I, to her, may be gorgeous myself and the day, in

retrospect, divine, as all the past loves of my life have been, and that boring
evening in County Derry as well, oh yes, they are all beautiful, now, when
I look back upon them, as, no doubt, my life will seem from some calm

and beautiful distance, some rapturous perspective, but here in the here
and now let me say that it's midafternoon, my lover is on her way over,
it's been a long chilly day in Budapest, what I thought was a herniated disc

is not, after all, a herniated disc, Mozart's 250th is behind us, as is the 60th
anniversary of Bartók's death, and it is only James Taylor on the stereo—
sweet, sentimental James—and I don't give a damn what anyone thinks

of my taste or emotional proclivities, I only know it's Thursday and in
an hour I'll be making love, and, looking up at me from the pillow,
my lover may or may not consider me beautiful, or even desirable,

but the deed will be already done, the evening before us, there
are roasted red peppers and goat cheese in the refrigerator, I'll be
as far from death as a man can be, oh can you imagine that?

Two Poems

Susurrus of Sheets, Goodbye

He leans across his arm, peeks
at her hose-crotch bed-height,
her breasts doubling over.
It's no artist's pose, feet in a basin,
pin shivers in pointillesque,
but the hair she holds off her neck
sends heat into him. Otherwise,

color and motion, the day's
global positioning ratchets
into place with a purse click.
Sweet, she says into the near dark.
She could mean the sudden breeze
except he catches her hand
against his rough cheek.

Wooly Bully

Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.
—SAM THE SHAM AND THE PHARAOHS

Something is too late,
her walk, her look?
Those in the know know

she could fix it with effort,
the transparent lie.
She could walk further

but she leans away from the path,
she stops to check the time.
How do you change it?

Her spouse tries out
an answer. There,
in the air, rushing

toward them at a fixed
rate, comes the sound of a sound—
watch it now, watch it.

Terese Svoboda

And the Cantilevered Inference Shall Hold the Day

by Michael Blumenthal

Things are not as they seem: the innuendo of everything makes
itself felt and trembles towards meanings we never intuited
or dreamed. Take, for example, how the warbler, perched on a

mere branch, can kidnap the day from its tediums and send us
heavenwards, or how, held up by nothing we really see, our
spirits soar and then, in a mysterious series of twists and turns,

come to a safe landing in a field, encircled by greenery. Nothing
I can say to you here can possibly convince you that a man
as unreliable as I have been can smuggle in truths between tercets

and quatrains on scraps of paper, but the world as we know
is full of surprises, and the likelihood that here, in the shape
of this very bird, redemption awaits us should not be dismissed

so easily. Each year, days swivel and diminish along their inscrutable
axes, then lengthen again until we are bathed in light we were not
prepared for. Last night, lying in bed with nothing to hold onto

but myself, I gazed at the emptiness beside me and saw there, in the
shape of absence, something so sweet and deliberate I called it darling.
No one who encrusticates (I made that up!) his silliness in a bowl,

waiting for sanctity, can ever know how lovely playfulness can be,
and, that said, let me wish you a Merry One (or Chanukah if you
prefer), and may whatever holds you up stay forever beneath you,

and may the robin find many a worm, and our cruelties abate,
and may you be well and happy and full of mischief as I am,
and may all your nothings, too, hold something up and sing.

5 AM

People want four things. The first three
are easy: to love, to know, to be.
The fourth is for the rooster atop
the bush outside my window to stop
its lonely crowing. For sleep's sake,
even the cat thinks what will it take
to figure his pretty hen is dead.
Shredded feathers and fluff were spread
across the yard outside the back door
like a shuttlecock factory floor.
From darkness, he calls her nonetheless,
till the stars have faded in the west.
Some morning soon I might take him
by the old comb and beak and shake him,
look him in the eye and say, She won't
be back, not now, not noon, so don't,
just don't. But then, I allow the blame
of betrayal is better than the shame
of silence. I get up, crow along,
singing some forlorn morning song
while poaching eggs. Silence comes
with eating. I throw the few toast crumbs
of what's left over into the back yard
along with last night's corn and Swiss chard,
and who comes barreling over to look
but this dumb bird who daily crooks
his neck to crow when he sees the sun
like a distant yolk not quite a son,
not quite a god, when he lifts his praise
to mystery and emptiness.

John Poch

Dolls
Orchises Press

Splitting an Order

by Ted Kooser

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,
observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he had asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

The Magi

by William Butler Yeats

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

When the Body

When the body
promises itself
and fulfills its promise
desiring with voices
that spill into the garden and stick to the branches
like resin
when the body in its exaltation announces
"In chaos I exist absolutely"
and under the bare light of the bulb
splits in two
so that one half sinks into
the other half
when its word becomes
a perpendicular line
connecting it to the heavens
when the body
poisoned by juices
swaddled by touches
reveals itself to be all alone
and bedazzled
when it swallows what it gives out
when it gives in to what presses in
when its measured surface
has been measured countless times
by the eye, the mouth
the exacting lens of time
down to the last pimple, pore
when the beautiful proportions
curl up out of breath
and the argument
I am in love therefore I exist
is exhausted
the voices come back to the roots of the kidney
and a bird hidden
untouched by all the saliva and kisses
flies away, flies over
the desert space
sown with the teeth and hair
left behind by the body
when the body ...

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke
translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck

6. News Will Arrive From Far Away

by Dana Gioia

News will arrive from far away: the phone
rings unexpectedly at night,
and a voice you almost recognize
will speak. Soft and familiar,
it mentions names you haven't heard for years,
names of another place, another time,
that street by street restore
the lost geography of childhood.
Half asleep you listen in the dark
gradually remembering where you are.
You start to speak. Then silence.
A dial tone. An intervening voice.
Or nothing. The call is finished.
Not even time to turn the lights on.
Now just the ticking of the clock,
the cold disorder of the bed.

Our Fathers

So we'll never hear Sinatra
the way our fathers did, who wander the rooms
in their pajamas wondering where in the world,
where? And someone says, No,
no thank you, sick of listening to strangers
in the street, sick of coming home in doubt
or in time for the familiar meal, the usual
complaints, fingers extended as the polish dries.
Our fathers. Alone or together alone
with the new wives that never took.
And the coffee by the window. And the neighbor's
dogs chasing deer down the driveway.
The arrival of mail and the afternoon light, a bruise
in the birches crowding the house.
Our fathers, for whom the days cannot pass
slowly enough, who find their old hats
behind the shoe boxes and photo albums
and say, Why not? For Frank before Las Vegas,
for DiMaggio and Bogart. They say, The evening
is wider than a mile, though of course nothing
is waiting on the other side,
nothing but night.

James Harms

Fifteen

by William Stafford

South of the bridge on Seventeenth
I found back of the willows one summer
day a motorcycle with engine running
as it lay on its side, ticking over
slowly in the high grass. I was fifteen.

I admired all that pulsing gleam, the
shiny flanks, the demure headlights
fringed where it lay; I led it gently
to the road and stood with that
companion, ready and friendly. I was fifteen.

We could find the end of a road, meet
the sky on out Seventeenth. I thought about
hills, and patting the handle got back a
confident opinion. On the bridge we indulged
a forward feeling, a tremble. I was fifteen.

Thinking, back farther in the grass I found
the owner, just coming to, where he had flipped
over the rail. He had blood on his hand, was pale—
I helped him walk to his machine. He ran his hand
over it, called me good man, roared away.

I stood there, fifteen.

Admission Requirements of U.S. and Canadian Dental Schools

by Ron Koertge

Is your furniture in mint condition?
Has the loathing settled down?
Do you have many commemorative coins?
Do you know what the lighthouse stands for
in poetry?
Do you regard "uppers" and "lowers" as versions
of the class struggle?
If you could snow, would you?
Could you wear a red hunting shirt rather than
the traditional white smock?
When someone murmurs, "But my first love
is the oboe," are you disheartened?
If you were a bird. what would be your wingspan?
If someone said. his gums were clandestine, would
you look forward to the drilling?
Do you know what makes bipeds wild with joy?
Could you be specific?

Cy Twombly, "Beyond (A System for Passing)"

by H. L. Hix

To say how much I've missed you, I offer this,

at most mist, at least assorted letters, lists,

numbers I insist tell stories. I kissed you

last, Dad, in the casket in which you passed on,

to some next place, but last listened for your voice

last night, these long years after, will listen next

when next oppressed by blue-gray, as I am now,

as I, thus lost, am always by your absence.

Self-Portrait as a Bear

by Donald Hall

Here is a fat animal, a bear
that is partly a dodo.
Ridiculous wings hang at his shoulders
as if they were collarbones
while he plods in the bad brickyards
at the edge of the city, smiling
and eating flowers. He eats them
because he loves them
because they are beautiful
because they love him.
It is eating flowers which makes him so fat.
He carries his huge stomach
over the gutters of damp leaves
in the parking lots in October,
but inside that paunch
he knows there are fields of lupine
and meadows of mustard and poppy.
He encloses sunshine.
Winds bend the flowers
in combers across the valley,
birds hang on the stiff wind,
at night there are showers, and the sun
lifts through a haze every morning
of the summer in the stomach.

A Noun Sentence
by Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Fady Joudah
A noun sentence, no verb to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed after making love ... a salty perfume or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy like the sunset at your strange windows. My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding my need, hesitant between two doors: entry a joke, and exit a labyrinth. Where is my shadow—my guide amid the crowdedness on the road to judgment day? And I as an ancient stone of two dark colors in the city wall, chestnut and black, a protruding insensitivity toward my visitors and the interpretation of shadows. Wishing for the present tense a foothold for walking behind me or ahead of me, barefoot. Where is my second road to the staircase of expanse? Where is futility? Where is the road to the road? And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam of speech the dots on the letters, wishing for the present tense a foothold on the pavement ...

The Heart Under Your Heart

Who gives his heart away too easily must have a heart
under his heart.
—James Richardson

The heart under your heart
is not the one you share
so readily so full of pleasantry
& tenderness

it is a single blackberry
at the heart of a bramble
or else some larger fruit
heavy the size of a fist

it is full of things
you have never shared with me
broken engagements bruises
& baking dishes

the scars on top of scars
of sixteen thousand pinpricks
the melody you want so much to carry
& always fear black fear

or so I imagine you have never shown me
& how could I expect you to
I also have a heart beneath my heart
perhaps you have seen or guessed

it is a beach at night
where the waves lap & the wind hisses
over a bank of thin
translucent orange & yellow jingle shells

on the far side of the harbor
the lighthouse beacon
shivers across the black water
& someone stands there waiting

Craig Arnold

Two Aunts

by Thomas James

When I feel the old hunger coming on,

I think of my two great-aunts,

A farmer’s daughters,

Speaking into the dusk in North Dakota.

I imagine the dark baron

Riding out of their mouths,

Thick-skinned and girded

Against disaster, swathed

In cuirass and chainmail and a curse.

My hunger was theirs

Too long ago. It swims in my blood,

Groping for a foothold.

It is the dark I thrust my tongue against,

The wine and the delicate symphony

That makes my head tick so exquisitely

Tonight. My ladies,

My dusky girls, I see you

With your bustles puffed up like life preservers,

Your needlepoint rose garden,

Your George Eliot coiffures,

Your flounces gathered like an 1890s valentine.

You both took heroin.

Your father never noticed.

You sprinkled it in your oatmeal,

Embroidered doilies with it,

Ate it like a last supper

At midnight. I know what you meant.

There was always the hunger,

The death of small things

Somewhere in your body,

The children that would never

Take place in either of you.

You were a garden of lost letters.

A lust inhabited your veins.

My addicts,

The village spoke of you.

Under your parasols, two rose windows,

The world swam with color.

Riding the monotonous hills at daybreak,

You escaped the indecisions

Your blood has handed down

To me. You rode your father’s spotted horses

As if they might have ferried you

Over an edge, a dark mouth in the distance.

I see you ride the black hills of my mind,

Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk,

Galloping

In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware

Of something I inherited,

The doubt,

The fear,

The needle point of speech,

The hunger you passed down that I

Possess.

The Bible Belt

by David Shumate

It's a vast and fertile land. Soybeans and corn grow in this soil.
Wheat and tobacco. A little sorghum. It's not dramatic terrain
with ocean waves crashing against the cliffs. It's mostly gently
rolling plains. Long stretches of prairie. You know you've entered
it when the signs along the highway begin telling you what God
wants you to do. Those who live here regard it as their duty to
make these things known. Otherwise the rest of the country
would be left in the dark. The bibles in this region are larger than
elsewhere. Most weigh over a hundred pounds. It takes two strong
men to lift them into a pickup truck to haul off to church. All the
women dress up on Sundays. And all the white men shake hands.

Cherishing What Isn't

by Jack Gilbert

Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this
long life, along with the few others.
And the four I may have loved, or stopped short
of loving. I wander through these woods
making songs of you. Some of regret, some
of longing, and a terrible one of death.
I carry the privacy of your bodies
and hearts in me. The shameful ardor
and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds
of happiness and the walled-up childhoods.
I carol loudly of you among trees emptied
of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.
A score of women if you count love both large
and small, real ones that were brief
and those that lasted. Gentle love and some
almost like an animal with its prey.
What is left is what's alive in me. The failing
of your beauty and its remaining.
You are like countries in which my love
took place. Like a bell in the trees
that makes your music in each wind that moves.
A music composed of what you have forgotten.
That will end with my ending.

Not To Trouble You

by Leonard Nathan

Not to trouble you with love, I mean
those adolescent dreams of great, of greater,
or of greatest loving, let alone
the crumbly personal kind—compared with, say,
the public good or harder thoughts of death
obliterating thoughts of love, or after-
thoughts of love outgrown or love undone;
and not to be ironic either, not
to forget we come into the world alone
and leave it so; and not to be claiming more
than you can give, uncertain as I am
what I require: something like love, I guess,
whatever it is we've done without so long,
so faithfully and with such tenderness.

A Hymn to Childhood

Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn't last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder to the attic?

The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother's china.

Don't fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,
and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood?
The one from which you'll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don't know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plentitude in the unseen bird
tolling at morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming.

Li-Young Lee

Behind My Eyes
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Student Theme

by Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.

Ben

by David Budbill

You can see him in the village almost anytime.
He's always on the street.
At noon he ambles down to Jerry's
in case a trucker who's stopped by for lunch
might feel like buying him a sandwich.
Don't misunderstand, Ben's not starving;
he's there each noon because he's sociable,
not because he's hungry.
He is a friend to everyone except the haughty.

There are at least half a dozen families in the village
who make sure he always has enough to eat
and there are places
where he's welcome to come in and spend the night.

Ben is a cynic in the Greek and philosophic sense,
one who gives his life to simplicity
seeking only the necessities
so he can spend his days
in the presence of his dreams.

Ben is a vision of another way,
the vessel in this place for
ancient Christian mystic, Buddhist recluse, Taoist hermit.
Chuang Tzu, The Abbot Moses, Meister Eckhart,
Khamtul Rimpoche, Thomas Merton—
all these and all the others live in Ben, because

in America only a dog
can spend his days
on the street or by the river
in quiet contemplation
and be fed.

An Auto-da-fé

I have nothing to recant, I am just
the decanter. You, the just destroyer,
have in faith become the role, recalling
for those gathered the noble fallen
with a prayer to his-grace-above-fire,
("Turn me, I'm burnt on that side")
St. Lawrence. Well done, I applaud.
And you: Well executed.

This is it. Not much else to await
when our fates touch: I've nowhere to be
but eternity, you've nothing to catch
but the thatch. Dry on dry,
we keep our wits about us ...
no one to meet but our match.

Kevin McFadden

Two Poems

What She Called the Blood Jet

The cabinet of love has only two doors,
in and out. There are four rooms.
In the first, screw top bottles and foil strips
hold brilliantly coloured answers.
The second holds something French
to do with herbs and truffle.
The third has the memory of childhood
and here, last of all, like mica, like mercury,
lies the present. It is a muscle. It is meat.

Familiar Object Seen from an Unusual Angle

Maybe it's the surface of the moon, pocky as rind, foreign,
or rain, on the beaches of childhood,
making holes in the sand, the 007 kind, splashy,

or the cross-hatched stars on your hand growing older,
or the real things, sparking still, as they cool,
it's how they twinkle, how we wonder what they are.

Maura Dooley

Song

by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.

All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it

Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing

The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then

They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head

Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly

The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away

Beside which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys

Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.

The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they

Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school

And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.

The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.

The head called to the body. The body to the head.

They missed each other. The missing grew large between them,

Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until

The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies

Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills.

Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,

Sang long and low until the morning light came up over

The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped....

The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named

The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after

The night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair

Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit.

The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night

She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn

Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke

To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang

Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats.

She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily

That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming

Made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn,

And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat

Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm

Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain

Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone

Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called

To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called

And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling

Like the feeling of the stones gouging the soft undersides

Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body

By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles

At the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head

Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take

These things away so that the girl would not see them.

They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.

They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear

Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke....

But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have

Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they

Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,

Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.

What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already

Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know

Was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them,

Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,

Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would

Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees

Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There

Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,

The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.

Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song

Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

Two Poems

Nonfiction

I make my pancakes from scratch,
mind you

but the decorative arts in general
leave me cold

Consequently I know
very little of the world.

That's the way they greet me—
that's the way they have always

greeted me:
a fire in the eyes

and dedication
to the experience
in the moment.

The Good-Enough Mother

rolling ball of thunder

discomfited by
change of venue

It's better to have a feeling
than a thought—

I got overheard
I got overexcited

Snow fell on the ground
making the heavens warmer.

He sneezed twice,
and lay on the ground also,

lazily sketching an angel's
wings with his wings.

Rebecca Wolff

Do You Doha?

A river of milk flows gently down the Howard Street gutter
Because it's a fine warm day in Sag Harbor
And someone upstream is washing a car.
I picture a Texan—Christian name Lamar—
Who snips off the end of a Cuban cigar
And lovingly lights up in Doha, Qatar,
Which young oilmen like him pronounce Doha, Cutter.
It's the Salt Flats of Utah in the Persian Gulf, but utter.
The emir is richer than melted butter.
Bumps and bubbles of white snot in the bone marrow look like an ice flow of hot
The way the universe was just before it expanded a lot.
You never know what disease you'll get, or you've already got.
It's your asteroid coming to get you, only for now it's smaller than a dot.
I'm an aging boy. I never grew up. I'm glued to the spot.

Adam in Eden is summertime Gloucestershire,
But riding to hounds in winter is really the glory here.
If it's strictly speaking illegal these days to chase a fox, they do not care.
If life is a matter of daring to do, they dare.
Lamar flies like the wind on the one he likes, the fiery mare.
She jumps a fence.
She doesn't care if it makes sense.
She leaps a ditch behind the pack.
Her thundering insolent brilliance will only attack.
I am thinking of your bad back and the stunning diagnosis.
I google multiple myeloma. I brace for the prognosis.
Yesterday you found out.
The sun rose today and the birds in the trees woke with a shout.
The Sag Harbor Tree Fund will plant many more memorial trees, no doubt.

I wouldn't recommend Stage III multiple myeloma.
The patient ends up screaming or in a coma.
Yes, the remissions can be quite exciting.
The question is, who is doing the accepting and who is doing the inviting.
Irrepressible plasma cells chitter-chatter away on their cell phones
While malignantly breaking your bones.
I personally would rather have non-small cell lung Ca.
Isn't that a wonderful name, itself a medical-language holiday?
Here's a pun—It took my breath away! Lung cancer? Breath away?
Outside, I can see through the window it is actually a nice day.
In the American manner, a visitor leaving the Visitors elevator says, Have a nice day!
I think of the Stradivarius fiddle I held this morning that made me want to pray.
I used to play.
That's what I'm trying to say.

Act your age!
I don't have to. I won't. You can't make me. I'm in an absolute rage.
I walk on stage.
The other ELVES are Gentry Shelton,
Raymond Sunderman, Harry Monteith, Harry Mathews, Alex Netchvolodoff,
James Hearne, Monroe Roberts III,
Paul Chandeysson, John Neiger III.
BEARS are Henry Pflager, Neil Horner, John Curtis, John Sutter, John Lewis,
Jan Bosman, Norfleet Johnston, George von Schrader.
BUNNIES: Teddy Simmons, Billy Crowell, Walter Shipley.
BLUEBIRDS: Nat Green, Joe Larimore.
ROBINS: Hord Hardin, August Busch III, Ralph Sansbury.
DANDELIONS, VIOLETS, ROSES: Little girls in various poses.
Titless teases and their diseases.

Boys and girls in Pakistan,
Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan,
Are sweeter far than marzipan,
And that includes the Taliban.
Sunni and Shia fulfill God's plan.
Afghanistan, Iraq,
Children on timers go tock-tick, tick-tock.
A boy is instructed by his parents, who are not peasants.
They pray with the child and give him compliments and presents.
Their son is sweeter to them than honey.
The parents receive martyr money.
We are ten thousand miles from my childhood in St. Louis.
St. Louis didn't do this.
St. Louis never knew this.

I know it was you who vomited on the chintz, Seidel.
You will never be invited to this house again, and just as well.
My wife and myself wish you well.
It will not end well.
She will follow you to hell.
The butler has gone to answer the front doorbell.
We are gentlemen here. No one here is a Jew or a queer.
I value sincerity: I know you are sincere.
Warren Beatty told Mary Kirby he liked candor.
Mary Kirby told Warren Beatty she gave good candor.
I remember dirt roads for the horsemen and the maroon perfume of summer roses.
Little girls grown up, and little boys, in various poses,
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

La Cina è vicina. China is near.
The butler returns to say the hearse is here. The ushers for the groom appear.
I give a toast, so brief that I sit down before anyone knows
I've given it, to no applause. God knows
It's odd to cry, with no one listening, my seagull cry.
Children wonder why one has to die.
It doesn't mean gulls are really crying when they cry in the sky.
Lamar can try to live forever. It's a poem. Why not try?
I flip a switch. The flowers wake with a shout. The trees immediately turn green.
Night dives like a submarine
As day breaks through the surface with its conning tower and power to preen.
On all sides of Sag Harbor Village is water—my little darling Doha in the desert!
Do you Doha? Do you knowa how to Doha?
La Cina è vicina. It is time to say Aloha.

Frederick Seidel

Fault

by Ron Koertge

In the airport bar, I tell my mother not to worry.
No one ever tripped and fell into the San Andreas
Fault. But as she dabs at her dry eyes, I remember
those old movies where the earth does open.

There's always one blonde entomologist, four
deceitful explorers, and a pilot who's good-looking
but not smart enough to take off his leather jacket
in the jungle.

Still, he and Dr. Cutie Bug are the only ones
who survive the spectacular quake because
they spent their time making plans to go back
to the Mid-West and live near his parents

while others wanted to steal the gold and ivory
then move to Los Angeles where they would rarely
call their mothers and almost never fly home
and when they did for only a few days at a time.

Shanked on the Red Bed
by Susan Wheeler
The perch was on the roof, and the puck was in the air. The diffident were driving, and the daunted didn't care. When I came out to search for you the lauded hit the breeze On detonated packages the bard had built to please. The century was breaking and the blame was on default, The smallest mammal redolent of what was in the vault, The screeches shrill, the ink-lines full of interbred regret— When I walked out to look for you the toad had left his net. The discourse flamed, the jurors sang, the lapdog strained its leash— When I went forth to have you found the tenured took the beach With dolloped hair and jangled nerves, without a jacking clue, While all around the clacking sound of polished woodblocks blew. When I went out to look for you the reductions had begun. A demento took a shopgirl to a raisin dance for fun, And for you, for me, for our quests ridiculous and chaste The lead sky leered in every cloud its consummate distaste. The mayors queued for mug shots while the banner rolled in wind That beat at bolted windows and bore down upon the thin, And everywhere warped deliverers got bellicose and brave, When I walked out to find you in the reconstructed rave. The envelopes were in the slots and paperweights were flung. When I came down to seek you out the torrents had begun To rip the pan from handle and horizons from their shore, To rip around your heady heart looking there for more.

Advice to Young Poets

by Martin Espada

Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head

Letters from Exile—II

by Hemant Mohapatra

http://www.eclectica.org/v13n3/mohapatra.html

how it adds up

what they don't tell you
is how it all ends. sure it was
spring:
volcanoes exploding
in the opposite hemisphere. moon
was igneous and adrift
while they cheered
your airship dreams of love
and you felt soft
and scared like a child
lowered into a well or some balloon
returning to a vast ocean.
you are in the kitchen
peeling garlic when it sneaks up
while the pots
stutter
boil
burn
and you hate it.
you hate it. you hate how it comes
from all directions
like breathless rhinos
chasing clouds you are already old
pushing this perpetual engine
of grief waiting at the window
for that letter to arrive three years
late so you
could write back "come home
my love, see how your departure
has unbalanced this air."
but it is now summer and no one writes
to you anyway
so you
just keep on waiting.

[Apologies for the lost formatting. I can't make Blogger do it. Go here for the original and effective formatting: http://www.eclectica.org/v13n3/mohapatra.html ]

[This is not a solicitous post. I really do like this one. -me]