My Autopsy

by Michael Dickman

There is a way

if we want

into everything

I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the

small and glowing loaves of bread

I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress

floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks

like water at night

The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese

poems

You eat the forks,

all the knives, asleep and waiting

on the white tables

What do you love?

I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on

despite worms or fire

I love our stomachs

turning over

the earth

There is a way

if we want

to stay, to leave

Both

My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air

particles of skin

The invisible floating universe of kisses, rising up in a sequinned

helix of dust and cinnamon

Breathe in

Breathe out

I smoke

unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes

from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them

here, and I’ll smoke them

There

There is a way

if we want

out of drowning

I’m having

a Gimlet, a Caruso, a

Fallen Angel

A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, a Stinger, an Angel

Face, a Corpse Reviver

What are you having?

I’m buying

I’m buying for the house

I’m standing the round

Wake me

from the dash of lemon juice,

the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy,

and the two fingers of gin

that make up paradise

There is a way

if we want

to untie ourselves

The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark

There are lots of stories about intestines

People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake

The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new

bright plastic curled around the older brother

Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned

Some people climb them into Heaven

Others believe we live in one

God’s intestine!

A conveyor belt of stars and saints

We tie and we loosen

Minor

and forgettable

miracles

The Answering Machine

by Linda Pastan

I call and hear your voice

on the answering machine

weeks after your death,

a fledgling ghost still longing

for human messages.

Shall I leave one, telling

how the fabric of our lives

has been ripped before

but that this sudden tear will not

be mended soon or easily?

In your emptying house, others

roll up rugs, pack books,

drink coffee at your antique table,

and listen to messages left

on a machine haunted

by the timbre of your voice,

more palpable than photographs

or fingerprints. On this first day

of this first fall without you,

ashamed and resisting

but compelled, I dial again

the number I know by heart,

thankful in a diminished world

for the accidental mercy of machines,

then listen and hang up.

Song of Myself (excerpt)

by Walt Whitman

This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make
appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp'd slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of
hair,

This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.
Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica
on the side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?
Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering
through the woods?
Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

20

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.

I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids,
conformity goes to the fourth-remov'd,
I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair,
counsel'd with doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

...

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is
myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or
ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can
wait.

Anything Warm
by Wendy Mnookin

Anything warm is warm.
Anything red has something to say.
Anything that drifts also smudges,
like secrets. That intense.
Anything loose is a message,
endless, and endlessly enticing.
Anything narrow gets there first.
Especially anger. Anything watery
pleads, though the story stays
buried under its layers, obscuring
whatever it is we've done
to deserve this. In the eternal life
of regret, Sunday looks back.
Monday is certainty,
with a mystery inside out.
Anything two days in a row
sings the same song I do
without repeating the first verse.
Because there is no return.
That seems dramatic, but likely.
Just look at the waves,
all moving in one direction.
It made Noah crazy!
Another day—hell, another
hour—he'd be ready
to wring that dove's neck.
What right did she have
to exhaustion, to twittery musings?
One declarative sentence
would be a relief.

$2.50

by Kenneth Fearing

But that dashing, dauntless, delphic, diehard, diabolic cracker likes his fiction turned with a certain elegance and wit; and that anti-anti-anti-slum-congestion clublady prefers romance;

Search through the mothballs, comb the lavender and lace;

Were her desires and struggles futile or did an innate fineness bring him at last to a prouder, richer peace in a world gone somehow mad?

We want one more compelling novel, Mr. Filbert Sopkins Jones,

All about it, all about it,

With signed testimonials to its stark, human while-u-wait, iced-or-heated, taste-that-sunshine tenderness and truth;

One more comedy of manners, Sir Warwick Aldous Wells, involving three blond souls; tried in the crucible of war, Countess Olga out-of-limbo by Hearst through the steerage peerage,

Glamorous, gripping, moving, try it, send for a 5 cent, 10 cent sample, restores faith in the flophouse, workhouse, warehouse, whorehouse, bughouse life of man,

Just one more long poem that sings a more heroic age, baby Edwin, 58,

But the faith is all gone,

And all the courage is gone, used up, devoured on the first morning of a home relief menu,

You'll have to borrow it from the picket killed last Tuesday on the fancy knitgoods line;

And the glamor, the ice for the cocktails, the shy appeal, the favors for the subdeb ball? O.K.,

O.K.,

But they smell of exports to the cannibals,

Reek of something blown away from the muzzle of a twenty-inch gun;

Lady, the demand is for a dream that lives and grows and does not fade when the midnight theater special pulls out on track 15;

Cracker, the demand is for a dream that stands and quickens and does not crumble when a General Motors dividend is passed;

Lady, the demand is for a dream that lives and grows and does not die when the national gaurdsmen fix those cold, bright bayonets;

Cracker, the demand is for a dream that stays, grows real, withstands the benign, afternoon vision of the clublady, survives the cracker's evening fantasy of honor, and profit, and grace.

Two Poems
by Frieda Hughes

The Lady M

Her gold is gone now. Gotten old,
She has fallen in on her hard white cage.
Bone-dangled and clattering,

Her face is cut sideways and smiles.
She is my mother-eater, she has cheated me of love.
Dry as a split gourd

She meets me like a relative, a lover even.
But her face has drawn its pale curtains on
The pits that bog it, and

Her eyes are closed.
Their black coals are only painted on
Her hollow doll. She herself has gone.

The Idea of a Dog

The idea of a Rottweiler grew legs
And walked. Its big, square head
Atop the solid, barreled torso
Looked up, waiting for instruction
Or embrace. The idea was obedient,
Faithful, intimidating to others,
But the idea was lopsided.
So the idea developed a twin brother.
Now, in my head, I'd say "sit"
And they would, dogs in duplicate,
Each reflecting the other identically.
I could see myself walking the streets
Flanked by muscles moving in tandem
Over the powerful shoulders
Of my synchronized keepers.
Perhaps I'd redden my lips,
Wear sunglasses
And a very short skirt.

To be alive
by Gregory Orr
To be alive: not just the carcass But the spark. That's crudely put, but… If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

Progress Does Not Always Come Easy

by Jimmy Carter

As a legislator in my state
I drew up my first law to say
that citizens could never vote again
after they had passed away.

My fellow members faced the troubling issue
bravely, locked in hard debate
on whether, after someone's death had come,
three years should be adequate

to let the family, recollecting him,
determine how a loved one may
have cast a vote if he had only lived
to see the later voting day.

My own neighbors warned me I had gone
too far in changing what we'd always done.
I lost the next campaign, and failed to carry
a single precinct with a cemetery.

Lyrical

by Joseph Millar

The spaniel next door yaps at the sparrows,
he yaps at the crows and the mailman,
yaps at the compost pile and the sunflower,
yaps at the rain and the sky. He yaps
at the steps leading down to the creek
where the flax plants bloom high as my waist
and blue flowers force their way up
though small stones the color of night. He
yaps at the garbage truck's back-up beeper,
iron bell song of the priest and bridegroom,
song of the lone ship, song of the train,
song of the big waves rolling and breaking
over the western reefs. He yaps at the rosebush,
yaps at the fence, song of the sidewalk cracked
in half, the wine bottle resting against the curb,
the neighbor who doesn't come home.

Three Poems
by Ruth Stone

Speaking to My Dead Mother

At two A.M. in Binghamton, it's quiet.
I did not comfort you with one last kiss.
Your death was my death. Instinct ran riot.
I ran. Didn't hold your hand at the abyss.
My life had gone like grass fire; like the trees
in drought, caught in the burning wind. And June
returns, another cycled year. Sweet-peas,
dahlias, phlox; the orchard I can't prune;
your small garden gloves, remnants of crystal
stemware. It wears away. I cannot bar
the passage. Jewelweed shoots its pistol
pouch of seeds and the storm, like a guitar,
thrums over the mountain. All that brooded,
ignorant in your safe arms, concluded.

The Awakening

Once when you turned to me and wound my hair
About my face, and in the dark your face
Was only a live felt thing, fear wrapped me too,
Disembodied arms held me in the bed's soft space.
Until you spoke, savagery crushed my throat,
And death like the snake slipped into our embrace.

Then by the light that later came cold
From the window, I saw you turned away
Asleep like a wax image, all of a color gray
And eyes shut down from all entwining, a fold
Of sheet between us, and my heart leaped up
To hear your voice, but your breath came easy, easy,
And your hands plucked aside my hair that brushed your face.
And there was a falling away from memory out of embrace.

How Aunt Maud Took to Being a Woman

A long hill sloped down to Aunt Maud's brick house.
You could climb an open stairway up the back
to a plank landing where she kept her crocks of wine.
I got sick on stolen angelfood cake and green wine
and slept in her feather bed for a week.
Nobody said a word. Aunt Maud just shifted
the bottles. Aunt's closets were all cedar lined.
She used the same pattern for her house dresses—
thirty years. Plain ugly, closets full of them,
you could generally find a new one cut and laid
out on her sewing machine. She preserved,
she canned. Her jars climbed the basement walls.
She was a vengeful housekeeper. She kept the blinds
pulled down in the parlor. Nobody really walked
on her hardwood floors. You lived in the kitchen.
Uncle Cal spent a lot of time on the back porch
waiting to be let in.

Counting the Mad

by Donald Justice

This one was put in a jacket,
This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat
But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there,
This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one thought himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man,
An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.

Happily Planting the Beans too Early

by Jack Gilbert

I waited until the sun was going down
to plant the bean seedlings. I was
beginning on the peas when the phone rang.
It was a long conversation about what
living this way in the woods might
be doing to me. It was dark by the time
I finished. Made tuna fish sandwiches
and read the second half of a novel.
Found myself out in the April moonlight
putting the rest of the pea shoots into
the soft earth. It was after midnight.
There was a bird calling intermittently
and I could hear the stream down below.
She was probably right about me getting
strange. After all, Basho and Tolstoy
at the end were at least going somewhere.

Among the Things He Does Not Deserve

by Dan Albergotti

Greek olives in oil, fine beer, the respect of colleagues,
the rapt attention of an audience, pressed white shirts,
just one last-second victory, sympathy, buttons made
to resemble pearls, a pale daughter, living wages, a father
with Italian blood, pity, the miraculous reversal of time,
a benevolent god, good health, another dog, nothing
cruel and unusual, spring, forgiveness, the benefit
of the doubt, the next line, cold fingers against his chest,
rich bass notes from walnut speakers, inebriation, more ink,
a hanging curve, great art, steady rain on Sunday, the purr
of a young cat, the crab cakes at their favorite little place,
the dull pain in his head, the soft gift of her parted lips.

J. Steals from the Rich and Uses the Money
to Get Drunk Again
by Jeffrey Schultz

Only those of us who carry our cause in our hearts
are willing to run the risks.
—Rigoberta Menchu

Too much to lose, he thinks, for anything else, picking pockets,
say, casually, without arousing suspicion out front of downtown’s
Banks and boutiques where late-afternoon yellows shop-windows,
yellows this gabardine’s hushed protest as one more wallet’s lifted,
Palmed, and repocketed in the darkness of a credit score’s grave.
Another round on me echoes as the first handful of earth drops
Without ceremony on the casket’s lid. Just too much at stake
for anything so romantic, so this: the legal, if not entirely ethical
Raid on their children’s college funds. In truth, he barely skims
the top. An adjunct’s wage. Nothing, really. Still, the students,
Over half of whom this semester are majoring in Business
Administration, hardly get what the parents pay for.
They ought to be learning something useful, how, for instance,
to begin without the slightest pang of guilt yet another memo
Which though one could never know it by reading the thing
will mean the disappearance of another thousand jobs, workers
Waking to confusion one morning as the sun reveals nothing
where, once, a livelihood had been. Instead, empty parking lots,
Temporary fencing. How will these kids ever learn the dead
and bureaucratic English in which inevitably the worst of news
Is delivered when he’s leading again what may someday become
a discussion on civil disobedience? How can they hope to master
Those conjugations and suffixes which most effectively liquidate
blame, responsibility, when he keeps count of third-world states
Toppled this week alone in foreign-backed military coups?
He should be precise, teach the five-paragraph essay’s perfect
Compartmentalization, its solid structural apparatus capable
of pacifying any guerrilla conscience, any full accounting
Of an argument’s collateral effects. Twelve-hundred words, please,
on a streamlined workforce and profit maximization. Don’t forget
The bibliography. Too much to lose then for anything much beyond
debating whether to add his name to another online petition,
An act too likely already to get a person placed on a watch list.
He couldn’t stand a night in jail even for those things he does
Believe. So nothing: after-work afternoon buried in Happy Hour’s
mass grave, the hinge of his briefcase’s shoulder strap adds
A cricket’s chirp to his cadence. He walks to the bus, imagines
the stand of trees wherein the revolution must be gathering.
All the way home, he practices. He’s learning Spanish
and just drunk enough not to care what the other riders
Think of this crazy book-bagged and brown-blazered white boy
as he mouths the words along with the voice in his headphones.
No, not white boy. Gringo, he thinks, his lips parting to the useless
yellowing expanse of his vocabulary: libre, liberar, libertad.

Jack

by Sara Backer

I have become the smaller flag on a ship,

the shorter rafters of a roof, a knave

in a pack of cards. I wear a skimpy coat,

tall leather boot, and leather drinking flask.

I am captured in a child's game

and hit when grown men gamble.

I am what they call a tame ape.

I was a common man

whose job was to lift weight.

Mechanical devices that replaced

my muscles took my job and pay

and more—they took my human name.

And I, who used to pull

my master's boots, hoist meat

and turn the spit, work the roller

and the winch, climb the steeple,

strike the bell and connect lines

in telephone exchange, am a daw,

the tiniest of crows, gathering

loose sticks to nest in castle ruins.

The solace of six centuries—and still—

is once, on a high and windy hill,

beside a well that was clear and full,

I kissed a girl named Gylle.

Evening

by Jo McDougall

From a wood beyond the fields,
something dark has not yet advanced
toward the yellow light
of the kitchen.
A woman puts away the dishes.
A man goes through the mail.
A child leans over the table,
saying her homework.

The dog looks up once and growls
as if not meaning to, a sound
almost inaudible.
He clicks across the floor, nosing for crumbs.

The Language Problem
by
Philip Levine

Cuban Spanish is incomprehensible even to Cubans. "If you spit in his face he'll tell you it's raining," the cab driver said. In Cuban it means, "Your cigar is from Tampa." Single, desperate, almost forty, my ex-wife told the Cuban doctor she'd give a million dollars for a perfect pair of tits. "God hates a coward," he said & directed her to an orthopedic shoe store where everything smelled like iodine. A full-page ad on the back of Nueva Prensa Cubana clearly read "Free rum 24 hours a day & more on weekends." ("Free rum" was in italics.) When I showed up that evening at the right address, Calle Obispo, 28, the little merchant I spoke to said, "Rum? This is not a distillery." They were flogging Venetian blue umbrellas for $4 American. Mine was made in Taiwan and when it rained refused to open. Before sunset the streets filled with music. In the great Plaza de la Revolución the dark came slowly, filled with the perfume of automobile exhaust and wisteria. I danced with a girl from Santiago de Cuba. Gabriela Mistral García was her name; she was taller than I & wore her black hair in a wiry tangle. She was a year from her doctorate in Critical Theory. After our dance she grabbed me powerfully by the shoulders as a commandante in a movie might, leaned down as though to kiss me on the cheek, & whispered in my good ear, "I dream of tenure." It was the Fifties all over again.

Violence
by Gregory Djanikian

Sometimes it can't be avoided
even though you might decline
the invitation to step outside—
sometimes you are outside

maybe in the repose of your garden
among rose petal and fern, but the whole
unvarnished spectacle of do
before you're done unto unfolding
as spider devours beetle, beetle, aphid,
and the cat red in the tooth and claw.

No need to bring up bombs bursting
in synch or the rockets' red glare
or every laser fescue pointing out
all that's erasable, good-bye good-bye.

It's among school children now,
maybe even in your neighbor's house,
eating ravenously at his table,
agreeing with everything he says.

Inside, your daughter is locking
all the basement windows, your son
is drawing a truth machine to zap
the bad from the good, and when
your wife comes home to tell you
of a small injustice she's endured,
the arrow of your steely retribution
thwunks into a soft, imagined heart.

No one immune here, no one
merely a small flash in the pan:
everything hugely combustible.

In the garden, you're deadheading
lilies, the petals spiraling down
like crushed wings, and your fingers,
steeped in pulp, are turning yellow,
orange, incarnadine, damage
creating its own aesthetic,
painting itself on your skin.

And if anyone asked you now
you'd confess you're damage, too,
you're for wreckage of heart and bone
wrenching out the smallest penance.

Above you, purple bruising the edges
of the sky. Even the heavens.

In another moment, someone
might come looking for you,
touch you on the shoulder
and you'd flame up.

Nothing seems so improbable
as the world of a few minutes ago.

Here's the night full of stars.
Behind each one, the darkness
you can never see.

One Must Divorce Oneself
by Nance Van Winckel

:from the trouble. From the woman
walking out with the box of herself
from the man. That rattle
on the backseat. From
the man's ache as he lights
the stove and the stalled
whatwhatwhat begins
to stew. From the dog
wagging from one
to the other: who
who who
holds the leash
to the former life?

Emergency Measures
by James Richardson

I take Saturday's unpopulated trains,
sitting at uncontagious distances,
change at junctions of low body count, in off hours,
and on national holidays especially, shun stadia
and other zones of efficient kill ratio,
since there is no safety anymore in numbers.

I wear the dull colors of nesting birds,
invest modestly in diverse futures,
books nobody reads, unfamous grooves,
views and moods undiscovered by tourists,
buy nothing I can't carry or would need to sell,
and since I must rest, maintain at several addresses
hardened electronics and three months of water.

And it is thus I favor this unspecific café,
choose the bitterest roast, and only the first sip
of your story, sweet but so long, and poignantly limited
by appointments neither of us can be late for, and why now
I will swim through the crowd to the place it is flowing away from,
my concerned look and Excuse me excuse me suggesting
I am hurrying back for my umbrella or glasses
or some thrilling truth they have all completely missed.

James Richardson

No Deal

by Ronald Wallace

No Deal

And when I died, the devil came and said,
"Now here's the deal: I'll give you your old life
all over once again, no strings attached.
Like an actor in a play, of course, you'll have
to follow the same script that you rehearsed
the first time through—you cannot change a glance,
a word, a gesture; but think of taking your first
steps again, and having your first romance

repeat itself, your love back from the dead,
beautiful and new and seventeen.
What matter if you see the future coming—
The cloven hoof of sorrow, loss's horn—
her dreamy eye, her nodding head?"
Get thee behind me, Satan, I should have said.

Over Ohio

You can say what you want about the evils of technology
and the mimicry of birds; I love it. I love the sheer,
unexpurgated hubris of it, I love the beaten egg whites
of clouds hovering beneath me, this ephemeral Hamlet
of believing in man's grandeur. You can have all that
talk about the holiness of nature and the second Babylon.
You can stay shocked about the future all you want,
reminisce about the beauties of midwifery. I'll lake this
anyday, this sweet imitation of Mars and Jupiter, this
sitting still at 600 mph like a jet-age fetus. I want to
go on looking at the moon for the rest of my life and seeing
footsteps. I want to keep flying, even for short distances,
like here between Columbus and Toledo on Air Wisconsin:
an Andean condor sailing over Ohio, above the factories.
above the dust and the highways and the miserable tires.

Not That Great of an Evening
by Mark Halliday

Yeah I went to the talk, and the reception.
Yeah I went to the dinner, and the party.
It was not a terrible evening. It was okay.
I don't think I did anything especially stupid.
But I feel kind of crummy. Not wretched, you know,
but just kind of lost or left over—
like I'm the little cup of overcooked beans
somebody covered with plastic wrap and pushed to the back of
the fridge. I might drink a little Scotch
just to get sleepy. Everything is okay. But it's like
there's so many voices—all these voices
still skittering around in my head like mice—people
having things to say. Everybody finding lots to say—
this professor gave a talk about the interpenetration
of coexisting cultures—I think that was the concept—
I kind of drifted away in some sections—and then
people clapped so I was clapping and then I was standing
with a cup of wine and trying to have on my face
the I'm-so-interested look. I'm so interested but
I'm also witty and cool. Then I was part of
several little exchanges—not really conversations,
it's more like we're throwing peanuts at each other's mouths.
My peanuts just bounced off the chin or the cheek of
whomever I spoke to. This was partly because the room was so noisy
and my voice is phlegmy and weak. In my next life
I want to have a voice nobody can ignore. But then
I would need to have things to say. Tonight I tried
but I could feel how unriveting I was. I don't blame people
for sliding away from me at the reception, and also at the party.
If I met me tonight I would slide away from me too.

But how do they all do it? Are they happy?
I know some of them are not happy, but at least they seem to be so
present. Whereas I was like glancing at the door
waiting for my interesting life to show up.
My cup of wine kept being empty
which made me feel as if I was standing there in my underwear
so I kept refilling it. I was a blur.
I was a blur on its way to becoming a smudge.
And this was not about the evening being terrible. Actually
that's the scary part of it. This was a normal evening
with me being a fuzzy blur. At dinner I kept trying
to look very interested in the conversation on my left or my right
so it wouldn't be obvious that my only true companion was
my plate of salmon and potato. At one point
the troublingly attractive woman across the table was talking
about the talk we heard on coexisting cultures and suddenly
I felt potentially witty and I said loudly, "Who would have thought
that interpenetration could be so boring?" and I grinned at her
and I felt quite rogueish for a quarter of a second
but she just blinked as if I'd thrown a peanut that hit her eyelid
and then she kind of tilted away from me so she could finish her observation
about the ironies of postcolonialism. My face then felt
like a huge decaying pumpkin. Then for a while
I pushed a piece of salmon around on my plate, seeing it as
a postcolonial island, and I imagined the natives muttering
"Things were better under the emperor, at least you knew who you were."

Then after coffee I drifted along to the party upstairs and I thought
there must be a way to have fun. What is it?
So I ate three brownies. While nibbling the brownies
I tried to maintain the I'm-so-interested look. I'm sure I chatted
with a dozen people. Several times I started a sentence with
"It's fascinating the way" or "It's so fascinating the way"
but at the moment I can't remember what I was saying was
so fascinating. It was something about memories of high school
at one point. At the party there were at least four women
who seemed very attractive and I just wanted one of them
to give me some big eye contact, that's all,
the kind of gleaming twinkling eye contact that says
"I am intensely aware of your masculine appeal"
but this did not happen, and I began to feel resentful,
I resented the feeling that the focus of the evening,
the focus of existence, was always over there or over there
and never like here where I was standing.

So yeah. It was like that. At some point pretty late
people were telling jokes and I started telling several people
the old long joke whose punch line is,
"Let your pages do the walking through the Yellow Fingers"
but somehow it took forever and only one person really heard the punch line
and he just patted my shoulder and said something like
"Time to get this old steed back to the stable."
Then we both laughed and actually I was happy then
for a second. After that I sat on the sofa
drinking something that looked like wine
and I felt I was such a blur it was like I was the sofa's third cushion.
And then apparently my shoes carried me all the way to this room
where it's just me and the Scotch and the empty bed.
Okay, so not that great of an evening, but no tragedy either;
but I'd just like to feel how it feels to be
in focus at the focus, to feel "Hey, you want the party?
Seek no more! The party's right here."

Mark Halliday

Knots & Splices

by Bruce F. Murphy

Take hold of the bitter end;

pass carefully around

the standing part,

being mindful of the bight.

Finish with a round turn,

make the knot up tight

and it will not slip under load.

But you'll find it not

so easily undone;

dangerous in the dark and cold

and wet, when it matters most.

These knots command allegiances.

The Turk's head and midshipman's bend,

the lighterman's hitch and

the hangman's noose.

See what names mean:

Knots are men.

Facing page—a simple eye-splice.

Apply a whipping at the end

so no strands come loose

in the braid. The knot will hold

Anything you care to bind.

My Name

by Mark Strand

My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

My Waiting Brain

by Bruce Weigl

i

There are certain pathways he must follow when he goes into my brain,
or else something catastrophic might happen he said. He said
any kind of bleeding in the brain is not good and should be avoided.
I think he was talking to himself. Meantime, my waiting brain said
Love yourself; love your pain and your illnesses
waiting down the road for you like old friends in the shade. Better
spend some time tonight looking at the stars.

ii

Empty again like the dead hawk's heart is empty of blood on the
highway
where it must have slammed into the truck's windshield at say
sixty-five miles an hour,
is how my brain says the world looks today,
although it may be this unseasonably warm winter of green grass,
and geese
who don't know which way to hoot
that has my head spinning;
the way a too warm December evening
can hold still its last moment of light, right before your eyes.

iii

Help, my waiting brain says, and then, Fuck you.
He woke me up at four a.m.
with his pal, Mr. Spinning Room,
in our private field of opiates,
so all I could do was lay there and listen to rain murmer in the night,
the sound like someone who is lost,
talking to herself in darkness.

iv

Good morning highly polished chrome nightmare tool.
You look fine this morning, like a silver snake
bristling alive in every scale,
longing to be inserted into my waiting brain
to wind down the tunnels of me, once and for all.

v

We were celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ the Savior,
by stuffing our bodies with food and wine,
so like the Romans,
we fell into a stupor afterward,
a semicomatose state, especially the men.
Everyone was otherwise preoccupied,
and though I was surrounded
by the snoozing, snoring bodies of my people,
it was as if I were alone,
just my waiting brain and me. Night came
with its enormous rotation of stars,
so something seemed possible, even if it wasn't hope,
even if the thing we spend our lives moving toward
is unknowable, until it's too late to turn back.

vi

In the dark I wanted peace,
my waiting brain told me,
as if that's too much to ask,
as if sacrifice is too much to ask,
given everything I've done for you
my brain explained, and how could I argue.

vii

In the end, my waiting brain said
Dismantle me but don't undress,
the blue spruce watch us through the blowing snow;
forgive my forgetfulness,
but I don't remember my name.

Deed

by Josephine Miles

As George Washington hacked at his cherry tree,

Joseph said to him

This is the tree that fed Mary

When she lingered by the way.

As George Washington polished his bright blade,

Joseph told him

This cherry tree

Bent down and nourished the mother and her babe.

As George Washington felled the cherry tree,

Voices of root and stem

Cried out to him

In heavenly accents, but he heard not what they had to say.

Rather, he was making

A clearing in the wilderness,

A subtle discrimination

Of church and state,

By which his little hatchet

Harvested a continental

Bumper crop for Mary

Of natural corn.

Deed

by Josephine Miles

As George Washington hacked at his cherry tree,

Joseph said to him

This is the tree that fed Mary

When she lingered by the way.

As George Washington polished his bright blade,

Joseph told him

This cherry tree

Bent down and nourished the mother and her babe.

As George Washington felled the cherry tree,

Voices of root and stem

Cried out to him

In heavenly accents, but he heard not what they had to say.

Rather, he was making

A clearing in the wilderness,

A subtle discrimination

Of church and state,

By which his little hatchet

Harvested a continental

Bumper crop for Mary

Of natural corn.

Rant

You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology

a cosmogony

laid out, before all eyes

there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living

it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not “make” it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create

every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky

w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire

history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
“find out for yourself”
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum

of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world

yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.

the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination

it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else’s world

the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is “it all adds up”
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT

There is no way out of a spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes

or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves

A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory

Dig it

There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector

the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making

the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death

bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself

the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant

intellectus means “light of the mind”
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun

the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central

Diane di Prima

Translations from Poèmes
By Malcolm de Chazal
translated from the French by Karina Borowicz & Ben Admussen

27

When
a rock
dies
it has
no need
to bury itself away.

53

Every object
that falls
blesses itself.

119

The hand
became
a nest
to catch
the bird.

144

The utensils being washed
held a conversation.

169

The flight
of birds
seized by fright
has the air
of swimming.

170

Winter is cold
only at the approach
of spring.

178

Leaves
in the bouquet
are
so many fingers
reaching
toward the flower.

181

Electricity
is hysterical
and neon
bloodless.

(Text of the poem in the original French)

Storm Catechism
By Kim Addonizio

The gods are rinsing their just-boiled pasta
in a colander, which is why
it is humid and fitfully raining
down here in the steel sink of mortal life.
Sometimes you can smell the truffle oil
and hear the ambrosia being knocked back,
sometimes you catch a drift
of laughter in that thunder crack: Zeus
knocking over his glass, spilling lightning
into a tree. The tree shears away from itself
and falls on a car, killing a high school girl.
Or maybe it just crashes down
on a few trash cans, and the next day
gets cut up and hauled away by the city.
Either way, hilarity. The gods are infinitely perfect
as is their divine mac and cheese.
Where does macaroni come from? Where does matter?
Why does the cat act autistic when you call her,
then bat a moth around for an hour, watching intently
as it drags its wings over the area rug?
The gods were here first, and they're bigger.
They always were, and always will be
living it up in their father's mansion.
You only crawled from the drain
a few millennia ago,
after inventing legs for yourself
so you could stand, inventing fists
in order to raise them and curse the heavens.
Do the gods see us?
Will the waters be rising soon?
The waters will be rising soon.
Find someone or something to cling to.

On a Perfect Day

by Jane Gentry

... I eat an artichoke in front
of the Charles Street Laundromat
and watch the clouds bloom
into white flowers out of
the building across the way.
The bright air moves on my face
like the touch of someone who loves me.
Far overhead a dart-shaped plane softens
through membranes of vacancy. A ship,
riding the bright glissade of the Hudson, slips
past the end of the street. Colette's vagabond
says the sun belongs to the lizard
that warms in its light. I own these moments
when my skin like a drumhead stretches on the frame
of my bones, then swells, a bellows filled
with sacred breath seared by this flame,
this happiness.

Somebody Blew Up America

by AMIRI BARAKA

Somebody Blew Up America

They say its some terrorist,
some barbaric
A Rab,
in Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn't
The gonorrhea in costume
The white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say?)
Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation

Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa

Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil

Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble

Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

Who define art
Who define science

Who made the bombs
Who made the guns

Who bought the slaves, who sold them

Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane

Who? Who? Who?

Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers

Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army

Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war

Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger

Who own this city

Who own the air
Who own the water

Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth

Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime

Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the ocean

Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio

Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners

Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws

Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying

Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who know who decide
Jesus get crucified

Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide

Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival

Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie

Who? Who? Who?

Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere

Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later

Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,

Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane,
Betty Shabazz, Die, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone,
Little Bobby

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia, Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin's head

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured, assassinated, vanished

Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,

Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids
Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"

Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek

Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal,
The New Frontier, The Great Society,

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere

Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs,
Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys,
The Hollywood Ten

Who set the Reichstag Fire

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

Who? Who? Who?

Explosion of Owl the newspaper say
The devil face cd be seen

Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national
oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.

Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful

Who you know ever
Seen God?

But everybody seen
The Devil

Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog

Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO who who
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!

Copyright 2002. Amiri Baraka.

Landscape with Arson
by Jennifer Grotz

Have you ever watched a cigarette released from a driver's fingers
swim through the night air and disintegrate in tiny embers?
Invisible by day, fire's little shards, its quiet dissemination.

That's how, one hot afternoon, no one noticed when
something desperate made the boy devise the strategy
to siphon gas from the motorcycle with a discarded straw,

spitting mouthfuls into a fast food cup until there was enough
to set the apartment complex on fire.
It happened in a neighborhood at the edge of town

where the wind sifted a constant precipitation of dust
like desiccated snow and the newly-poured streets
looked like frosting spread across the desert field.

Ducks had just found the man-made pond.
At dusk, they waddled ashore
to explore the construction site like the boy.

He started with the door. Stood mesmerized
as the fire took on new colors. He fed it litter
collected from the field. It hissed and turned green,

it splintered pink, it bloomed aureoles of blue.
But there was hardly time to admire it before
remorse overtook him and he fled.

Before the howl of sirens. He was
gone before—he started with the door—whatever
he wanted to let out.

Something can stop being true in the time it takes
a cigarette to burn to its filter. It was your crime
but it's me who goes back to the scene. Now it's only me

who wants to burn something for you, but there's nothing left—how
do you set fire to the past? Only an impulse to shake free—like cellophane
peeled from a pack—something that clings.

Sometimes I conjure a fire for you in my mind,
the gnats swarming furiously above the water, up and down,
can you see it? How they mimic flame, hovering

at the pond's edge. Lately I find myself there all the time.

Larson's Holstein Bull

by Jim Harrison

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn't read or write. She wasn't a virgin.
She was "simpleminded," we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She's lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.

(“Keep me fully glad...”)

by Rabindranath Tagore

II

Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand.
In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing.
I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast.
Make my life glad with nothing.
The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy.

Disgust
by Carl Dennis

It isn't dependable as a guide when it flows
From a grudge against the body, but consider
How helpful it proved in prompting the god
Who revealed himself to the prophet Amos
To gag when he sniffed the savor rising
From temple altars. The smoke of sacrifice
Stank in his nostrils when the fires were lit
By those grown fat on the gleanings of orphans,
On bribes and kickbacks, on the plunder of war.

It couldn't have taken long for a god like that,
Made sick by sanctimonious prayer,
To lose his appetite completely
And dwindle to skin and bones.
No option then but abandoning heaven,
Leaving it to a deity with a stronger stomach.

Down here, he'd have been likely to choose
A rural retreat for his retirement,
Where people worshipped only the gods of harvest:
Potato god, corn god, rain god, sun god.
He couldn't object to simple prayers for continuance,
To a faith in what he considered his best work,
The first five days of creation.

Maybe in time he chose to live on the land
Himself and serve the seasons, to be a farmer
Not too proud to sell his produce on weekends
From a stand at the end of his driveway.
Here come the city-dwellers who'd rather buy
From local growers. Good for them
If they're not put off by the smell of the barnyard
Or by the mud the farmer's left on the roots,
Enough for a grub to hide in, or an earthworm.

While they drive home to a homely meal,
He piles his boxes back on his truck,
Exhorting himself not to feel disgust when comparing
The garden he first conceived for the planet
With the gardens he's willing to sponsor now.

La Strada

by George Bilgere

A dollar got you a folding chair
in the drafty lecture hall
with a handful of other wretched grad students.

Then the big reels and low-tech chatter
of a sixteen-millimeter projector.

La Strada. Rashomon. HMS Potemkin.
La Belle e Ie Béte, before
Disney got his hands on it.

And The Bicycle Thief, and for God's sake,
La Strada.

You can't find them
at the video store anymore. Only the latest
G-rated animated pixilated computer-generated prequels.

That's just the way it goes.

Even if you could,
you'd see them on DVD,
restored, colorized, scratch-free,
on a plasma-screen TV. With your wife,
your dog, your degree. You'd get up
to answer the phone, check on the baby.

You're just not young enough,
or poor enough, or miserable
enough anymore to see—really see

Les Enfants du Paradis, or Ikiru,
or The 400 Blows. Or, for God's sake,
La Strada.

Two Poems
By
Michael Hofmann

Family Holidays

The car got a sun-tan while my father worked
in its compound . . . Mixed with the cicadas,
you could hear the fecundity of his typing
under the green corrugated plastic roof.

My mother staggered about like a nude
in her sun-hat, high heels and bathing-costume.
She was Quartermaster and Communications.

My doughy sisters baked on the stony beach,
swelling out of their bikinis, turning over
every half-hour. Still, they were never done.

The little one fraternised with foreign children.

. . . Every day I swam further out of my depth,
but always, miserably, crawled back to safety.

Broken Nights

FOR BILL AND MARY GASS

Then morning comes,
saying, 'This was a night.'
—ROBERT LOWELL

Broken knights.
—No, not like that.
Well, no matter.
Something agreeably
Tennysonian (is there
Any other kind?)
About 'broken knights'.
Sir Bors and Sir Bedivere.
In my one-piece pyjamas—
My it-doesn't-matter suit,
With necessarily non-matching
—Matchless, makeless, makeles—
Added top, I pad
Downstairs to look
At the green time
On the digital microwave.
My watch, you must know,
Died on my watch
All at the top, at midnight,
After a few
Anguished weeks of macro-
biotic stakhanovite
5-second ticks,
And I haven't had
Time, it seems,
To get it repaired.
Further (weewee hours),
To patronise
My #2 bathroom en bas
(Though N.B.
Only for a pee).
Groping for a piss,
As the poet saith.
Wondering how soon
It might be safe
To turn on the wireless,
Without it being either
New Age
Help you through the night
Seducer mellotrons
(What's a tron, mellow I can do?)
Or merely
Dependency inducing
And wehrzersetzend,
Deleterious for morale of the troops.
I eat to the beat,
Then snooze to the news.
Drift off to Morning Edition.
Arise/Decline, Sir
Baa Bedwards.

Michael Hofmann

Mammoth

by Robert Wrigley

Returning the refilled feeder to its hanger on the tree,
I am followed, and from my first step out the door
to the careful slipping of the loop of twine over the hook's tang
made to understand – as he darts within inches of my eyes –
that this hummingbird, while he may not despise me,
finds my human dawdling not simply unacceptable but offensive,
a lumbering no less appalling than the moonscape of my face
and its billion plumbable pores. Even the vast tidal wash
of my infernal, slow-witted breathing disgusts him. Therefore he loops
so swiftly around me I can hardly blink, and when I tell him he is
beautiful, he hears only the two ton roar of a woolly mammoth
as it thrashes in a bog, at the edges of which, this time of year,
the red, sweet flowers he loves most of all still thrive.

In Blackwater Woods

by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

The Lost Years
by Patrick Warner

i.

Rip the flex from the electric clock,
braid bare wire ends to the steel sieve's rim,
and plop it like a helmet on your skull.
Now reach and plug the three-pin in.

The shyest creatures come out to play:
wild lynx, mink and whiskered otter;
wrist-thick trout that tremble and shudder,
regale you with tales of salt water.

Now write of your fabled breakthrough,
the wall cracking open below the clock,
no Narnia fur-trimmed portal this,
but the broken teeth of chiselled brick,

with the frayed ends of one-inch slats
and fat-lip lumps of mortar hanging loose.
Earphones like moss pads over ears
with Back in Black on continuous loop,

that demolition soundtrack giving way
to something altogether country:
birdsong, and nearby a trickling brook,
sunlight filtering down through a canopy,

and awe like a shock of long thick hair:
like that aforementioned colander
hot-wired to frig the hard-wired brain,
and shock you into the free-and-clear,

so real, at three A.M., when every beer,
when every tumbler of amber rum,
lighting the way from there to here,
shone like a lantern, frail and paper-thin.

ii.

The sun that day was not the sun I knew.
Crash-test dummy amperes struck on anvil ohms
unzipping phosphorescent candles, hot-car joules.

So cruel the way its gammas sparked gamin,
the way it powered down, obliterating shade,
green-housing me, by a no-name petrol station.

Later, the fumy pumps were lanced, the tuberous
tanks dug up, the toy-land car-port canopy knocked
and carted off. The shop converted to a key & lock.

Tulk's, a name I often think of when I think about
the interval between that pot-bound, heat-struck day,
and the day I surfaced, a hemisphere away,

sockless, shoeless, shirtless, clueless, with nothing
but a pair of check pants bunching up my balls
and the memory of wind whipping past my ears,

a bellows that fanned the embers of that sun
with everything pent up, jammed, stuck, on hold
about to rip through muscle, burst through skin.

iii.

Ashen my younger face emerging
from the ashtray's mush of ash stabbed
with burned-out Seadogs, jack-knifed butts.

Dusty footsteps lead across the floor
between black moons of long-playing albums,
lead all the way to the double bay

that overlooks the hard-tramped snow,
the aftermath of what? a lover's dance,
a midnight stagger around a streetlamp,

hands warming in each other's pants,
footsteps frozen at twenty below.
We were young. Then came the thaw.

Like jump-leads, these butter knives,
their blackened tips still surface
in our kitchen drawer from time to time.

Mole
Anansi

Waking from Sleep

by Robert Bly

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,

Tiny explosions at the waterlines,

And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.

Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full

Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!

Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,

Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.

Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;

We know that our master has left us for the day.