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.