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We Lived in a Hug, Shivering with Cold
Tomaz Salamun
Issue 184, Spring 2008
..... On handcarts
(wheelbarrows) there are
blue baby
bags. An unguaranteed
growth ring is left
on the asphalt.
The gadget with which
you fatten
your ears,
rubbed out from sky
lights. The other
will understand all of this
when he takes the time.
The Danube will open its graves.
—Translated from Slovenian
by Brian Henry and the author
{excerpt from the Paris Review}
Jazz Fan Looks Back
by Jayne Cortez
I crisscrossed with Monk
Wailed with Bud
Counted every star with Stitt
Sang "Don't Blame Me" with Sarah
Wore a flower like Billie
Screamed in the range of Dinah
& scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald
as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium
Jazz at the Philharmonic
I cut my hair into a permanent tam
Made my feet rebellious metronomes
Embedded record needles in paint on paper
Talked bopology talk
Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases
Became keeper of every Bird riff
every Lester lick
as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tongues
& Blakey drummed militant messages in
soul of my applauding teeth
& Ray hit bass notes to the last love seat in my bones ... {excerpt}
MIND
The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop. What is it
they cast for? The poplars,
advancing or retreating,
lose their stature
equally, and yet stand firm,
making arrangements
in order to become
imaginary. ... {excerpt}
FLOATING BRIDGES
Oh what a crush of People
Invisible, reborn
Make their way to into this garden
For their eternal rest
Every step we take on earth
Brings us to a new world
Every foot supported
On a floating bridge
I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads
And steadily our feet
Keep walking and creating
Like enormous fans
These roads in embryo {excerpt}
SUITE FOR RED RIVER GORGE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I. Whistling Arch
(Arch in Formation)
In high winds air rushing through the low opening whines, giving the arch its name. This whine is something that happens very rarely.
—Kentucky’s Land of the Arches: The Red River Gorge
Here geologic time tumbles
from the sandstone face in great slabs
of rock, progress marked
on some same clock keeping pace
with glaciers, the passing of comets,
volcano formation.
The stone’s lonely O frames
mountaintop, dark gorge,
catches a patch of white sky
in its aperture. It shows
where time was, and now passed
sings its only hymn to a congregation
of centipede and snake, blackbird
perched on an ancient laurel,
trillium unfurled,
its pale ear pressed to the stars. {Part I of three from Lynnell Edwards poem}
SLEEPING IN BLUE
I lean into you,
we bury down
in the dunes
the breeze holds
like a whisper
you stroke my brown knees
your fingers
are my unspoken thoughts
the silence is sensuous,
suffuses like
scent of sandalwood ... {excerpt}
Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (A Story for Children)
Issue 184, Spring 2008
1.
If I look to the opposite shore and greet myself there,
if I call out to myself come here
and watch myself laboriously construct from shore-things
a boat, and watch myself over the waters come rowing,
but, crossing the midpoint between shores,
out in the middle of the colorless lake,
no longer approaching, no longer coming closer,
disappear, where am I now, has my boat capsized?
2.
Infinite capacity for love in the smallest detail;
infinite suffering in the innermost reality;
large mind in even the dumbest, mutest object;
destiny in an object that stands still;
heart in the middle of the gray, motionless water;
the largest sadness in the world in a groaning buoy;
in a buoy and the bird overhead, huge sadness,
and yet I hop from place to place as though I’m weightless.
3.
When I picture my father I see the surface of the moon,
plains of moon-stuff chalk-dust papers shredded
by a paper shredder, snowbanks of shredded paper,
nobody to organize it all, no way to “moralize the day
out of its aimlessness,” nobody with a Shop-Vac handy
slowly to turn the whiteness into pattern and form,
revealing, as a chisel reveals in the marble,
a figure, a woman’s figure, an expression of bliss—
4.
now that that big nonentity the moon is in my mind
the clichés for representing Earth are hereby banished—
a hundred open-ended poems, abrupt transitions, high tones
grating against the low, unsorted experience;
sex beside the holy man defiled by sex,
the pig pile of ways you can get high, right there
beside the dawn and how you badly want to kill yourself,
the fleer, the road that unravels like a banner before him—
5.
and the child’s attention fixed upon the animal book,
and all the animals in the book intent upon dinner
or eyeing some harbinger cloud forever, permanently
dejected because some little stone turned their child
to stone, weeping big mule or owl tears as though
the child never turned the page, the sun never shone
again bringing larkspurs, gentian, and the mule-boy
reunited with mule mommy and daddy just in time to end,
6.
but the mule on page four will always be sad, the owl
overhead will always mourn for the mule in his sadness,
nobody will ever bring news of page eighteen when mule-boy
returns from the dead, and the child reading the book
will always preside like a sinister god over these animals,
always dipping in and out of their moods like a snacker,
a little sadness to tide you over until suppertime,
a little elegiac owl, some time at the grief picnic . . . ...
{excerpt...from the Paris Review}
Poems of Depth
--for Gerardo Deniz, based on his "20,000 Places Under Our Mothers," based on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
1.
O Ned your name is Land and it’s not anywhere near you;
you’re free in your captivity, holy paradox!
You tire of walking around the submarine,
of looking out at the luminous waters,
brimming with the phosphorescent zoophytes, tiny noctilucae, starfish and aurelias
you know not how to classify.
You’re bored with the sea breeze and the occasional horizon.
O harpooner, how did you land where the only bread is a replacement,
breadfruit?
What creatures are you shooting in your mind?
How you manage to stop the hand, and instead reach for the diving suit.
2.
The crew members hush when the captain’s right hand comes in.
Nemo knows he’s no one;
he enforces, forces.
Is he a double, or an appendage?
The closest of them all.
And if the captain were left-handed?
He says "Less paradigmatic,"
more so, more so.
Underwater’s reign is verticality.
Conseil hears the master’s cry and immediately asks
"Has it bitten you, Monsieur?"
"I’d pay with a limb to own the treasure I just found."
The cannibals throw stones; destroy it.
Destroy the left-handed shell, growing awkward against the clock.
Aronnax takes this lightheartedly; water being less dense,
certainly. He’ll plunge. Nemo hears no news about the incident.
{excerpt)
My Carmelite Family
It had taken me more than an hour
To come to life, under the rose-encrusted
Influence of the star-driven morning.
A blue a bit too pastel, with all its accessories,
A colour he could not have given us
In a hundred years, familiar but shallow,
Intense but guarded, multipled the sensations
Of his different flesh, though not
My ability to return the increased gaze.
Breathtakingly tactile, his beautiful
Carnal mask distanced the white reserve
Of the paper, yet brought it closer
To his cornerstones, the perfect control
Of his hands' immense fresco about to move. ... {excerpt}
"Ships in the night"
Half-past midnight, hours to go till five.
Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Fair Isle, Bailey
echo confirmation I'm alive.
Half-ignored at two and seven daily
shipping forecasts beat the bounds of light,
track the channels where the moon shines palely:
Humber, Biscay, Fisher, German Bight -
haunts of kittiwake and golden plover -
sound the deepest reaches of my night.
While I'm tossing, turning, thrashing over,
strung out taut with sleepless eyes shut fast,
Plymouth, Portland, Dogger, Wight and Dover
sing me senseless, lashed to nightmare's mast. ...
{excerpt} -- http://www.interpretershouse.org.uk/
THE GAZING EYE FALLS THROUGH THE WORLD
—for Ono No Komachi, 834-880 A. D.
Philadelphia, almost dawn. The Delaware stares
Back like lilies. In their ten thousand sets of eyes
A hawk's claw moon again, hung barely,
And there goes a train clearing snow
For someone beautiful. And while she isn't sure
Why, she's dreaming of moving again
While a Japanese poem whisks by in shapes the snow makes:
As certain as color
Passes from the petal,
Irrevocable as flesh,
The gazing eye falls through the world.
The heart does break.
Ono No Komachi did not beg for her beauty back
On the streets of Kyoto, and the boys running
Past her did not throw carp at her feet,
Nor did they force her to see her age anymore
Than she already had, for she was fire, only
Smarter. Yet, I exist, is the line she hides.
Her eyes, hazel if the sun glanced her face
As she turned away from the street and toward the sea,
Would tell it another way, distilling, as they had for years,
The Sea of Japan until it was a shawl draped across her back,
Its wind carrying the scent of a snuffed candle, until
She was a little snow drifting onto white paper
Containing no lines . . .
~
A stack of white paper, in fact, packed
In a box and taken cross-country.
Even if this story weren't true, I'd still tell it.
{excerpt} ---- blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/poetry.htm
Selection from "City Terrace Field Manual" ..... "What's a little riot between friends? So I stabbed you with a screwdriver between pauses in the ammunition going off, popping of metal canisters burning and exploding? How could I be expected to know if the gunshots in your house were mine? This is life in the big city, free market of desire: you'll thank me in the end. Sure, you may need a little radiation therapy for a fiber-optic plug in your brain. Sure, your kids whine for technicolor mercy in some crystal cathedral a lifetime after toking up as they choked. There's nothing wrong with that--nothing wrong with every Chino-Facility-for-Men Day. Besides, footprints on your face give you a wise look, creases beside your mouth distinguished as headlines. I acknowledge your deepest feelings for me, or the most shallow, what sludge! I don't hold it against you that I had to throw you to the ground, kick you repeatedly. So you broke a few bones? My clothes are clean, no bother. Hey, no diminished affection for your loss of skin. I will not light your children on fire with a molotov cocktail today. I appreciate your concern. My best to you and yours. No one is home to take your call." ..... {excerpt from one prose poem}
"Counting the Dead"
a review
By JOEL BROUWER
Published: June 22, 2008
RISING, FALLING, HOVERING
By C. D. Wright.
97 pp. Copper Canyon Press. $22.
{latest collection by an unpredictable poet} http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/bo...l?8bu&emc=bua2
iNCARNATION
When the Holy One stepped from endless order
into the chaos of our days, it was winter.
Weather blew everywhere. Time itself was dying.
The squirrel, with a tail soft as breath,
curled inside the maple trunk.
The cold stayed. Five-fingered leaves pressed the ground,
their stems perpendicular, thin wrists above each flame-tipped palm.
Cataclysm scanned the days; like any future, like our own. ... {excerpt}
Purgatorio, Canto XXIX
Singing the way a lady sings in love,
she continued, after saying the last word,
"Blessèd are they whose sins are covered,"
and like the nymphs who once wandered alone
through the shadows of the forest, one
longing to see, one avoiding the sun
then she went, against the flow of the river,
walking along the bank, and I went with her,
following her small steps with my own small steps.
We had not taken a hundred steps between us
when the banks turned to the right as one,
so that I was facing the east again.
And we had not gone far in that direction
when the lady turned around toward me
saying, "My brother, look and listen."
And all at once there was a shining
that raced through the great forest on all sides
making me wonder whether it was lightning,
but whereas lightning is gone as swiftly
as it comes, this stayed, shining brighter and brighter,
and in my mind I was saying, "What can this be?"
And running through the luminous air was
a sweet melody, so that a good zeal
led me to blame Eve for her recklessness,
that there, where the earth and heaven obeyed,
a woman, alone, and who had just been made,
could not bear to be veiled by anything.
If she had only stayed devoutly under
her own, I could have tasted these pleasures
beyond words earlier, and for longer.
While I walked on among so many
first-fruits of eternal happiness,
enraptured, and longing for still greater joys,
before us, the air under the green boughs
came to be like a fire blazing
and we could hear that the sweet sound was singing.
Oh, most holy virgins, if I have endured
fasting, cold, and vigils for you ever,
need drives me now to ask for the reward.
Now is the time for Helicon to brim over
and Urania to help me with her choir
to put into verse things hard to hold in thought.
A little farther, seven golden trees
appeared as an illusion the long space
gave rise to, that was still between us,
but when I had come so near to them that
the common object which deceives the sense
lost none of its features because of distance,
the faculty that nourishes the discourse
of reason saw that they were candlesticks
and heard "Hosanna" in the singing voices.
Above us flamed the beautiful panoply,
far brighter than the moon in the clear sky
at midnight in the middle of the month.
Full of wonder, I turned around toward
the good Virgil, and he answered
with a look as amazed as my own.
Then I turned my face to the high things again
moving so slowly in our direction
that newly wed brides would have overtaken them.
The lady scolded me: "Why are you so
intent on the living lights that you pay no
attention to what there is behind them?"
Then I saw people coming after them
as after their leaders; they were dressed in white
and here there was never whiteness like that.
The water held my image on my left
and like a mirror showed me my own left
in a reflection, when I looked at it.
When I was at a point along the bank
where my distance from them was only
the river’s width, I stood still, the better to see,
and I saw the flames moving ahead, leaving
the air painted behind them, and they
looked the way pennons do, streaming
so that overhead was striped with seven
bands, in all the colors which the sun
makes his bow from, and Delia her girdle.
Those standards went back farther than I
could see, and to my mind there seemed to be
ten paces between the outer ones.
Under a sky as beautiful as I
have said came four and twenty elders, and they
walked two by two, wearing crowns of lilies.
All of them were singing, "Blessèd are you
among the daughters of Adam, and to
all eternity may your beauty be blessed."
After the flowers and other tender growth
opposite to me on the other shore
were without those elect people once more,
in the way star succeeds star in heaven
four animals came following them, each one
wearing green leaves made into a crown.
Each one of them was winged with six wings,
the feathers full of eyes, and Argo’s eyes,
if they were living, would be like those.
I will not waste more rhymes describing their
forms, reader, for I am pressed by another
demand that does not leave me scope for this,
but read Ezekiel who portrays them as
he saw them, out of the cold places
coming with wind and cloud and fire,
and as in his pages you will find them
so were they here, all except for the wings,
where John is with me and departs from him. ... {excerpt}