James L. White

[from James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies, Graywolf, 1982]

The Clay Dancer [excerpt]

6.

The man in leather is finally at your bed.
He strips down to your mother
who wanders through your cold boyhood house
giving out blankets to empty rooms.

A wheel in you forgets to breathe,
and you are dead,
and you know you are dead.

7.

Embalmer's report:
He looked like corroded alabaster on the worktable.
His old body, the cracked desert roads, older
than the courthouse square, older than the farmers
spitting their phlegm-filled days,
older than the dirty magazines in the dirty shops
in the dirty cities he so revered.

His open arteries discharged two white colts.
His childless loins repaid
the turquoise, the amber and agate.

His yellowed body finished with the flutes,
finished with the mycins of regret,
finished with the vaporizers and failures,
canceled the bromides and small dreams.
But his eyes wouldn't film
or close, saw further than they should.
Only the two colts remained,
their eyes toward still water,
the blue grass and bean blossom.

8.

What goes into heaven with you
so perfectly prepared on the pillow
like a dead satyr
Lights from the remaining colts
or the cold cafes of November
near your turquoise hands?
The faceless loins?
The rotted coyotes?
The aged owls?
Agate temple?
Corn fire?

None.

You go without streets, songs, or hair.

9.

Here at the Del Rio, honey
your shaken steps are voided.
An anonymous patron has picked up your tab.
Your room's off the veranda.
It's quiet here except for weekends
when Reba brings the girls down for the sailors.

You look quite young in your famous blue button-down.
A sax and piano begin the waltz.
Sweet Chocolate sends you your first drink.
The neon lights up tit-pink:
     and the night
     and the night
     and the night!

Buy James L. White's book @ Amazon

Fanny Howe

[Fanny Howe interviewed in What Is Poetry [Conversations with the American Avant-Garde], ed. Daniel Kane, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2003]

FH: The fact is, I don't even like "modernism" or "material text" or any term that tries to surround an action that is simultaneously trying to be free. So this leads directly to my problem with titles, because (to me) they put a lid on the loneliness of the poem. And they influence the way it is read. Freedom at any cost!

Because titles come after the composition of the poem, they are not usually part of its eruption. They have a kind of leaden quality, unless they are like song titles that are lifted from inside the song itself, or are muted mood messages, and are not music, the way titles are also words. I tend to scribble down the messages as they come in, and then elucidate and organize them into a cluster based on the time zone surrounding their arrival. I think of them as days more than anything else, days in the ancient sense of an act or a feeling that begins and completes itself. How many times the sun rises and sets in that kind of day is of no importance. All that matters is knowing when it ended, and, more mysteriously, when it began. . . .

I think for me poems are sentences, which may be why they are getting shorter. I love a complete sentence, and all that it contains in the way of balance and aspiration. I love prose sentences. But a whole poem of mine is a sentence composed of sound-lines (bars), each line being the equivalent of a complex word. Each sound-line floats in tandem with the next one. Each one is a word. The group of sound-liens or words forms a sort of sentence which is a poem.

A few words create together one word, and that word is on a line and the next line consists of another long word made up of words. Then the poem is composed of both many and few words. The lines themselves demonstrate their separateness and, at the same time, the gravitational pull in relation to each other.

Prose only differs to the extent that the lines jump on each other, left to right, instead of falling down from an upwards position. The jumping to the side saves paper (time and space), but it also indicates another thought process -- one with a goal. It's the difference between taking a walk and sitting still. Prose has just as much poetry in it as a poem does. It's just in a rush to get somewhere and bears more guilt, always trying to justify itself.

DK: What are the advantages of writing lines as "the equivalent of a complex word"?

FH: Such an approach offers a kind of cubist, or three-dimensional, look at language. By stacking the independent clauses and keeping them as free as possible from the chaining effect of the next lines, the words create an optical illusion of depth and clamor. The line stands alone, and in tandem, and in space.

Buy Daniel Kane's book @ Amazon

Eleanor Rand Wilner

[from Eleanor Rand Wilner's The Girl with Bees in Her Hair, Copper Canyon, 2004]

Field of Vision

And if the bee, half-drunk
on the nectar of the columbine,
could think of the dying queen, the buzz
of chaos in the hive, the agitation
of the workers in their cells, the veiled
figure come again to rob the combs --
then would the summer fields
grow still, the hum of propagation
cease, the flowers spread
bright petals to no avail -- as if
a plug were drawn from a socket
in the sun, the light that flowed into
the growing field would fail;
for how should the bee make honey then,
afraid to look, afraid to look away?


Theory and Practice in Poetry

    for Annie, working the desk at the Canyon Ranch

The idea that freezes me this time
    is the "ideal" of a poet finding
          her poetics. While outside, Mr. T
             in his T-shirt is prowling the greens,
          and all the long lazy days are lying down
       in the meadow outside the ruined
    precincts of an old sophistry, in
       another state, getting on toward noon,
          where, among a thickness of flowers
             so redolent and sweet as to dizzy
          even the bees, summer slides in,
       bringing a haze of heat like the skin
    shed by a river when a mist rises
       from its indolent wet back, droplets
          of water (each carrying a world)
             that travel on the back of a sequined
          wind to that meadow woven of
       grass, flowers, and guesswork -- so
    intricate a tapestry of greens
       that in all that steam, and heat, and
          growing matter, the ideal of a poet
             finding her poetics is lost like
          like a ball in tall weeds, and the dog who
       finds it carries it off in his mouth,
    coating it with his sweet saliva,
       and brings it, across miles of odd
          synapses and scattered thoughts,
             and drops it at the feet of a woman
          who is staring down a well, but
       just then turns away to acknowledge
    the warm breath on her knee, and
       reaches down and pats the warm
          furred head of the panting, eager
             dog, who feels pleased at his
          feat of fetching, as does she, as
       she rubs behind his ears
    and lifting the sticky ball from
       his mouth, she thinks for a minute
          of tossing it down the well, but
             instead she throws it, as far
          as she can, into the lucid blue
       desert sky, and watches
    as it makes that beautiful arc
       (gravity's rainbow) back
          toward the sandy earth
             as the dog hurtles off after it,
          until, all at once, all unaware
       of how he has found it -- there it is: bright
    and round in his mouth, then dropped
       like the world at your feet.

Buy Eleanor Rand Wilner's book @ Amazon

Tory Dent

[from Tory Dent's HIV, Mon Amour, Sheep Meadow, 1999]

Fourteen Days in Quarantine [excerpt]

10.

My physician arrived every day at about 9:00 am, announcing himself with
    that jingle
of raps on my door which signifies a friend, not foe, outside. He never
wore the prerequisite quarantine mask, perhaps because he knew the
    perimeters
of exposure and didn't feel his short visits to be a danger or perhaps because
he thought that communicating with a full face was important for our
    discussions,
for my confidence in him, in the treatment decisions, in myself as something
more than another verified statistic with tubes flowing out from my
limbs attached to plastic bags of clear medication, my form reconfigured as
needing something larger than a god, something scientifically derived in order
to be sustained. For the most part it worked, the matching up of my two
    identities,
the reality of me sick and the memory of me well, centered my soul like glass
slides containing a blood smear for microscopic inspection. Particularly in the
    eye
contact when we discussed the alternatives, in the pauses after when we
    remained
looking at each other in mutual contemplation of the seriousness of the
    situation,
I would sense myself positioned thus between the imagined researcher's
    hands.
And the gut feeling I had always associated with the word "Tory", the specific
white pine amidst the general landscape, would be brought into sharp focus as
    if
gently held down, trembling vase on rudimentary table within the bomb
    shelter
security of the room. We would watch almost as if a third party were present,
the potential for it to be blown apart like any ordinary structure in a tornado,
where wooden fences lie prostrate and barn animals soar upward into an ever
    obscuring
sky; where I, a juxtapositional series of flashbacks and idiosyncratic urges
superimposed upon each other like pages of a memoir that comprises a
    kinetic, almost
moaning kind of narrative, might disappear also into the indefeasible spiral
    above.


11.

On the eve before the TB drugs were reintroduced, my physician and I
tossed a coin in order to decide which one would likely cause another
allergic response akin to that which had required hospitalization a week
earlier. The embossed profile of George Washington signified Rifampin instead
of Ioniazid, a choice that brought no reassurance since the outcome remained
equally uncertain: I continued revolving, a quarter dollar in the air, glints
of fluorescence ricocheting off our forefather's cheekbone, the claw-foot of
the eagle alighted atop of neither branch nor rock. I beheld, beholden to the
sight as if some mystical vision, the literal turning of my fate, its infinite
axis where, like a glistened pig self-reflecting on the spit, or a convertible
that, having overshot its ultimate goal of the highway, teeters upon a
cracked precipice, I lay as if held out, a barbaric gift. A slab of marble
was the gurney cot of my hospital bed and the springs digging against my back
could be interrupted as actual pressure from the vast, the pale, from the
frameless filigree of winter branches, skyscrapers and truncated river. To
that from which no voice would emit I was forced to entrust my failing body
my life's possessions in a bundle and stick willed to their abandonment.
It seemed as if the days and nights I spent in quarantine evolved into a
kind of extension of that eve, that particular night a metonymical event
occurring within the greater overarching eve that delineates this world
from the next, the schematic of which one experiences as sinking into twilight
the way the shipwrecked do into the ocean, the way HIV overrides my body as
if overwriting the flesh, the waterline rising above my upturned, gaping face.
It was as if my body were asking for the privilege to be viewed as remains,
to be given the opportunity to float unfettered away from me, to struggle
for a while, alternately bob and drown, allowed to live or die on its own.

Buy Tory Dent's book @ SPD or Amazon

Eileen Myles

[from Eileen Myles's Harriet blogpost from the poetry foundation, 05/31/09]

I Hate Poetry

I’m wondering why we hate poetry. I don’t mean people who don’t write it. I mean people who do. I hate poetry magazines by and large. You get two copies in the mail. One to archive and the other to read for a week and then to give away. Poems, fiction and a sad bit of art or two. It seems like poetry dies in such magazines. All alone with each other essentially. It’s the death of our art form these journals and I say it has to end here. Can’t we get our poems out some other way. Any way. In part I think the reason everyone wants to get a poem in the New Yorker is that people buy the magazine for other reasons and then they will stumble on your poem. They may or may not read it but they will see it. Maybe outside of The Nation it is the only journal I can think of that does that. Magazines and journals are dying of course like birds at superfund sites. So it’s time to give up on them first. Balloons, shirts, anything, send your poems out. And don’t let a poetry organization be put in charge of placing poems on buses. It upholds the cavalcade of nice. If poetry is nice then it is dead. The saddest job in America for instance is the poet laureate. The poet laureate of America. That’s like being Alfred E. Neuman. When you start to work for the government next thing you know you start demanding poetry be accessible. Or else what? You’ll get detention. Being forced to be clear is right next to being good. And why we considered moral or good? Cause we’re poor. That’s really sad. Remember Nicanor Parra – poems and anti-poems. I don’t even remember those poems but their existence, the fact that he wrote poems against poetry made me glad. I hate poetry movements. It seems like now that the art world knows that movements are dead the poetry world would at least slavishly imitate the big dogs. Oh no, poetry is all ready to get in on the past and is banding together in little groups to show its new flashy edge. Since the birth of MTV in the 80s when Madonna wore crucifix earrings like every junkie in the east village and suddenly every junior high girl in America was imitating her the idea of the avant-garde, the tiny little in crowd of art was dead. I know that artists feel that what they are up to is more profound than fashion – well some do – poets do for instance but in fact that in itself is a very old fashioned idea. There is nothing more profound than fashion. Except silence and it’s time for poetry to find a way to speak through both at once.

[my emphasis]

Graham Foust

[from Graham Foust's Leave the Room to Itself, Ahsahta, 2003]

Philanthropy

I can contemplate

poverty, what gives,
my place and time there.

I can pray a lie.

What I'd kill for: now,
a limousineful

of bees. Absolutely
unmixed attention.


Whispered to a Wound

Collapse back
together.

Keep on

keeping out
and in.

Proceed

as the world
(any world

I've welcomed) would --

on thinnest ice
and medicine

and lists.

Buy Graham Foust's book @ SPD or Amazon

poetry book reviews

Mayday Magazine features many responses to Kent Johnson's letter to Poetry regarding poetry book reviews.

Christina Davis

[from Christina Davis's Forth a Raven, Alice James, 2006]

The Outset

I

It's 7:30. It is still possible
to know where you are.

The field quiet and birded, across it a deer has fled
and then turned back
as if it left some part of itself behind,
the part that feared me.

II

Which is harder, do you think, the journey to paradise
or the one to the underworld,
if on either occasion you know from the outset

you will have to return?

III

Before there was a self, there were many hunches,

many came to the cradle
but in going began
to define me as what-does-not-go-away.

IV

We are each what never leaves us, what we never see
the back of
is the self. But what loves us

is at the back, as Eurydice was
escorting him out
without his knowing.

V

It is eight o'clock, it is ten. It is time.

Home begins
in the mind, a dream

of walking.

Buy Christina Davis's book @ Amazon

B. H. Fairchild

[from B. H. Fairchild's Usher, Norton, 2009]

Frieda Pushnik

             "Little Frieda Pushnik, the Armless, Legless Girl
             Wonder," who spent years as a touring attraction
             for Ripley's Believe It or Not and Ringling Brothers
             and Barnum and Bailey . . .
                         -- "Obituaries," Los Angeles Times

These are the faces I love. Adrift with wonder,
big-eyed as infants and famished for that strangeness
in the world they haven't known since early childhood,
they are monsters of innocence who gladly shoulder
the burden of the blessed, the unbroken, the beautiful,
the lost. They should be walking on their lovely knees
like pilgrims to that shrine in Guadelupe, where
I failed to draw a crowd. I might even be their weird
little saint, though God knows I've wanted everything
they've wanted, and more, of course. When we toured Texas,
west from San Antonio, those tiny cow towns flung
like pearls from the broken necklace of the Rio Grande,
I looked out on a near-infinity of rangeland
and far blue mountains, avatars of emptiness,
minor gods of that vast and impossible pure nothing
to whom I spoke my little stillborn, ritual prayer.
I'm not on those posters they paste all over town,
those silent orgies of secondary colors -- jade,
burnt orange, purple -- each one a shrieking anthem
to the exotic: Bengal tigers, ubiquitous
as alley cats, raw with not inhuman but
superhuman beauty, demonic spider monkeys,
absurdly buxom dancers clad in gossamer,
and spiritual gray elephants, trunks raised like arms
to Allah. Franciscan murals of plentiude,
brute vitality ripe with the fruit of eros,
the faint blush of sin, and I am not there. Rather,
my role is the unadvertised, secret, wholly
unexpected thrill you find within. A discovery.
Irresistible, like sex.
                               So here I am. The crowd
leaks in -- halting, unsure, a bit like mourners
at a funeral but without the grief. And there is
always something damp, interior, and, well,
sticky about them, cotton-candy souls that smear
the bad air, funky, bleak. All, quite forgettable,
except for three. A woman, middle-aged, plain
and unwrinkled as her Salvation Army uniform,
bland as oatmeal but with this heavy, leaden sorrow
pulling at her eyelids and the corners of her mouth.
Front row four times, weeping, weeping constantly,
then looking up, lips moving in a silent prayer,
I think, and blotting tears with a kind of practiced,
automatic movement somehow suggesting that
the sorrow is her own and I'm her mirror now,
the little well of suffering from which she drinks.
A minister once told me to embrace my sorrow.
To hell with that, I said, embrace your own. And then
there was that nice young woman, Arbus, who came and talked,
talked brilliantly, took hours setting up the shot,
then said, I'm very sorry, and just walked away.
The way the sunlight plunges through the opening
at the top around the center tent pole like a spotlight
cutting through the smutty air, and it fell on him,
the third, a boy of maybe sixteen, hardly grown,
sitting in the fourth row, not too far but not too close,
red hair flaring numinous, ears big as hands,
gray eyes that nailed themselves to mine. My mother,
I remember, looked at me that way. And a smile
not quite a smile. He came twice. And that second time,
just before I thanked the crowd, I'm so glad you could
drop by, please tell your friends, his hand rose -- floated,
really -- to his chest. It was a wave. The slightest,
shyest wave good-bye, hello (and what's the difference,
anyway) as if he knew me, truly knew me, as if,
someday, he might return. His eyes. His hair, as vivid
as the howdahs on those elephants. In the posters
where I'm not. That day the crowd seemed to slither out,
to ooze, I thought, like reptiles -- sluggish, sleek, gut-hungry
for the pleasures of the world, the prize, the magic number,
the winning shot, the doll from the rifle booth, the girl
he gives it to, the snow cone dripping, the popcorn dyed
with all the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow, the sky
it crowns, and whatever lies beyond, the One, perhaps,
we're told, enthroned there who in love or rage or spasm
of inscrutable desire made that teeming, oozing,
devouring throng borne now into the midway's sunlight,
that vanished, forever silent God to whom I say
again my little prayer, let me be one of them.

Buy B. H. Fairchild's book @ Amazon

Eileen Myles

[Eileen Myles on Harriet]

Do we have copies in poetry, do we have drag. I mean when a poet dies we all stand up and read their work and it’s always interesting to see who does a good version of Creeley or Ruykeser or whoever and who can’t sound like anything but themself or mangles the poem beyond belief and who really interestingly reinterprets the work. Nobody but a filmmaker it seems would ever take on poet drag from another century like what Hal Hartley did in Henry Fool – a kind of handsome romantic with a warbling voice gazes off into the near distance while talking to the other characters in the film. Henry, the poet character seemed torn out of or stuck onto the surface of the film whereas everyone else seemed embedded. The fake poet character created a perception of depth. I would think poetry readings would be more interesting if we either stopped doing introductions altogether and simply had the poet just begin – as if we trusted the poems themselves instead of their constructed reputations.

Molly Peacock

The Lull

Deborah Digges

[from Deborah Digges's Trapeze, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004]

Lilacs

Let's say for that time
I was an instrument forbidding music.
That spring no thief of fire.
I tapped from the source a self sick of love,
and then beyond sickness,
an invalid of my loathing.
Yes, loathing put me to bed each night
and burned my dreams,
in the morning woke me with strong coffee.
And this was loathing's greeting --
Get up. Drink.
All this in spite of the lilacs returning,
their odor the odor of life everlasting,
another year,
another season onward, another spring.
But they bloomed of a sudden pale in unison
like lifeboats rowing into dawn,
the passengers gone mad, exhausted in the open,
even the wives, the mothers
rescued for their children,
their lives, believe me, not their own.
Boats full of lilacs drifting thus,
each grayish bush against my gray house.
But theirs is a short season, a few weeks,
rarely more.
And I was glad to be rid of them,
rid of a thing that could touch in me
what might be called "mercy."
See how one's lips must kiss to make the m,
touch tongue to back of teeth and smile.
Pity's swept clean and conscious,
an ancient room whose floors resound,
but mercy's an asylum,
a house sliding forever out to sea.
As if I were expected to wade out into the yard each night
and swing a lantern!
And just this morning, still early into autumn,
I noticed how the lilacs had set themselves on fire.
As for me, I have my privacy.
It's mine I might have killed for.
I have my solitude,
the face of the beloved like a room locked in time,
and when I look back I am not there.
It's as if the lilacs martyred themselves,
the stories of their journey
embellished or misread
or lacking a true bard, a song associate,
something with starlight in it,
blue lilac starlight
and the sound of dipping oars.
I could sing it for them now,
make it up as I go along,
a detailed, useless lyric among shipwrecked green.
In my heart is the surprise of dusk come early
to ancient shapes like cairns,
the cold rising vast, these episodes
of silence like eternity.
Sing with me a siren song,
a ferryman song.
Sing for the dead lilacs.


Trillium

How ever bad it was, she must have loved the dog, their walks by the river. How the man who brought her here or what he thought no longer mattered. Say she was spindrift. That's how it felt. Nothing engaged her. Days went by before she'd bathe. She could smell the animal like anguish in her hair and reveled in it. But for the dog she might have hanged herself, or filled her pockets full of stones instead of scraps for Cerberus. Two steps at a time she took the dark staircases. Outside the gates, among the beggar dead, she'd find him, kneel, unlock his chains. He leaned against her, as they walked, his sphinx's shoulders. What he knew of her of course, no one can say.
Call it a nearness like a room you make inside yourself for sorrow. Few are invited in. And she to him? Cerberus was welcome. In spring among the trillium she longed for him. Who could believe it was a pomegranate seed secured her soul? It was the dog that kept her going back.

My Life's Calling @ poets.org

Buy Deborah Digges's book @ Amazon

Ed Pavlić

[from Ed Pavlić’s Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, Copper Canyon, 2001]

You Sound Unseen

          -- for Phyllis Hyman

A red spot burns
    a cyclone on the cymbal's
       crown. Take

the night off. Give up
    the scar between
       hindsight &

the unheard. Save
    your ears for tongue-tips
       & the things

they do well. Let's
    don't disturb twisters
       of unspoken

brass. Leave sweat
    profiles alone on the
       sheet. Step

thru tastes & stain
    in the street. & nobody
       knows what

to do at the lakefront after
    a storm. Confessions wash
       ashore. Wave set

upon wave, knee deep
    in driftwood tangled & smooth
       as hammer

handles or ankle bones.
    & holding on means fingers
       hurt,

means we
    braid our own
       hair.

§

The El sickles thru.
    Sparks shriek. Then glow
       in a low pulse-

ache. Shoves a grudge thru
    tight veins toward missing limbs.
       At night,

if I smell tobacco in the breeze,
    I can still feel my granddad's
       knotted hand

tuck me in bed, the firm
    press of his Y shaped grip.
       Not a sound

from his ironworker's stride.
    He told me about cold jobs.
       and high jobs

up in the Loop that floated blue
    on morning fog blown in
       off the lake.

Said by 3:30, he could walk
    a beam of light thru a smoky
       room for a shot

& a beer. Said the beauty
    or an open coke furnace was
       you always knew

how much fire your chest
    could hold, & exactly where
       the Devil was.

§

An old man
    mutters into his drink
       scalp silvered

ebony, dusted
    by a three day old
       shave.

Sits alone at the end
    of the bar. A carnation
       in his green

lapel. By '87, you'd already
    begun to whistle thru
       a few verses

of "Old Friend." Not fooled
    by the sequin sheen,
       wags

a missing index finger
    when a mic-swipe cleaves
       your voice.

Whispers under breath into
    the rift.    I know your
       tricks now --

From across the room,
    a waitress sees him shake
       his fist

while candle-lit couples hold
    hands at tables up front.
       He lights

a cigarette & blows a cloud
    over his glassy-eyed
       scotch.

The cold traps
    a curl of smoke in the glass.
       A long ash

falls to the bar. Toasts
    touché    to the whistler
       & downs

the rest. With a wince,
    slides off the stool thru a red
       cloud behind

your silhouette & Welcome to
    George's frost-etched
       in the bar

mirror. Turns to go, reads
    his own lips    Punish it woman,
       punish it.

Buy Ed Pavlić's book @ Amazon

Jeff Clark

[from Jeff Clark's A Little Door Slides Back, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1997]

Marie-Pristine
        for Hoopy

There is about three minutes that I received from you this postal card of eleven lines -- but a silence of three years? I had fears to write you -- fears -- imagining your address to be empty, or your body.

Have you this month received a large cake with twenty-three candles, as your pen told me once it is custom there?

Yes, I see that you did get an auto. Pray, get now an airplane, that you may undertake a journey to me, to know my new person.

Have you found yet the picture of my city, of poor relief? And the plan of my country, is it clear where I am to be found? (I will go on waiting impatiently for the reliefs promised by your letter of three years past, so if you can speedily, I have desires to see your new face.)

Winter-days are gone. I go in the meadow now to no end, whereas I was passing all the days at my window, a blanket in my shoulder-tops, watching in the morning the boulevard events, at noontime the seamen row from the mud berth, in the evening the pimp on the walk, who casts and who reels back, it is typical, nothing. But the brougham of this man! Have you there a word for this auto, for its great length and luster? "Pimp-sedan"? Or simple "limousine"? Does it grow red as a noisette in your thinking, the wonderment at how such a one as a pimp -- a mack! -- should be permitted to stain my staring around, not to say my nights, my town . . . ah, but he is ever there. His name is Larousse.

Now the gibbering of his associates in the late night is such that I must close my window, and stifle.

Forgetfulness! Take up once more the envelope that bore this to you. It is so: half my name, known by you so many years, is gone from me. It was simple and the death of two birds: my head turns no more to the oft-called "Marie-Christine," and more, I delight my familiars with this fancy-exotic.

"Who, these familiars?"

-- the feathered, you remember them. (And my dictionary says that I am Mary-Pure for you now?)

Do you remember my bath songs, how they disturbed you? The hi-fi reminds me.

I have now an old stereoscope. Do you know the one? Also three stereotypes: the plaza of my city; a campanile, the bell of whom will make illusions of to and fro when the device is jostled; and the seacoast. Do you often see it? Or is this perchance no longer a predilection? I have reveries of it there, so dark and chill to the feet, the wood portions (the sea-sticks) across the sand, and the wind who pushed the cypress trees backward.

Your desire: without camera I can no more snare my image than send it to you. But if you must have me, I will tell you how to see: a gauze over the eyes, the vigor going from the hair, the breast unfirms, a tooth here and there is dark.

And! my fright when at first the telephone rings.

Also have me rushing down the stair for the mails that seldom arrive.

Will you believe that I now write, in this same hand, my more vital prayers? Especially this: "Take the Devil from my within." I place them on this table and sleep then, whereas all my life, you remember from your nights here, I was going to bed, putting out the lamp, and then making my prayers there. For me now, dialogue becomes a fright.

I am slapped, and downtrod, in so many moments by Him, and here has become another common prayer: "Let me be," or "Today I beg one furlough from your gall." Is it by bêtises and false airs I have deserved his slaps in the night? Or do you too get them? Am I an abecedarian in my suffering? Though: if you would accompany me once in my night, you would see my felonies, and would not blame Him his bruisings. But please, do not have me as a pity-wanting anchorite, knelt in the fogbow by his feet. Rather, have me in the human way: one part fear, one devotion.

(A terror to wonder: do the slaps come from the other way?)

Where does it go now, your life? Is it according to your desires, and content? When this arrives at your box, and after, into your hand, receive from me one embrace, and see me now as not so different from what memory you guard. And then, to be gracious, I will summon you to my beach, for a picnic, and then will see that the Ocean closes, for I will have waited all day!

Pray, more postal cards with lines of you. Even: navigate by wine this very night to your writing-desk. In this wish I kiss your cheek, and wave most tenderly.

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Mary Jo Bang

[from Mary Jo Bang's Apology for Want, Middlebury College, 1997]

In Order Not to Be Eten
Nor All to Torne

The elevator mirror tells me nothing, not how
nor why -- won't even say whether I'm ready.
Quiet also are the wolves

attached to my shirt cuffs and coat hem.
No trace of a howl, their canines sewn silent
through cloth. What is sound

but music of forest storm and sea spray?
Pitiable low under sentence of death.
Come here, little kitty, come here

from two boys at the well -- one
with a mud streaked face. The audible wish
for unparalleled happiness. What is vision

but rheotrope and ruffle
of silver wolf-willow leaves? Trembling lambs,
some thick and short, some long and swift.

Framed face in the bevel-edge
mirror, wolf's snout hung at my neck
so no witch will hurt me. And what is harm?

Wolf-trees of morning -- their children dressed
in bright green. Taking more than their share
of space, leafed heads buckling the sky above.

They restrict their neighbor's portion,
push them aside. They must be held -- but surely
you know this -- by their ears.


& There He Kept Her, Very Well

Harsh orange, dull burn
of realization.
My imperfections, once subtle,

are not inadmissible.
Still he keeps me
like a pretty need-not

in this fusty dungeon.
Someone has chosen poorly:
a pale persimmon for the walls,

the ceiling, the floor.
A single window, no door.
Hands dip into the vat,

a vicarage of strings.
He's removing the seeds
installing them in egg cups.

Soon a tray of tender shoots
will phosphoresce
in the dark. He wants me

to brighten
says a well-lit face will dazzle.
Outside, the dogs

have begun to howl.
Look --
it's Hecate, a torch in each hand.

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Brenda Hillman

[from Brenda Hillman's Loose Sugar, Wesleyan, 1997]

Active Magic

You want to know where you are again?
Back in the middle of the interrupted everything
third side of the double album,
the start of the night shift
as eternity's waitress;
it's dusk, many years after the war,
you've crossed the same wild fields as before;
they've started selling uniforms of the new dead soldiers,
gone back to putting peace signs on t-shirts--;
you're stepping lightly in the dream
you can afford, the magic that was
and always must have been for you--

A dusk ago,--Remember? don't you?
Remember? Look. You had
an old soul. Killdeer
landed in the fields out there,
landed in their sounds,
in what's already happening,
dee, d-dee,
near your dormitory room,
you stretched once like an oak tree,
many times like a laurel;
the ones who would be drafted
came into your room

and you had an old soul.
You had started the same soul
five times, you were good at it;
the moon watched you one of those times
peering in at you
before you had lain down, peered in
behind the loaded cypress;
the moon horizoned herself,
you told her your sexual secrets,
loved what she could not help
being farther then--

The ones who would be drafted
came into the room (it's still possible,
the never happening); you thought
you'd been sent to earch to rescue them,
said, leave them alone, they already have tenses;
they draped blue workshirts over chairs--;
the moon was doing her best imitation,
old waitress, tilting herself like a tray,
said to the war, leave them alone,
they have what they want,
they don't need a future
when they have a soul . . . And why

shouldn't they have. (Headlights
shattered them. Loud
white damage of oncoming cars.)
You thought you'd been sent to earth
to help them not to fight--
when they rained with the rain,
when they clouded,
they were the little bit almost,
a little bit Sacramento, in love
with the magic of the active ground,
and you rode north or south with them,
on the backs of Triumphs, in the vans--

You afraid? Not really.
You afraid? Not really no.     OK OK
if you get afraid just tell me--
till you stopped in the middle of orchards
with little hard crosses, in love
with the magic of the active ground;
why, every seed moved!
Shook and shook.
Even the necklacey Woolworth's ones
the spiders loved--and why
shouldn't they have. Night
was coming on--

it was dusk
between the stages of the war. You
would save them. Dusk lifted you
with 2 fingers like a field mouse
and set you down 2 hawks from here
where you had done the other game,
pawn to queen four, the being
active till you loved
the mind and body of their world,
and lay in the low thin dormitory
boats of those beds of theirs,
their noisy hands all over you--;

you know how mercury shakes?
You know how mercury shivers
like tomorrow when you break
the end off the thermometer?
You see your own face in the silver.
Active magic. You could
become like that.
They gave you a body
before they left, made love to you
so easily it felt like spending money;
after the marching and the shouting
they left the voices in your flesh . . .

Some of them got free. Some left. Some died.
One fought the war in you.
When they rained with the rain,
when they clouded, in eaches
and whens, the water streaming
from their bodies as they left,
when their faces lay,
when your mouth lay, when their
mouths lay down in the it
with you . . . You were home
from that time, and why
shouldn't you have been?

Imperialism failed. Such
startled years for the world.
Medium countries swelling,
little countries bleeding, big
countries turning into little countries
as they have since the start of time.
You stared out at the coast--
radio flowers of sound from Los Angeles,
boats dragging accidents
that hadn't happened . . . A gull flies
through two thirds of the shadow
of another gull . . .

You can't keep another person,
you know that. You had
to give them up--couldn't save them;
You lean left in the hut
and right in the magic. It's years
since you have missed them,
missed them most of all
while you were with them.
You broke free and spilled out
all the unreflected light they left
like the moon who has already
healed her nothing--

wasn't she triumphant
in her slim smile,
like one stripe peeled off a lighthouse;
they had added to your shadow
where you were,
you had become a little bit them
and were proud of the reflection,
proud of the crossing,
could expect to be recognized
where the day was undoing the day
and let the magic spread--

                                               L.S.--Berkeley     1969-1994

Cheap Gas on fort.org

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Roberto Harrison

[from Roberto Harrison's Counter Daemons, Litmus Press, 2006]

[Live Chat]

¿are you
on the other side
waiting
for alarms
in a desert
of sleepless
evaporations?

¿are you
beside yourself
in the aisles
that distance
makes shorter

than light waves
in the daylight
that pounds
a lead slab
in the soup
that the winter
dissolves?

¿are you
the signal
that another plane
carves into wings
in rounded contusions
of a late afternoon
storm,
full of sparks
that the night hurries out
on Locust and serial
cheeks
shrouded
in shiny costumes?

¿are you
a circle
like juntas
that the winter makes clear
on the shaved orbiting molecule
that the ear revolves
around,
in a retreat
of explosive fossils?

¿are you
memorizing
the connections
between the hand
and the foot
and the torso
in reverse
of the automatic?

¿are you
materializing
the unknown
without weather
to increase
the planet
otherwise?

¿are you
pocketing
the insurance claims
that parkas
and snow equips
with sutures
and hand grenades?

¿forever?

¿are you
increasing
the tackle box
full of piers
to widen the sea
and shorten
circuits
full of trees?

¿are you
feeding the unworn
through a parallel
shapelessness
in desert blooms
on the roots
of a tarp
milking masks?

¿are you
remodeling
the world
as a breathing
action doll?

¿are you
calm for knots
like the guardian bell
that a sewer makes
for angels
in their last testimony
skewered
like the pony
was?

¿are you
freezing in the open
course that half
of everything
enumerates
like clouds?

¿are you
unwound in a fear
that a jacket
stores
for feed, in easy
shows
and rented
faces on the pain
of entry?

¿are you
good
like ovens?

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Erin Belieu

[from Erin Belieu's One Above & One Below, Copper Canyon, 2000]

I Can't Write a Poem about Class Rage

Too prosaic, didactic,
purely political, the cause lacking
a certain loftiness, unlike homelessness
or domestic abuse, those subjects
newly upholstered with the necessary,
American-style noblesse oblige.

Maybe if I were writing in
an Eastern European language with
a translator who caught all the verve
of my colloquial phrasing, writing
from a tradition that believes in options
other than the exhausted, ethical
tepidity of Art for Art's Sake,

the verbal icon spinning away
unsullied in some universal nook,
clean as Ol' Possum's toilet bowl,
that preatomic mode that's so outre
but keeps on spreading anyway,
then maybe I could get away with it.

But I can't write a poem about class rage.
Who likes to read about the real-
life troubles of the undistinguished poor,
a bunch of luckless, disinherited,
trailer-trash folk and their relentlessly
shitty lives? Even Keats, purged of his Cockney
accent, couldn't salvage a poem out of
my best friend's nephew, a kid too broke
to buy even half a billable hour, buried

away in the country lockup of some
unheard-of-by-their-own-standards
corner of Oklahoma, falsely accused
of raping an infant since the baby's
crank-addled mother had a score to settle
with the nephew's ex-wife. That won't
melt one stick of butter with
the versifying trust-fund crowd.

So I can't write a poem about class rage
without my own (no doubt) illicit motives
being called into question, and who am I
to take such a hectoring tone, to rant,
about someone else's baby or nephew,
and where are my credentials? What makes me
think I could throw a legislator's stone?


Choose Your Garden

When we decided on the Japanese,
forgoing the Victorian, its Hester
Prynne-ish air of hardly mastered urges,

I thought it would be peaceful.
I thought it would relax my nerves,

which these days curl like cheap gift wrap:
my hands spelling their obsessions, a nervous
tic, to wring the unspeakable from
a silent alphabet.

I thought it would be like heaven: stern,
very clean, virtuous and a little dull --

but we had to cross the bridge to enter
and in the crossing came upon a slaughter
of camellias, a velvet mass-decapitation
floating on the artificial lake,

where, beneath its placid surface, a school
of bloated goldfish frenzied, O-ing
their weightless urgency
with mouths too exact to bear:
           O My Beloved,

they said to the snowy
petals and to the pink petals soft as
wet fingers,
           O Benevolent Master,

they said, looking straight up at us
where we stood near the entrance, near
the teahouse half-hidden in a copse of ginkgo,

where even now, discreetly and behind
its paper windows, a woman sinks down
on all fours, having loosened the knot
at the waist of her robe.

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Mark Wunderlich

[from Mark Wunderlich's Voluntary Servitude, Graywolf, 2004]

Town, Gone

He touched the back of his neck,
forked his fingers through red hair,
and the trees breathed their dioxide in the street,

and the gulls waved their cuts,
in the air, and I asked if this
was what he meant, the static,

and he nodded, and I looked down
at my hands touching
the only skin they'll own,

and he moved to touch my hair,
hair grown pale in the winter, silver
like the iced trees in half-light

and I asked what could break
or trouble the form
our lives had taken and he said

he didn't know, but I knew
that this was how it would be
and the town in my head

where my inventions moved
in their elaborate machines, their dramas
and re-enactments, their closing doors

and sweeping, their papers
rifled through and tested for accuracy,
that town began to empty

until the room was full of that population,
and they were of me and I
was of them, and they

broke into pieces, a windshield
gone through, and left
in fragments through the window

I cracked to let out the smoke,
left me looking down at my hands
and I knew I'd never hear them again

and that they were the smoke
and -- town gone, vast catastrophe --
I was what they left behind in the fire.

Read It's Your Turn to Do the Milking, Father Said @ Post Road Magazine

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D. A. Powell

[from D. A. Powell's Chronic, Graywolf, 2009]

clutch and pumps

if you were in your shoes, you purse your mouth
but you were never in my shoes, chinaberry
nor I in yours: the cherry ash of fags
burns your path down the scatty streets

your smile wraps round pumps with a smack
the jawbone of a mighty red croc
who served up his behind to your toes
jagged bite marks: the hem of your frock

tombs, sister, you've got lithic tombs for hips
one chimney stack where a bbq pit should be
you say that I'm in janitor drag this year: as last
do these tits go with these shoulders? why ask me?

those talons you cultivate I do admire
the chchineal cheeks the flirty lashes
I don't want to live in a clutch purse town
you snap: and yet everything matches


cosmos, late blooming

already the warm days taper to a plumate end: sky, where is your featherbed
some portion for me to fall to, in my contused and stricken state
not the extravagant robe I bartered for: tatters, pinked edges, unpressed

lord, I am a homely child, scrabbling in the midden for my keep
why should you send this strapping gardener, hay in his teeth, to tend me
now that the showy crown begins to dip like a paper saucer

surely he'll not content with corrupted flesh that dismantles daily
so singular this closing act: spectacular ruin, the spark that descends in air
might he find no thrill in this trodden bower.     ragamuffin sum of veins

in my mouth the mausoleum of refusal: everything died inside me
including fish and vegetables, language and lovers, desire, yes, and passion
how could I make room in this crypt for another sorrow: caretaker:

lost man, these brambles part for your boots, denizened to my lot
your hand upon my stem now grasps the last shoots of summer
choose me for your chaplet, sweetheart.     wasted were my early flowers

Centerfold in Boston Review

Continental Divide in Poetry Magazine

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