PLEIN AIR
BITTER
GREEN SONG
A narrow road of
bitter green your marrow.
A race course of
bitter green your sorrow.
A skimcoat of
bitter green your striving.
A slipknot of
bitter green your love.
Watch for the sun's signal to turn
bitter green and then run.
Switch your heart's bitter green
current back to On.
Ride your eyesight's bitter green
tilt-a-whirl till curfew.
Taste this spring's bitter green sugar
and say thank you.
THANK
YOU
If you find
yourself half naked
and barefoot in the
frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's
great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of
the now and gone, that says
all you love will
turn to dust,
and will meet you
there, do not
raise your
fist. Do not raise
your small voice
against it. And do
not
take cover.
Instead, curl your toes
into the grass,
watch the cloud
ascending from your
lips.
Walk
through the
garden's dormant splendor.
Say only, thank
you.
Thank
you.
EN PLEIN AIR
Now that I’ve got
them quiet,
sitting lamb-like
in front of some educational fare,
they won’t notice,
I’m sure, if I step out
for a minute to
rest on our porch,
en plein
air. Isn’t that what
the painters called it?
I’m amazed I can
still think. It’s early September
and the first
yellow leaves are burning
the lawn. They knew
what they were doing, didn’t they?
When they met for a
drink
on boats, or on the
forest floor,
their blankets laid
down against the dampness.
The men in
mustaches, the women in hats,
everyone dressed as
if there were reason to.
This is where I
belong, I’m sure,
not in that house I
hate! It’s growing late.
Should I sweep the
path to the street?
No, the swirling
leaves
would render that,
too, pointless.
Better to enjoy
myself a moment longer,
taking in the
enormous sky,
the fast moving
clouds, before the show ends
and I have to
return to their countless
questions and
demands. Especially that older one:
she has such a
strong grip on the earth.
RICK
O’SHEA
Scanning my porn,
with a view of the bay,
I hear a nasty
thwack—
there on the
designer deck
lies a catbird on
his back
dead or stunned
from the slab of glass
reflecting an
IBM-blue sky
and trompe l’oeil
pine,
limned as if in
Chinese pen
or a Calvin model’s
scrim,
blind to the David
and laptop within.
With his feet erect
like a cartoon cat’s
as if he toys at
being dead,
I await his mean
meow,
the clenching of
his ruffled fist.
Nope. A fluid
stains the slats.
None come to suss
the cause, or caw
at what must seem a
broken law.
Sight and compass
should collude
and not get gulled
by forgery--
aren’t birds
disturbed that bird and sky collide?
I guess before my
morning wank
I must spatula him
up
and pitch him deep
into the weeds
for dirt to
undertake its work.
What tools have I
got in the utility shack?
But first let me
gaze at this electric pic
quivering on the
screen,
with his nearly
vinyl skin,
the bay his diode’s
diadem.
I wonder what is
Rick O’Shea’s real name.
Kaye McDonough
TOVARICH
While we are walking one evening near Caffe Trieste,
we see a friend who’s known to be fond of what’s Russian.
Tovarich! you call to him kindly.
Another man, walking in our direction, smiles and bows,
thinking the greeting has been made mistakenly to him.
Buona sera, he says, not wanting to offend.
The four of us now come together on the corner,
smile deeply, shake hands,
make appreciative gestures to one another, then part,
a meeting of great politeness being ended.
Jim
Elledge
CONDADO, SAN JUAN,
P.R.
Planets orbit.
Stars, too. Galaxies
swirl. The ocean
streams loop-
the-loop. And
time
circles. And
atoms—their
protons, neutrons,
electrons spin
like plates on a
juggler’s
stick. How dizzy
that great
universe God must
be. I know I am.
TORONTO ISLAND
ORATORIOS
Snailing
the poison ivy path, boom boom of Olympic island a
tad
pole
in the hubba bubba of august, clovering milkweed
pod,
monarchs
commingling, wild lilies stamening under canopied
red
robins
and salmonberry orioles tacking the tamarack
bone-sad
October
swishing, simmering cottonwoods spidering over
me-glad
hollyhocks
tall and shoulders back, sunflowering in
sod,
sweet
clover sails horn blowing the bay and you mossing,
toad-
like
at the shore. Finger the silver scales: nose into
goldenrod,
nose
into the loam of it, into the mock of the earth’s
load.
CLEFT
The
ferries slide over and back, white slabs
regular
as tides, mute as what
passes
between us, reclining, watching
through
glass. A fog horn blows
something
remembered,
untimed. You push
back your chair
and I
stand up. You cross
the lawn
to
pick up a beer bottle broken there.
The
grass reaches up and
August stops it.
Catherine
Barnett
THE LETTING
GO
Under the apple
trees, two half-broken Adirondack chairs
almost touch each
other
and the hawk above
the field
is the last keyhole
in a locked blue sky.
Each evening the
clouds slide by on rungs overhead—
curtain flung
open.
That’s the problem
out here—
even the moon
reminds me of you.
WHITTIER
Out of the stale
smoke & wood paneled motel room
where I might’ve
shot myself if I had the guts, or a gun,
I bring my coffee
down to the water’s bitter edge
where only the
squabbling gulls
and drunk
long-liners seem at home, and the man
backing up his
forklift, arms tattooed like Sunday
comics,
unloading crates of
halibut.
The mountains shove
their chests into the sky,
a fogbank hangs
across the harbor like a frayed rope.
Seal heads, black
as licorice, bob and vanish,
a bed of ochre
seaweed steams in the sun.
But the fishing
vessels that scuttle toward the Sound
against a slight
breeze—catspaws on the surface—
the marina pilings
coated with kreosote
making rainbows in
the once-clean water,
the float planes
taxiing from the dock like horseflies
line the shallow
pockets of this town
and rip the prayer
from the morning.
Two men in
jumpsuits pump waste from a Port-a-John
then pump back in
some chemical blue.
They laugh and make
shit jokes. It’s a job, I suppose,
and while I bet
they’ve got families at home to feed,
repairs to make on
their cabins, I don’t think I’ll praise today
their mildly heroic
work ethic
when the gulls have
been up since dawn
cracking shells on
the rocks. It’s just a job.
The breeze shifts,
the smell of rot
is replaced by
something
made obvious
for what it tries
to conceal.
Paul Guest
NOT FOR
YOU
Not
for you, the daily entreaty of the mailbox
asking
for your hand, your hope, your wish
like
a vacuum. Not for
you, the newly dead
squirrel
there in the road's midline,
calling
to mind a tube of horrid red paint
and
not for you, but for it, the burnished
acorn
it
carried, rolled away, whole. Not for
you,
the
snow that would not stay, not
for
an hour, though it shone to the blank sky
like
porcelain. Not for
you, the child
crying
in the phone like a ghost, like a banshee.
Not
for you, the news of chaos,
the
distant air of one more city perfumed by
ash.
Not
for you, dear heart, the night
made
empty by the new moon.
Not for you,
the
hosannas of rain that soak
and
mock your life where you stand.
Not
for you, the wounds of the world, though they
heal.
Not
for you, each hour escaping
like
starlings from a field, their wings
beating
the
air with joy. Not
for you, the blade
mossy
with rust that slipped
in
my hand. Not for
you, the blood like more rust.
Not
for you, the things I've broken
and
not remade, though in my sleep
I
dream them a new life forever
and
not for you the stark ends of those
dreams.
Not
for you, the old apple
thrown
away, its face lumpen with age and soft.
Not
for you, the stubbed toe
and
hangnail, the barked shin, the invidious paper
cut.
Not
for you, these minor pains,
but
instead the sun, narcotic star, forever
and ever upon your
skin.
Julia Cole
FIRE
LOOKOUT
San Jacinto Wilderness,
California
I circle the
house’s wood deck, look in
at the lime-green
log book, the sponge
at the sink’s edge,
the square linoleum tiles,
the coffee mug, the
neat cot all made up.
At the center of
the room is a fire finder,
an antique device
with a sight like a rifle
that tells you just
where the fire you see
below, in the
woods, is on your map.
This narrow life in
a windowed room
on a mountaintop,
this broad view of the world,
this sad distance
from it, this clear task at-hand,
this device, this
life, still current,
they appeal to me,
although you can’t
fight a fire from a
house in the sky,
and maybe because
of that. You just watch
for a fire far off
and you tell someone.
July 24, 2004, 3
a.m. Black
smoke
on the horizon off
Tahquitz Peak,
2 miles northeast
of Idyllwild.
The moon woke me
and I put out the call.
Sebastian Matthews
IAN AT THE WAITERS’
PARTY, OUT BEHIND THE BARN, BREAD LOAF
for
Patrick
We watch him as he
climbs the ladder of drunkenness
and falls off.
Laughing, we help him to his feet.
“You’re Assholes #1
& #2,” he tells us
gleefully. “You’ve
disappointed me greatly.”
The night before he
presided over our debate
with raw, easily
spurned grace, mockingly
demanding that we
choose: Dylan vs. Joni.
Stones vs. Beatles.
We kept switching sides. Later,
in the slowly
tightening clutch of revelers
out behind the
barn, we see Ian circled by young men
in beards and
farmer caps, back on their heels,
hands around cups
of beer or hitched in pants.
He is radiant in
their casual attention, rising
to the night’s last
level of inebriation (though
maybe there are
further rings), telling a story
that is really a
joke, a joke that is also a story
of how the stars
hide, like locusts, in the earth, only
coming out when
called forth by the flute of the moon.
I leave before you,
sometime after 1—“late”
I am told “for a
new father,” which is just a polite way
of saying old. When
I step out of the light, brushing past
the building’s
shoulder, I catch one last glimpse of Ian:
listening to a
woman tell another story, or the same
story, arms folded
over chest, a smile opening his face,
moths like stars
flying out into the night.
Yerra
Sugarman
THE ENGLISH ELM
(Washington
Square Park, New
York, 2004)
Leaves blow light
back into the air
above the elm
tree’s capsized shadow.
Is it an art to
learn a tongue
that tells how
mortal we are, how cruel,
to study and read
such lips of leaves?
Pigeons dive onto
the pavement’s swaying
sea. Their amber
eyes laser
shadows stroking
the indifferent grasses.
Are the dead here
twigs under twisted
ropes of breeze?
What if there is no
ground, really,
only shadow piled
on shadow,
only a fragile roof
conspiring with our
senses,
only our
hesitations,
is this the place
I’ve come to land?
Sometimes, sorrow
makes me a vine
to train, a pilgrim
ant.
Sometimes, I am
softly pebbled.
Sometimes, children
are hinges,
as they swing,
opening
and closing the
doors
over thresholds of
breathing.
What are bodies if
not touched?
Small brown
limitations.
Small
scavengers.
Bits of building
and street.
What is the soul’s
spectrum
in this once
potter’s field,
once burial ground
in the 1700s
for those—many of
them slaves—
with yellow fever?
In a later incarnation
a gallows for
public hangings. You can still see
the massive
“Hangman’s Elm,”
an English Elm the
British used
during the American
Revolution.
Sounds spill and
cradle.
Fastened to a
cornice,
three flags slap
the ether.
A boy and his
mother fold old clothes
they take from a
paper bag on a bench.
Wet light bursts to
fall in the fountain,
a homeless man
wading through it.
An old woman with
white legs, still
beautiful, sits in
her wheelchair, staring a blank
stare. Another
talks with her hands,
gesturing wildly.
The elm grows
on a lawn scattered
with bright chips of wood,
its bark like
loose, wrinkled skin.
Where it meets the
ground,
its trunk is gashed
and red,
the wound the shape
of a tent.
Do we need a
revolution to know the soul
is stateless? Chips
fly, born in wind.
Has there been no
evolution?
I pick them out of
the air.
Will they taste
like bits of belief and reprieve?
Will they taste
like the souls living through them?
Curtis
Bauer
POEM WRITTEN ON A
MAGAZINE LATE SUMMER 2004
Reading this
morning and a wanting
for foul weather, a need to pull on
a thick sweater,
walk in the rain,
feel the leaves shoosh and spit
beneath my feet, go
out with
or without an
umbrella—
it doesn’t matter—
with shoes that have seen better
days but are still
too good
to throw out. However you like,
Reader, but out there, in
the cold
damp air, free to
spend
the day doing
nothing, wandering.
But if you think of
it, why not
give me someone to
walk beside;
there are friends
to choose
from and even those
I don’t know,
like the woman who
shared
my umbrella in
London
fifteen years ago
while we waited
for the National
Gallery to open.
Today I’d take her,
or someone
so honest she makes
my heart hurt
when she
talks. Or
maybe
you. Let’s walk
and
let the rain keep
falling.
Michelle
Yasmine Valladares
AUGUST, BEACON
TARN, LAKE DISTRICT
after the
rains
The hills above
Coniston Lake are lined
with lavender and
pink heather.
The tarn is
full.
Its peat bottom
turns swimmers
gold. Like nagas, crossing the lake
they pass white
lotus in bloom. A
dog
splashes along the
shore. The sun
burns. One small
cloud drifts.
On a boulder ledge,
cross-legged
yogis contemplate
perfection.
Families feast in the grass.
From the
middle,
the swimmers create
ripples
to the tarn’s
edge.
tarn,
a small mountain lake made
by glaciers.
nagas,
from Sanskrit, are
serpent like beings with upper torsos of humans
and bodies
of snakes found in
Hinduism and Buddhism. yogis meditate.
Aaron Smith
PSALM: 4 a.m.
