Salamander Cove

2011-11-10T14:14:00.008-05:00

Hunting

As a child I hunted the weak
members of the playground,
striking with whatever words
would wound most deeply.
There was no place for sympathy
in this most elementary of food chains.
Of the four chambers
in the human heart, mercy
ought to squeeze into one of them.
I never felt guilty trying kill the human spirit.

When my dad shot the elk and broke her back
we hustled through the snow to make her ending quick.
She looked at us with fearful, wild forfeit
and I wished we weren’t there.
He tenderly slit her throat and her wildness
seeped onto the sagebrush, melted the snow—
her eyes dim, dark, marble.
Why should I care more for her suffering
than for my own kind?

We hide in revenge and terror,
numb to the ripped esophagus
of our bleeding brothers.

~ ~ Joel E. Jacobson

Catapault Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 18 (October, 2010).

2011-11-10T14:14:00.007-05:00

Lesson

Even if the mountain I climbed
Proved to be a duncecap really,
It was only on gaining its peak
That that knowledge reached me.

~ ~ Bill Knott

From The Moon’s Memoirs, Collected Short Poems, 2011

2011-11-10T14:13:00.002-05:00

Shirt Collar

You’re standing by the mirror,
and I watch your fingers
slip cufflinks through buttonholes.
Your shoulders ease back,
as if the world finally had room for them,
as if your skin fit differently
under this shirt. Your small breasts
press out, unexpected
in these starched folds.

For you I would learn
the forgotten motions of my father’s hands,
the foreign ritual of folding a tie
in on itself, anything
for an excuse to reach behind your neck,
slide my fingers up under your shirt collar,
that sharp cool crease.

~ ~ Anna Swanson

The Nights Also (Tightrope Books, 2010).

2011-11-10T14:13:00.000-05:00

There is a stillness

in snow

that the summer

never understands.

~ ~ Joel E. Jacobson

La Nuit.. Artist: Jean-Michel Ripaud

2011-11-10T14:12:00.000-05:00

The moon of magpies quarrelling

shimmers in the pale sky of early morning
like a court reporter's screen. It records
the magpies' proceedings - litigious birds
with ermine draped across their glossy shoulders,
their bellies drooped in prosperous curves.
They introduce their offspring to the court's
attention in harsh, good-natured voices.
They teach their fledglings legalese, the value
of bright shiny objects and their importance
in the scheme of branches.
They do not mean to be
so handsome, so much bigger than the other
birds, or to have such clever eyes. It's just
the way things are, they tell
judiciously brightening skies.

~ ~ Alice Major

From: Tales for an Urban Sky (Broken Jaw Press, 2001).

2011-11-10T14:11:00.000-05:00

"Water" - Photographer: Jonathan, of Beeps and Chirps

Meaning

Imagine a world disguised as art,
or one in which art masquerades
as you, so your face is just a portrait,
your legs a landscape. Your hair
abstract expressionism. And when
you go to the window each morning
you glimpse in its transfiguring pane
a streak of the vein source of things:
that your eyelashes remain nothing
but brushstrokes, that your feet
beneath it all are woodcuts. And when
you open the door to inquire how
a rose can limp between the breasts
of the dawn, you feel like a collage
snipped from the pages of a novel
whose words have always remained
immune to meaning, whose plot is
not subject to that mute truthserum.

~ ~ Bill Knott

2011-11-10T14:10:00.000-05:00

Woodpeckers

We should have stayed in the forest, watching woodpeckers.
A knock on hollow wood and air rattles in the tree’s chambers
like a voice trying to remember where to put its tongue.

Wingbeats echo on the inside of a skull. A stutter slides in parallax
between two birds translating early autumn into insect drone,
sky into raised voices, mushrooms into footsteps on mud.

We should have stayed in the forest, drowned out
by hiss between the branches, but even there you can’t be sure
that what you hear as morse might not be scattershot. And now

you’re speaking. Hover and balance. Hover and stop : hold it.
We could have stayed in the forest and I could have said -
but I didn’t. And you could have heard something different.

~ ~ Zoe Skoulding

2011-11-10T14:09:00.000-05:00

"Hiding Out" - Artist: Anthony Duce

Envoi

Chunnaic mi eadar-theangachadh de dhàn agam

ann an duanaire de bhàrdachd ghaoil à Alba,

agus bu neònach leam gun robh an càirdeas

nach do mhair agamsa ach trì seachdainean,

ged a luidir an t-uisge-stiùir mi fad bhliadhnachan,

an sin an ainm a’ ghaoil a mhaireas.

Bu neònaiche buileach na h-ìomhaighean,

cuid a ghineadh ann an òrain Ghàidhlig eile,

cuid a tharraing saighead a’ chomhardaidh a-nuas,

is iad nan seasamh gu borb sa Bheurla,

gun iomradh fiù ’s gum b’i a’ Ghàidhlig

a’ bhean-ghlùine no am bogha.

Bitheadh an tàcharan ag imeachd -

tha a chaolan dhomhsa air a sgaoileadh;

ma labhras e ri feadhainn mun ghaol shìorraidh

gach beannachd leotha ’s guma fada beò an gaol ac’,

ach gur leamsa an taisbeanadh cinnteach àraid

nach ionann fìrinn na beatha is fìrinn na bàrdachd.

Envoi

I saw one of my poems translated

in a book of love poems from Scotland,

and it felt strange that an affair

that lasted only three weeks

(but in whose wake I floundered long after)

was there in the name of eternal commitment.

It was stranger yet to see the images,

some born of other Gaelic songs,

some brought down by the arrow of rhyme,

standing naked and incongruous in English,

with no mention that Gaelic

was either the midwife or the bow.

But let the changeling make its way –

its umbilical cord with me is cut;

if it speaks to some of enduring love

may theirs be the blessing of love that lasts,

but let this particular revelation be mine

that reality and poetic truth are not the same.

~ ~ Meg Bateman

2011-11-10T14:08:00.000-05:00

the rabbit

it is dark there
but we are collecting our toys we aren't scared
well maybe just a tiny bit
they promised there will be nothing there
to be scared of

we are collecting our dolls and teddies
and all the toy cars even the broken ones
because we feel sorry for them
we are collecting the scattered puzzle pieces
there's one under the bed but it is dark there
better not to look for it

the puzzle pieces when collected correctly
make pictures a squirrel
a ball or a funny clown
but they say we have no time anymore
and so we are collecting them any old way
it is just that the rabbit is nowhere to be found
the one with an ear torn away
no one has played with it recently

they say there's no need
we will not play where we are going
but how do they know they hurry us up
and we are doing our best but why
don't they have time for us anymore
what have they done with all our time

they say we mustn't be scared but we know
it will be dark there all the time
perhaps we are scared after all
but no one wants to start bawling first
there will be no stopping us then

well here it is the doggone rabbit
how stupid of me not to have noticed
they shouldn't say we don't need it anymore
there where we are all going
where are we all going

~ ~ Aleksei Tsvetkov

2011-11-10T13:14:00.025-05:00

Artwork by Bill Knott

History

Hope . . . goosestep.

~ ~ Bill Knott

2011-11-10T12:53:00.028-05:00

combien de dormeurs du Val

nous faut-il

pour comprendre enfin

qu’on n’a pas besoin

de la guerre et de son venin?

how many sleepers in the Valley

                 do we need
        finally to understand
     that we don’t have need

of war and its venom?

~ ~ Sedley Richard Assonne

"Les dormeurs du Val"
Artist: Jean-Michel Ripaud

2011-11-10T12:53:00.011-05:00

UNTITLED

Nature doesn't need
a mountain to show
it exists; mist will
suffice. But the poet
must painfully pile
up every pebble of
his absent summit.

~ ~ Bill Knott

"Bird" - Artist: Bill Knott

2011-11-10T12:52:00.006-05:00

Temple of the Buddha's Footprint

They surround him
with carved ivory
apply gold-leaf
to the image of one
whose palms
were inlaid with rebirth
whose toes
were all the same length
whose earlobes
sagged with long life
but only those
who have felt the knife
of his inward gaze
his fire
that burns up suffering
but throws neither light
nor heat
know him
as peace calling out
to peace ...

the smile of an empty bowl.

~ ~ Paul Pines

Adrift on Blinding Light (New York, NY: Ikon, 2003).

2011-11-10T12:52:00.004-05:00

uncomplaining

an itinerant dons his woolens his furs and felt
daubs smelly seal fat all over his face
and sets off across the universe of ice
the seamless plain of snows that never melt

there are things in his knapsack that may turn out
useful and to make sure he took one of each
and cast an arbuscle twig to inquire about
direction if not the point he set out to reach

off you wander into the light that cannot fade
though faint since the sun is smeared with lard
so what if the ice underfoot is always hard
isn’t the rock and no one ever complained
follow the faithful twig never stray from the course
we all are natives and i am one of yours

fall asleep and blotches of green and blue and pink
pierce the ice like pale incunabulum ink
somewhere else not in this world of ours
bursting up like that from the dirt
you would make an effort and call them flowers
if you knew what they were and possessed the proper word
you could try and smell them sleeping late
but the blubber stinks awful
and the ice is as hard as fate

~ ~ Alexei Tsvetkov

Cardinal Points Journal, Vol. 4, 2011

2011-11-10T12:51:00.002-05:00

UNTITLED

mute/hard
forboden
words
line the mountain
down which we melt—
stones that wore our
trickle tongues away

~ ~ Bill Knott

2011-11-10T12:50:00.007-05:00

"Melting Men" - Artist: Néle Azevedo

I'll never understand
the Universe as music

planets and glands
like notes
on a diatonic scale

the sound of wind
through leaves

tumors in my bloodline

what Pythagoras
listened for until
he found the perfect ratio...

all those years
without so much as a whisper

~ ~ Paul Pines

Adrift on Blinding Light (New York, NY: Ikon, 2003).

2011-11-10T12:49:00.003-05:00

Becoming Art
for T.W.

The picture won’t paint itself.
The idea won’t self-reveal
without forcing itself
through the prism of the artist.

Thick, grieving strokes black out
the self (a penciled-in outline)
and the subsequent colors,
however sad or beautiful
are no longer sensible or appealing.

What it takes to sit there
and let each brush be felt
each piece be placed
until the picture holds depth.

Things used to inspire eventually expire,
end up in the back corner of a tired thrift store
on sale for 25 cents. It becomes difficult to tell
which is heavier,

the dust or the paint.

~ ~ Joel E. Jacobson

From: Water the Mud (A Poetic Matter, 2011).

2011-11-10T12:48:00.004-05:00

POEM

Doesn't each tree throw
its shade to show
boundary to the others’
thirsting thrust?
Only the roots are brothers;
the roots are the forest.

~ ~ Bill Knott

From The Moon’s Memoirs, Collected Short Poems, 2011

"The Horses of Time" - Artist: Bill Knott

2011-11-10T12:47:00.002-05:00

A little girl
in a red dress
falls down
in dandelions
laughing at
her own clumsiness ...

at first
I think her an image
among images, then
see she's the whole poem.

~ ~ Paul Pines

Adrift on Blinding Light (New York, NY: Ikon, 2003).

2011-10-02T20:15:00.000-04:00

Windfall

When she objected that the bedroom
was too hot that summer day
for what I had proposed and suggested
we create a spectacle of ourselves
for the audience of trees and shrubs
in our backyard, I had forgotten
about the apples.

And when we spread wide open
the sheet and sleeping bag on the grass,
out of sight (mostly) of the road,
and released our entire bodies,
piece by piece of clothing,
into the arms of the air
(which, unaccustomed to such
an opportunity, puffed excitedly),
I was not thinking at all
of the apples.

And even when we laid ourselves down
and sanctified that country acre as it had
long deserved to be sanctified,
sending birds racing between trees
while the whole world gathered itself
in her eyes, into which I looked and looked,
I did not see the apples.

But later that afternoon,
as I carried our clothes toward the house,
and she, walking ahead of me, stopped
to pick up a windfall apple and tasted it,
declaring it delicious and urging me
to take a bite, I most certainly noticed
not only the apple but the garden
surrounding it, like a scene
from a familiar story, one including
a man happy in his skin and a woman as
tall and shapely as she was naked--

naked, that is, except for the Raybans,
which she'd slipped on when she went
to get us each a beer after our holy
expense of energy and which,
with their Vogue-like stylish incongruity,
saved me from an insufferably poetic moment
and let me enjoy the very apple
that the apple was.

~ ~ Philip Dacey

First published in Cider Press Review, 2004

2011-10-02T20:14:00.003-04:00

"Windy Lake"

Photographer Rezi Vasiri

Night draws me open :: I work like a seed ::

building my tree through the depths

~ ~ Grant Hackett

2011-10-02T20:14:00.002-04:00

Stage Directions

Place setting
Sun left

Enter full
Moon right

No dialogue

Necessary.

~ ~ Vassilis Zambaras

2011-10-02T20:14:00.000-04:00

Golden Rule

In a forgotten drawer
my father’s wooden rule,
brass-hinged to unfold
sideways and lengthways
for measuring boat timbers.

I hear the slap and click
of its closing,
before I can say ‘lifeboat’,
see it vanish
into that long pocket
on the thigh of blue overalls.

Indicator of his precision
love of numbers
a life measured
in feet and inches
business takings
cricket scores
football pools
bingo calls.

His emotions kept in check,
marked off by pencil,
held in columns,
buttoned up in cardigans,
till an outburst
a sea-squall soon past.

Now he’s gone to talk
spans and cubits
and dead-reckoning with Noah.

Margaret Eddershaw

First published in Iota, 2007

2011-10-02T20:13:00.002-04:00

broken wheel
the drunken rounds we sing
to celebrate life

~ ~ Rick Daddario

2011-10-02T20:13:00.000-04:00

Poets Nova

Our thoughts are like dancers, two
inter-mingled, co-existing electrons
spinning around the same nucleus.
Our hearts, the pulsars at the center of
this rich, red, universe. Roses clinched
between orbiting lips that circle a black
planet obscured by an eclipsing moon.
I wonder if wishing sets thoughts in motion,
causing invisible ripples in the unseen.
Ripples that carry our secrets to God.

I consider all these things from my bar stool,
the poet's throne. A magical chair with roots
that grows limbs and a mind of its own.

~ ~ Charles P. Ries

2011-10-02T20:12:00.005-04:00

There is water to be found ::

where the tired self sleeps ::

we are made of faraway places

~ ~ Grant Hackett

2011-10-02T20:12:00.000-04:00

Autumn of a Lepidopterist

On edge

Of buckling, weathered
Red-tiled roof,

Orange-brown and black
Veined monarch trembling,

Like a leaf.

~ ~ Vassilis Zambaras

2011-10-02T20:11:00.003-04:00

Photographer: Sue McDonagh

Ana Becho'ach

I say a prayer in a language I can't read
from a world in which I struggle
to a god,
that I wish to understand.

Listening from left to right
I repeat and repeat
until the words link,
until each belong to each other.

Perhaps I have just understood my solitude
and like the words and god
we are,
all part of each other

~ ~ Simon Bridges

PoetrySpaceNews, July 2011

2011-10-02T20:11:00.000-04:00

Dying before the leaves of autumn ::

I shall grow stronger in forgotten lands

Dance of death :: sound of the flute ::

the fields swept bare of me

~ ~ Grant Hackett

2011-10-02T20:10:00.000-04:00

Improvise

What if the word that I want,
the word so precise in its meaning,
the one that I need
for the thought I am wanting to think,
does not exist?
What then?
Can I still think it?
Or will I be able
to improvise?

And what if words that I want do exist,
but harbour insurgents,
harsh malcontents and saboteurs
who use innuendo
subverting the meanings,
gathering round them
the most undesirable words,
can it be there's a way
to improvise truth from their lies,

creating my meanings
from new combinations,
making it up
whilst I'm making my way?
And what if the thought
has the shape of a word
but is empty of meaning,
cuts a space for new thinking,
can I satisfy it with my makeshift devices?

~ ~ Dave King

2011-10-02T20:09:00.001-04:00

Untitled 2001

Artist: Graham Lambkin

Freedom

To some
death is freedom.
To others
breath is.

~ ~ Alaka Yeravadekar

2011-07-19T16:42:00.000-04:00

Poem to Poetry

Poetry,
you are an electric,
a magic, field--like the space
between a sleepwalker's outheld arms!

~ ~ Bill Knott

"Arcane Figure" by Bill Knott

2011-07-19T16:41:00.002-04:00

Ossabaw Island Dream
#6

Think of yourself as an idea
Through which time is crystallized

Say you have occurred to yourself
As an idea and time as the silent

Architect of its outlines,
Say further that you fear

Its shape still conforms
To numerous things no longer here

Consider yourself contained
by a form that seems determined

by absences, to depend upon them.
You ask yourself, "What am I

doing in this abstraction as if
it were my experience

and I were just an activity
of time trying to make itself clear?"

~ ~ Paul Pines

Adrift on Blinding Light, Ikon, 2003.

2011-07-19T16:41:00.001-04:00

Lindos, March 17, 1969, 3:15 a.m.

Artist: Ed Baker

From my window
I can smell the lemon tree
& I can hear a ship's bell

I listen to the rain drop from
the eaves of my house

                    & what if I
                    thin-blooded as I am

                    sit out the whole man

~ ~ Ed Baker

Published in Butcher of Oxen (Doxie Press, 1970).

2011-07-19T16:41:00.000-04:00

mistake after mistake
after mistake, adding up
to just the right thing

~ ~ Don Wentworth

Past All Traps, Six Gallery Press, 2011

2011-07-19T16:40:00.002-04:00

pine trees or palms,

everywhere I travel,

the moon follows

~ ~ Art Durkee

"Cloud Wisps" by Art Durkee

2011-07-19T16:40:00.001-04:00

singing to no one in particular

there are birds that sing with two voices
blessed with a divided larynx
were they people they could hold
two conversations simultaneously
and both turn out right in the end

now i am expediently perched
for precisely such an attempt
except that there is no interlocutor
similarly gifted and the two songs
are not aimed at each other

such an animal is split in the middle
by an impenetrable plane
cutting off its left hand voice
from its right hand voice and the heart
from the heartless yet also singing side

but if we possessed two hearts
our blood would flow against itself
better stay as you are a useless warbler
whose two discourses addressed to the void
receive no response to either

~ ~ Alexei Tsvetkov

Cardinal Points Journal, Vol. 4, 2011

2011-07-19T16:40:00.000-04:00

I was in

another place

all the way

here

findng

my way home -

the lovely

urgency

of uncertainty

~ ~ Tom Montag

2011-07-19T16:39:00.001-04:00

One Man's Wake

He goes around concerned more than usual
about time, life, other minor things like being,
dying without having found himself.

He was single-minded about this and on rainy days
he would go out and start asking if they had seen him
aboard some woman's eyes or somewhere along
the Brazilian coast in love with its pounding surf
or most likely at the funeral of his innocence.

He always had words or pale and miserable pieces
of love and of violent winds in reserve,
he had been about to enter death thirteen times
but came back from force of habit, he said.

Among other things he wanted
someone else to understand the world,
and this terrified loneliness itself.
Now they're holding this scary wake here
inside these walls on which his curses still come rolling off,

the rustle of his beard, still full of life, falls from his face
and no one who can smell him
will ever guess how much he wanted to enjoy the mystery of innocent love
and give water to his children.

As he returns his borrowed skin and bones to neglect,
he makes out his own figure in the distance and runs after himself,
so there's no doubt now
that it will soon begin to rain.

~ ~ Juan Gelman

Translated by Hardie St. Martin

Big Bridge, Issue #15 (Spring 2011).

2011-07-19T16:39:00.000-04:00

Way of the Warrior

I planted my madness
in the world

watched it grow
            and fade

                                      like a wildflower
                                      on a hillside

~ ~ Paul Pines

Takidancing, Ikon, 2007.

2011-07-19T16:38:00.000-04:00

where will you
take me next when
the winds
change and what i
know turns to ash?

~ ~ robert d. wilson

2011-07-19T16:37:00.000-04:00

Wild Orchid
playing
with my mind

~ ~ Ed Baker

Wild Orchard, tel-net (2002).

2011-06-19T08:22:00.000-04:00

Sons and Fathers – Brighton Beach

In the palm of his hand
I tried to be perfect and I was. My two sandled feet
the width of his one great hand – my soles rooted
to his life line, mound of Venus, mound of Mars.
Held high, an acrobat stunt, or an offering to the Gods,
I was not afraid of him but perfect in his hand, face, smile -
our same curly hair -
my baby coat buttoned high with one round collar scalloping
my fat cheek. I grew and he had to use two hands
to keep me – one foot in each hand – his balance was my balance.
I grew and he used his feet on my hip bones
to suspend me above him.
I grew and his hand supported my back to push me forward.
I grew and he placed his hands on my shoulders to slow me down.

We have the same ears but it was his brown eyes that held me
brought joy, sorrow, sharpness and obsidian anger. Taller, I grew,
still trying to be approved, to be perfect, always wanting
to be held high again held that sacred again
but I know
if I stood on his hands now
I would crush him.

~ ~ Suzanne S. Rancourt

From Muddy River Review Issue #3 (Fall, 2010).

"Father and Son"

Photo by Rosemarie Hayes of LifeUnfoldsPhotography

2011-06-19T08:21:00.002-04:00

Today's Lesson

I do not have much
of my father left:
a hat, a coat, and some gloves.

They are not him though.
They belonged to him;
they have learned his shape by rote

(tried and true is best)
so when I wear them
I can feel him again and

again. Again, that
is the key word here.
And it should not be a verb.

~ ~ Jim Murdoch

Published in This Is Not About What You Think (Fandango Virtual, 2010).

2011-06-19T08:21:00.001-04:00

Candid

When I saw
the photo of myself
I squirmed
for only a moment
then looked straight at it.

I saw a gray man
with a crooked smile,
my father’s face looking back at me,
sporting a half-mouth grin
I’d only ever seen in one photograph
from Korea, green before first combat
in his uniform,
his whole platoon around him,
his hair short, his eyes bright,
nine years before my birth.

In the picture he’s smirking
as if he knew even then
that his son would someday come
to a similar moment of recognition
and amused resignation,
a moment of humor
before a terrifying future,
that my face
would inevitably become his
in spite of all my years of being certain
that if I just kept my head down
and did everything he never did,
I could keep such a thing
from ever happening.

I wonder if he knew
that it would take this long.

~ ~ Tony Brown

2011-06-19T08:21:00.000-04:00

Whose Mouth Do I Speak With

I can remember my father bringing home spruce gum.
He worked in the woods and filled his pockets
with golden chunks of pitch.
For his children
he provided this special sacrament
and we'd gather at this feet, around his legs,
bumping his lunchbox, and his empty thermos rattled inside.
Our skin would stick to Daddy's gluey clothing
and we'd smell like Mumma's Pine Sol.
We had no money for store bought gum
but that's all right.
The spruce gum
was so close to chewing amber
as though in our mouths we held the eyes of Coyote
and how many other children had fathers
that placed on their innocent, anxious tongue
the blood of tree?

~ ~ Suzanne S. Rancourt

From Billboard in the Clouds (Northwestern University Press, 2010);
first published by Curbstone Press, 2004.

2011-06-19T08:20:00.000-04:00

home from the steel warehouse
dad's lunch box filled
with wildflowers

                              prayers over
                              dad’s casket descends
                              through a maze of severed roots

“Red Hots!”

for an instant i’m ten
and
father’s still alive

~ ~ Ed Markowski

"Steel Warehouse" was published in tinywords, October 26, 2005.
"Prayers Over" was first published on David Giacalone's blog f/k/a June 19, 2005.
"Red Hots" was published in Haiku Sun Magazine, Issue #10, 2004.

2011-06-19T08:19:00.002-04:00

The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

~ ~ Stanley Kunitz

From Next to Last Things: New Poems and Essays,
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985.

2011-06-19T08:19:00.001-04:00

dad’s grave

all
the

flowers
he

wouldn't
let

momma
plant

~ ~ Ed Markowski

Published in tinywords, July 24, 2006.

2011-06-19T08:19:00.000-04:00

For My Father

After you've been gone,
I've been flying alone back and forth
above the waters and the continents.
Both of us: me here and you there
know too well that this is a waste of time
and space.
I may be flying, looking for you
for the rest of my life
or death, and still never see you.

Nothing can be undone,
and I can't take it.
Nor I can take the fact
that every time I see my close ones, I know,
it may be the last time I see them.

Don't worry about me. While I fly,
an angel in uniform attends me,
gives me some water and bread,
and smiles to me.
She takes care of me
until it's time to get out,
get in line for the luggage
and then to disappear into crowd
which lives on the exhaust,
cyclic persistence
and canned expectations.

The latter is something
I live on myself, expectation
melting slowly into waiting
as I keep on flying
in the space given

~ ~ Andrey Gritsman

From: Live Landscape, Cervená Barva Press, 2010.

2011-06-19T08:18:00.003-04:00

A Thought On Father's Day

I read this poem at my father's funeral on April 23, 2003.
Lawrence J. Holder was 86, and one helluva guy.

And yes
it has come to the time
when I see my father's face
in the mirror,
my squint is his
the nascent crow's feet
stretching into laugh lines
my angry brow
solicits the always surprising question
"What's wrong?"
"Why--nothing."
Didn't I always ask him the same question?
Do I find myself
praying over the New York Times
like a scholar over a sacred text?
A drink to my side
my legs crossed right to left
just like him?
Was that him the other day
that reflection in the store window
slightly hunched
arms stiff
swinging robotically
clothed in Seersucker?
I looked back
but he was gone.
Was I chasing a hallucination?
Like him
I am drawn to the sea
to the sound of breaking waves,
on the shore-
to the eternal ebb and flow
to the primal smell of death and life
to the gulls sitting shiva
on the rocks
to the purple death
of the sun each evening
its bright rebirth
from the portals of the sea's horizon.
Who is this man I see?
It is my father
and it is me.

~ ~ Doug Holder

The Somerville Journal, April 27, 2003.

2011-06-19T08:18:00.002-04:00

Pinching the bridge
of my glasses
for cleaning –

my father’s
fingers.

~ ~ Don Wentworth

The New Yinzer, Invisible Cities (Spring, 2009).

2011-06-19T08:18:00.001-04:00

Riddles for My Father

Whatever we see when awake is death;
when asleep, dreams.

— Heraclitus

He began in Colorado.
Anyplace he loved was home.
His breath scarred by cigarettes
was a rough-barked branch;
an orphaned owl hunched there,
amber eyes cradling a banked fire.

The moon was new all of his life.
The stars trafficked in secrets.

Only the earth woke in his hands
that were strong as barn-door hinges,
and he savored the give and take
of seed and harvest. His nightmare:
an upright pitchfork forgotten
deep in a mound of hay.

But always there was a horse
snorting in its damp stall,
and a saddle on the stall rail,
and not far off some mountains,
and canyons a man might live
another life in, and rivers he might
step into and out of at will....

(He’d never have heard Heraclitus
in those lines, for who in our family
would have loved such riddles
but me? I knew he’d declare them
dark and not to be trusted—so
I always held my tongue.)

Now he sleeps in the earth,
in that long dreamless house
clods drummed down on
like hooves. His face
is a new moon, and all
that was starry in him flies
like a dry beam of light
away from me. His hands
lay like broken sheaves
at his sides.

I’m awake.
And Heraclitus
is ashes in my mouth.

~ ~ Joseph Hutchison

The Rattling Wall, Issue 1 (Spring 2011).

2011-06-19T08:18:00.000-04:00

Father-Son Conversation

To J.V.P.
Born 24 January 2006 - Died 27 January 2006

Dear imagination of a boy, my round idea,
you will not know the calluses on my hand,
I will not teach you to wave hello.

You came in waving goodbye, in your way,
and the sound of your own music filled
the hallway between this place and another.

Beauty is not for everyone, but you gathered
the light from the hospital into your face.
To be brutally honest, I loved you.

I tried to hold you carefully by the stem,
But you were determined to fall, and falling,
blaze up like an evening populated with cloud.

You wore your mother's womanly lips, pursed
in a pleasant smile, but your eyes you protected
from the too-bright world we learn to call home.

The music within me is quiet, but persistent.
One day, like you, I will return to being the song.
Beneath my eyelids, too, runs the sound of water.

Beneath this world, another, and another.
Who would give me a map to find you, the paper
superimposed with a constantly moving "X"?

To me, you were first a synapse, then a son.
Now grief sparks again in my dome-covered brain.
I row the underground waters, lantern in hand.

I tried to hold you carefully, but goodbye
was already on your lips, a silent prayer.
I will go on speaking to you as long as I live.

~ ~ Robert Peake

From: Human Shade (Lost Horse Press, 2011).

2011-05-25T12:13:00.007-04:00

The Piano

All it took was one light note
One finger pressed
By one calm slave

A single note a supple instant
For the muffled clamor of offense
Tucked at the back of black veins
To rise and burst into the stirless air

The master knowing not what to do
Before such tumult
Commands that the piano be closed
Forever

~ ~ Anne Hébert

Translated by A. Z. Foreman

Le Piano

Il a suffi d'une note légère
D'un seul doigt frappée
Par un esclave tranquille

Une seule note un instant tenue
Pour que la clameur sourde des outrages
Enfouis au creux des veines noires
Monte et se décharge dans l'air immobile

Le maître ne sachant que faire
Devant ce tumulte
Ordonne qu'on ferme le piano
A jamais

~ ~ Anne Hébert

From: Oeuvre Poétique 1950-1990 (Paris: Ed. Boréal/Seuil, 1992).

2011-05-25T12:13:00.006-04:00

Saint John of the Cross in Prison

Saint John of the Cross stood up in his
prison cell and the stones became

donuts

He knew it was from the devil so he
did not eat.

He knew if he ate his state could go dark
the radiant escalators of his

innermost sunlight would vanish
the skies of black brilliance in which he

dwelt showered by God direct would
congeal in a sodden cloud

He turned and glanced out the
shimmering licorice bars of the window onto the

vague milky daylight and
swallowed his dry swallow in which

the fresh cascades of Andalusia
splashed refreshingly into his heart

and sat down again this time on his
hard bed which by Divine Grace had become

a donkey riding him across green
mountainsides aglitter with sparrows

above the churning sea of God’s Good Pleasure
crashing against the

rocks of his heartbeats below

~ ~ Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

From The Caged Bear Spies the Angel, in preparation.

"Dancing Tale" by Baghdad artist Vian Sora

2011-05-25T12:12:00.002-04:00

Hope

What's the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope -
the almost twin
of making-do,
the isotope
of going on:
what isn't in
the envelope
just before
it isn't:
the always tabled
righting of the present.

~ ~ Kay Ryan

From Elephant Rocks (New York: Grove Press, 1996).

2011-05-25T12:12:00.001-04:00

What I've wanted most not to govern my life—

the sun's short stride

the forfeited sight of human eyes ~ ~

Why threaten a singing man with the stones of existence ~ ~

          How shall the heart cling to its tree :: when the wing is
          underground ~ ~

          Will one leaf on the last tree be time enough ~ ~

~~ Grant Hackett

2011-05-25T12:12:00.000-04:00

Birds

I have a feeling
they will sing right up
to the moment
the world
ends.

~ ~ William Michaelian

First published February 5, 2008, in Songs and Letters.

2011-04-10T09:41:00.004-04:00

Before Saying Any of the Great Words

We already know: first we must agree
on which they are; but let us acknowledge that they exist:

they resound in all their weight and gravity
down Nevsky Prospekt, in the muttering of Raskolnikov,

and Cortázar mocks them at every opportunity,
lightens them up, musses their hair, reconciles them

with the rest of the vocabulary so that they may rub benignly
against one another and liberty won't do too much harm

with its tonnage of Greek marble
and its whiff of existentialism and its undeniable tragic greatness

to janitor, tenedor, bibelot--although the greatness of this last one
is suspect, for which we have Mallormé to blame,

there are also the short and decisive words: yes, no, now, never,
turbid love, clean death, rattled poetry,

other words that are like art for art' sake: sandalwood
for instance, and words like deoxyribonucleic, telescopic

and possessing an undeniably scientific elegance, a diffuse,
intense, and labyrinthine character, all at once, linked

to that other word, life, and of course there are the combinations,

your mouth, this letter, dozens of verbal objects,
that are only important for inexplicable reasons,

spoken at night or during the day, said

or held in silence, in the velvety net
of memory, in the transparent and energetic fortress

of forgetting, that body or fabric from which
are also made the great words, time, so many things.

~ ~ David Huerta

Translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer.
From: Before Saying Any of the Great Words (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).
With permission.

2011-04-10T09:37:00.003-04:00

Why Must It Be Beautiful?

What is it for, all this
beauty? The curve
of the spiral

from the laddered
twist of DNA
to the vast wave

of galaxies; the green
luna moth, breath-
taking & ordinary.

Does the prey see
beauty in its predator?
Do gazelles admire

the leopard? Does
the seal lift
its sleek head

to gaze in wonder
at the bumbling,
lethal polar bear?

Our science tells us
how. Our science
gives us reason.

But why must it be
beautiful? The aero-
nautic miracle

of the bumble bee;
the passing brilliance
of the butterfly. Surely

predators would be
more deterred by
ugliness. The hideous

and the platypus
have their own glory.
Humans have our

own glory. Do other
creatures adore
the useless,

the only gorgeous,
the green wave
of Northern Lights

dimming the stars?
The indented shadow
of the heron's bath

in a snowdrift? Why
must it be beautiful?
When we pass, with

the bee, with
the butterfly,
with the polar bear,

the leopard,
the gazelle,
who will grieve

this deep and terrible
loss? Who will delight
in what comes next?

~ ~ Sharon Brogan

2011-04-10T09:36:00.001-04:00

Aural

Escarcha sucia del audio
en la penumbra nómada
del automóvil;
ciénaga de sonidos
en donde la aguja del oído
apenas puede moverse.
De pronto, una torch singer
desmenuza a Wittgenstein
con tenedores de Cante...
¿Cómo lo hace? ¿Cómo
desenlaza, destraba los lenguajes,
hace fluir el mundo - y por añadidura
suma la gracia
y la tragedia?
El automóvil
entra en la noche
ungido por la música.

Aural

               Gritty frost from
               the radio speaker
               in the car's
               nomadic shadows:
               a swamp of sounds
               in which hearing's
               needle can
               barely move.
               Out of nowhere,
               a torch singer
               slices through Wittgenstein
               with the cutlery
               of cante jondo...
               How does she do it? -
               unstitch, unseam
               language itself,
               make the world flow and
               if that wasn't enough
               hit the twin peaks
               of grace and tragedy?
               The car
               anointed with music
               slips into the night.

~ ~ David Huerta

Translated from the Spanish by Jamie McKendrick.

2011-03-05T14:09:00.001-05:00

The Dog Show

You don’t know the dog show
has been staged for your benefit
and all these dogs represent
people you’ve forgotten to thank
for their contributions to your life.

You don’t see that the handlers
in their odd and dowdy suits
are the teachers who brought you
the lessons you needed to learn
and paraded them before you.

You don’t recognize that those shiny coats
and brushed out fur and white hard teeth
are signifiers of crucial junctures
when you worshipped style over substance
and feared the honest chomp of a deserved bite.

All you know is the vague preferences
that stir you. You like the Westie,
the Skye, the Bearded Collie;
you are indifferent to the Toys;
you feel love for the Scottish Deerhound,

and that Viszla reminds you of
moments you were just ahead of Death,
who coursed behind you snapping at your heels
and guiding you to this moment where you
are the dog show watcher.

You are fur, and breath, and memory.
You are observing effort that you’d never make yourself.
You are badly dressed and amazed and squealing
over animals that seem perfect and at ease when they move.
You wish you’d done something like this with your life.

~ ~ Tony Brown

2011-03-05T14:08:00.001-05:00

Undone

The body collects countless cruelties.

Regrets nest in each forehead crease,

while every heartache slits its imprint

just below the wrist. Even after midnight,

troubles upset the peace within my stomach.

Broke down and blown through,

I dream of a history of anonymity,

its precision: me, my father’s sole progeny,

and my achievements, all worthless as cold coffee

or rain-soaked cigarettes. Surely we all struggle

with the misnomer of identity, or a knot in the rope

of our errant epiphanies. Even now, anger

simmers in my sternum, while apprehension swims

through blood streams, the heart’s gates and locks.

My confidence still unravels at the slightest pull.

~ ~ Adrian S. Potter

Published in Foliate Oak Literary Journal (April, 2009).

2011-03-05T14:08:00.000-05:00

on being seventeen

the people that you love
think they know they think
they remember being you
conversations like cheese

graters & you’re the cheese
they shred you & they
don’t even notice the fine
white pieces as they chew

& you fear the boy you love
will grow up to be a man
you don’t want to want him
you don’t want to watch him

turn into your father & you don’t
want him to see you becoming
your mother & being seventeen
& the oldest means leaving

or staying & shredding
into thin white curls on the family
kitchen counter but how can you
leave when you’re only seventeen

& adult means knowing more than
you they must know something
you need to & being seventeen
& a woman (in this borrowed

body) is not what you had hoped
the body tricks you in the most
unexpected ways who would know
how you ride its fierce insistence

how your thoughts become all bone-
less liquid slow when inside you feel
so hot & hard & sharp words
slice you like thick white cheese

& you’re only seventeen
but watching them you know
what you must not become
but you know they said the same so how

do you get out?

~ ~ Sharon Brogan

2011-03-05T14:07:00.000-05:00

Rock means
what rock is.

Soil is more
deceitful.

Not much time

and not much space

but lots of words

to feed the darkness.

Not enough
wind to make

a leaf
tremble.

What you grasp

eludes you.

~ ~ Tom Montag

2011-03-05T14:06:00.001-05:00

Imagine

Imagine nothing to read or write
no way to watch your saffron thoughts
unfurl in gray graphite on pristine sheets of white

Imagine loneliness without solitude
no way to swim between friends and lovers
and the treasured company of your own secret muse

Imagine only filthy, brackish water
or no water at all to cleanse your body, inside or out
no clean springs in which to play by graceful glades

Imagine children conceived in rage and revenge
mothers without means to provide, to protect
endless explosions stilling life on killing grounds

Imagine knowing only
war
poverty
ignorance
powerlessness
hunger

Imagine dying before you are old enough to know who you are

~ ~ Jamie Dedes

First published in Poets Against the War (February 2010).

2011-01-30T15:53:00.010-05:00

That Pomegranate Shine

Two brides arise from the river, shivering and shining like pomegranate seeds.
– Words from an Armenian Song

I was the wrong kind of bride,
more sweat than glisten,
more peach than pomegranate.
At twenty-three, in love with marriage,
not the man,
I plunged into rough water,
bringing grandmother’s candlesticks,
mother’s books and two silver trays.
Ten years later, I emerged shivering,
dragging my ragged volumes,
one candlestick and two babies.
On the bank, I shook off the water
and breathed.
Standing with my children,
looking out over the river,
the new brides asked me where
I got that pomegranate shine.

~ ~ Lori Desrosiers

Featured at SplitThisRock.com as Poem of the Week, June, 2010. With permission of the poet.

2011-01-30T15:51:00.016-05:00

Between Times

These times between times,
Transitions of one to another
Unlike winter or spring
Or Thursday
Which have standing and gravity;
Heft in the mind and extravagance on the tongue
Not that you’d know it
With all our blasé blasé and inattention
But they do and are
A destination of sorts
A roadside attraction
Rather than the passage itself
But these times between times are different
With no heart or skin
No nervous center or command bunker
Setting the rules of what’s what
No there as Ms. Stein might quip
Just a sitting on the bench
Waiting
Another image arises
Of a Wheel of Chance

Clacking like a Zydeco washboard
And skipping from one prize to the next
Thing is, I’m talking about the space between prizes
The time between times.

~ ~ Joshua Rose

2011-01-30T15:51:00.015-05:00

Every Sound in the Cosmos

Every sound in the cosmos got trapped one day, in a
giant glass cube of silence
on a hill of new ferns

as soon as the sound was inside
it started to glow and lit up the whole sky

every bird-chirp harp-pluck bell-ring door-slam
pipe-stem-clench toboggan-swoosh airplane-drone
two-at-a-table outdoor terrace gossip tennis-serve lob-pop
ocean-roar surf-hiss gull-cry sky-boom
even the almost soundless expanse-sound of the sky itself
and the usually inaudible rumble of the earth as it creakily turns
and the faint sighing sound of the moon longing for its
origin somewhere in the Atlantic
and every heartbeat rat-a-tat of every
person on earth walking or sitting or sound asleep
each egg in its quiet hum
each sperm in its anxious and excitable wriggling high-pitched whistle

and silent clouds passed overhead
and silent light bathed the cube in supernal splendor

and for a moment people saw things as they really were
with a vision so complete

you could hear a pin drop

~ ~ Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

From: The Music Space (The Ecstatic Exchange, 2007).

2011-01-30T15:49:00.002-05:00

Fool

It is a privilege to be the fool
Of no consequence and silliness squandered
Of no rank
To see the world as it is
With an innocent eye
Defeating the horror with a tune
Turning a tune with a picture
No
You cannot fool the fool
With twisty ties of word
Or sleight of hand
Or trickster throwing down the cards
“Watch the queen, watch the queen”
Trickster nonchalants
Stealing your confidence
And twenty bucks
But not if you’re the fool
No sir!
Not if you’re the fool

~ ~ Joshua Rose

2010-12-21T15:53:00.013-05:00

The Valve

The one-way flow of time we take for granted,
but what if the valve is defective? What if the threads
on the stem wear thin, or the stuffing box or the bonnet
ring leaks, or the joints to the pipe ring fail,
and there's a backwash?
It happens.
And then old loves,
meeting again, have no idea what to do,
resuming or not resuming from where they were
years before. Or the dead come back to chat.
Or you are reduced for a giddy moment to childhood's
innocent incompetence. You look up
as if to see some hint in the sky's blackboard.
But then, whatever it was, some fluff or grit
that clogged the works, works free, and again time passes,
almost as before, and you try to get on with your life.

From Falling from Silence, by David R. Slavitt. Copyright © 2001 by David R. Slavitt. Reproduced with permission of Louisiana Sate University Press. All rights reserved.

~ ~ David R. Slavitt

2010-12-21T15:53:00.011-05:00

Winter, Ageless Time

There was a place
I’d go in winter
Before starting
Each new year
In the ageless period
After midlife wars
Before the treaty
Or the surrender
Not sure anymore
It lasted many years

When foolish decisions
Had time to recover
What had been ignored
What caused the wars
In the first place
The ageless time
Before who I am now

~ ~ Anthony Duce

2010-12-21T15:52:00.004-05:00

The Carpenter

The gentle fears he tells me of being
afraid to climb back down each day
from the top of the unfinished building.
He says: I’m getting old
and wish each morning when I arrive
I could beat into shape
a scaffold to take me higher
but the wood I need
is still growing on the hills
the nails raw red with rust
still changing shape in bluffs
somewhere north of my mind.

I’ve hung over this city like a bird
and seen it change from shacks to towers
It’s not that I’m afraid
but sometimes when I’m alone up here
and know I can’t get higher
I think I’ll just walk off the edge
and either fall or fly
and then he laughs
so that his plumb-bob goes awry
and single strokes the spikes into the joists
pushing the floor another level higher
like a hawk every year adds levels to his nest
until he’s risen above the tree he builds on
and alone lifts into the wind
beating his wings like nails into the sky.

~ ~ Patrick Lane

From Selected Poems 1977-1997. Harbour Publishing, 1997. With permission.

2010-12-21T15:51:00.002-05:00

which of us is subject,
window,
mirror ...

for all our gazing,
never coming
nearer.

~ ~ Gabriella Mirollo

Photograph by Gabriella Mirollo; the lines above are an excerpt from
her poem,"To Mademoiselle Charlotte du Val d'Ognes (Artist Unknown)".
Shared here today, with her kind permission.

2010-12-21T15:50:00.004-05:00

A Carpenter’s Gift

The carpenter stooped from his bench
gathered a nest of curled shavings,
and offered it as a metaphor of craft,
knowing I would understand his gift:
blond birch and butter yellow ash
warmed by the soft brown furls of oak.

If my stock in trade were not words,
I would choose the carpenter’s way,
and saw and sand and carve and turn,
plane and stain and polish and buff.
I would make new and wondrous poems
of hue and tint and shape and grain.

The paths and traces ordained
by time and sun and rain would impose
their rules on me - arrow-shaped
and soaring skyward,
or a blaze of liquid movement,
a voluptuous spread of watered silk.

I would listen to ancient whisperings
of bog-birthed pine, oak, elm and yew,
coaxing twisted logs of haggard wood
from their coma into sensual shapes -
their rounded forms a resurrection,
a connection of past, present and yet to come.

~ ~ Angela Hanley

2010-12-05T11:33:00.000-05:00

Two Ways of Looking at the
Gravity of the World

Pessimism:

Red-eyed,

The first thing you see
In the morning
Is a falling
Yellow
Leaf.

Optimism:

What--

An uplifting
Brisk wind brings it
To land on a flying green tarmac.

~ ~ Vassilis Zambaras

2010-12-05T11:31:00.001-05:00

Train Song

I lurk in a wooded
bend of the railroad
where I won’t be spotted.
Duffle bag — check.
Zippo lighter — check.
Deck of marked cards — check.
All my life I’ve been listening to trains
& all my life I’ve been letting them go by,
each whistle Dopplering down
from summons to wail,
followed by a thunder
as intoxicating as any heavy metal band,
graffitoed messages flying past
too fast to parse
& a poorly aligned wheel
shrieking like feedback from a speaker
all the way to Chicago.
It’s not that I want to travel, but this sky’s
too narrow, too full of murk.
It hurts to breathe.
I raise a pants leg
& here’s another goddamned tick
just starting to burrow in.
Out West, I’ve heard, there are places so empty
nobody’s even given them a name yet.
That’s why the next
slow freight & I
have a date.
Here comes
one now. Hear how
the rails are starting to sing?

~ ~ Dave Bonta

2010-12-05T11:30:00.002-05:00

Some lines are crooked.
You cannot fix them,

cannot let them go.

~ ~ Tom Montag

2010-12-05T11:27:00.002-05:00

To the Child I Never Had

There you are again, hollering
just for the company of the echo.
There you are wearing my genes,
bucktoothed, nearsighted
& hollow-eyed from insomnia, the family curse.
I know you, long-distance runner,
apostate, follower of game trails.
I see already your ruin, inevitable as oxygen.
I hear the birds who never spoke to me
calling to you by name,
as if the world could possibly miss
one more neurotic primate lover.
The bindweed sheds its leaves
& turns to gold filagree in the lilac,
above the graves of the strangers
whose whiskey bottles I have placed,
green & purple, in the windows
to catch the winter sun.

~ ~ Dave Bonta

2010-12-05T11:26:00.000-05:00

The lightness of letting go.

The world falls away

like dirt from a boot.

~ ~ Tom Montag

2010-11-04T14:19:00.000-04:00

Saturday Night Out

He sits alone at the table, his fingers
ease across the sticky ring-marked surface.
Once sure, his grip is firm.
The pint of beer proclaims
his right to be there.

Tuned to the pin-dropping noises
of silence, his sensitive ears scream
in this world of babbled voices,
demonic decibels of rhythm,
clinking protest of glass.

In an atmosphere thick with warmth,
the tactile waves lap around him,
sweeping him through the evening.

His beer finally sips to a creamy smear
and he rises, reluctantly.
The Red Sea parts…
Shuffling towards the door, his white stick
describes the arc of his isolation…

Somebody grabs his chair.

~ ~ Marion Sharville

2010-11-04T14:18:00.000-04:00

Wind, like
water

disturbing
the edge

of things.

~ ~ Tom Montag

2010-11-04T14:15:00.000-04:00

The Magic Gardens

The open gates of book
and verse and speech and glance
invite us just inside to chase
the butterflies of thought
that light upon our ignorance;

to gaze upon soft vistas,
pearl-covered with the dew
of age-old wisdom nourishing
the frail hypothesis, the struggling
seeds of something new.

We are free to wander
each new-found path that winds,
to crush the weeds of prejudice
and pluck the buds of truth
from the magic gardens of our minds.

~ ~ Marion Sharville

LOSS

2010-09-07T16:57:00.001-04:00

There, but Not

The almost-were, who never formed; the ones not breathing,
voice unheard; the safely launched then quickly gone, or with
us long and snatched away.
Death came and took them, one by one; the how--it hurt;
the loss--much more, as memories spill, of those we knew,
or not yet knew ...
the ache’s the same.

They came to us, as if on loan, not really ours to keep
(as if love can be harnessed, owned). They visit now
through shadows' mist. The ache subsides, then crashes
forth; retreats, returns--a shriek, a moan, and when
grief's spent, no words at all;
not even words unsaid.

We settle down into the now, but with us still, the
There-but-Nots--within, without; not there, yet
There; we hold their place, that empty space inside we keep
for them (and only them) to fill, our loved, beloved
lost ones--gone,
still there.

A very special thanks to the eight poets below for their kind and gracious permission to share these deeply personal poems of loss, grief, memories, reflections, and above all ... Love. All but two of them have written about a personal loss as a parent; two were written about the loss of someone else's child/children but because of the profound effect it had on these poets, their verses have been included here as well. The focus in this small collection is not on the fact of death but on the depth of the sense of loss of certain special beings, or almost-beings, who are no longer with us.

~ ~ Editor, Salamander Cove

Photo courtesy of Jonathan
at Beeps & Chirps

Here

not here
is
the one
truth

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing, Salt Publishing, 2009. Copyright Chris Agee,
quoted with permissiom from Salt Publishing.

never
gets done
it sits
on the desk
covered in dust
the notebook
of "Memories"
I'm unable
to face

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing, Salt Publishing, 2009. With permission.

2010-09-07T16:57:00.000-04:00

Miscarriage

Little yolk, fly-speck, web
unworked, detail without name,
unlatch yourself from me, go.
In your small submersible,
your thousands of cells have stopped
beating. I felt their tappings
like braille on a quaking bog: a faint print,
then none. Go, almost thing,
the sundews have opened
their sticky pink mitts to catch
your brothers, and soon
the cranberries will float red
on the harvesting pond.
(This, too, will come to an end.)

~ ~ Anna Ross

Published in Memorious #8, August 2007, and in Hawk Weather, Finishing Line Press, 2009.

2010-09-07T16:56:00.004-04:00

After the Miscarriage

It’s the first three drinks you’ve had in months
and you want to shop. We go to Hanson’s
end-of-year sale. All their log furniture is marked

half-off. We pick two Adirondack chairs, a plant stand,
table wide enough for a stack of books, maybe a cocktail
or two, something to drink while we sit in the living room

tonight and watch bugs bang around the lamps. First
you want to try out a spruce bench carved
in Southwestern sunset motif with armrest wings.

We sit and wait for it to lift us through the ceiling,
above the roof and deep into cactus country. Imagine
how good it will feel to drift forever

and never think about missing something. But that’s
too much. We head back toward the nursery sets,
climb in their biggest crib and sleep.

~ ~ Dave Jarecki

2010-09-07T16:56:00.003-04:00

in the end
you still
live
in me
like clouds
in a vernal pond
whose sky
has vanished

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing, Salt Publishing, 2009. With permission.

2010-09-07T16:56:00.001-04:00

Stillbirth

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:
No, Laetitia, no.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing,
but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No.
No one in that car could have been you,
but I rushed in, searching for your face:
no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you.
Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.
No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:
I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:
I was told not to look. Not to get attached—
I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.
On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.

~ ~ Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Published in A New Hunger, Ausable Press, March, 2007.

Still Life

(for Emma)
Wednesday, 28 January 2009

Still, a breath away from life,
a heartbeat away from breath,
still my baby lies

her frozen hand
reaching out
to receive

the gift that was
no longer
mine to give.

Still, everything is still,
until I cry her cry and
shatter that stillness

forever.

~ ~ Jim Murdoch

Published in This Is Not About What You Think (Fandango Virtual, 2010).

2010-09-07T16:56:00.000-04:00

To Friends Not Knowing What to Say

To J.V.P., B. Jan. 24, 2006 D. Jan. 27, 2006

It is mine
               to bear, this sack
                                          of dust, broken
rhythms of night’s
                            covered drum.
The wind has something
                                      to tell me.
Look how it tugs
                           at my sleeve.
In a dream,
                   I disown the alphabet,
unsaying each letter
                               in a song.
Who can repair
                         the questions
to make them hold
                              water or bones?
The drum renounces
                                 its echo.
Bagpipes offer us
                            the reed’s endless song.
Beside the river
                         two children are gasping
at a paper boat
                         swamped by stones.

~ ~ Robert Peake

Published in Iota, No. 85 (2009).

2010-09-07T16:55:00.002-04:00

As Ever

fresh and new-minted
the face
I love
in the gloom
of every dawn-dusk

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing, Salt Publishing, 2009. With permission.

2010-09-07T16:55:00.001-04:00

Other Mothers' Children

In Near Eastern places once held sacred
The sky is bright with rocket glare and
Other mothers’ children stare unseeing
From shattered hovels, no sweet, wet
Baby kisses from blistered lips with songs unsung
No family portraits to dust and treasure, just bodies
Some other mothers’ children rotting in the dust
Frozen moments of horror framed in blood
Limbs cracked and broken, bellies torn
Faces purpled, hearts stopped
Collateral damage, primary pain.

~ ~ Jamie Dedes

Published in Poets Against the War, February 2010.

2010-09-07T16:55:00.000-04:00

I heard

tell
of Mrs Kelly
seen
often
in Derry City's
cemetery
on a cold night
with blankets
to keep
her son
warm
and know now
I have not
remembered
enough.

Dublin, 3 October 2003

Michael Kelly, aged 17, murdered 30 January 1972

~ ~ Chris Agee
From Next to Nothing, Salt Publishing, 2009. With permission.

2010-09-07T16:54:00.001-04:00

Dark, dark the day when you I cannot see ...

Grief knows no hierarchies.

~ ~ Charles Bernstein

Excerpted from the Eulogy on December 31, 2008, for his daughter, Emma Bee Bernstein.

All the Whiskey in Heaven

Not for all the whiskey in heaven
Not for all the flies in Vermont.
Not for all the tears in the basement
Not for a million trips to Mars

Not if you paid me in diamonds
Not if you paid me in pearls
Not if you gave me your pinky ring
Not if you gave me your curls

Not for all the fire in hell
Not for all the blue in the sky
Not for an empire of my own
Not even for peace of mind

No, never, I’ll never stop loving you
Not till my heart beats its last
And even then in my words and my songs
I will love you all over again

~ ~ Charles Bernstein

From All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Copyright @ 2010 by Charles Bernstein. Posted here with permission.

2010-09-07T16:54:00.000-04:00

Love

You will never return. Hope means nothing
And nothing will alter it. Love means something

Though: you still exist for me. Like the Big Dipper
Between the void of the two cypress, or a day moon

Against the shimmering stavelines of the heart's pylan.

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing, Salt Publishing, 2009. With permission.

The morning moon

in blue
Omega
like the dead
here
and not here
real
and not real
banished by
the daily
afternoon
pure and bright
ready for exit
at the moment's
gate
the last poem
always unwritten

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing, Salt Publishing, 2009. With permission.

2010-05-15T14:10:00.000-04:00

Tell Me Lies in a Dead Language

Perhaps it starts with genetics.
The knack of the body to remember
what the mind chooses to disregard:
gloom, heartbreak, and black eyes.
To routinely recall the verb forget
soon after a drunken argument
has leaned in close and shouted
sinister advice in your ears.

Each day, less of you survives,
and what remains seems fragile and disposable,
half-healed bones and broken china.
A penchant for shoplifting, sex,
and scotch before noon.
Scattered scars that outline your wrists
and bruises that ache, disappear, then return.

So you say that your husband is nice
in his own way, a statement as undecipherable
to me as Sanskrit. You tell me lies
in a dead language and I answer them
with the comforting weight of silence.
I can only think of how at dusk,
as night closes around our world like a fist,
he will punch you behind drawn curtains
and locked doors.
If I believed in apologies,
I’d give all of mine to you,
mumbled like unanswered prayers
floating aimlessly toward heaven.

~ ~ Adrian Potter

From: The Shine Journal, Vol. 1 (2010).

2010-05-15T14:09:00.001-04:00

Anguish

Sounds like something squashed, squished,
stepped on, lost.

An guish
rather than a guish, as if right off,

you began wrong.

~ ~ John Levy

From: Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs, First Intensity Press, 2008.

2010-05-15T14:08:00.000-04:00

in between petals
of a tiny white daisy
this shifting world

~ ~ Donna Fleischer

From: "Seed Packets", Bottle Rockets Press Anthology, 2010

filling

with Spring light

an abandoned nest

~ ~ Donna Fleischer

Published in Kō, 2009.
Photo, with permission of Pam Harris.

2010-05-15T14:07:00.000-04:00

Sleep

The young dog would like to know
why we sit so long in one place
intent on a box that makes the same
noises and has no smell whatever.
Get out! Get out! we tell him
when he asks us by licking the back
of our hand, which has small hairs,
almost like his. Other times he finds us
motionless with papers in our lap
or at a desk looking into a humming
square of light. Soon the dog understands
we are not looking, exactly, but sleeping
with our eyes open, then goes to sleep
himself. Is it us he cries out to,
moving his legs somewhere beyond
the rooms where we spend our lives?
We don't think to ask, upset
as we are in the end with the dog,
who has begun throwing the old,
shabby coat of himself down on every
floor or rug in the apartment, sleep,
we say, all that damn dog does is sleep.

~ ~ Wesley McNair

From Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems by Wesley McNair.
Used by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 by Wesley McNair

2010-05-15T14:06:00.001-04:00

Birds change places the bare tree branches.

~ ~ John Levy

From: Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs, First Intensity Press, 2008.