There is water to be found ::

               where the tired self sleeps ::

                              we are made of faraway places

~ ~ Grant Hackett

Autumn of a Lepidopterist

On edge

Of buckling, weathered
Red-tiled roof,

Orange-brown and black
Veined monarch trembling,

Like a leaf.

~ ~ Vassilis Zambaras

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

 

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

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

Untitled 2001

Artist:  Graham Lambkin

Freedom

To some
death is freedom.
To others
breath is.

~ ~  Alaka Yeravadekar

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

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.

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).

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

~ ~ Don Wentworth


Past All Traps, Six Gallery Press, 2011

                                                  pine trees or palms,

                                                       everywhere I travel,

                                                  the moon follows

                                                  ~ ~ Art Durkee

"Cloud Wisps" by Art Durkee

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

I was in

another place

all the way

here

      findng

      my way home -

      the lovely

      urgency

      of uncertainty



~ ~ Tom Montag

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).

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.

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

~ ~ robert d. wilson

Wild Orchid
playing
with my mind

~ ~ Ed Baker

Wild Orchard, tel-net (2002).

 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

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).  

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

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. 

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.

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.

dad’s grave

all
the

flowers
he

wouldn't
let

momma
plant

~ ~ Ed Markowski

Published in tinywords, July 24, 2006.

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.

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.

Pinching the bridge
of my glasses
for cleaning –

my father’s
fingers.

~ ~ Don Wentworth


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

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).  

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).

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).

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

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).

          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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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

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

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).

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.

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

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). 

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

 
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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Some lines are crooked.
You cannot fix them,

cannot let them go.


~ ~ Tom Montag

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

The lightness of letting go.

The world falls away

like dirt from a boot.

~ ~ Tom Montag

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

 


Wind, like
 water

disturbing
the edge

of things.

~ ~ Tom Montag

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

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.

It

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.  

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.