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.

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