Supersize It   Thursday, April 26, 2007




Welcome to this "Here and Now" number II.4.3. posted early due to travel preparations I need to make in the next two days.

This is a special, supersized bledition for a couple of reasons.

First, with this post, "Here and Now" completes it's first year on the web. (Cue kazoos and balloons.) Plus, this April blissue will be the first to meet my goal of 1,000 visits per month. Not big news for the big guys, but a big deal for me.

Also, after this post, we will shut down for three or four weeks. Dora and I will be taking an extended sojourn up the west coast of the United States and into British Columbia. We'll start via Amtrak from San Antonio to Los Angeles, then continue by rental car up the coast to Vancouver and maybe beyond.

We hope this extended blissue will keep you reading until we get back, at which point we hope to see you back, too.

So, to celebrate our first anniversary and to make up for our absence in May, we're making this blissue of "Here and Now" a "really big shew." (Please raise your hand if you're old enough to get that reference.

"And awayyyyyyyy we go!" (Another oldie point if you get that one, too.)







We begin with this powerful poem by Gary Blankenship. Gary says it is his favorite. Of it, he says, "I consider it the best I have done - the poem that if it was the only poem I wrote or will ever have written, would be enough."
The poem was previously published on line at the PK Poetry List and the Wild Poet's Anthology. He also read it in April 2007 at the Seattle Poetry Festival in a reading of poets from A Chaos of Angels.

Gary has written many outstanding poems that I've read and probably just as many I haven't, so I can't say it's the best of them all. Best or not, it is an extraordinarily powerful poem a difficult subject, one that Gary says he has avoided in the past. This one, he says, was written only in response to a challenge.


Sarah Jane Passed Through

When Sarah Jane was three,
she saw a camel in a cloud and a horse in a rock;
and when she told her mother, Mommy said
"Don't be silly. Rocks are rocks and clouds are clouds."
(and thinking of Emily, went back to feeding Baby Alice.)

When Sarah Jane was five,
she went to kindergarten dressed in her sister Dora's dress
which had been preworn by her sister Clara
and Bobby Mills pinched her and made her cry,
calling her white trash and saying she smelled.
(Only Sarah's socks and underwear were new.)

When Sarah Jane was nine,
Bobby offered her a quarter
to go under the bleachers and lift her dress;
when she said no, he told Tommy she wanted a dollar;
and when she told her mommy,
her daddy belted her for leading the boys on
(and saying he was sorry, comforted her later that night.)

when Sarah Jane was fourteen,
Bobby asked her to the homecoming dance;
but her mother said she was too young
and her sisters wouldn't let her wear their old dresses.
instead Bobby took Mary Ann Witherspoon
from over at the trailer park.
(while Sarah Jane sat on her bed
and wrote in her special book.)

when Sarah Jane was eighteen,
she married Bobby Mills
and they moved in with his stepmother,
next to Mary Ann's parents in the trailer park
(and her momma cried for her Baby Alice
and losing Emily.)

when Sarah Jane was nearly twenty
and expecting Little Donna's sister
they buried her in a cardboard casket
Bobby smashed her head for asking him
why he was out all night with Mary Ann Nelson
(and Alice's mother buried the special book with her)
When Donna was three.






This is a recollection by Victor Hernandez Cruz of a reading he shared with New Orleans poet Andrei Codrescu in Taos, New Mexico. I took it from Cruz' book Red Beans

I've considered using this several times but always in the end decided it was too long. Since "too long" isn't a factor this week, here it is.


Taos: The Poetry Bout
Codrescu vs. Cruz


In Puerto Rico as well as Brazil there is a form known as Controversia in which two singing bards go into combat, throwing poetic jingles at each other. On the island of Puerto Rico it is carried out in the ten-line Spanish decima, accompanied by musicians playing guitars and gourds. The musicians, synchronized superbly with the poets, know exactly when to come in - so a poet singer better take care of his business within the allotted time. Infringement into the musical portion is already a sign of weakness and reason enough for defeat.

The idea is to insult and diminish our opponent, to list his bad qualities and exalt your superiority. Since these songs are improvised, many immediate things come into the jingles. Like the way one of the bards finds the other one dressed - if he is wearing a hat too big or a pair of pants hanging to high that becomes part of the ammunition. One of the singers might shoot:
     If you cannot properly attire
     yourself
     How could you stand there
     and sing
     Go back home and start
     all over again

The other might retort:
     I'd rather have material
     missing on my pants
     Than to have it missing
     from my brain
     Besides look at your shoes
     Perhaps it is your habit
     to step on dog doo

The battle would go on until one of the singers runs out of decimas and the other tops him off.

The poetic bout which Codrescu and I participated in had none of these strict laws of meter. It went 9 rounds, each of which consisted of one poem read aloud from text. Only the last round was improvised, based upon a theme selected from a jar. We could say that these poetic bouts rely heavily on the mood of the audience and the judges. An audience might be in a social-realist mood, looking to see how the poet relates to social issues, how he or she uses craft to support political struggles. Or the audience might be into surrealism or concerned with language poetry, who knows exactly what that is. In Taos we were lucky in that the audience was not particularly dedicated to any poetic school; it was all delivery and drama, making poetry the winner. It became a heightened reading, with the both of us cutting our lines with nuclear razors, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in Roumanmian and always with an accent.

My own accent out of the Spanish has its moods. It starts leaning toward Spanish at night. There are conscious moments when I try to charge into the English like Sir Lancelot and fill all the curves of its letters, take those syllables with coconut oil. When I was in Puerto Rico, I was surrounded by Spanish. Now that I am back in the U.S. of A. I am engulfed by English, so my Spanish stands up inside; phrases sail across in slow motion. Every time I hear English I give myself an immediate translation into Spanish. An accent is the lingering memory of the tongue true to its first formations, something that pulls back through the saliva to original utterances. Andrei Codrescu has an accent that's like a three-piece suit. His English is almost Roumanian. It is that Eastern European accent a la exaggerated Dracula. I threw a poem in Spanish and Codrescu threw a poem in Roumanian, the rest were in an English that tilted.

Taos has a Ibero-Indian flavor, making it feel Latin American. With a sensational landscape that makes one’s eyes go out for miles like a glide through the clouds, to see Rio Grande Gorge - an immense opening in the mountains - is to come close to bliss. It was through this beautiful countryside that Andrei and I took off to prepare for out bout that evening. We crisscrossed roads that looked like lines disappearing into the horizon, finally coming to Ojo Caliente, where we dove into hot mineral baths full of rancheros with bellies full of Corona. They spoke to each other in Spanish so I joined them in chitchat while we soaked in water so hot it gave you immediate second thoughts.

After the pool we were wrapped with green blankets like some vegetable and laid out to dry. As I tried to put my bones back together from the meltdown, I thought of strategy for the evening. I had selected some poems but didn't know the order in which I would read them. I wanted to counter the poems that Codrescu read, so I would wait to hear the content, temperament, style of his poems and read something which would reflect an opposite area of concern. If he read a tragic or a philosophical poem I would resort to humor, or to counter metaphysics I would read a poem with a story line, where the simplicity of the events would add up to a similar inquiry. In other words, if he threw a left I would throw a right. I had to be aware of over-reading, of presenting poems that were too long and hermetic and possibly hard to follow. I had uppercuts in the form of haikus and sonnets, but when to throw those punches would be determined by Cordrescu's maneuverings. The gladiator spirit exists in poetry at many levels so thy not focus it with a poetry reading bout? Maybe in the future they could put some spice in it by having poets of differing schools read next to each other, e.g. feminist poets with anti-feminist poets. after all, it is a circus.

The moment of the bout, Andrei and I went up on stage as reserved as possible, with a bottle of Jack Daniels and smirks on our faces. The audience cheered and booed. According to Lewis MacAdams, who made twenty dollars on a bet, some money was being exchanged on the floor, perhaps as much as eighty dollars. According to the Taos News there were some 500 people in the audience.

When I first heard of the Poetry Bout I immediately thought: only in North American could poets engage in such leisurely activity. Most world poets are involved in questions of national identity and liberation. The act of writing could be deadly in most Hispanic countries. Writing must be specific to meaning to explore the center of spiritual and political existence. It is a personal and collective healing process. It is to fight oppression - whether it be of a family or governmental nature - that we express ourselves. Everything I do in poetry must have a meaning beyond itself that is the center of metaphor. In North American society the poet is isolated from the masses, making him a loner. Not so in the Hispanic culture. Many of the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca are now the popular songs of Spain. The same is the case throughout the Americas. To create is to find yourself in others. That is why we are involved in language, which is the height of communication. The public poetry reading is the great forum of mental and emotional meaning coming at us orally. It is the least expensive form of entertainment in the land of electric gadgetry. To keep that spirit up is why I entered the ring at the Taos Poetry Circus. These debates between poets can only sharpen the poetic presentation, and it must be done with a great sense of humor. So gua-gua-gua I say to my possible opponent next year. She or he better bring rhythm, content and flavor, for I am sharpening the nails of my rooster, and I don't care where their content is from, for I am a Caribbean frog - and those jump every-which-a-way.




for you and me

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - Page 86








Here's a poem by Andre Lorde from the book Making Callaloo, 25 Years of Black Literature that I've mentioned before.


Fishing the White Water

Men claim the easiest spots
stand knee-deep in calm dark water
where the trout is proven.

I never intended to press beyond
the sharp lines set as boundary
named as the razor names
parting the skin
and seeing the shapes of our weakness
etched into afternoon
that sudden vegetarian hunger for meat
tears on the typewriter
tyrannies of the correct
we offer mercy     forgiveness
to ourselves and our lovers
to the failures we underline daily
insisting upon next Thursday
yet forgetting to mention each other's name
the mother of desires
wrote them under our skin.

I call the stone     sister     who remembers
my grandmother's hand
bushed     on her way to market
to the ships
you can choose     not to live
near the graves where your grandmother sings
in wind through the corn.

There have been easier times
for loving     different richness
if it were only the stars
we had wanted
to conquer
I could turn from your dear face
into the prism light makes
along my line
we cast into rapids
alone     back to back
laboring the current.

In some distant summer
working our way farther from bone
we will lie in the river
silent as caribou
and the children will bring us food.

You carry the yellow tackle box
a fishnet over your shoulder
knapsacked
I balance the broken-down rods
our rhythms pass through the trees
staking a claim     in difficult places
we head for the source.




Michaela Gabriel is a poet, artist and web guru. Among her many achievements, she designed and built 7beats.com and "Here and Now."

For this anniversary blissue, she sent this Haiga.










Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn and attended Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. She began writing as a child and by the age of nineteen was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards was published in 1958s.

Di Prima spent the late 1950's and early 1960s in Manhattan, where she participated in the emerging Beat movement. She spent some time in California at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, returned to New York City and eventually moved to San Francisco permanently. Di Prima was a bridge figure between the Beat movement and the later Hippies as well as between east coat and west coast artists. In 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary's psychedelic community. In 1969, she wrote a novel describing her experience of the Beat movement titled Memoirs of a Beatnik. She published her major work, the long poem Loba in 1978, with an enlarged edition in 1998. In 2001 she published Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years.

Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman.


April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa

Today is your
birthday and I have tried
writing these things before,
but now
in the gathering madness, I want to
thank you
for telling me what to expect
for pulling
no punches, back there in that scrubbed Bronx parlor
thank you
for honestly weeping in time to
innumerable heartbreaking
italian operas for
pulling my hair when I
pulled the leaves off the trees so I'd
know how it feels, we're
involved in it now, revolution, up to our
knees and the tide is rising, I embrace
strangers on the street, filled with their love and
mine, the love you told us had to come or we
die, told them all in that Bronx park, me listening in
spring Bronx dusk, breathing stars, so glorious
to me your white hair, your height your fierce
blue eyes, rare among italians, I stood
a ways off, looking up at you, my grandpa
people listened to, I stand
a ways off listening as I pour out soup
young men with light in their faces
at my table, talking love, talking revolution
which is love, spelled backwards, how
you would love us all, would thunder your anarchist wisdom
at us, would thunder Dane, and Giordano Bruno, orderly men
bent to your ends, well I want you to know
we do it for you, and your ilk, for Carlo Tresca,
for Sacco and Vanzetti, without knowing
it, or thinking about it, as we do it for Aubrey Bardsley
Oscar Wilde (all street lights
shall be purple), do it
for Trotsky and Shelley and big/dumb
Kropotkin
Eisenstein's Strike people, Jean Cocteau's ennui, we do it for
the stars over the Bronx
that they may look on earth
and not be ashamed.




life is

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - Page 28








Here's another poem from the "Callaloo" book, this one by Harryette Mullen


Unspoken

I'm holding on to your, but you're gone already,
halfway up the mountain, maybe,
in a dream I cannot climb.
I lie awake outside the door
that leads to my own dreams of houses
with bookshelves in every room.

I'm holding your body the color of walnuts -
brown shell you've left behind,
a code I cannot crack -
and wishing you talked in your sleep,
so I could listen in.

Always, when I want to know what you're feeling,
"Here, let me show you,"
and you let your hands do the talking.
Oh yes, I like it and it feels good,
but of course that isn't what I meant.
"We don't need words for this," you tell me.
I wonder if that's what you like best
about our bodies side by side,
together and strange,
like words in two languages
trying to form a sentence.
There I go again,
talking of words and languages
while you've gone to sleep,
leaving me to find a message in your snoring.

Holding you,
I concentrate on the arcane language of your breathing.
Holding your hands in the dark,
I finger the lines of each curling palm,
as if they were braille I could learn to read.

Finally, I put my ear to your chest,
thinking I can eavesdrop on your heart,
hoping to hear a meaningful pattern of beats -
a telegram you stop to send
on your way down the far side of the mountain.







From her home in India, Ellen Kombiyil sent this piece for out use. Ellen notes that the piece originally appeared in Eclectica, a very fine journal that has also used my stuff.

To take a look at the current issue, just click on the link on the right.


Laura and the River

The bridge into town ran over the deep
part at the swimming hole. All summer,
sounds of splashing: jumping jackknives
and cannonballs from the iron rail.

We'd start upstream, at the tributary
behind the Sugar Creek Diner.
Our journey took us through shallow
water rushing over stones and into
deep wading pools, quiet under low
branches, the only sounds houseflies, dragon-
flies. Phlunk. Phlish. Lips and retreating fin.

it made me dizzy, trying
to keep straight what flowed into what
and where, which part was named river
and what merely brook, mountain flow.

The summer I stopped naming, let water
be water, all interconnected
and mixing, Laura climbed the bridge
with the boys, wearing her first bikini.
The whole time she was standing then falling,
I wanted to cry out No, no. Under
the bridge, a damp smell, murky water.
Emerging, she said she'd gone all the way,
touched bottom. Her words flashed silver
in the sharp air, her face a river
of droplets, eyes round like a fish.






Stuart Dybek is a Guggenheim Fellow and professor of English at Western Michigan University. He published a novel-in-stories , I Sailed with Magellan, two collections of short stories, The Coast of Chicago and Childhood and other Neighborhoods and a collection of poetry, Brass Knuckles.


Current

The third rail
and the electric chair

are charged with the current
that glows tonight

in the bedside lamp
illuminating your body.




dark lover

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - Page 148








From the book Jazz Poetry Anthology we have this poem by one of the book's editors, Sascha Feinstein. The other editor is Yusef Komunyakaa


Buying Wine

His alto leaks steam, a radiator of sound,
frozen breath shining on the bell. He's good,
and I can't help but lean against the bus stop

and watch someone's blue cotton hat with
a Yankees sticker not doing shit for heat,
cut-open gloves to finger the horn, a shiny

coat from the Salvation Army, and two blocks up
some fellow stuffed in a Santa suit clangs
for donations. There's a yellow haze

from the local food mart, carts for bags no doubt
full with fatty hams and cranberry relish,
sweet potatoes, flour for the thick gravy

and scones, tubs of butter, peaches, fresh
cream. The wheels scrape icy concrete, clatter
quickly by him, somehow blending with an off-

minor run so hip I yell to him, Do it, do it.
A hunched figure sorts his change, drops coins
that vaguely catch the light. I've got

seven bucks for a Chianti, bills twisting
in my pocket. When I return with a bottle
he's playing "Blue Monk," slow for the mood,

just up enough for circulation. I empty
what's left so fast he knows I can't be
counting, knows it can't be much

but pulls the sax from his mouth to thank me.
Wonderful holiday to you, sir, I wave,
and only when I reach the apartment

do the sounds disappear completely. You're
basting a roast, and my ears fill with blood.
We kiss, I pour the wine, and of course

it's delicious. I'm so glad you went out
for this, you say. Everything's just perfect.







Now here's a poem sent to us for this issue by Amanda Evangelista of Battle Creek, Michigan.


Masterpiece

This puzzle that is life

So intricately shaped
Custom made by the Creator
With infinite solutions
Some pieces fit automatically
Divine, intertwined

Pulled, no, placed together
Without effort, struggle, or thought
Becoming a masterpiece
Of the perfect design
Nature, Earth, Space, Mankind

While other pieces
Just will not connect
No matter the reconfiguring
The blind attempts to force
Or sweet coercion

Still denied, and now
Rough around the edges
They need to be discarded
Not kept in fear of change
Flaws need not be forever

In this beautiful creation







Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. He died in 1997 of liver cancer.

The first of the two poems below was the last poem written before the final diagnosis of his illness. The second was written in the final week of his life, the only poem written during those final days.


Dream

     There was a bulge in my right side, this dream recently - just now
I realized I had a baby, full grown that came out of my right abdomen
while I in hospital with dangerous hepatitis C.
     I lay there a while, wondering what to do, half grateful, half appre-
hensive. It'll need milk, it'll need exercise, taken out into fresh air
with baby carriage.
     Peter there sympathetic, he'll help me, bent over my bed, kissed
me, happy a child to care for. What compassion he has. Reassured I
felt the miracle was in Peter's reliable hands - but gee what if he
began drinking again? No this'll keep him straight. How care for a
baby, what can I do?
     Worried & pleased since it was true I slowly woke, still thinking
it'd happened, consciousness returned slowly 2:29 AM I was awake
and there's no little mystic baby - naturally appeared, just disap-
peared -
     A glow of happiness next morn, warm glow of pleasure half the
day

March 27, 1997, 4 A.M.


Things I'll Not Do (Nostalgias)

Never go to Bulgaria, had a booklet & invitation
Same Albania, invited last year, privately by Lottery scammers or
       recovering alcoholics,
Or enlightened poets of the antique land of Hades Gates
Nor visit Lhasa live in Hilton or Ngawang Gelek's household & weary
       ascend Potala
Nor ever return to Kashi "oldest continuously habited city in the world"
       bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter,
       visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Bibhum take
       notes tales of Khaki B Baba
Or hear music festivals in Madras with Philip
Or enter to have Chai with older Sunil & Young coffeeshop poets,
Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem
       Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah
       Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly
Nor the alleyways of Achmed's Fez, nevermore drink mint tea at Soco
       Chico, visit Paul B. in Tangiers
Or see the Sphinx in Desert at Sunrise or sunset, morn & dusk in the
       desert
Ancient sollapsed Beirut, sad bombed Babylon & Ur of old, Syria's
       grim mysteries all Araby & Saudi Deserts, Yemen's sprightly
       folk,
Old opium tribal Afghanistan, Tibet - Templed Beluchistan
See Shangha again, nor cares of Dunhuang
Nor climb E. 12th Street's stairway 3 flights again,
Nor go to literary Argentina, accompany Glass to Sao Paolo & live a
       month in a flat Rio's beaches and favella boys, Bahia's great
       Carnival
Nor more daydream of Bali, too far Adelaide's festival to get new scent
       sticks
Not see the new slums of Jakarta, mysterious Borneo forests & painted
       men and women
Nor mor Sunset Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Oz on Ocean Way
Old cousin Danny Leegant, memories of Aunt Edith in Santa Monica
No mor sweet summers with lovers, teaching Blake at naropa,
Mind Writing Slogans, new modern American Poetics, Williams
       Kerouac Reznikoff Rakosi Corso Creely Orlovsky
Any visits to B'nai Israel graves of Buda, Aunt Rose, Harry Meltzer and
       Aunt Clara, Father Louis
Not myself except in an urn of ashes

March 30, 1997, A.M.




buggin' out

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 121







From The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry we have this poem by Gong Peiyu, writing under the pen name Shu Ting, the leading woman poet in China in the 1980's. She was went to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution before she graduated from junior high school. Then she worked in a cement factory and later a textile mill and a lightbulb factory. In 1979 she published her first poem and in 1983 was asked to be a professional writer by the Writers's Association. Although she was attacked in the early 1980's during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, she won the National Book Award in 1981 and 1983.

Her collections include Bigantines, and Selected Lyrics of Shu Ting and Gu Cheng. She has also published several books of prose.


Two or Three Incidents Recollected

An overturned cup of wine.
A stone path sailing in moonlight.
Where the blue grass is flattened,
an azalea flower abandoned.

The eucalyptus wood swirls.
Stars above teem into a kaleidoscope.
On a rusty anchor,
eyes mirror the dizzy sky.

Holding up a book to shade the candle
and with a finger in between the lips,
I sit in an eggshell quiet,
having a semitransparent dream.

(Translated by Chou Ping)







These poems are from Susan McDonough, another good friend of "Here and Now."


Just Past Sunrise

The sky is still white
too early to find its blue.
I water the Bougainvillea;
its red bracts silently
fill lonely spaces.


Sweet Talked

I'm slowly cleaved into
single-mindedness and
become a cloud collected
above the dusty earth,
to stage a rain dance
in the belly of a drought.

Sleep is seduction,
it grabs me
kisses my forehead,
parts my consciousness
like a lover parts ripe
thighs by degrees.

I tingle like dry roots
near water, beg
without shame for my
horizontal baptism.


Slacker Sunday

I'm dressed in pajamas and laptop,
Chenille afghan for flair. My dog coiled
in a C, gently leaning against a floral
pillow, not stationed at the back door.

The day is gray and I raked
leaves yesterday. So I'll pour
one more cup of coffee, drink
from another poem or two,

a stretch and a primal yawn
and maybe I'll take the stall
out of my engine and if I don't;
those red slippers sure look fine.







Here's the title poem from Nikki Giovanni from her book My House.


My House

i only want to
be there to kiss you
as you want to be kissed
when you need to be kissed
where i want to kiss you
cause it's my house
and i plan to live in it

i really need to hug you
when i want to hug you
as you like to hug me
does this sound like a silly poem

i mean it's my house
and i want to fry pork chops
and bake sweet potatoes
and call them yams
cause i run the kitchen
and i can stand the heat

i spent all winter in
carpet stores gathering
patches so i could make
a quilt
does this really sound
like a silly poem
i mean i want to keep you
warm

and my windows might be dirty
but it's my house
and if i can't see out sometimes
they can't see in either

english isn't a good language
to express emotion through
mostly i imagine because people
try to speak english instead
of trying to speak through it
i don't know maybe it is
a silly poem

i'm saying it's my house
and i'll make fudge and call
it love and touch my lips
to the chocolate warmth
and smile at old men and call
it revolution cause what's real
is really real
and i still like men in tight
pants cause everybody has some
thing to give and more
important need something to take

and this is my house and you make me
happy
so this is your poem

(26 feb 72)




lotsa hots

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 26







Now, from the anthology American Negro Poetry, a poem by Frank Yerby, a famous mid-century writer, much better known for his popular novels than his excellent poetry.


Wisdom

I have known nights rain-washed and crystal-clear
And heavy with the mellow, mingled scent
of honeysuckle, rose, and pine, while near
The shadowed ghosts of trees the new moon bent,
And touched your eyes with silvered ecstasy.

Then I believed in Magic, Youth, and Spring,
Then parting was synonymous with Death;
And every note I heard the night birds sing
Caused fitful haltings in my labored breath.

How strange that now I look into new eyes
In utter calm, yet with a deeper awe,
And know so well that when the old love dies
A new is born, as Spring from Winter's thaw
Arises in new light and loveliness.

And yet it is not quite the same to know
How transient grief, how fleeting, pain;
What prosaic love to stand and watch you go,
And, in a month, to be at peace again!




Next we gave some photos by long time amigo, John Strieb. John has the habit of winning photography contests with fifty year old cameras, including, in one instance, a fifty year old camera I gave to him because it didn't work and had been gathering dust in my attic for at least forty five years.

John used both his antiques and modern digital cameras in capturing these images. As you can see from his first picture of his 1922 Essex, John is a mechanic. He didn't tell me, but I assume this picture is before his repair work and not after.



Photo by John Strieb


Photo by John Strieb


Photo by John Strieb


Photo by John Strieb


Photo by John Strieb








Here's a brief Bukowski.


Royal Standard

bad nights can't be cured by bad poems, you
have to wait, look at a doorknob, read the newspaper
over again

you are not the only one having a bad night, it's a
world full of bad nights

and it's enough sometimes just to have a typewriter
and to
smoke a cigarette
and just look at the machine

and wonder about all the good luck you've had
with that machine and
the other machines

yet
one is spoiled
one wants
more and more

and now my fingers
tap the keys
and tell you and
it
about all that.




eyes of sister jude

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 98








I keep using, probably overusing, these travel poems by Blaise Cendrars, but they are so light and easy and fun I can't pass them up. Here are a few more.


Sunsets

Everyone talks about sunsets
All travelers are happy to talk about the sunsets in these waters
There are hundreds of books that do nothing but describe sunsets
The tropical sunsets
Yes it's true they're wonderful
But I really prefer the sunrise
Dawn
I wouldn't miss one for the world
I'm always on deck
In the buff
And I'm always the only one there admiring them
But I'm not going to describe them the dawns
I'm going to keep them for me alone


Starry Nights

I spend the greater part of the night on deck
The familiar stars of our latitudes lean lean over the sky
The North Star descends further and further on the northern horizon
Orion - my constellation - is at the zenith
The Milky Way like a luminous slit grown larger every night
Ursa Major is a patch of fog
The south is darker and darker up ahead
And I can't wait for the Southern Cross to appear in the east
To help me wait Venus has doubled in size and quintupled in brightness
   like the moon she makes a trail across the water
Tonight I saw a big shooting star


Cabin No. 6

I live here
I should always live here
I deserve no praise for staying shut in and working
Besides I don't work I write down everything that goes through my head
Well not really everything
Because tons of things go through my head but don't get out into the
   cabin
I'm living in a breeze the porthole wide open and the fan whirring
Not reading


Orion

It's my star
It's in the form of a hand
It's my hand gone up into the sky
During the entire war I saw Orion through a lookout slip
When the zeppelins came to bomb Paris they always came from Orion
I have it above my head today
The main mast pierces the palm of the hand which must hurt
As my amputated hand hurts me pierced as it is by a continual stabbing
   pain


The Equator

The ocean is dark blue the blue sky is pale next to it
The sea swells all around the horizon
It's as if the Atlantic were going to spill over into the sky
All around the steamer it's a vat of pure ultramarine


Sunday

It is Sunday on the water
It's hot
I'm in my cabin as if trapped in melting butter

(Translated by Ron Padgett)







From the foothills of the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania Nancy Williams Lazar sends us this anniversary poem.


Playground Pirates

All's quiet in your playground tonight;
the swings are still, tables empty as hands,
but welcoming. Your grounded galleon

surveys a sea of grass and blacktop,
fence and diamond. I see the Visitors
have their place, and the Home team too,

until dusk, when they are rounded up-
all but the footprints. Last to leave
is a young couple pushing a baby carriage

who dream of the day they will let go,
and me, prone in the ship's hold missing
my boyfriends who would have warmed

this hiding place as we watched the moon
slide backwards through the gaps, pop out
of a pirates eye and slip into his pocket.







Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert wonders about the future of traditional poetry.


Wagon

What is he doing
this hundred-year-old man
with a face like an ancient book
his eyes without tears
lips pressed
watching over the memories
and mumblings of history

now
when winter mountains
are extinguished
and Fujiyama enters the constellation of Orion
Hirohito
a hundred-year-old man-emperor god and state official-
is writing

these are not acts
of mercy
or acts of anger
nominations
of generals
ingenious tortures
but a composition
for the annual competition
of traditional poetry

the subject
is a wagon
and form: the venerable tanka
five lines
thirty-one feet

"as I get on the train
of the state railway
I think of the world
of my grandfather Emperor Meji"

a poem
coarse in appearance
its breath held in check
with no artificial blushes

different
from shamelessly wet
modern productions
filled with triumphant howling

a crumb
about a railway
devoid of melancholy
of haste before a long journey
even
of sadness and hope

I think
with my heart rensed
about Hirohito

about his bent back
frozen head
the face of an old doll

I think of his
dried eyes
small hands
his thought slow
like the pause
between one owl calling
and another

I think
with my heart tensed
what will be the fate
of traditional poetry

will it depart
following the emperor's shadow
vanishing
weightless

(Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter




through the 100 meter lens

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 82







Now, here's another poem from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (a very good book, by the way), this one by Ha Jin


Our Words

Although you were the strongest boy in our neighborhood
you could beat none of us. Whenever
we fought with you we would shout:
"Your father is a landlord.
You are bastard of a blackhearted landlord."
Or we would mimic your father's voice
when he was publicly denounced:
"My name is Li Wanbao. I was a landlord;
before liberation I exploited my hired hands
and the poor peasants. I am guilty
and my guilt deserves ten thousand deaths."
Then you would withdraw your hard fists
and flee home cursing and weeping like a wild cat.

You fought only with your hands,
but we fought with both our hands and our words.
We fought and fought and fought
until we overgrew you and overgrew ourselves,
until you and we were sent to the same village
working together in the fields
sharing tobacco and sorghum spirits at night
and cursing the brigade leader behind his back
when he said: "You, petty bourgeoisie,
must take your reeducation seriously!"

Until none of us had words.

(Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping)







Next, two short prose pieces by our very good friend Alice Folkart.


Rapture


Traffic was light for a weekday, but then I was early. I switched on the radio, NPR News. All it seemed to spout lately was one disaster or boondoggle after another. It often left me feeling angry and helpless.

The highway lay across the flatlands behind the coastal dunes. Up until forty years ago this had been truck farms. The soil still held the moisture, so there was frequently ground fog in the mornings rendering the blocky buildings and burger joints in a soft haze. I sometimes felt as if I were driving through a painting by Monet, all pastels and indistinct shapes permeated by light from somewhere in the distance. I switched to music, a Mexican station, accordions and horns, a wailing song about love, poverty and sincerity.

This was an easy morning drive, always smooth. Every driver knew exactly where he or she was going. No decisions, no surprises. Nothing to disturb the meditation of the short journey that would put me in the proper, submissive, friendly frame of mind a secretary needs.

A tiny red car pulled up and kept pace next to me, the driver leered at me and moved his lips. The Mexican music stopped and his voice came out of my radio speaker.

"Hi, Babe! Wanna levitate?"

What?

He repeated himself, and, as he was speaking, a blue car just in front of mine floated upward, a few feet off the pavement and a khaki-colored Hummer on the right shot straight up.

What?

"See," said the soothing voice, "See what we can do?"

I punched the radio's OFF button. Around me more cars were rising in the air. The man was laughing, raising his huge eyebrows, waving one hand in the air as if conducting an orchestra. Lots of cars were floating now, and so was I. People were opening their doors and stepping out into the air and floating too, like astronauts in zero gravity.

Was it a dream? Or, did I step out of my car too, and let myself waft out into mid-air? The man in the red car joined me.

The sun rose above the trees that line the highway, a beautiful mix of music from all the car radios filled the air, mingling with the warm sunshine. The man kicked his feet, as if swimming, and floated over to me. He took my hand, an older woman joined us, we sang and twirled in the air, rising higher and higher, heading slowly for the light. I knew I was going to be late for work.



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Jukebox, beautiful cond., money-operated, like new, $1,650.

Milo had loved surprising her - eight mature palms planted by a nursery to remind her of Hawaii, but palms don't do very well in the Ohio, and they'd had to pay someone to pull them out before they fell over dead Then there was that leopard kitten named Louella. She sure was cute, even with those claws. But, she grew and grew, ate ten pounds of chicken a day, and started watching out the bay window when people walked their Yorkies and Cockapoos. She'd astonished Pearl one day when she'd bounded through the glass, knocked over old Mrs. Belden, and devoured her pedigreed Princess in three bites. The zoo had been glad to get the cat. Mrs. Belden, on doctor's orders, had moved in with her daughter.

Milo had given Pearl so much. He'd loved to see the look on her face when he'd brought something really unusual: a one-ring circus tent and trapeze (with net), a python (for only one night, she'd made him take it away as soon as they'd been able to find it again), a freezer full of elk steaks (would have come in handy with the leopard), and an assortment of dusty rocks that had turned out to be radioactive.

Almost everything was gone now, even Milo. The last, the 1946 Wurlitzer 1015 Bubbler Jukebox, was going today, still loaded with all their favorite 78's. They'd had fun with it, admired the heavy double arch at the top glowing red and yellow, and the thick side columns of yellow catalin plastic pulsing blue, the chromed grill and gold lame that hid the speakers. They'd often fed it dimes and danced, just the two of them, and since they could get the money out if they wanted to, Milo called it their piggy bank. They'd only opened it up once a year, and spent whatever had accumulated on a splurge dinner.

But, all that was over. Time to move into a smaller place, get a little help with things. A man in Pittsburgh had seen her ad and wanted it for his collection. Said it was a real good price, he'd take it sight unseen. He'd be here by three. She'd polished it, taped the cord to the back, and checked the till. It was empty. He wouldn't be getting any more than he'd paid for.







Luis J. Rodriguez is a poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and columnist.


He was born in the U.S.-Mexico border city of El Paso, Texas. His parents, natives of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, had their children on the U.S. side of the border to ease the transition into the United States, where they had intentions of relocating. His father was a high school principal and his mother was a school secretary. The elder Rodriguez, who refused to be dominated by local politicians from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, relocated the family to South Los Angeles when Rodriguez was two. There he spent the first part of his childhood and witnessed the 1965 Watts Riots. The family later moved to the San Gabriel Valley, and he joined his first street gang at the age of 11.

His work has won several awards, and he is recognized as a major figure of contemporary Chicano literature. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., is the recipient of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, among others, and has been the subject of controversy when included on reading lists in California, Illinois, Michigan, and Texas schools due to its frank depictions of gang life. Rodriguez has also founded or co-founded numerous organizations, including the Tia Chucha Press, which publishes the work of unknown writers, Tia Chucha's Cafe & Centro Cultural, a San Fernando Valley cultural center, and the Chicago-based Youth Struggling for Survival, an organization for at-risk youth.

Here's one of his poems, taken from From Totems To Hip-Hop Edited by Ishmael Reed.


Hungry

My wife lef me, taking the two kids
and everything
but the stereo, TV and a few dishes.
Later in this squalid hour,
I began an affair
with my wife's best friend.
But she already had three kids and no man
and talked about love and marriage,
and I didn't know how to get out of it,
being also an alcoholic.
Soon I couldn't pay the rent
so I kept getting notices in death tones,
insinuating broken bones or whatever.
My friend Franco helped me sneak
out ot the place.
Franco and me arrived in the middle of the night,
and loaded what I had onto a pickup truck.
I would come back
on other late nights to get the mail.
And the woman, who was alone with three kids
and looking for a husband,
kept leaving notes,
and I kept throwing them away.
But the hunger had just begun.
My only property of value was a 1954
red Chevy in mint condition.
It had the original skirts, whitewalls,
and chrome hood ornament.
What a prize!
I never wanted to part with it,
even as layoff slips and parking tickets
accumulated on the dashboard,
even when I found my self living with Mom and Dad
and the '54 Chevy got stashed out in back.
But the hunger and the drinking
and looking for love in all the wrong faces
blurred into a sort of blindness
I stared out the back window,
at that red Chevy,
and thought how it resembled a large steak
with egg yolks for headlights.
No, no, I couldn't do it;
I couldn’t turn my back on it now.
The days whiled away
and again I looked out that window,
with Mom yelling behind me
about getting a job,
and I could taste the last scotch,
the last carnitas burrito,
and perhaps take in the stale scent
of a one-room apartment somewhere.
Then the hunger became a fever.
The fever a pain in my head.
And as soon as some dude with 200 bucks came along
I sold it. God almighty,
I sold my red Chevy!
For 200 bucks!
For nothing, man.
Oh, I thought it would help
stop my wife's face
in every reflection;
her friends staring out of my coffee cup.
that it would help hold me
for more than a week,
and end the curses
ringing in my ears.
I sold it! My red Chevy.
Prized possession.
200 bucks.
Gone forever.
Days later, the 200 bucks spent,
I was still hungry.




lying in the sun with susan

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 25








Next, we have this piece by Phillip Levine


Milkweed

Remember how unimportant
they seemed, growing loosely
in the open fields we crossed
on the way to school. We
would carve wooden swords
and slash at the luscious trunks
until the white milk started
and then flowed. Then we'd
go on to the long day after
day of the History of History
or the tables of numbers and order
as the clock slowly paid
out the moments. The windows
went dark first with rain
and then snow, and then the days,
then the years ran together and not
one mattered more than
another, and not one mattered.

Two days ago I walked
the empty woods, bent over,
crunching through oak leaves,
asking myself questions
without answers, From somewhere
a froth of seeds drifted by touched
with gold in the last light
of a lost day, going with
the wind as they always did.




Jane Roken, a "Here and Now" friend and regular contributor, proves she's a triple threat by sending poetry, art and photo images for this issue. We start with a few of her images, both drawing and photographs. We'll get to her tanka later on in the blissue.



Image by jane Roken



Image by Jane Roken



Image by Jane Roken



Image by Jane Roken



Image by Jane Roken



Image by Jane Roken








Now, two poems by Jane Hirshfield from her book Of Gravity & Angels.

Rain In May

The blackened iron
of the stove
is ticking into coolness
when the first drops
start against the roof.
It is late: the night
has darkened into this
like a fruit -
a sudden pear-aroma fills the room.

Just before dawn
it comes up harder again,
a white, steady drum of day-rain
caught in the moon's deep pail.
A battered tin-light
overspills ocean and sky,
hill opens to facing hill,
and I wake to a simple longing,
all I want of this ordinary hour,
this ordinary earth
that was long ago married to time:
to hear as a sand crab hears the waves,
loud as a second heart;
to see as a green thing sees the sun,
with the undividing attention of blind love.


This Ripeness

Thin roads splice field to field
in the early light;
under the trees, many pears
lie opening to the ground.
This ripeness is the landscape I want,
a hand on the kitchen table
passing from sunlight to shadow, warm wood
to cool, and back, behind me the bright jars
ranked on their shelves - harvest
of rutted lanes, to small for naming
that lead, one to another, through the day.




fleshware

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 93








Here's a little piece from Rimbaud on the road.


The Shy Girl

In the brown dining room, perfumed
With an odor of varnish and fruit, leisurely
I gathered up some Belgian dish
Or other, and spread out in my huge chair.

While I ate, I listened to the clock - happy and quiet.
The kitchen door opened with a gust
- And a servant girl came, I don't know why,
Her neckerchief loose, her hair coyly dressed
And as she passed her small trembling finger
Over her cheek, a pink and white peach velvet skin,
And pouted with her childish mouth,

She arranged the plates, near me, to put me a ease;
- Then, just like that - to get a kiss, naturally -
Said softly: "Feel there: I've caught a cold on my cheek...."




James Fowler sent a poem for this blissue, along with his own photo to illustrate it.

Here they are.




One Way Out

Damn, we're at that point again.
Can't figure out the sound
with Duane gone, and everyone
packing powder up their noses.

Dicky thinks it's the equipment.
After some weed and a fifth of Jack,
we decide he's right. What else
could it be? It's the only change.

So we toss those new raggedity-ass
speakers out in the yard behind Gregg's.
Let the roosters do the funky chicken
on 'em like those NY disco folks.

Make mighty fine seats, hounds howlin'
at the old Marshalls' sweet sound.





Photo by Josh Y'barbo



From Hazard, the Painter, a collection published in 1975, we have this poem by William Meredith


Music

I. LOUD

The neighbors have a teenaged girl. Below the hill
where Hazard works in an old barn with a stove,
the neighbors' house is throbbing. It doesn't move
visibly and he can't hear the Rolling Stones, still,
he can feel it throb. Will the decibels do structural harm
to the child's lovely ears, to the brick house,
to the frail culture of Jefferson and Adams,
Hazard and Franz Kline? They will do no good.
He would bring his own stereo the the barn
and make soft counter-seisms of Coltrane or Strauss,
but he can't paint to music, he never could

II THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY (C. 1927)

When he was small, one day he was kept indoors
with a cold. His mother was hoovering the rug,
a new liberation then - the neighbors
still had carpet sweepers, One had a maid
with a dustpan on a stick and a little broom.

child Hazard sprawled on the hoovered part with the dog,
under the tall victrola. He played
his favorite of the thick black
hooting discs, with flus-de-lys stamped on the back,
he played "Then Land of the Sky-Blue Water" loud.
(To make it loud you opened all four doors
and with just a diaphragm it filled the room.)

When he asked her, "Mother, how do they get
the lady into the record so she sings?"
his mother said, or at least he thinks she said
over the hoover (who hadn’t been president yet)
"When a person sings, they press him in hot wax"
(She was never much on scientific things.)

Shocked at the death of Jessica Dragonette,
he slipped her black corpse back into one of the books
and thought of the heavy cost an artist paid.
Then he thought how queer it was to own
all those pressed singers and a gramophone
and not be able to afford a live maid.




cinnamon dreams

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 115








Now, three anonymous sanskrit songs from about 500 B.C.


When he comes back

When he comes back
    in my arms
    I'll make him feel
    what nobody ever felt

    everywhere
    me
    vanishing into him

    like water
    into the clay of a new jar


My husband

My husband
before leaving on a journey

is still in the house speaking
to the gods and already
separation is climbing like
bad monkeys to the window


He who stole my virginity

He who stole my virginity
is the same man
I am married to
and these are the same
spring nights and
this is the same moment of
the jasmine's opening
with winds just coming of age carrying
the scent of its flowers mingled
with pollen from Kadamba trees
to wake desire
in its nakedness
I am no different yet I
long with my heart
for the delicate
love-making back there under
the dense cane-trees
by the bank of the river
Namanda in
the Vindhya mountain

(Translated by W.S. Merwin and Moussaieff Mason)







Christopher George sent this poem to us as he and his wife prepare for a trip to England. While there in his home city of Liverpool, he will be taking part in a couple of readings for a new anthology, Living on Hope Street, edited by Liverpool performance poet Jim Bennett, that includes his work.


Rain on New Windows

Spring in Baltimore: rain, a full-throated cardinal sings
in the gap between our apartment buildings. The windows
people have visited - father and daughter - and installed
double-paned delights - so clean compared to the paint-
peeled, dusty Twenties sash windows, so chiaroscuro.

My Mom's in a nursing home, 86 years on. Old pics I found
of her: strong, in control, and me the teenager in Beatles'
Liverpool, my grandfather's roses flowering in Mersey rain.
All the deaths that define my days. I see the baroque dome
of the D.C. basilica that delighted you, can no longer share

my thoughts with you. But the rain is falling and the cardinal
in a rain-soaked sycamore is singing spring into a new year.






Here's a short one from the fabulous Gwendolyn Brooks. I heard an old interview with her the other day on, I think, NPR. How cool.


Old Mary

My last defense
is the present tense

It little hurts to me now to know
I shall not go

Cathedral-hunting in Spain
Nor cherrying in Michigan or Maine.




late news

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 47








In the course of studying Chippewa, Hidatsa, and Sioux music, Frances Densmore made these early translations of these songs.


Song of the Thunder

Sometimes
I go about pitying
myself
while I am carried by the wind
across the sky.


Song of the Trees

The wind
only
I am afraid of.


The Noise of the Village

Whenever I pause
the noise
of the village.


Brown Owls

Brown owls come here in the blue evening.
They are hooting about.
They are shaking their wings and hooting.







Michelle Beth Cronk sent this neat poem to us for this blissue.


A rough draft of January.

There is always something behind the dark. I saw
clouds roll in but did not see there was no light
until there was
no light to see by.

Now, I will be stunned by the way time
swallow and spits. You will be
properly amazed by the appearance
of the sky and we

will pretend this is new.
This sudden life.







And now, two more from Charles Bukowski, in, as usual, story mode.


lunch

I parked in back
and went in to eat.
a new restaurant
a small place
a very small guy
almost a midget
behind the counter.
that's nice, I thought,
a little guy like that,
he's making it it, got his
own place but he's very
nervous, why is he so
nervous?
I gave him my order and
told him, "get it started,
I'll be back, I'm going
across the street for a
newspaper."
"o.k.," he said.
there was a Mexican girl
in there mopping the floor.

when I got back the
girl was still mopping and
the guy hadn't started my
order.
he was screaming at the
girl: "hurry up and
finish mopping! the people
are gonna be arriving
soon and you're gonna
have to help me
with the orders!"

"I'm here now," I said
"You got my order ready?"

"just a minute," he said.
he ran into the crapper
and leaving the door
half open he
flipped the seat down
yanking his pants and
his shorts down
in one motion
as he did so.

"put the god-damned
coffee on!" he screamed
at the girl
as he sat there.

then he was silent
head down
working on
this new problem.
I watched him
finish
making sure he
washed his
hands.

he did
then ran out
and got started on
my order.
the girl was still
mopping.

I sat down
at a small table and
read the headlines:
the Russians were
on the Polish
border again.

I checked the race
results and the
entries.

"o.k.," the little
guy screamed at
me, "it's ready!"

I went over
picked up my order
paid
went back to the table
began eating
reading:
city councilman accused of
having sex with three minors
giving them drugs
the girls were 14, 15 and
16.
the city councilman
denied the charges.

"finish the mopping!" the guy
screamed at the girl. "have you
made the coffee yet?"

the girl came mopping by my table,
the floor looking very good
she must have been about 20.
"help me," she said.
she had a thick accent.
"what?" I asked.
"help me!" she repeated
with more emphasis
her eyes were dark brown and
I could see the panic in
them.

"oh yeah," I smiled back.

she paused
then continued her work.

"come here!" the little guy
screamed at her.

she put her mop in the bucket
and went around behind the counter.

"you don't know nothing!" the little
guy screamed at her. "listen to me and
maybe you’ll learn something!"

I finished eating
and walked out
to the back.

as I unlocked
my car
I could see through
the screen door in the
back of the cafe.
I could hear his
voice
but I couldn't
decipher the
words
all I could see
were his arms
waving
as he screamed

she was in a
short red dress and
flat white shoes
as she stood
before him
and listened.

I got into the car
started it and
backed out of the
parking lot
into the
alley
cut right
down the alley
took
a left
up the next
street
then
a right
and then
I was at
the freeway
and
on my way.


four young gang-bangers

you know how women can get
they can goad you.
I was fighting with my girlfriend
and I was fighting mad.
we were arguing over the phone
and I said that's it!
and she said that's it!
and we hung up.

I went to the racetrack that
night and played all the
longshots
and I bet heavily because I didn't care
and I kept winning damn near eve'y race
but that only made me angry
because here was nobody around to see
how good I was even when
I wasn’t trying and that in particular
only made me even more unhappy.

then the races were over and I had
all that cash but it didn’t matter to me
as I drove up 8th Avenue
and I stopped at a traffic signal.
it was a bad part of town
and the car behind me
began to push up against my rear bumper.

I looked back and there were four
young gang-bangers in the car behind me.

I pulled away from the signal
then pulled over to the curb and waited
to let them go by me
then I started up and got behind them
and began to tailgate them.
at every stop sign I rammed their
read bumper.

they started to speed up,
taking he corners and going down side streets.
I followed, making sharp turns,
skidding, I kept as close as I could to the rear
of their car.

then their car pulled up
and they just sat and waited
near a dark playground.
I pulled up behind them
opened my door
leaped out and
ran over to them.

their car jumped off
into the night.
I ran back, leaped into
my car, took off after them,
took a right where they
had turned but

they were gone....

I never told my girlfriend about it
after we got back together
but I did tell her
that I had won 12 or
13 hundred dollars.

"it was a lucky night for
you," she said.

"you're certainly right,"
I replied.




finding religion at 3 am

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 95








I was very pleased to get this piece from Justin Hyde. He's a very strong and intense writer, probably young, I would guess, and writing with great energy.


what I learned on the farm

we were in the middle
of john kearn's
fallow corn field.

grandpa
strapped wooden blocks
to the gas and brake
of his suburban
with bungee.

he showed me the gist
and where to stomp
the emergency-brake
if i lost nerve,

then he got out,
said certain things
a man needs to figure
alone.

sweat
ran from my asshole,
but i feathered the thing,
worked it
in a big slow circle.

my nerve didn't go,
i took it faster,
made a figure eight
and nosedived the fucker
clean into the little creek
at the south edge.

grandpa set his flask down,
put his hand on my back,
said a man usually
gets thrown by his first bull,
that i'd done well.

said it would be some time
before john kearn came back
from the indian casino
and could pull us out
with his tractor.

we sat in the sand
next to the creek,

gave me a small taste
of the flask.
told me someday
i'd want to ride a woman
like i'd done the suburban,

that the results
might be similar.

but i shouldn't
let that
deter me.




bopsheebop

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 124








From one of my favorites, Langston Hughes, here are three poems from his Madam To You series.


Madam's Past History

My name is Johnson -
Madam Alberta K.
The Madam sands for business.
I'm smart that way.

I had a
HAIR-DRESSINIG PARLOR
Before
The depression put
The prices lower

Then I had a
BARBECUE STAND
Till I got mixed up
With a no-ood man.

Cause I had a insurance
The WPA
Said, We can't use you
Wealthy that way.

I said,
DON'T WORRY 'BOUT ME!
Just like the song
You WPA folks take care of yourself -
And I'll get along.

I do cooking.
Da's work, too!
Alberta K. Johnson -
Madam to you.


Madam and the Charity Child

Once I adopted
A little girl child.
She grew up and got ruint,
Nearly drove me wild.

Then I adopted
A little boy.
He used a switch-blade
For a Toy

What makes these charity
Children so bad?
Ain't had no luck
With none I had.

Poor little tings,
Born behind the 8-rock,
With parents that don't even
Stop to take stock.

The county won't pay me
But a few bucks a week
Can't raise no child on that,
So to speak.

And the lady from the
Juvenile Court
Always coming around
Wanting a report.

Last time I told her,
Report, my eye!
Things is bad -
You figure out why!


Madam and the Minister

Reverend Butler came by
My house last week.
He said, Have you got
A little time to speak?

He said, I am interested
In your soul.
Has it been saved,
Or is your heart stone-cold?

I said, Reverend,
I'll have you know
I was baptized
Long ago.

He said, What have you
done since then?
I said, None of your
business, friend.

He said, Sister
Have you back-slid?
I said, It felt good -
If I did!

He said, Sister,
Come time to die,
The Lord sill surely
Ask you why!
I'm gonna pray
For you!
Goodbye!


I felt kinda sorry
I talked that way
After Rev. Butler
Went away
So I ain't in no mood
For sin today.







Here are Jane Roken's tanka, as promised.


rural rides

moorland fog
and a solitary barn
dark rhombus
slowly grown forth
on a chessboard

***

driveway to the farm
upright square stones
natty flower beds
and a dead pig -
churchyard caricature

***

abandoned stackyard
planks & wire sheltering
the little grass patch
we just flattened
so cheerfully

***

aerial hop garden
monumental mess
signal masts
designed for visitors
from outer space







Across State Lines is an interesting collection by The American Poetry & Literary Project of a wide variety of well and lesser known poets with poems about each of the 50 states.

The poem representing Kansas is by Harley Elliott.


Outside Abilene

the full rage of kansas
turns loose upon us

On the mexican radio station
they are singing "Espiritu de mis suenos"
and that is
exactly it tonight.

The spirit of my dreams
rises in the storm like vapor.

Deep cloudy bulge together
and below them
we are in a tiny constellation of lights
the car
laid under sheets of lightning
moving straight in to the night.

Before us are miles
and miles of water and wind.



For Ohio, the book has this poem by Robert Kinsley


A Walk Along the Old Tracks

When I was young they had already been
abandoned for years
overgrown with sumac and sour apple,
the iron scrapped, the wood long
gone for other things.
In summer my father would send us along them
to fetch the cows from the back pasture,
a long walk to a far off place it seemed
for boys so young. Lost again for a moment
in that simple place,
I fling apples from a stick and look for snakes
in the gullies. There is
a music to the past, the sweet tones
of perfect octaves
even though we know it was never so.
My father had to sell the farm in that near perfect time
and once old Al Shott killed a six foot rattler on the tracks.
"And when the trolly was running" he said "you could jump
her as she went by and ride all the way to Cleveland,
and oh," he said, "what a time you could have there."



And finally, the book gives us Vermont in this poem by Hayden Carruth


The Cows at Night

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont
a brown road through the mist

of mountain-ark, among farms
so quiet and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, taking my flashlight
to the pasture fence. Thy turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them - forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.




about sex

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


(Seven Beats a Second page 132)
)







Mark Perlberg has published three books of poetry, The Burning Field, The Feel of the Sun and The Impossible Toystore. He is a founder and now director emeritus of the Poetry Center of Chicago.


Out There

The Chinese painters didn't use
a vanishing point to show perspective.
     Washes of light and lighter color
     indicated distances - past cliffs, streams
     and humped bridges, past water falling
     from the lip of a rock into a gorge,
     out to farther pales and shallows,
     where the Immortals ride great fishes and turtles,
     sporting in the unseen world.







Next we have this poem from Mary Jo Caffrey about the condition our condition's in.


Wanting More

Some people say there's never enough.

The last Tootsie Roll is quite pathetic
among more than one dear lover of chocolate,
even the chewy kind so removed
from a smoothly soft Hershey's square,
tongued into a sweet memory,
not of chocolate glue.

Can't ever get the last glob
of toothpaste out of that tube,
teeth screaming - if they could -
for a minty-fresh scrubbing.

Never enough time, either,
for everything to do,
learn how to sky dive
and coast gravity-down to the ground,
time to learn a new language
and practice it on an immigrant street,
or eavesdrop so wisely in another tongue,
marveling at an ever-growing world.

Can't quite seem to master that tuba,
heavy silvered rings wrapped
around valves that could -
with the right embouchure and wind -
bellow out a fast-paced rhythm
for polka-loving dancers or
just those who love music
pounding in their ears.

Losing opportunities to learn
with every passing year,
a grocery trip, housework,
or nap somehow conspire
to preempt all those wonderful
new things we want to do, or try,
or sometimes just touch,
like the soft muzzle of a llama at the zoo.

So much to do, so much to choose,
practicality stands on the top of the hill
and pushes intentions down every time.
There's never enough time
and sometimes never enough will.







Yusef Komunyakaa teaches at Princeton University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is a recipient of the the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems), the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. His subject matter ranges from the African-American experience through rural Southern life before civil rights and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.

He was born and grew up in the small town of Bogalusa, Louisiana before and during the Civil Rights era. He served a tour of Army duty during the Vietnam War, when he acted as a journalist for the military paper, covering major actions, interviewing fellow soldiers and publishing articles on Vietnamese history and literature. Upon his return to the states he turned to poetry.

Komunyakaa obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado, an M.A. in creative writing from Colorado State University, and an M.F.A. in creating writing from the University of California, Irvine. After teaching at the University of New Orleans, Komunyakaa was a professor at Indiana University for over ten years, and, in the fall of 1997, began teaching at Princeton University.

After achieving some success as poet, his breakthrough moment came with the publication of Dien Cai Dau - pronounced "dinky dow," which means "crazy" in Vietnamese - which focused on his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. Included was the poem Facing It which has become his signature poem.


Facing It

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit; No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way - the stone lets me go.
I turn that way - I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's bushing a boy's hair.




caress

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 116








From Howard Moss, this short poem.


At Georgia Beach

How roughly ambivalent the seizure is
Of the sea to fix each wave it undoes
In the wake each time of the breakage it was,

Each coming in to the edge of drydock,
And then, underneath, the long drawing back,
Leaving the minor clatter of shellshock....

It's day. The wind's up. The ocean's gambling
With light. The dice thrown, the game is running
Away with itself in runnels and creases -

The long cliff-hangers, just as they strengthen
Their hold on the surface, break and capsize
Into the sinking spools and renewals

Of things getting ready only to be things.







Now we have two pieces sent to us for this blissue by Jill Chan.


Once Again

We're at opposite ends
of a frayed rope,
feet digging into the sand.
The sky raining,
perhaps out of pity.
Perhaps it has nothing
to do with us.

I will remember
how we never fail
to walk side by side
after each game
and begin to ask
after each other,
when we've used up
the strength to
play ourselves.


Sometimes, I Fear Strength

Afraid that it might lead me,
boldly unaware
of this weakness,
this leaving out
of things.

The trees touch the sky,
not knowing where it begins.

Perhaps everyone who isn't strong
is somewhere standing,
feeling a beginning
too boundless to start.







Lawrence Ferlinghetti tries on modern times, but doesn’t fit.


Director of Alienation

Looking at the mirrors at Macy's
and thinking it's a subterranean plot
to make me feel like Chaplin
snuck in with his bent shoes & bent bowler
looking for a fair-haired angel
Who's this bum
crept in off he streets
blinking in the neon
an anarchist among the floorwalkers
a strike-breaker even
right past the pickets
and the picket line is the People yet?
I think I'll hook a new derby
on my cane
and put a sign on it reading
Director of Alienation
or The Real Revolution
So it's Mister Alienation is it
like he don't like nobody?
It's not me It's Them out of step
I came in looking for an angel
male or female dark or fair
so why does everyone look
so serious or unhappy
like as if everyone's alienated
from something or someone
from the whole earth even
and the green land
among the loud indignant birds
My land is your land
but "all is is changed, changed utterly"
Look at this alien face
in this elevator mirror
The Tele-tector scans me
He looks paranoid Better get him out
before he starts trying on the underwear
Keep you filthy mitts ofa
I better stick to the escalators
Too many nylon ladies in the lifts
too many two-way mirrors
I came in the looking for an angel
among the alien corn
I might get caught
fingering the lingerie
feeling up the mannequins
House dicks after me
Where's your credit cards
They'll find the hole in my sock
in the Shoe Department
The full-length mirrors all designed
to make you look your worst
so you'll get real depressed
and throw off all your old clothes
and buy new duds on the spot
Well I'll take them at their word
They asked for it
Off with these grungy threads
and slide down the escalators bare-ass
Slip between the on-sale sheets
into the on-sale bed
feeling for an angel in it
Try this new flush toilet
and the portable shower
emerging from the bath in something sexy
into a store window
among the Coquette Wigs by Eve Gabo
and freeze in one of the wigs
when the Keystone Cops come running
I came in looking for an angel
passion eyes and longing hair
in mirrors made of water
But that's the wrack of civilization
I've fallen into
This must be the end of something
the last days of somebody's empire
Seven floors of it
from Women's Wear to Men's Furnishings
Lost souls descending thru
Dante's seven circles
Ladies like bees avaricious
clustered at counters
I don't want to join them either
Always the Outsider
What a drag
Why don't you get with it
It's your country
What a cliche this outsider
a real bore
But is there anyone left inside
in this year of boring Bicentennial
Indians alienated Artists alienated
All those poets alienated
Parents husbands wives alienated
Kids alienated
Even billionaires alienated
hiding out in foreign countries
Don't let them tell you different
with their flags and their grants
so Buy Buy Buy
and get Inside
Get a loada this junk
You wanna belong
You gotta have it
Pull yourself together
and descend to Macy's basemen
And eat your way up
thru the seven stages
of this classless society
with the Credit Department on the top floor
where surely some revelation is at hand
Consume your way up
until you’re consumed by it
at the very top
where surely a terrible beauty is born
Then jump off the roof
o dark of hair
o Ruth among the alien corn
waving plastic jewels and genitals




ripples

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 2








Galway Kinnel was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Princeton University and received his master of arts degree from the University of Rochester. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, and went to Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. During the 1960's, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States caught his attention. Upon returning to the US, he joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and worked on voter registration and workplace integration in Hammond, Louisiana. This effort got him arrested. Kinnell draws upon both his involvement with the civil rights movement and his experiences protesting against the Vietnam War in his book-long poem The Book of Nightmares. His other work includes The Fundamental Project of Technology, The Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible, Daybreak and After Making Love We Hear Footsteps.

In addition to his works of poetry and his translations, Kinnell published one novel, Black Light and one children's book How the Alligator Missed Breakfast. This poem is a casual and amusing tribute to Keats. The reference to Patrick Kavanaugh is an inside joke referring to Kavanaugh's best-known poem The Great Hunger


Oatmeal

I eat oatmeal for breakfast
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to ear oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if somebody
    eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast
    with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal - porridge, as he
    called it - with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him due to its glutinous tex-
    ture, gluey, lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to dis-
    integrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone.
He said that, in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an
    imaginary companion,
and he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser
    and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome
    as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the “Ode
    to a Nightingale.”
He had a heck of a time finishing it - those were his words - "'oi 'ad a
    'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas, and
    he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense
    of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a
    hole in the pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a
    Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay
    itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward
    with God's reckless wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the
    scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his
    own, but only made matters worse.
I could hot have known about any of this but for my reluctance to eat
    oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
    lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn." I doubt if there is
    much of one.
But he did say the sigh of a just harvested oat field got him started on it,
and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er brimmed their clammy cells"
    and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came to him
    while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him - drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glim-
    mering furrows, muttering - and it occurs to me:
maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters,
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from
    lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery and simultane-
    ously gummy and crumbly,
and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.








Canadian poet Don Schaeffer sent us this piece.


Teflon

Five AM
last time rising
from this bed
1007 California Avenue
Learning and Labor, Illinois.
No one says goodbye
two and one half cold years
they pretend to sleep.

Launch
for eight-thirty Trailways
at the cafe-bus-terminal
not a friend, but I'm young
friendship is in my hope.

I can leave this world
clean as a whistle.
Others leave
while I pretend to sleep.
Tears are only
for those you miss
and so far
my eyes are dry.


I slip
into the night
while she tells me
about her grip
and her underwear.
Hardly noticed.

The waters of infinity
are dark and rich as soup.
They do not ripple.







Thomas Lux lives in Atlanta and holds the Borne Chair in Poetry and is director of the McEvr Visiting Writers Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has received three national Endowment for the Arts grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent collection of poetry is The Cradle Place.


To Help the Monkey Cross the River

which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruit and nuts,
to help him
I sit, with my wife, on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first up river: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from up the river to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from down river burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey
croc and snake-speed and, if, if
it looks like the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river's far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times, into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.

Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They're just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands, like a child's
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.







Sara Zang joins our special supersized issue with these two poems.


Fireflies

A slow moon
rolls over the hill,
It exaggerates
the height of trees,
stretches shadows
into oblique beings
exhilarated with the freedom
found only at midnight
in moonlight. A firefly,
or a wayward star,
lands on my hand.
I hold it for a moment,
then let it go.


Wind and Roses

What the wind gives
it takes away,

    the soft scent of roses
    and sea breeze,
    the white capped waves,
    the sails that fill the harbor
    'til dawn when they sail again,
    All leave with the wind.

I gave it my dry leaves
and my flowers
that bloomed by the fountain,
Now the wind is gone,
My feet are anchored in stone.







Now we have several poems from Emily Dickinson who could write anywhere and any time and still be the best natural poet in town.


I taste a liquor never brewed -

I taste a liquor never brewed -
From Tankards scooped in Pearl -
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air - am I -
And Debauche of Dew -
Reeling - thru endless summer days -
From inns of Molten Blue -
When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door -
When Butterflies - renounce their "drams" -
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats -
And Saints - to windows run -
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the - Sun -


I've nothing else - to bring, You know -

I've nothing else - to bring, You know
So I keep bringing These -
Just as the Night keeps fetching Stars
To our familiar eyes -

Maybe, we shouldn't mind them -
Unless they didn't come -
Then - maybe it would puzzle us
To find our way Home -


Wild Nights - Wild Nights!

Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the Winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Down with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but more - Tonight -
In Thee!


"Hope" is the thing with feathers -

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chilliest land -
And in the strangest Sea -
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of Me.


I died for Beauty - but was scarce

I died for Beauty - but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room -

He questioned softly "Why I failed?"
"For beauty," I replied -
"And I-- for Truth - Themself are One -
We Brethren, are," He said -

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night -
We talked between the Rooms -
Until the Moss had reached our lips -
And covered up - our names -




before you were flesh

Poem by Allen Itz w/ Art by Vincent Martinez


Seven Beats a Second - page 125








And this brings us to the end of this special extended blissue of "Here and Now." I thank all poets and artists for the use of their work, especially those "Friends of Here and Now” who aqnswered my call for material. This was a big one, and at this point, I feel like I've just put together a Russian novel.

But, it is late, almost midnight (that's pretty late for an old folk), so I might be exaggerating.

As usual, all material reproduced in this issue remains the sole property of its creators.

Back in three to four weeks; hope you'll join us then.
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Insert Favorite "Bee" Cliche Here   Saturday, April 21, 2007




There's no way I'm going to start this blissue without making mention of the very nice review of my book Seven Beats a Second that just came out in Tryst Poetry Journal. There's a link on the right to the journal, but to directly access the review, copy and paste this url to your browser.

http://www.tryst3.com/news/archives/news_reviews12.html


After you check out the review, check out what follows below, blissue number II.4.3 of "Here and Now."

Excuse me while I bask for a moment.







How can we go wrong starting with a poem about mothers by Nikki Giovanni from her book My House?

We're going to be talking about the Virginia Tech murders later, but, now, just in passing, I note that Nikki Giovanni was mentioned in the stories about the incident as the creative writing teacher who faced up to the killer-to-be and had him removed from her class a couple of years ago when everyone else was afraid of him.


Mothers

the last time i was home
to see my mother we kissed
exchanged pleasantries
and unpleasantries pulled a warm
comforting silence around
us and read separate books

i remember the first time
i consciously saw her
we were living in a three room
apartment on burns avenue

mommy always sat in the dark
i don't know how i knew that but she did

that night i stumbled into the kitchen
maybe because i've always been
a night person or perhaps because i had wet
the bed
she was sitting on a chair
the room was bathed in moonlight diffused through
those thousand of panes landlords who rented
to people with children were prone to put in windows

she may have been smoking but maybe not
her hair was three-quarters her height
which made me a strong believer in the samson myth
and very black

i'm sure i just hung there by the door
i remember thinking; what a beautiful lady

she was very deliberately waiting
perhaps for my father to come home
from his night job or maybe for a dream
that had promised to come by
"come here" she said "i'll teach you
a poem: i see the moon
        the moon sees me
        god bless the moon
        and god bless me"
I taught it to my son
who recited it for her
just to say we must learn
to bear the pleasures
as we have born the pains

       [10 mar 72]







The thing about the online poetry workshops is, like everything else on the web, they react immediately to events in the world. You don't have to wait weeks or months to find out what poets thought of major events, you can find out now, immediately, what they're thinking as events unfold.

Within hours of the horrendous events at Virginia, the first poems began to appear.

I'm going to include several of those poems, including two of my own, written within the first and second day of the event.

Reactions varied, depending on the poet and the time elapsed before it was written. This poem, by "Here and Now" regular Alice Folkart, was one of the first posted. In it, you can see Alice's shock as she tries to process what she's hearing in the news and her looking to another figure in the news that day for resolution.


What Kurt V. Would Have Said


My heart is heavy,
tears blurred my vision today
as I drove from place to place
ticking "to do's" off my list
and listening to the car radio,
listening to the convocation
at a far away university
that is the only thing
humans could think of to do
in the face of overwhelming
bad luck, madness, and fate.

There's no accounting
for the malignant soul
infected with hate and despair
trying to prove its existence
to itself, to the world,
and how else but with a burst of power,
the greatest power after creation,
the random dealing out of death,
gunshots and laughter said one of the witnesses,
that's all we heard, the most terrible laughter.

I can make no sense of it.
Tears come, bringing with them
a deep sense of uselessness,
no solution, no help, no balm.
We have no power, not even love is enough.

But, another life was ended this week,
Kurt Vonnegut left us, a writer
working out his own experience of horror
in book after book, burrowing under the surface,
trying to see "why?" and remaining blind.

Finally, his advice on facing pain and suffering
hatred and evil and greed and cruelty?

Be kind.







Here are two poems by Octavio Paz on a poet's struggle to communicate.


The Written Word

Written now the first
word (never the one thought of,
but the other - this
that doesn't say it, contradicts it,
says it without saying it)
Written now the first
word (one, two, three -
sun above, your face
in the well water fixed
like an astonished sun)
Written now the first
word (four, five -
the pebble keeps falling,
look at your face as it falls, reckon
the vertical measure of its falling)
Written now the first
word (there's another, below,
not the one that's falling,
the one that holds face, sun, and time
above the abyss; the word
before the fall, before the measure)
Written now the first
word (two, three, four -
you will see your face crack,
you will see a sun that scatters,
you will see the stone in the broken water,
you will see the same face, the same sun,
fixed above the same water)
Written now the first
word (go on,
there are no more words
than the words of the measure)


The Spoken Word

The word lifts
from the written page.
The word,
stalactite shaped,
column carved
letter by letter.
Echo hardening
on the rock page.

A soul,
white as the page,
the word lifts.
It walks
the wire stretched
from silence to scream,
across the ridge
of strict speech.
the ear: sound's nest
or labyrinth.

What it says it doesn't say
what it says; how to say
what it doesn't say?
                    Say
maybe the vestal is bestial.

A shout
in a dead crater;
in another galaxy
how does one say pathetic fallacy?

They say what they say
directly and upside down.
Some drone, some groan,
some lonesome, phone:
cemetery's a seminary,
to inter is to infer.

Labyrinth of the ear,
what you say's unsaid
from silence to the scream
unheard.

With innocence and no science;
to speak learn to keep still.

(Translated by Eliot Weinberger)







This is from me, chronicling one of the bad days. Notice, though, that I still have a pen in my pocket and am armed to write.


24-7

I'm trying to find
an idea
that will grow
into my next poem,
something worth keeping,
something with depth
that can bring that moment
to a reader when it's like
a dark day turns bright with the light
of an idea or an image or
a sense of the inner workings
of a poet's mind and heart

and all I can think of
is how damn tired I am,
which leads me to think about
sleep and what a gift it is
and how the life we lead
spurns that gift
as if is a cheap plastic
doodad we receive in the mail
as some kind of promotion
for a product even cheaper

watch how a cat sleeps

mine does it so well, finding
a place next to me at night
that she'll keep through the night
and most of the next day, arising
for just a few hours during the day
to do what cats do
when out of the sight of man

how intense is her short waking life
and how drab is mine, stretched over
the greater part of my life -
how deep and uncomplicated her sleep
and how short
and unsatisfying is mine







And now, here are a couple of poems from Chinese poet Bei Dao.

The first poem presents me with a problem. I like it very much and have read it many times. The thing is, I don't remember if I've used it here. I hope not, but, even if I did, it's worth reading twice.

What courage it takes in a tyranny that bases it's oppression on communal myth to simply say "I don't believe!"


Response

The base make a safe-conduct pass of their own baseness,
while honest men's honor is their epitaph.
Look - the gold-plated sky is brimming
with drifting reflections of the dead

If the Ice Age is over
why does everything hang with icicles?
The Cape of good Hope has been found long ago,
so why do sails still contend in the Dead Sea?

I came to this world with nothing
but paper, rope and my own shadow
to speak for the condemned
before sentencing;

Listen to me, world,
I - don't - believe!
You've piled a thousand enemies at your feet.
Count me as a thousand and one.

I don't believe the sky is blue.
I don't believe in echoing thunder.
I don't believe dreams are just fantasy,
that there is no revenge after death.

If the ocean must burst through the seawall,
let its bitter water irrigate my heart.
If the continents are destined to pile up,
let us choose the mountain peaks as our hermitage.

Glittering stars and new spinning events
pierce the naked sky,
like pictographs five thousand years old,
like the coming generation's watching eyes.

(Translated by Tony Barnstone and Newton Liu)


A Formal Declaration

Maybe these are the last days
I haven't put aside a will
just a pen, for my mother
I'm hardly a hero
in times with no heroes
I'll just be a man

The calm horizon
divides the ranks of living and dead
I align myself with the sky
no way will I kneel
to state assassins
who lock up the winds of freedom

The star holes of bullets
bleed in the black-bright days

(Translated by James A. Wilson)


Requiem

(for the victims of June Fourth)

Not the living but the dead
under the doomsday-purple sky
go in groups
Suffering fluids forward suffering
at the end of hatred is hatred
the spring has run dry, the conflagration stretches unbroken
the road back is even farther away

Not gods but the children
amid the clashing of helmets
say their prayers
mothers breed light
darkness breeds mothers
the stone rolls, the clock runs backward
the eclipse of the sun has already taken place

Not your bodies but your souls
shall share a common birthday every year
you're all the same age
love has founded for the dead
and everlasting alliance
you embrace each other closely
in the massive register of deaths

(Translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Chen Maiping)







Here's Deborah Garrison, a poet new to me, with two poems from her book A Working Girl Can't Win

Garrison worked on the editorial staff of the New Yorker for fifteen years and is now the poetry editor of Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor of Pantheon Books.


Please Fire Me

Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust

while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.

Here comes another alpha male -
a man's man, a dealmaker,
holds tanks of liquor,
charms them pantsless at lunch;

I've never been sicker.
Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I'm through
with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things ego.

I'd like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don't mean
Europe.


Saying Yes to a Drink

What's a grown woman do?
She'd tug off an earring
when the phone rang, drop it to the desk

for the clatter and roll. You'd hear
in this the ice, tangling in the glass;
in her voice, low on the line, the drink

being poured. All night awake
I heard its fruity murmur of disease
and cure. I heard the sweet word "sleep,"

which made me thirstier. Did I say it,
or did you? And will I learn
to wave the drink with a good-bye wrist

in conversations, toss it off all bracelet-bare
like more small talk about a small affair?
To begin, I'll claim what I want

is small; the childish hand
of a dream to smooth me over,
a cold sip of water in bed,

your one kiss, never again.
I'll claim I was a girl before this gin,
then beg for another.







And here's another of the Virginia Tech poems, this one from frequent "Here and Now" contributor, Dan Cuddy

Dan's poem is a howl of outrage and grief and angry questioning. It was the first Virginia Tech poem to appear on the workshop I was monitoring. I need to mention that the typos and mis-spellings in the text are, according to the poet, purposeful and an important element of the poem.


Virginia Tech: An Inner Monologue of Slapping Reality

discarded matchsticks,mattresses wet, flopped
leaves of cut grass
so much straw
no-no-no-no
AK-47
what millimeter this or that
projectile
CSI Miami bllody Don Imus or karzacoweee in
eye-rach or how bout eye-ran
33 used to mean RPM
but you needed that third to go along
a third of the pie
pi logarithms and calculating calculus
engineering an almost emotionless trade
bridges-oil tanks-highways BUILD BUILD
bloody murder can't deny bloody rotten murder
too damn rational any talk about it
maybe if you have guns boom-boom
video games where ya just fire blip-blip
too easy THIS analysis too Fucking easy
if the damn thing is a vail a ble it will be
used
atomic bombs are now aVaiLaBLe cheep-cheep
boom
the worlds ills solved like an equation by DEATH
that gothic religious icon of the secular crazed
God-invoking-paranoid-schizophrenic-manic-depressive-mind
chemicals bubbling stupidity-violence-indifference-fury-amnesia
in that suicidal-mind that needs to engineer JUSTICE or REVENGE
in this dripping sidewalk bastion billiard billboard Wolfowitz WORLD
it's entertainment....Quentin F U Tarantula-teeny-O
O Bibby dillon killing dem dead in Peoria
ya motha ya mad schtick ball-point pen clicking newspapers
running down street dog pissing
hydrant blud redd %^ ya think chutes & ladder daze saints
twas a game....32 to 1 we lost
big time
and ya can't sit forever with a wash cloth sopping up eye-spill
I-spill
Gos-Gasp-spell-spill
Gawd-gawd-gawd why have you forsaken us
leaving us with that damn free will
or is it pre-destination and here we are
frightened to hell
a rrright to the gggunn
bbbadd to the bbbone
mock-mock-mock-mock
radio RKO radio beep-beep
humor yes,no
ha
ha
this is not only Amreica but the world
ka-boom
strong as our wealest link and we are weak WEAK week after week
we they us them these those dese dose//////dem
jusy can't
help
our rotten selves
to a nice little loving world ttoo damn BIG too many crazy rats
in da maze da maise anazed are we? no yes
dis-
fucking
course
polite society Fuck polite society
33 dead dud dead
it never
fucking ENDS







I'm not sure where I picked up this book, Making Callaloo, 25 Years of Black Literature, but it's a treasure trove of really good stuff. I usually get my poetry at used book stores (not so outrageously expensive), but this one I think I must have found on a remainder rack at either Borders or Barnes & Noble. I've been using it as a source for several weeks now and have two more poems from it for this blissue.

The first poem is by Natasha Trethewey.

Trethewey's first poetry collection, Domestic Work won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2003 and numerous poetry and literary journals. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

She has taught at Auburn University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Duke University.

Her most recent collection is Native Guard, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Here's her poem.


Vignette - from a photograph by E.J. Bellocq, circa 1912

They pose the portrait outside
the brothel - Bellocq's black scrim,
a chair for her to sit on. She wears
white, a rhinestone choker, fur,
her dark crown of hair - an elegant image,
one she might send to her mother.
Perhaps the others crowd in behind
Bellocq, waiting their turns, tremors
of laughter in their white throats.
Maybe Bellocq chats, just a little,
to put her at ease while he waits
for the right moment, a look on her face
to keep in a gilded frame, the ornate box
he'll put her in. Suppose he tells her
about a circus coming to town - monkeys
and organ music, the high trapeze - but then

she's no longer listening; she's forgotten
he's there. Instead she must be thinking
of her childhood wonder at seeing
the contortionist in a sideshow - how
he could make himself small, fit
into cramped spaces, his lungs
barely expanding with each tiny breath.
she thinks of her own shallow breath -
her back straining the stays of a bustier,
the weight of a body pressing her down.
Picture her face now as she realizes
that it mush have been harder every year,
that the contortionist, too, must have ached
each night in his tent. This is how
Bellocq takes her, her brow furrowed
as she looks out at the left, past all of them.
Imagine her a moment later, stepping out
of the frame, wide-eyed, into her life.


Our second poet from the Callaloo collection is Harryette Mullen

Mullen is a poet, short story writer, and literary scholar who was born on Alabama, grew up in Texas, graduated from University of Texas, Austin, and attended graduate school at University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer's fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists.

Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, was published in 1981. Her later books include S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

She has taught at Cornell University, and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Now, her poem.


Fable

When the crow fell in love
with a scarecrow
the possibilities seemed endless.
Such strangers,
they could teach each each other.
Crow was not afraid
and scarecrow,
though dressed like a working man,
had nothing better
to occupy the time.

Actually there was little
they could do -
with scarecrow staked out
in the corn,
fastened to a silly grin,
wearing clothes that once belonged
to a real person.
Only tatters now,
an imperfect skin trying to contain
innards of straw,
the hay spilling out.

That bird sits on one shoulder,
cocking her head to the side,
Crow, bright-eyed,
glossy-feathered.
Know the way rainbows thrive
in the black shine of oil?
Raucous bird
thinks she can sing.
Scarecrow seems pleased,
unable to cover its ears
or change its expression.
Easy critic dances in the breeze
while the blackbird whispers
notes toward a song.







Feeling a Bukowski deficiency?

I am.

Here's the cure.


Model Friend

Wentworth worked as a model.
he even got paid for it and he didn't
look any different from
the rest of us.

"put on your cap for Hank, show
him how you posed as a sea
captain," said Clara.

Clara was his woman.
I was with Jane.

we were drinking in their apartment,
a very nice place.
we lived in a tiny room
just a few blocks away and were far
behind in the rent.

we had brought along our own wine
and they were drinking it.
I was 40 pounds underweight
barely alive and
going crazy.

Wentworth got his cap and
put it on.
it was blue and flopped just
right.
he stood in front of a
full-
length mirror and smiled.

I was being sued in the aftermath
of a driving accident
had ulcers
and every time I drank whiskey I
spit up blood.

"Wentworth," I told him, "you look dashing."

why don't they give us something to
eat? I thought. can't they see that
we're starving?

Wentworth turned from the mirror
and looked at me. "modeling is a
good show. what do you do?"

"Hank's a writer," Jane said.

Jane was a good girl; she answered all the
questions for me.

"oh," said Clara, "how fascinating!
how's it going"

"things are a little slow," I
said.

Wentworth sat down and poured himself
another drink.

"wanna arm wrestle?" he asked me.

"o.k.," I said, "I'll try you."

we bellied up to the table, came to
grips, nodded, and he slammed my arm
on the table like a marsh reed.

"well," I said, "you were best that
time."

"wanna try another?"

"not right a way."

"maybe I can get you into
modeling?"

"what as?"

"or into a secretarial position.
how many words can you type a minute?"

"I'm into longhand right now."

"what do you write about?"

"death."

"death? nobody wants to read about
that."

"I think you're right."

the girls were talking to each other.
then Clara got up and went to the bedroom.
she was there awhile
then she came out with a new hat
on.
she stood,
smiling.

"oh, Clara," said Jane, "it's
lovely!"

"women don't wear hats anymore," said
Clara, "but I just love hats!"

"you should, you look so dear!"

so here was Wentworth in his blue sea
captain's cap and there was Clara in her new
purple foxglove.

"wanna try another arm wrestle?" asked
Wentworth, "the best two out of
three?"

"just pour me a drink."

"oh, sorry...."

the evening continued and we got to be good
friends, I suppose.
we sang some songs, sea songs among them,
and Wentworth gave me a cigar.
I was proud of Jane.
she had a great little figure, just
right.
even when we didn't eat for days I was
the only one who lost weight
which sometimes gave me the idea that
she might be eating someplace else while I
practiced my new longhand prose style.
but it didn't matter: she deserved the
food.

meanwhile,
I begged off the arm wrestling and we
kept drinking my wine.
when it was gone
the evening was over.

I remember standing in their doorway
hugging him and her
saying
goodbye, yes, yes, it was a great
evening.
and then the door closed and
there was the empty street
as we walked back to our
room Jane said, "look at that
moon! isn't the moon
wonderful?"
I couldn't say it was so I
didn’t answer.

then we were standing in the hall of our
rooming house.
I took out the key
and stuck it in the door and it snapped in
half and the door wouldn't open and the key
couldn't come back out so I gave the door what
shoulder I had and it split wide open and
as it did some guy down the hall hollered,
"HEY, YOU GOD-DAMNED DRUNKS, I GOT A
GOOD MIND TO SEND YOU DOWN THE
RIVER IN A SACK OF SHIT!"

it sounded like mr. big mouth lived in
room 8.

I walked down to room 8 and
knocked "come on out," I said "I've got
something for you."

there wasn't an answer.

Jane was at my side, "you've got the
wrong door."

"I've got the right door," I told her
I BANGED on the son of a bitch.

"COME ON OUT, FUCKER! I'LL KILL YOU!"

"it was room 9," said Jane.
"you got the wrong door."

I walked down to 9 and BANGED again. "COME ON
OUT, FUCKER, AND I'LL KILL YOU!"

"if you don't go away," I heard a voice say
from behind the door, "I'm going to call the
police!"

"you chickenshit scum," I said.

I walked back to our room and Jane
followed me.
she closed the door and I sat down
on the edge of the bed and pulled off
my shoes and stockings.

"your buddy in the sailor cap," I
told her, "he gets on my nerves."







Here's a little observational poem of the kind I like to do. They don't betray much in the way of poetic ambition, but they're fun to write.


dream weaver

the boy
in the yellow
shirt
with dark
latin
eyes
looks for the girl
in the yellow
dress
with broad brown
shoulders
and hair
black
and flowing

he dreamed
of her last night
and knows
she
will soon dream
of him







Here's another poem by William Heyen from his "Machines" series. This is from his book, Lord Dragonfly>


The Machine That Collects Butterflies

Today is a lepidopterist's delight;
monarchs, swallowtails, rare finchwings
flutter ad gambol in the meadow like lambs;
zephyrs bend the long grasses to waves.

Moving on a soft rush of air,
following your eye that follows
the single elusive butterfly
you've been searching for for so long,

the machine whispers qa fine spray
that rainbows in the gold light,
brings your prize down to your feet
like a leaf: dead, beautiful,

and perfect, even the dust on its wings
shining for years in your glass box.






I've never had a reason to be in California and never particularly wanted to go there with or without a reason, but I read a lot of Robinson Jeffers when I was younger and have drawn most of my impressions of the California coast from that reading.

I finally have the to go to California next month (it's between where I am and where I want to be) and I'm looking forward to seeing it all myself. Also, after visiting, I won't have to continue to use the Pecos River near Langtry in Texas as an image stand-in for that area.

Here's a poem by Jeffers that takes stock of the changes in the area as modernity has intruded and the things that will never change.

It's a little strange. When I read Jeffers some years ago, I always thought of him as a very "modern" poet, grouping him, somewhow, in my mind with the beats. As I read him now, he seems very traditional, almost 19th century.

I pulled this poem from Poet's Choice, Poems for Everyday Life, a book of poems selected by Robert Hass.


Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop
   rockheads -
Now the spoiler has come; does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine
   beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs out cliff. - As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves:
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.







Diane Glancy is a Cherokee poet, author and playwright. She has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa and has taught Native American literature and creative writing as associate professor at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Glancy has a long list of novels, poetry collections and plays. These two poems are from her collection Lone Dog's Winter Count published in 1991.


Lone Dog's Winter Count

1.
The dread walking with him nudging his ear.

He knew the split-dream&nbps;&nbps;&nbps;&nbps;&nbps;&nbps;filled afterwards
(cornfields.)Ki ye. But in that then,
that present in moment of geese-flying, grasses-moving,
time lay under the doom-sense he woke with.

Upshore a new sky, new stress points. The burial ground
of stars burning nightly.

Lone Dog looked for the-pulled-beyond not blacked-out
by the NOW.

Hei yow. More than was in the land before him
the Spirit squatting like a dull chief picking
the cold sores on his nose.

Why the wind change? Why wind?

Was there a motion of trees to carry them through?
This way (not that). The nothing that could be done.
Their canoes pushing the river forward
the hooves of horses smoothing grasses when they passed.

2.
Ki yop the dread of all of them now.
The tribe asking what he saw, what he knew.
He thought of them like a single wanting.

It was another spirit taking the land wiping out
different ways at once.

Lone Dog sat at the council fire watched its edges eat
the air like prairie fire in grass.

Often he flinched as though an arrow pierced his body
often re reached for breath.

He knew their legends knew their words of strength
he had always heard.

But now Lone Dog was pushed into dry land.
He remembered how it had been
the words left of it anyway in the tiny womb of the ear.

3.
Now wind hurries the river.
The snow nestling their fingers.

The tribe waits for the voice of Lone Dog to pierce the silence
to father thought
like children running into their heads.

Let go of the baggage
let go of the dogs with their packs of small hides
& breading needles.

Everywhere snow whirls into the crevice of the tribe
hurling their massive wandering into the empty hole
of their bellies.

He sees a dead woman
the edge of her blanket moving
as though her hand under it still scraped hides.

4.
The cold drives the heat of the body toward the heart
away from the toes and fingers the outer rim of the ears
the tip of the nose up the arms & legs trying.

There is a hunger that gnaws the head until it is
light & dizzy.

Then the warm little heart alone in the chest
calls the will in to dream with it
one last time before going.


Here I Am Standing Beside Mself

just look at the family album. My white mother
her sisters their husbands our cousins. Then my
father my brother & I the stuffed skin of sparrow
hawks on our heads the i'ig'ig'ig'ig'i in our
throats.

My father said his grandfather fled Indian
Territory kuna' eli st'di (claw-scratch-like)
when he'd done something wrong. We were outcast
now as well as Indian. & only part of them.
Outcast of outcasts. ju!jiji skew! It was a
sense I had. I'm trying to find the words.

It's when I remember the taste of cornbread soaked
in squirrel-grease. The feeling we weren't but
really were. The Cherokee hymns I heard in brush-
arbors. The corn-god Jesus at festival hops.

It's when I see the moon is male. Vigilant &
raveling at night. (Now cast some beads around
the neck of your wife the sun & and wrap her in weasel-
skin and darken her face so the clouds will come.)

It's when I remember the raccoon turtle deer that
nibbled at my feet at night. I still hold my legs
up to myself pull my fingers inside out draw my
arms into my chest my ears & nose into my head.







Here is another piece in response to the Virginia Tech murders. This one from frequent contributor Mary Jo Caffrey, a somber piece, reflective, showing the beginning of acceptance.


Approximating Grief

After a sad song is sung,
the notes of the last measure ring
in the mind, sound and faint taste
of salt in mouth, heart beating slowly.

Brain repeats the deepest part,
where heaven bent down
and left wings motionless,
no healing touch,
just saddest eyes watching.

Music comes closest,
though imperfect
cadence and response,
a caricature of human grief
scored on paper and
played on the violin.

Human-like cries resonate on string,
soundboard echoes the deepest hollow
not even Beethovan can fill.
In time, maybe love will.

Maybe decades after then,
a heart-lost connection will mend,
sound music of its own
Pomp and Circumstance again.







From his series of travel poems, it seems clear to me that you couldn't find a better traveling companion than Blaise Cendrars, bright, usually cheerful and always interested and attendant to even the smallest pleasure.

Here are several of those poems.


Adrienne Lecouvreur and Cocteau

I bought two more very small wistitis
And two birds with feathers like moire paper
My little monkeys have rings in their ears
My bids have gilded claws
I baptized the smaller monkey Adrienne Lecouvreur and the other Jean
I gave a bird to the daughter of the Argentinean admiral who is on board
She's a stupid girl who squints out of both eyes
She gave a footbath to her bird to remove the gilt from its claws
The other one is singing in my cabin in a few days it will imitate these
   familiar sounds and will ding like my typewriter
When I write my little monkeys watch me
I amuse them enormously
They think they have me in a cage


Sharks

They call
There are sharks in our wake
Two or three monsters which veer up white out of the water when hens
   are thrown to them
I buy a sheep and throw it overboard
The sheep swims the sharks are scared I've been had


I Told You So

I had said so
When you buy monkeys
You must take the really lively ones that almost scare you
And never pick a sweet sleepy monkey that snuggles up in your arms
Because these are drugged monkeys that will be ferocious the day after
   tomorrow
And that's what just happened to a girl who got bitten on the nose


Christopher Columbus

What I lost sight of today by heading east is what Christopher
   Columbus discovered by heading west
It's in these waters that he saw that first bird black and white which
   made him fall to his knees and thank God
With such feeling
And to improvise that Baudelairian prayer which can be found in his
   log book
Where he asks forgiveness for lying to his mates every day by giving
   them a false position
So they couldn't find their way back


Laughing

I laugh
I laugh
You laugh
We laugh
Nothing else matters
But this laughing we love
You just have to know how to be stupid and happy







I have become a great fan of Cyra S. Dumitru since finding her book Listening to Light. The way she takes mythical beings and turns them into real, flesh and blood human beings is wonderful to me.

We've used several of these poems, mostly from the Adam and Eve story.

Here's another one. If you read any of the earlier pieces, you'll recall that Adam took the naming responsibility given to him by God very seriously. You'll also recall Eve's fascination with making circles composed of small stones. This was the first indication in Eden of her mind breaking free of the restrictions of God that came to seem arbitrary to her.

In this poem, Adam has died and Eve confronts her loneliness. Cain has killed Abel and is gone, not to be seen by Eve again.


Under the Full Moon

Are you naming again, Adam,
so fresh in your new knowing?
Is Eden quite overgrown?

Without you to talk to
I have spent more time listening to the voice.
The One speaks from within now.

I can remember
verses to lost songs,
moments I feared lost.

The time when Cain began to speak
no longer just grunting or whining.
You circled inside the cave, pointing

to fire, kindling, peaches ripening,
naming them and Cain echoed you.
Then he grabbed your hands and shouted, "Daddy!"

A wave rippled along the back of my head
down my spine, out through my toes.
I felt thrilled to be alive,

like when you first called me "Eve."
I guess those early days together, before more
children came, were our childhood too.

I have collected small white stones worn smooth
from riverbeds. Tonight, when the moon is full,
I will place a circle upon your grave,

sleep within it, listening
as the garden pulses within me.







Here are two of my poems responding to the events at Virginia State. The first one, from the first day, is angry. The second one, from the day after, is more reflective.


license to carry

license
to carry
that's what we have
where I live

that means your
normal
everyday
psychotic
whack'o
can carry a gun
as long as they keep it
concealed
and as long as they can pass
a test developed by the NRA
to insure that every
normal
everyday
psychotic
whack'o
who wants to carry
his own
personal
six shooter
can
by god!
buy one at the weapons
and murder store
of their choice

and I think that's
plain stupid
since it seems clear to me
that if you're going to let you
normal
everyday
psychotic
whack'o
carry a gun
you don't want that sucker
concealed
instead
you oughta wanta be
fuckin' sure they're required
to carry it
right out in plain sight
maybe with a big red arrow
pointing right at it
with flashing neon lights saying
"whack'o whack'o whack'o"
so us regular people can
get out of the way
when we see them
moseying in our
direction


the devil can find you anywhere

it's part of living in the city
we think
the noise of sirens
the fire trucks
the ambulances
the police cars
their supercharged engines
whoosh of air
and power like a bear's
long growl
as they cross the creek
just down the road;
all the little murders
the little killings that come
so often it begins to seem
like a stream of blood
passing
a flood of blood
passing on weekends
the nude woman found
in a drainage ditch
shot dead
the baby in her crib
shot dead as a drive by
bullet penetrates the thin wall
she sleeps by
bar fights
that lead to shootings
in parking lots
blood on oily asphalt shinning
in the flashing lights
domestic disturbances
that rise from desperation
separation from hope
unhappiness
and too much to drink ending in rage-deaths
(I had a friend when I was thirteen, killed
by his father, shot as he tried to protect
his mother) so many
that we loose count and it's just another
half inch story on the back pages
and when we think of it at all we
shake our heads at the viciousness of it all
imagine quite places
where the sirens don't wail
all night, where murder and tragedy and rage
only happens on tv and we daydream
like this until something happens like happened
this week and we realize the devil can
always find you anywhere
and we see that
death
comes to
quiet places too







Carolyn Forche is a poet, editor, and human rights advocate. Born in Michigan, she earned a B.A. in international relations and creative writing at Michigan State University in 1972. After graduate study at Bowling Green State University in 1975, she taught at a number of universities, including the University of Arkansas, Vassar College, Columbia University, and in the Master of Fine Arts program at George Mason University. She now teaches at Skidmore College..

Her first poetry collection, Gathering the Tribes, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award from Yale University Press. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría. Upon her return, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, The Country Between Us, received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Forche has held three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1992 received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.

Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was published in 1993, and her third book of poetry, The Angel of History, was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award.

The prose poem below is one of her most well known works.


The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fool-ing around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught the scrape of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.







Next a poem by online poet and "Here and Now" first timer Jim Corner that has nothing to do with Virginia Tech.

Jim is founder and publisher of www.DesertMoonReview.com a poetry workshop of six years. His poetry appears in various E-zines and hard copy including Arizona Newspapers. He was poet in residence on Disciples Today, a compartment www.disciples.org for four years. He is up for publication in Disciples World (hardcopy ) in July 2007. He is a retired clergy and lives in Mesa, Arizona with his wife Kathy and Dobie/Rot dog Trudy.


Winged Seeds

A child of six eating lunch
beneath the only maple tree
in the yard of our one room school,
seeds rotate into my lard-can
lunch pail.

After school in my attic room
I find a new Tom Mix lunch box.
Its top is adorned with Tony,
his horse, rearing from
bottom to top, six guns blazing
on the side, a sensation
for show and tell.

My old pail, a red and blue
Piggly Wiggly, once silver
with copper underneath,
found lodging under the maple tree
surrounded by tiny roads and hills -
highways for cast iron toys.

Summer and fall seep into winter,
winter into warm rain.
On the first cloudless day I find
sprouts pushing up from the mold
in the bottom of my rusting pail.
I remember Samara playfully
whirly-gigging, landing
on top of my sandwich.

("Samara," botanical term for maple seed)






Now continuing on a gentler note, this from Li-Young Lee is an American poet born in Indonesia to Chinese parents. His father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964.

Li-Young Lee attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport. He has taught at several universities, including Northwestern and the University of Iowa. He is the author of Book of My Nights, The City in Which I Love You, which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, as well as a memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His other honors include a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.


From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted "Peaches."

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only he sugar, but the days to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
there are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background: from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom






I'm going to have the last word this week with a poem about another kind of loss.

For most of the last eight years, I have worked about four months a year, usually in two to three week segments, at a place several miles outside San Antonio's outermost highway ring (Loop 1604) that circles the city. The inner loop is about 50 miles around; this "outer" loop is at least two or three times that. A new ring, if it were to be built today, would probably have to be 300 to 400 miles long to completely circle the city.

Eight years ago, it was, except where major highways crossed the loop, mostly a drive in the country. Since then, the "country" has disappeared. Hills and valleys once green, are now covered in gray rooftops. Trees are gone, pastures are gone, any sense of serenity that might have, at one time felt, is gone. It is civilization in all it's inevitable vulgarity.

That's what this poem is about.


there was a pasture here

there was a pasture
right here,
rocky and not good for much
but in the spring
it was a field of bluebonnets,
blue from fence to fence
like a summer
sky
brought softly
to earth

not so many years ago
there were many
pastures
just like this one,
a special one I remember,
on a hill, where,
on an April afternoon
you could sit amid the flowers
and look down on the city
in the broad river valley below,
the first beginning
of the descent to the coastal plains

there are still
fields of wildflowers,
but none so close
as those in years before,
pasture land and hills drowned
in the advancing asphalt tide,
the stink and heat of the city
pushing those fields
where wildflowers bloomed
in spring
further and further away

it is this time of year
and little things
like these missing
wildflower
pastures
that make me feel
I should apologize to my son
for the world I'll be leaving behind


And that's "Here and Now" for this week. So, until next week, I offer my thanks and appreciation to all who contributed to this issue and to our reading pleasure. All material reproduced in this issue remains the sole property of its creators.
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Sunny Days Are Here Again   Saturday, April 14, 2007





Welcome to "Here and Now" number II.4.2. I've been working full time for a week and a half, so this blissue is a little bit shorter than usual. One more week in this current project, and I'll be back to my life of poetic leisure.






Nebraska poet Mary Jo Caffrey is back with this piece to begin this weeks issue.


woman of the blank heart

I don't hear from anyone anymore.
Nothing beating here but my own drum,
undone by apathy mirrored in empathy.
We all live separate lives
in boxes we call homes,
heart long departed,
leaving only television and
odd hobbies that scare others
and sometimes, even ourselves.

How many doilies tatted in euchre can the world hold before it explodes
in a rain of beige thread and the memory of bare tables without covers?

God looks out for drunks,
old men and children.
I'm too lazy to learn alcoholism,
hiding bottles and responsibility.
Nor am I a man, though I suppose
it's surgically possible, not alluring,
the thought of all that muscle binding
to hearty bones, then bending to
defenselessness,
fate of male potency defined
to ghost by geriatrics.
Nor am I a child, though skilled
at childish nature and petulance
and loving candy more than I should.
No, not a child either.
God blinks and misses me.

In a dream, I slip off my Nikes and wireless bra, everything
that could cause an alarm, but at both counters
there's no record of me living at all.

I masquerade happy
and soft-shoe with red slippers,
brainwork blown confetti,
until midnight strikes
and shield melts away,
revealing a network of memories
in a membrane of consciousness,
soul seeking redemption
in a greeting,
if there ever is one.
I remember one.

Nobody writes anymore, just send internet jokes and those awful photos
of children I don't know. The phone rings repairmen and telemarketers,
wistful, too, but not for me.

The woman of the blank heart searches for something to fill it,
maybe fancy work in drawers or stacked on the floor or
little dogs spoiled by personification, or even Witness meetings
four times a week and neighborhood trolling for people like me,
hands hesitant on doorknobs and dead faces before
animation sparks an invitation to come in.

A blank heart is always eventually filled with something.







Also this week, we have this beautifully descriptive poem by Richard Wilbur.

Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the US Army from 1943 until 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade. He is the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes.

In addition to his poetry, he is also a translator, specializing in the 17th century French comedies of Molière and the dramas of Jean Racine. Less well-known is his foray into lyric writing, providing many of the lyrical touches in Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical, Candide.


Thyme Flowering Among Rocks

This, if Japanese,
Would represent gray boulders
Walloped by rough seas

So that, here or there,
The balked water tossed its froth
straight into the air.

Here, where things are what
They are, it is thyme blooming,
Rocks, and nothing but -

Having, nonetheless,
Many small leaves implicit,
A green consciousness.

Crouching down, peering
Into perplexed recesses,
You find a clearing

Occupied by sun
Where, alone prone, rachitic
Branches, one by one,

Pale stems arise, squared
In the manner of Mentha,
The oblong leaves paired.

One branch, in ending,
Lifts a little and begets
A straight-ascending

Spike, whorled with fine blue
Or purple trumpets, banked in
The leaf-axils, You

Are lost now in dense
Fact, fact which one might have thought
Hidden from the sense,

Blinking in detail
Peppery as this fragrance,
Lost to proper scale

As, in the motion
Of striped fins, a bathysphere
Forgets the ocean.

It makes the craned head
Spin. Unfathomed thyme! The world's
A dream, Basho said,

Not because that dream's
A falsehood, but because it's
Truer than it seems.







I was a stubbornly stupid boy who grew to a stubbornly stupid man, mending my ways finally ten years ago upon the plea of every one from the Surgeon General to my ten year-old son.

Any of you who remain stubbornly stupid, as I was, take heed of this poem and smarten up.


the day I started suiciding

I had my first
cigarette
when I was twelve,
a Mexican brand called
Delgados,
short,
oval shaped,
and, with paper soaked in sugar,
sweet as a peppermint stick

the kid who gave me
that first one
quit smoking
about three weeks later
and never smoked again
while it took me forty years
from that first saccharine puff
to quit, a thousand days and more
of sleeping on my side because
the accumulation of noxious drool
if I slept on my back choked me,
a thousand days and more
of throwing up every morning
to clear my nose and throat and lungs,
a thousand days and more
of panting and gasping with every slight
exertion, a thousand days and more
or remembering the ten years
of my father's dying, the narrowing
of his world as more and more
of his breath was stolen from him
until at last, lying on a hospital bed
in a coma, dependent on the wheeze
in and out of the machines
that breathed for him until the plug
was pulled and he was freed

the Delgados,
the sweet little Delgados,
offered by my friend more than
fifty years ago, my friend,
if there is to be justice,
he must surely die
before me







Here, again, are three poets by the book Voices of Light - Spiritual and Visionary Poems by Women Around the World From Ancient Sumeria to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone.


First, Ruth Stone, born in 1915 in Virginia, was recipient of the 2002 National Book Award (for her collection In the Next Galaxy) and the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award.


Green Apples

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something;
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.



Born in 1956, Aliki Barnstone teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her most recent book of poems, Madly in Love, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.


Blue

Blue is Greece where fisherman tame their boats,
where I float naked in the color of truth, the sea

humming in my ears, lulling me with ultramarines
like a baby kicking in amniotic seas, like god

whose throne is this transparent blue bowl,
the star-sapphire studded cadle of waves.

She must have blue skin and eyes, lapis lazuli
looped in strands and strands around her rounded belly

and here breasts amply squirting blue-white milk.
She must make love on silk sheets of azure air.

She must have been there in the window,
that narrow shaft in the hospital wall letting in

pale blue spring light the morning my daughter was born.
She hid in the forget-me-nots in the wallpaper,

fluttered in the doctors' and nurses' blue medical gowns,
glinted in the metallic blue of the scissors that cut the cord.

Her blue threads embroidered the bloody placenta.
She colors the newborns' eyes blue

for babies come from her inside-out world.
She is in the bluish spit against the evil eye.

When I'm blue I close my eyes and see blue with my third eye.
Blue light comes from the island in my brain

where sunflowers crook their necks, weary of time.
Sunflowers, your wild fire hair burns in blue.

Peaceful blue, luminous blue, keep my daughter safe.
She splashes her little feet in the Aegean blue sea,

reaches her hands into blue beauty. I hug her dry
in a towel deep blue as Mary's timeless robes.



Sappho's Gymnasium is a collaborative book of poems by Olga Broumas and T Begley.

Broumas, born in 1949, is the author of 7 books of poetry and 4 books of translations of the Greek Nobel Laureate poet Odysseas Elytis. She is also known for the innovative practice of co-authoring poetry collections.

Born and raised in Greece, she has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. She spends her summers on Cape Cod, where she, in the Eighties, founded and taught at a school for female artists called Freehand, Inc.

Begley comes from a strong literary and language background. She counts Renaissance Literature, Classical Greek, Latin, and Indonesian among her many studies, which include sojourns in Mexico, Indonesia, and Thailand. Her lyric documentaries of these countries exist as photograph, sculpture, video, and poem.


from Sappho's Gymnasium

This helpless desire your own suffering the
work of grace makes us visible
flocking on small
islands of inland waters the near
shore of unsayable

**

The lamp stands on the little table
and the little table is spread the bed
is a prayer and here is this room in a near
dead darkness in which I first
know you undo the garden of exceeding
happiness after each flush I
end up crying
after the ships
called bluets and innocents

**

Grief that is not expressed I have saved
and at times recovering my natural
voice I sit by he death bed she is
so beautiful a transparence one speaks
is the beginning of
memory of sensation let me make
it good light being unborn

**

What if there were no sea
to take up the table of our hearts
breath which is everywhere curved
hand from infinity broken

**

Peaceful limbs
had been little breathless
branches of two humans
the gods are open-mouthed

**

By long kiss the icon is
worn a lighter color
than the rest of the face
bathing the living

**

I don't know virgin
when I was made I was made

**

I come single
alone
under my clothes

**

Desert silence
who must constantly beat her wings

**

Transitive body this fresco amen I mouth

**

Like flocks of solitudes surrender
a bird beautiful and uncovered
I bite small seas into your heart
populate with birds a sky
immaculate with shriek of wing
for its updraft I have married

**

I am not alone
facing the sun
lover of all

**

Among indelible black
cosmos I keep words
or sing

**

Lord let me all I can wild cherry
I'm dazed all my ways of arriving bear tracks
failure of being torn to pieces is me
mumbling anxiety and I love my heart
I do each day lightly suffering desire
for kindness vividly today
idiot red unselfish green blue threadbare of cloud
outside the labyrinth imagining my life







Well, this what I look like when I'm under the weather. And when I look like that I don't feel like writing a poem and all promises related to writing a poem are null and void.

But some are made of sterner stuff than me.

Gary Blankenship, feeling sickly and feeling bad about not feeling like writing a poem writes a poem about feeling to bad to write a poem. If you get what I mean.

Here's Gary's feeling too bad to write a poem poem.


No Poem Day

No poem today from the yellow-green leaves of sugar maple
No poem today from the pink blossoms
green-red bark of flowering plums

No poem today from the dark red of a paly structure,
no poem today from the joy of children at play
the sun and warmth of spring

No poem today
head plugged

Tomorrow Saturday
but no poem today







Next, this astoundingly beautiful prose from Rimbaud. For some reason, perhaps the richness of it, I read this and think of Whitman, which sets off all sorts of other electron bursts in my mind.


Metropolitan


From the Indigo straits to Ossian's seas, over the rose-orange sand washed by a wine-colored sky, crystal boulevards have risen up and crossed, immediately settled by poor young families who get their food at the fruit dealers. Nothing rich. - Just the city!

From the asphalt desert flee in a straight line helmets, wheels, barges, rumps - in confusion with the sheets of fog spaced in horrible bands in the sky which bends back, withdraws and comes down, formed by the most treacherous black smoke which the Ocean in mourning can make. - Just the battle!

Look up: this wood bridge, arched; these last vegetable gardens of Samaria; these illuminated masks under the lantern whipped by the cold night; the silky water nymph in her noisy dress, in the lower part of the river; these luminous skulls in the pea rows - and other bewitchments just the country.

These roads lined with fences and walls, their gardens bursting over them and the terrible flowers called hearts and sisters, damask damning slowly - possessions of fairy-like aristocracies beyond the Rhenish, Japanese, Guaranian, still capable of receiving the music of the ancients - and there are inns which will never open again now - there are princesses, and if you are not oo overwrought, the study of the stars - just the sky.

In the morning when with Her, you fought in those shimmerings of snow, the green lips, the ice, the black flags and blue rays, and he red perfumes of the polar sun, - just your strength.

(Translated by Wallace Fowlie)








I'm still working on that poem-a-day workshop that I mentioned last week. I'm on my 13th day and my poems have gone really rotten yet. (Thirteen days may sound pretty good, but at least one of the workshoppers is working on his 30th thirty days, which works out to a poem a day for 900 days if my math holds up.)

Here's one of mine from several days ago.


old men talk

old men
talk
and talk
all the time
to anyone
anywhere,
using up words
they hoarded
when young
and certain
to need them
later







Wikipedia let me down on Japanese poet Ibaragi Noriko. From all the references to her elsewhere, it's obvious she was a major 20th century poet but the only thing that look like it had biographical information was in Japanese and the translation was so bad it was nonsensical. Several references indicate she died at the age of 79 late last year. Also, the book I took her poem from says that she was born in 1926. That would have made her in her mid to late teens at the time she talks about in this poem.


When I Was Prettiest In My Life

When I was prettiest in my life,
the cities crumbled down,
and the blue sky appeared
in the most unexpected paces.

When I was prettiest in my life,
a lot of people around me were killed,
in factories, in the sea, and on nameless islands.
I lost the chance to dress up like a girl should.

When I was prettiest in my life,
no men offered me thoughtful gifts.
They only knew how to salute in the military fashion.
They all went off to the front, leaving their beautiful eyes behind.

When I was prettiest in my life,
my head was empty,
my heart was obstinate,
and only my limbs had the bright color of chestnuts.

When I was prettiest in my life,
my country lost in a war.
"How can it be true?" I asked,
striding, with my sleeves rolled up, through the prideless town.

When I was prettiest in my life,
I was most unhappy,
I was most absurd,
I was helplessly lonely.

Therefore I decided to live a long time, if I could,
like old Rouault of France,
who painted magnificent pictures in his old age.

(Translated by Naoshi Koriyama and Edward Lueders)







How about two barku suggested by Jim Feuerstein?

Jim, whose technical assistance was essential to preparing my book for publishing, and I have been semi-regulars at two coffee shops now for a couple of years, first Borders and now Casa Chiapas. Jim is probably more regular than me, since he operates his business from his office at the third table on the left.

The question this time of year is whether to do our coffee drinking (or, in Jim's case, wealth creation) inside or outside on the cafe's wonderful front porch. The peculiar thing is that I, South Texas born and raised, spend most of my time outside on the porch, even in the winter, while, Jim, hardy son of the north, finds it too cold until, like today, the temps rise into the 80s.

Jim made his foray to the porch this morning (when the weather was maybe 70 degrees) wondering if he could last in the chill. These two barku came to mind after reading his brief haikuish email describing his predicament.

first robin of spring

(Channel 4 Weatherman version)

on the
porch today
chill winds
blow
discouraging
extended stay

(Channel 5 Weatherman version)

on the porch
sun
warms
sleeping dogs
encouraging
extended stay







Roberto Juarroz was an Argentine poet famous for his Poesia Vertical. He published fourteen volumes of poetry in all, numbered successively 1 to 14, all under that title, the with the first appearing in 1958 and the final one posthumously in 1997. his poetry is spare and sometimes cryptic, like this piece. Born in 1925, Juarroz died in 1995.


Life Draws a Tree

Life draws a tree
and death draws another one.
Life draws a nest
and death copies it.
Life draws a bird
to live in the nest
and right away death
draws another bird.
A hand that draws nothing
wanders among the drawings
and at times moves one of them.







One of the things I really like about the online workshops is the way poets can be inspired by each other. Dan Cuddy, who we've read here before, used my old men talk poem as a jumping off point to write his own fine poem on old men talking.

Here it is.


old men talking

old men talk
if not wisdom
the ticking of the clock
the rock of a country porch chair
or the drip of seconds from a mall fountain
or the table saw noise of making something unique
and useless
in a cluttered basement
virgin board, sawdust, shining blade

old men reminisce
words mist covering the landscape of the past
with a selective beauty
a stilled battlefield
morning, the sun through the tops of trees,
the char and smoke blended in
like cream, sugar in bitter coffee
blended in the mist of selected details
told partly as bravado, partly as lament

old men prattle
so much kept in
discipline, decorum, a sense of manliness
now as the screws of time tighten,squeeze
words,feelings,rash thoughts
parade like hand-waving politicians
oh, approval
oh, save the man from oblivion

old men talk to themselves
wound up, the key visible in their back
turning,hobbling in circles
jittery movement
any moment the whole toy could tip
gyrate in death throes
but now circling
no apparent goal
the conversation with themselves
the importance of which
young dreams can not fathom

old men in a corner murmuring
one to another but the hearing is so bad
speech the last thing to go
no, thought the last bulb
in a dimly lit room







We've used poems by Robert Francis several times in the past few weeks. The more I read of him, the more I find I really like him. It seems strange that he is so little known.


Cold

Cold and the colors of cold: mineral, shell,
And burning blue. The sky is on fire with blue
And wind keeps ringing, ringing the fire bell.

I am caught up into a chill as high
As creaking glaciers and powder-plumed peaks
And the absolutes of interstellar sky.

Abstract, impersonal, metaphysical, pure,
This dazzling art derides me. How should warm breath
Dare to exist - exist, exult, endure?

Hums in my ear the old Ur-father of freeze
And burn, that pre-post Christian Fellow before
And after all myths and demonologies,

Under the glaring and sardonic sun,
Behind the icicles and double glass
I huddle, hoard, hold out, hold on, hold on.







I hate cellphones.

I was finally persuaded by my wife to buy a cellphone (she bought it and told me to put it in my pocket, or else), but I still hate'em, not quite as much as I hate car alarms, but close.


ring tones

little man
on a cellphone
advertises
with booming voice
there is more to him
than appears

**

business suit
charcoal gray
pin stripped
red necktie
on pristine white shirt
whispers
to himself
as he picks
at his Blackberry
with a plastic
stylus

I read his lips,
"beam me up, Scottie"

it's true,
I swear

**

two girls
on the sofa
under the Starbucks sign
each with cellphone
talking
each in private
conversation
ignoring the other

it"s only as I pass
I realize
they are talking
to each other

**

fat woman
in a pink jogging suit

two kids
one on each
tree stump leg

receiver
on her walkie-talkie phone
set to maximum loud
public address system
mode so that the man
on the other end
echoes across the store
like a sonic boom
and she yells back
sure, I guess,
that he's as deaf
as she

**

woman behind me
at a high school band concert
talks on her cellphone,
taking calls and making calls
all the way through the hour and a half
concert, Wagner, Sousa, Rimsky-Korsakov
Hindemith, Mussorgsky, Joplin,
Tchaikovsky and all the rest
less interesting than her girlfriend's
report on the new hairdresser

and the concert ends
and the children all come out
to meet their parents
and she tells her child
as they leave, good work,
you were really good

I'm so glad I came







R.S. Thomas is another poet we've used before who is not as well know as some others. A clergyman as well as a poet, his style is dry and, to me, somewhat foreboding.


That

It will always win.
Other men will come as I have
To stand here and beat upon it
As on a door, and ask for love,
For compassion, for hatred even; for anything
rather than blank indifference,
That the neutrality of its answers, if they can be called
     answers.
These gray skies, these wet fields,
With the wind's winding-sheet upon them.

And endlessly the days go on
With their business. Lovers make their appearance
And vanish. The germ finds its way
From the grass to the snail to the liver to the grass.
The shadow of the tree falls
On our acres like a crucifixion,
With a bird singing in the branches
What its shrill species has always sung,
Hammerine its notes home
One by one into our brief flesh.







Christine Kiefer returns this week with this sensuous daydream.


I like it in the sky, just don't make a flag out of it

Standing under your gazebo
a rainbow arcs above a tree
with a heart shape balloon dead in its branches

I want to go down on you in the shower
be on my knees for you, I think of this when I'm alone

The grass is greener than I remember it being
as a child when we'd hunt for colored eggs this time of year
when pink was favored and socks were folded down just so

I like when your legs are spread like this
do you mind that I look down and watch them

With the top down you look like a pimpin' teenager
and the gas station attendant wonders if you're my son
when we get cigarettes and a lighter to hold closely in the rain

You look good in my shirt standing here in my town
the rainbow is poetry and I like its smile on you







Here are five short pieces from Blaise Cendrars who we've read here before. All three are from the third section of Travel Notes. Like with Robert Francis, the more I read of Cendrars, the more I like him, even though they are such different poets, with the simplicity of Francis as compared to the exoticism of Cendrars.


Sunset

We can see the coastline now
The sunset was extraordinary
In the flaming evening
Enormous clouds perpendicular and insanely all
Chimeras griffins and a big winged victory stayed all night just above
     the horizon
At daybreak the whole flock found itself reunited pink and yellow over
     Bahia laid out like a checkerboard


Bahia

Lagoons churches palm trees cubical houses
Big boats with two upside down rectangular sails which look like
     immense puffed-out pants legs
Little boats with shark fins bounding among groundswells
Big perpendicular inflated clouds colored like pottery
Yellow and blue


Night Rises

I watched very closely how it happened
When the sun has gone down
It's the sea that gets darker
The sky stays bright for quite a while
The night rises from the water and slowly encircles the entire horizon
The in its turn the sky slowly darkens
There is a moment when it is completely dark
Then the darkness of the water and the darkness of the sky recede
An eburnean transparency appears with reflections in the water and
     dark pockets in the sky
Then the Coal Sack beneath the Southern Cross
Then the Milky Way


Heat

It's six days from la Plata to Pernambuco on a fast transatlantic steamer
You often see the coast but not a single bird
Like in the middle of the immense state of Sao Paulo where you drive
     all day down the dusty roads
Without scaring up a single bird
That's how hot it is


Cape Fria

I heard tonight a child's voice through my door
Soft
Rising and falling
Pure
It did me good







Remember this?

It's me without my chili.


best damn chili in Texas

Frontier
Something or Other
was the name of the place

best damn chili
in Texas,
the devil's own
hangover preventative

pork and beef
and three kinds of
pepper
hot enough to defoliate
your nose hairs
and grease enough
to coat your guts
from inflow to the
gotta go

a bowl
before you hit the bars
and a bowl after
and you're be so damn
stone
cold
sober
at reveille your eyebrows
stand and salute
when old General Pushcart
come by on the back of his jeep

I used to know a lot
about this sort of
thing







Nancy Willard is a children's author and poet. In 1982, she received the Newbery Medal for A Visit to William Blake's Inn. She lives in New York and lectures at Vassar College. She was educated at the University of Michigan and Stanford University.


Night Light

The moon is not green cheese.
It is china and stands in this room.
It has a ten-watt bulb and a motto:
"Made in Japan."

Whey-faced, doll faced,
it's closed as a tooth
and cold as the dead dear are cold
till I touch the switch

Then the moon performs
its one trick:
It turns into a banana.
It warms to its subjects.

It draws us into its light,
just as I knew it would
when I gave ten dollars
to the pale clerk
in the store that sold everything.
She asked, did I have a car?
She shrouded the moon in tissue
and laid it to rest in a box.
The box did not say Moon.
It said "This side up."
I tucked the moon into my basket

and bicycled into the world.
By the light of the sun
I could not see the
moon under my sack of apples

moon under slab of salmon,
moon under clean laundry,
under milk its sister
and bread it's brother

moon under meat.
Now supper is eaten.
Now laundry is folded away.
I shake out the old comforters.

My nine cats find their places
and go on dreaming where they left off.
My son snuggles under the heap.
His father loses his way in a book.

It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.







Here is a wonderful, tender love poem by "Here and Now" first-timer Beki Reese. Beki has been publishing in small press journals and online for about 15 years. In real life she is a circulation supervisor at a county library in Southern California.

In the past, I've known Beki as an outstanding poet in the short verse Japanese tradition. This poem is unlike anything of hers I've read bfore and I like it very much.


Sometimes....

There are so many things
I long to say to you.
In those moments
when uncertainty stops my tongue
and silence grows to fill the distance
that separates us,
I quietly whisper them
into my heart.

I say again
how much I love you;
how my very skin
longs to whisper against your skin,
to feel the flame of old desires
rise and leap between us,
melting barriers
until I fall so deeply into you
that no distance or circumstance
can ever separate us
again.

I whisper
"Look at me!"
I'm the one who never faltered
down the quiet years,
the long, lonely years
when we walked on different paths.
From wide eyed devotion
through marriages and children,
from back seat fumblings
through passionate illicit afternoons,
from never hearing your name at all
to having it linger
like a secret
on my lips,
all I ever wanted was you.

I want to say
I have loved you
my whole life;
measured every man by you
and found them wanting.
I have no need for other arms,
no desire for another touch
when I lie here in the dark.
It's your name I whisper
into the shadows
when loneliness presses down on me
like poisoned air.
There is no part of me
that does not cry out for you alone;
your arms, your breath, your kiss,
your touch which still undoes me.

Tonight
There are so many things
I long to say to you -
open your heart
and hear me.







Faced with a challenge to write a poem about a body part, I thought about and discarded all the things that first come to mind. Then walking behind several young women in strapless shoes, I realized something that had never occurred to me before. The bottom of a woman's foot, specifically, the instep, is wonderfully sensuous.

So, I got my body part poem.


flashing

watch her walk

with each step
the rear of her foot rises
as weight shifts from her heel to her toe
while her shoe lags behind
and between the shoe
and the bottom of her foot
the soft pale flesh
of her instep flashes
like a lover's wink
across a crowded room,
this most beautiful, unseen place,
inviting a caress,
a kiss,
flashing like a secret
across a crowded room







Charles Wright was born in Tennessee and attended Davidson College and the University of Iowa. He has been widely published, winning the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997 for Black Zodiac. Other works include Chickamauga, Buffalo Yoga, Negative Blue, Appalachia, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990, Zone Journals and Hard Freight. His work also appears in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.

Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.


Stone Canyon Nocturne

Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you'll come back.
No one believes in his own life anymore.

The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread
At the earth's edge,
Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs.

In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings.
They sing songs , and their fingers blear.
And the spike mirimbas of dawn rattling heir amulets...

Soon it will be time for the long walk under the earth toward the sea.

And time to retrieve the dead yellow sunsuit and little shoes
                        they took my picture in

In Knoxville, in 1938.

Time to gather the fire in its quartz bowl.

I hope the one with the white wings will come.
I hope the island of reeds is as far away as I think it is.

When I get there, I hope they forgive me if the knot I tie is the
                        wrong knot.








From Denmark, Jane Roken returns this week with this poem about a dream.


This is what I dream

This is what I dream
as I move in the blind folds
of the curtain of time -

This is what I dream
as I sleep beneath moonrise rocks
in the torrid desert -

This is what I dream
as I soar among feathery grasses
on the boundless plains -

This is what I dream
as I cross the vast spaces
from the beginning to the end
and back again (and again ...)

Your happy hungry countenance,
the badger sparkle in your eyes.







A civil rights and antiwar activist in his youth< W.S. Merwin now lives in Hawaii, writing increasingly simpler and more mysterious poems. These are from a suite called Summer Canyon.


Some of the mayflies
drift on into June
without their names

_________________________


Spring reappears in the evening
oyster cloud sky catches in pines
waterlight wells out of needles after sundown

_________________________


On small summit pine hollow
field chickweed under tree
split white petals drifting over shadow

_________________________


Two crows call to each other
flying over
same places

_________________________


Three broad blue petals
I do not know what kind of flower

_________________________


Leaves never seen before
look how they have grown
since we came here

_________________________


Day's end green summer stillness
pine shadows drift far out
on long boards

_________________________


Mourning dove sound
cricket sound
no third

_________________________


All day the wind blows
and the rock
keeps its place

_________________________


Sunlight after rain
reflections of ruffled water
cross the ceiling

________________________


High in the east full moon
and far below on the plan
low clouds and lightening

_________________________


Jay clatters through dark pines
it remembers
something it wants among them



After a reading of this kind of poem, an audience member asked if they were haiku. Merwin replied that, no, then gave his definition of haiku: a seventeen-syllable poem, written in Japanese.

I though that was funny.







Tracks are being laid for a new direction for the Casa Chiapas Poetry Table which could lead to two nights of poetry a month at the restaurant, with one night for the Poetry Table and a second night for open-mike poetry reading, possibly to start in June.

We'll have more information on this in June.

And that's it for this week, but we'll be back again next Saturday. In the meantime, I offer my thanks and appreciation to all who contributed to this issue and to our reading pleasure. All material reproduced in this issue remains the sole property of its creators.
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Some Old and Some New   Saturday, April 07, 2007




So there it is,a new high tech venue (very high) for publishing your poetry. Some length restrictins may apply.

And here we are, with "Here and Now" number II.4.1.





Painting by Mack Stewart


We start this week with some class, old Will Shakespeare himself. I think I might have heard an adapted version of this poem on country music ratio in 1957 in in Cowboy Tex Billy Bob Joe's song, "You May Be Ugly, But You Still Be Mine."

There I go, blowing the class act right off the top. Anyway, here's our Shakespeare for the week.


My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips. red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grown on her head.
I have seen roses demasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground;
And yea, by heaven, I think my love is rare
As any she belied with false compare.







From Shakespeare straight to Bukowski, why the hell not.


.188

it dissolves, it all dissolves: those we thought
were great, so exceptional - they dissolve;
even the cat
walking across the rug vanishes in a
puff of smoke;
nations break apart at the seams
and overnight become
tenth-rate powers;
the .330 hitter can no longer
see the ball, he dips to .188,
sits apart on the bench,
wonders about
the remainder of his life;
the heavyweight champ is knocked senseless by
a 40-to-one underdog;
it dissolves, it all dissolves -
lovers leave and
old cars break down
on the freeway at rush hour;
I look at a photo of myself
and think,
who's that
awkward
foolish
old man?
it dissolves - the nights of hurricane and
hunger
have turned
placid;
I search for a partial set of my teeth
on the bookcase
shelf;
and I can't even think of
a last line
for this poem;
sometimes
before his death
a man can see
his
ghost.







Here's a excellent piece from Steve Williams, a poet new to me. The poem is from his chapbook Skin Stretched Around the Hollow. Steve lives in Portland, Oregon and is co-administrator of the Wild Poetry Forum, an on-line poetry workshop I visit frequently.


Tete-a-tete

Only she knows the name of that place
below the throat, above my chest:
skin stretched over speech, swallow,
breath. Velvet case of cantos
beneath, beard and wrinkles. Place
of creases, angles, altered trajectories,
pulsing pipes.

Her lips inherit that place, speak
oral history, language renewed
by vows unrecorded. Nameless
notes are composed here, penned
on staves of quiet cantatas,
diary entries - unwritten






May Sarton was an American poet and novelist born in Belgium. She died at the age of 80 in 1995, shortly after publication of her last book Coming Into Eighty She spent most of her last years living alone in a house by the sea in Maine.

This poem is from her last book.


December Moon

Before going to bed
After a fall of snow
I look out on the field
Shining there in the moonlight
So calm, untouched and white
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.

Hours later near dawn
When I look down again
The whole landscape has changed
The perfect surface gone
Crisscrossed and written on
Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.

Why did my dog not bark?
Why did I hear no sound
There on the snow-locked ground
In the tumultuous dark?

How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we'll never know
sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.






I had a pretty good writing week, so, unlike last week, I've got some new stuff of my own to post. Here's the first one.


almost, again

sometimes
I think
I'm really close
to the nut of it all
but it's a hard-shelled
truth
not easy to crack
and slick
like oil on ice
always slipping away
and I'm left
with the sour taste
of almost, again,
again
almost to the nut of it
all, still
circling
in the orbit
of almost
knowing
the nut of it all
and my time is running
out
and more and more
I think
the nut of it all
is not for me
to know







William Dickey was not among the most famous and popular of the poets of the1950s generation, but he was a beloved teacher for many years at San Francisco State University. He died in 1994 from AIDS-related illness.

This poem is from his last book, The Education of Desire


On The White Road

On the white road
in dust of summer
someone's arriving

apricots bend
from the wall garden
welcoming summer

someone's arriving
clothed only in light
his hands empty
his eyes full of islands
stoked by blue ocean
in the summer air

violent and singing
on the empty road
someone's arriving

the white light
cherishing his step
and his naked stare.







Regular contributor Alice Folkart is back with this wake up moment.


Blast

I wake up
because cat
wants me to,
seeing everything
his way:
black and white.

I raise the shade,
stretch,
yawn,
screwing my eyes
up tight.
Thinking of coffee.
What to do
today.

Deep breath
and open eyes -
a blast of
screaming red and yellow
lantana
outside my window
technicolors
my world.







Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the last of his generation of San Francisco beat poets, sees the last of many things all around.


Rough Song of Animals Dying

In a dream within a dream I dreamt a dream
of the reality of existance
inside the ultimate computer
which is the universe
in which the Arrow of Time
flies both ways
through bent space
In a dream within a dream I dreamt a dream
of all the animals dying
all animals everywhere
dying & dying
the wild animals the longhaired animals
winged animals feathered animals
clawed & scaled & furry animals
rutting & dying & dying

In a dream within a dream I dreamt a dream
of creatures everywhere dying out
in shrinking rain forests
in piney woods & high sierras
on shrinking prairies & tumbleweed mesas
captured beaten strapped starved & stunned
cornered & traded
species not meant to be nomadic
wandering rootless as man
In dream within a dream I dreamt a dream
of all the animals crying out
in their hidden places
in the still silent places left to them
slinking away & crawling about
through the last wild places
through the dense underbrush
the last Great Thickets
beyond the mountains
crisscrossed with switch backs
beyond the marshes
beyond the plains & fences
(the West won with barbed-wire machines)
in the high country
in the low country
crisscrossed with highways
In a dream within a dream I dreamt a dream
of how they feed & rut & run & hide
In a dream within a dream I saw
how the seals are beaten on the ice-fields
the soft white furry seals with eggshell skulls
the Great Green turtles beaten & eaten
exotic birds netted & caged & tethered
rare wild beasts & strange reptiles & weird woozoos
hunted down for zoos
by bearded black-marketeers
who afterwards ride around Singapore
in German limousines
In a dream within a dream I dreamt a dream
of the earth heating up & drying out
in the famous Greenhouse Effect
under its canopy of carbon dioxide
breathed out by a billion infernal combustion engines
mixed with the sweet smell of burning flesh
In dream within a dream I dreamt a dream
of animals calling to each other
in codes we never understand
The seal and steer cry out
in the same voice
as they are clubbed
in Chicago stockyards & Newfoundland snow fields
It is the same cry
The wounds never heal
in the commonweal of animals
We steal their lives
to feed our own
and with their lives
our dreams are sown
In a dream within a dream I dreamt a dream
of the daily scrimmage for existence
in the wind-up model of the universe
the spinning meat-wheel world
in which I was a fish who eats his tail
in which I was a claw upon a beach
in which I was a snake upon a tree
in which I ws a serpent's egg
a ying-yang yolk of good and evil
about to consume itself






Here's another piece of mine, written this week.


blink

listen
to the wind
it whispers
but it does not tell

**

gather
sand
castles
in repose

**

the sea
roars
at shell-white
beaches
takes tiny
bites
and spits them
back
with every
wave

**

moonlight
on green
meadows
seeps
to roots
below

**

the hawk
flies
but not for
pleasure
despite the grace
of its ascent

**

without
the sun
there would be
no shadows
to tell us
there is a sun-bright
day








Wiltshire returns with thoughts about poetry that draw huzzahs and hurrahs from many parts of the room, including this one.


Contemplating Poetry

A friend
well, an acquaintance....
okay,
someone whose name
I know
suggests Poetry (yes, with
a capital P) is due
for something new -
oh say can you
see?
Quite often no (you know?) so
he

wonders if a dose of
clarity
would make for less
disparity and dreams
of simple meaning
capable
of gleaning (or is it
more the feeling that
tends to leave
us reeling?)

I'm not really certain
we want to look
behind the curtain
or hear the true
life story (many
seem quite gory).
Though

I ask you....
does my Daddy
need
to be a Jew
(and a German too)
for me to
bleed
for or write
a sermon
on the holocaust?

And what cost
simple clarity,
that rarity?
In modern poetry
I doubt it would
bring parity.

As Frost knew long
ago, the downhill
race has not been
slow
(we've quickly
gone confessional, led
by the professionals)

And now we feel
some inhibition,
about toying with such
tradition.

In obscurity we find purity
and no one can dispute
the rules
when the words
do not compute
(just shrug and say
how cool)

No, better let
the big P muddle
along in its same
puddle. Imagine
the wrath of Plath
(Bishop aside) if
we turn the tide!
Still

I have to hail
the thought
of well-wrought
poems that play
(get bought)
at Yale
yet reach
and teach
in Peoria, too.

How about you?







These poems are from the book Voices of Light: Spiritual and Visionary poems by Women Around the World From Ancient Sumeria to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone


Izumi Shikibu (Lady Izumi) born near the end of the second millennium was a mid Heian period Japanese poet. Known for her scandalous affairs, her emotional poetry was a favorite in the imperial court.


From darkness
I go onto the road
of darkness.
Moon, shine on me from far
over the mountain edge.

*

Someone else
looked at the sky
with the same rapture
when the moon
crossed the dawn.

*

When you broke from me
I thought I let the thread
of my life break,
yet now, for you,
I don't want to die

*

Orange leaves are gone,
ripped away by cold night
and winter rain.
If only yesterday we'd gone
to see the mountains!

*

If you love me,
come. The road
I live on
is not forbidden
by impetuous gods.

*

On this winter night
my eyes are closed
with ice.
I wore out the darkness
until lazy dawn

*

Here in this world
I won't live
one minute more,
where pain is rank
like black bamboo.

(Translated by Willis Barnstone)


Chu Shu-Chen was a 12th century Chinese poet whose parents destroyed her poems upon her death. Only a few survived, mostly in the hands of her friends. This is one of the surviving poems, giving a hint of our loss.


Sorrow

The white moon gleams through scudding
clouds in the cold sky of the Ninth
Month. The frost weighs down the
Leaves and the branches bend low
Over the freezing water.
All alone I sit by my
Window. The crushing burden
Of the passing days never
Grows lighter for an instant.
I write poems, change and correct them,
and finally throw them away.
Gold chrysanthemums wither
Along the balcony. Hard
Cries of migrating storks fall
Heavily from the icy sky.
All alone by my window
Hidden in my empty room,
All alone, I burn incense,
And dream in the smoke, all alone.

(Translated by Kenneth Rexroth)


Mirabai was a female Hindu mystic poet who lived from the late 15th to the mid 16th centuries.


The night is painted red

The night is painted red
and I am ready,
dressed to get undressed.
This is my night
with the king.
The sheets are fresh.
My eyes have their dark coloring.
I am jasmine with its night aroma.
I'm so happy I go out
tossing gems to the hungry.
He has put on his beautiful
dark face.
I am happy
because now my wedding night
is eternity.
What hurt me is gone.
Don't worry, friend. I'm
lucky.
The Braj prince is mine
with his habit
of mountain holding and flute playing.
I don't have to go through
birth after birth.
He's taken me.

(Translated by Willis Barnstone and Usha Nilsson)







Here's a sexy little poem by a "Here and Now" first-timer who writes under the pen name Lilith. She says she is 27 years old and currently living in the United Kingdom. As to her real life, she says "when I'm not spending too much time on the internet or in dubious drinking establishments I earn a crust (just about) as a freelance graphic designer." She adds that she is "completely in love" with her black cat Don Juan. Lucky cat, some would say.


The Pillow Monument

A rapacious twist into the other body,
the counterweight
together we make the balance.
A final grunt, then a shift off
excuses made

then I, full up with your flowers,
fat on the kind of silky string
that comes with only the best packaged blooms,
the sort you like to give away to other lovers,
I roll back
luxuriate in past bedtime stories
physical enactments of tales
and
scrolling through the blue movie theatre of my mind
that charges a nominal admission for all afternoon

I slink down in to the shabby velvet of my seat and part the rose again.







Don't you ever wonder about those weird subject headings on your spam. Here's the third poem I wrote this week.


her cuzzart an chatom

what the hell
does that mean

an Apache war chant
maybe

or ancient Sumarian curse

Norse toast
to Odin
and the dominion of giants
or maybe a plea
to tiny Irish folk

Greek

is this something
Socrates might have
said to his students,
I think
therefore
someone else
has to pay for the
pizza

it's not Spanish
and it's not Russian
both of which I studied
or German where
I lived for a year
and drank a lot of beer
and listened to a lot
of beer garden German
and it's not
any of their linguistic
cousins because I would
recognize them in a minute,
especially with another beer

and it's probably not French
since it's pronounceable
as written
so I just don't know

I know it's not Nigerian
because I've had lots
of email from them
and it's nothing they've
ever said

I mean,
for crying out loud

her cuzzart an chatom

that's what it says,
right there on the email
subject line and I'm afraid
to open because I don't know
what it means, I don't know
what it is

a coded message
from terrorists,
worse,
a trick by Homeland Security
to catch me at something
but I don't know what
and send me to Cuba
for seventeen years
and I don't even like
camping out on the beach

her cuzzart an chatom

I'm so confused
and just don't know
what I'm supposed to do







In this poem, longtime New Yorker Poetry Editor Howard Moss talks about dry times. Those of us from Texas and the American Southwest, know such drought and the helplessness of parched and cracked earth he alludes to.


The Night Express

That moment we neared the reservoir
Dry wit dried up aware that water
Was no longer there for the taking. Hazel
And birch, those secret, solitary drinkers,
Were suddenly duplicated everywhere,
Even the ground consuming its portion.
The word on every lip was "parched."
Could the desert be a stone's throw away,
As so many people had guessed? In her bath,
The old lady down the road was appalled
To find herself knee-deep in rust,
This after years of limpid clearness,
Soap beautifully wrapped and scented -
It was better than a sojourn at a thousand spas.
The sodas of the spring, the dew
Knew they were doomed not to be, feather-
Bedders of a union that had seen its day.
And so moisture, morning mist, and streaks
Of rain became so valuable collectors
Held out cans especially designed
To catch every drop of cold sweat
Of the night express as it went roaring by.







From the book Making Callaloo - 25 Years of Black Literature, this piece by Kevin Young, a young poet born in Nebraska and educated at Brown and Harvard Universities. He now teaches writing at Emory University.


Cassius Clay by Basquiat

   1982, acrylic & oil paintstick on canvas

I'm pretty!
I shook up

the world! Clay shouts
to the announcer

after trouncing
Sonny Liston -

the next day he
will turn Ali.

Butterfly,
bee - none stung

or swole carpet-red
as the paint B covered

this canvas, drawing
blood - not even Cassius

called out his name
Refusing to recognize

Allah - like Terrell
or fool Floyd Patterson -

will get you a new haircut,
whether you want one

or not. How
he hounds

Liston, waving
his prize belt -

a noose for Sonny's ex-
con neck. Petty crook.

Ali just bout serves
time to himself

- title stripped
like paint

- Army taking away
his right to fight

when he won't fight
them Viet Cong

who've done him
nothing wrong.

Houston, we gots
a problem - will not

bow or stand
when his no-longer

name the Draft
Board calls, Lords

over Liston
- Get up, you bum!

- who will fall to phantom
punch 1st rd, forget

to get up. (Died,
Liston did, five

years later, in Vegas
the needle in

his arm, the neon.)
Ali, now he could hit you

into next year -
but apart from the flogging,
his flaunting, were the taunts
challenger heard ringing

Uncle Tom! Come on
Come on White America!

even above the ten count
& crowd - his undented smile -

that smarts still.







Now here's Alice Folkart again, trying something new, a little prose piece.


Through the Roof


Why did she do that herself? Maybe we were poor just then. Not too poor to go to the movies or eat dinner, but too poor to pay someone to re-shingle the roof. Or, maybe, she just wanted to see if she could. She was like that.

I must not have been there that day, because seeing my mother up on the roof would have scared me, I would have run off to a friend's house to play so I wouldn't have to see her all mashed and dead in the ivy.

My father probably took the picture from the apartment over the garage. He wasn't about to climb up on any roof, but he would make sure there were pictures. He was in the movie business.

Her butt's to the camera, she's stooped on a steep, shingled down-slope. A clumsy ladder leans against the house and bundles of shingles, a big, black bucket of tar, rags, hammers and saws are scattered on the flattish roof of the kitchen.

Must have been hot. She's in shorts. Mt. Lee, with its HOLLYWOOD sign rises in the distance nearly obscured by summer smog, and the feathery top of a Washingtonia palm, probably a block away, pokes up over the roof ridge like the Afro hair of a Zamboangan native sneaking up on her.

On this side, our house is separated from the Zurvel's by an oil-stained concrete driveway edged with tall oleander bushes. Those little white dots against the dark leaves are the flowers. Poisonous. You could kill yourself by picking even one and not washing your hands before eating a peanut butter sandwich.

I never did.







This is, I think, my fifth of the week.


at just dark


birds unfurl
from trees
black flag
swirling
flailing
cloud of dark
rising

**

end of shift
nurses
green scrubs
soft shoes
circle
at Starbucks
complain
in secret voices
of doctors
and patients
and extended
hours


**

car lights
lined
on the Loop
one after another
three abreast
in both directions
on this side
those who work
in the east
and live in the west
and on the other
side
the reverse
such is
the state
of our affairs

**

"_ood fo_d"

"ch_ap"

blinking
neon sign
incomplete
message
casting
green shadows
on the cracked sidewalk
in front of the diner
at 5th and Grand
three old men
at the counter
for a meal
fit to meet
their meager
pensions
every night
here
then as morning
breaks
breakfast
too
and
sometimes
when they're riding high
lunch
don't care
about the broken
sign
quit seeing the sign
years ago

regulars

**

whores
don't walk the streets
in this neighborhood
but a little later
when it's not so early
they'll all be at the bar
and in the back booth
over at San Miguel's
across from the barber shop
just a phone call
and a cab ride away
mostly young
mostly pretty
the black tar
of too-many tricks
just a small spot
inside
not yet spread
to their
eyes

**

hard clunk
of a heavy switch
thrown
in San Pedro
Park
tennis court
island
shines
against
dark tide
advancing

**

Millie Sands
afraid
of the dark
hurries
to give Bixbie
his walk
before shadows
converge
yanks
hard his leash
as he stops to check
his mail
at Robinsons' oak

**

ambulance
passes on Callahan
fast
siren screeching
like five o'clock
whistle
common
sound this time
of day as
commuters
on the Loop
maneuver for
advantage
still
sets the dogs
to yowling







And now a couple more of her "first family" stories from Cyra S. Dumitru.


Cain and Abel's Sister

I have grown beyond anger,
searching for threads that lead me
past grief and loss to some belonging.

I am nameless; my brothers are famous.
Cain spoke of remembering life in the garden.
It has been for me to remember him and Abel,

the anguish of my parents.
I found Cain beside Abel, holding his cold hand.
Death lingering like a new mist.

When I saw the rock bright with blood
I feared stepping closer.
Cain always spoke loudest with his hands.

Words piled up in him like rocks in a river.
Outrage would finally break through.
Regret, its swirling currents, followed later.

Abel was full of song and laughter.
He loved how summer sank deep into his skin,
the soft bleating of newborn sheep.

Cain hungered fro such easy joy, yet held himself apart,
more comfortable with shadows than light
when we gathered round the fire

to talk, argue, stir the great clay pot.
I would join him sometimes and eat quietly.
He'd smile at me with distant eyes.

I have thought about this as the world has unfolded -
for some of us, life is a broken wheel
and the pieces so scattered

the path can never be made smooth.
Cain and I decided together to bury Abel.
We couldn't let our parents see him,

his face smashed beyond knowing.
We found a place near the best grazing meadows
and fruit trees blooming.

Our hands dug with help of a broken rock.
Our digging took us well past sunset.
In the gentle light of moon

we gave Abel the rich ground
buried him as one might plant a giant flower bulb,
carefully patting the earth above him.

At dawn we returned to the cave
our hands dark from dirt.
Cain fell to his knees before telling,

led them to the grave site.
Mother silent until seeing the fruit trees.
Then she began shrieking, hurling fallen apples.

Father finally roused, stilled her arms, gathered
her to him. I did not notice Cain walk away.
He simple vanished into warming air.

He was not there to help me bury our parents.
By then, I was a mother, just beginning
to grasp how grief burrows into bone.

As I mend my children's coverings
I glance into shadows
see again his restless eyes.

Perhaps you do not need to know my name,
you can choose one for me or keep me faceless.
I am everyone who witnesses, remembers,

who loves regardless of the terrible.
I am she whose hands need to carry
a bowl of warm soup into uneasy darkness.


Lamenting the Death of Eve

A strange silence woke me just before dawn.
I went to collect water in hollowed gourds
watching as sky brimmed

with changing light,
I kept listening for you -
your voice singing

every morning from the same hilltop.
As the quiet continued unsung
some impulse led me here

to find you
encircled by white stones
on Grandfather's grave.

As I held you
I traced deep curve of muscles
in old arms

that still smelled of firewood
and smoke, arms that once held me
and spoke about strength.

I am leaving this morning,
a panther preys upon my sheep.
I will track it, taste its blood

wear its skin unless it shreds mine first.
Tucked among my arrows
is the small stone

you held in your hand
when I found you,
a greeting

to the warmth of a new sun.
I hear you singing as I too step
alone into unknown light.





Painting by Blas Hernandez Jr. and Rita Ramos


Audre Lorde finds it hard to sleep in the middle of life, even at 1 AM


The Electric Slide Boogie

New Year's Day 1:16 AM
and my body is weary beyond
time to withdraw and rest
ample room allowed me in everyone's head
but community calls
right over the threshold
drums beating through the walls
children playing their truck dramas
under the collapsible coat rack
in the narrow hallway outside my room

The TV lounge next door is wide open
it is midnight in Idaho
and the throb   easy   subtle   spin
of the electric slide boogie
step-stepping
around the corner of the parlor
past the sweet clink
of dining room glasses
and the edged aroma of slightly overdone
dutch-apple pie
all laced together
with the rich dark laughter
of Gloria
and her higher-octave sisters

How hard it is to sleep
in the middle of life.

(January 3, 1992)







Another one I wrote this week.


the horror

they've changed
everything

this place
where
for ten years
I've written my
poems

they've prettified

they've gentrified

the crappy
chairs are gone
and the wobbly tables
and the dingy walls
with holes where paintings
were hung then taken down

gone

now
my god
it's like some kind
of dark paneled
fancy-dan
fern bar

I'm loud
down
and gritty
rude
crude
lewd
and naked
angel
tattooed

my god,
how can I write
in this environment

the horror

oh,
the
horror







Now, Jack Kerouac, from his book Mexico City Blues, writes on Charley Parker's death.


239th Chorus

Charley Parker Looked like Buddha
Charley Parker, who recently died
Laughing at a juggler on the TV
after weeks of strain and sickness,
was called the Perfect Musician.
And his expression on his face
was as clam, beautiful, and profound
As the image of the Buddha
Represented in the East, the lidded eyes,
The expression that says "All is Well"
- This was what Charley Parker
Said when he played, All is Well.
You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning
Like a hermit's joy, or like
                    the perfect cry
Of some wild gang at a jam session
"Wail, Wop" - Charley burst
His lungs to reach the speed
Of what the speedsters wanted
And what they wanted
Was his Eternal Slowdown.
A great musician and a great
                  creator of forms
That ultimately find expression
In mores and what have you.







Finally, a poem for Dora upon her completion of 30 years of exemplary service (exemplary, it says so, right there on the proclamation from the Governor and the Legislature) to the children and youth of Texas.

Not much of a poem, but good advice.


advice to my wife upon her retirement

you were successful in your work
for all those years
because, like all successful people,
you were oriented toward outcome,
always keeping your eye on
where you needed to be
and what you needed to accomplish

now you start a different life,
a life that is first
for you,
with room for others
only as you choose
them

in this different life
it is process that should give
direction - most
important now
how you live your life,
not what you do with it

a puzzle's joy now
is in the solving
not in the solution

a garden's purpose now
in the planting
not in the reaping

in everything,
doing
not completing







Time sometimes runs away from me and I forget to notice that the calendar is some days or weeks ahead of. Today, it almost escaped me that next week is the second Friday of April, meaning it's Poetry Table night here at Casa Chiapas. We would like to have more people at the table and invite all in the San Antonio area to join us to read, listen, all of the above, none of the above, as you wish. It's the most relaxed poetry event in town, guaranteed. So come sit with us, 7:30, next Friday, April, 13th, at Casa Chiapas, 926 South Alamo (about half a block down from Rosarios).

That being the end of it for today, I offer my thanks and appreciation to all who contributed to this issue and to our reading pleasure. All material reproduced in this issue of "Here and Now" remains the sole property of its creators.

Adios.
1 Comments:
at 9:57 PM Anonymous Anonymous said...

cuzzart is french in origin.pretty funny though.

sean cuzzart
scuzzart@yahoo.com
louisville,ky

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