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And-Ah One And-Ah Two
Friday, August 01, 2008 III.8.1. So here we are, August 1st. My grandfather's name was August and he was, I'm told, a very nice man. The month of August, however, is the pit of the pits. The only good thing about August 1st is it signals the likelihood of only two more months of summer. And even that's far from assured. Well, August is what August is and the weather is what the weather is and I can't do anything about either, so, setting my pitiful whining aside, let's move on. The line up for "Here and Now" for this week is: From my library Dennis Tourbin David St. John Margaret Atwood G.E. Patterson Charles Bukowski Czeslaw Milosz Travis Watkins Gladys Cardiff Francisco X. Alarcon Deborah Garrison Friends of "Here and Now" Dan Cuddy James Hutchings Alice Folkart Jim Fowler Shawn Nacona Stroud And my own contributions as well.  My first poem this week is by Dennis Tourbin, from his book In Hitler's Window published in 1991 by The Tellem Press of Ottawa. Tourbin, born in 1946, was a poet, painter, performance artist, novelist and art and poetry-magazine publisher. He was active in the artist-run centers network since the early days; he was a founding member of the Niagara Artists' Center and ran Gallery 101 in Ottawa, in addition to having been Chairman of the Board of Artspace in Peterborough. He is said to have been a key part of the development of the lively regional art scene since the seventies. Dennis Tourbin died in 1998. Electro Knokke In the dark night the glow of pink neon cuts through the flash of a car's headlights. In the distance - the vast Atlantic Ocean appears. Huge ships, like cities inch along the horizon; the slow passage of light and time. The cold North Atlantic... I imagined young men, soldiers, landing on this beach years ago. I imagined their bodies washing ashore, their ghosts...their voices whispering, whispering as the water hit the shore. I imagined those last few moments the bitter cold of the water and the sand and the sharp snap of bullets through the dense flesh A slow movement into an eternity so foreign, so strange, each step a mystery; the waves washing away all evidence with each deep breath of the ocean. The blood just a small reminder, a certain remembrance of some forgotten dream. The flash of chrome sparkling in the mirror glass mirror. The main street, an abattoir, a new discovery; the disappearing landscape, metal hurtling through space, the blur of colour in the distance, a fire shooting from every window. In time I will hold burning diamonds in the palm of my hand. White flames dancing, reaching, for the distance in the violent sky.  Looking through the newspaper the other day, I found some interesting stories. national report New Hampshire storms carve swath of death, destruction God is blamed, along with newly elected politicians and Greek sailors on leave - God makes no comment, newly elected politicians unleash swaths of meaningless politigoop, Greek sailors' comment only one word, "what?" after lengthy discussion among themselves in a foreign language which a panel of experts said, when consulted, might be Greek Arizona community college shooting injures 3 incident blamed on God, newly elected members of the Arizona House of Prevaricators, and Albanian parachutists - all refused comment except the ghost of Barry Goldwater who, when consulted, said "go away!" Alaska bear attack leaves woman in bad shape close associates report woman bent in at least three places, also suffering bad case of bear breath hangover District of Columbia US Airways fires pilot whose gun discharged pilot fires back Louisiana river oil spill cleanup could take weeks if not months, or possibly years - former governor Edwin Edwards reports from his cell in the Louisiana Federal Correctional Facility for Former Big Shots that he could fix it all in hours if everyone in Louisiana would send him three dollars and forty-seven cents District of Columbia foreign AIDS aid legislation approved former Senator Jesse Helms signals approval from his grave, as long as, the recently deceased Senator adds, none of the money goes to queers. California Charges against Marine dismissed after court martial panel determined that the killing of the two Syrians, was provoked by their wearing of long beards, open toed sandals, and otherwise appearing Arabic Elsewhere in the Universe President George W. Bush assured by the Vice-President and Karl Rove that his swing would improve with just a little more practice, returned to his game of golf, handing off the nuclear "football" to Jenna in the interim so she'd have something to play with while on honeymoon  David St. John was born in Fresno, California, in 1949, and educated at California State University, Fresno, where he received his B.A. In 1974, he received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He is the author of six books of poetry, including Prism, Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems, No Heaven, and Hush. His awards include the Discover/The Nation prize, the James D. Phelan Prize, and the prix de Rome fellowship in literature. He has also received several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. St. John currently teaches in the English Department at University of Southern California, Los Angeles. My poem from him this week is from Study for the World's Body published in 1994 by HarperCollins. The Avenues Some nights when you're off Painting in you studio above the laundromat, I get bored about two or three A.M. and go out walking down one of the avenues Until I can see along some desolate side street The glare of an all-night cafeteria. I sit at the counter, In front of those glass racks with the long, Narrow mirrors tilted above them like every French bedroom you've ever read About. I stare at all those lonely pies, Homely wedges lifted From their moons. The charred crusts and limp Meringues reflected so shamelessly - Their shapely fruits and creams all spilling From the flat pyramids, the isosceles spokes Of dough. This late at night, So few souls left In the place, even the cheesecake Looks a little blue. With my sour coffee, I wander back out, past a sullen boy In leather beneath the whining neon, Along those streets we used to walk at night, Those endless shops of spells: the love philtres And lotions, 20th century voodoo. Once, Over your bath, I poured One called Mystery of the Spies, Orange powders sizzling all around your hips. Tonight, I'll drink alone as these streets haze To a pale grey. I know you're out somewhere - Walking the avenues, shadowboxing the rising Smoke as the trucks leave their alleys and loading Chutes - looking for breakfast, or a little peace.  Here's a longish poem from "Here and Now" friend Dan Cuddy. Dan posted this on the Blueline Forum in three parts over the course of three days. I was sold on the poem from the very first post. Painting What would I paint if I painted? Rooms? No, my wife likes to paint rooms, and she sculpts them too with furniture, pictures, flowers. There is an art to decorating a room. Would I paint doors? How many shades of white or black or red or green or, God help us, gray, could I paint a door? I would have to be a minimalist. I am not Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella doors? Okay for art museums, but not a house. Would I paint a rectangular canvas in the great tradition? I can't draw more than stick figures. My trees would be blotches, not leaves of green, the clouds would be a film like on glass, and they wouldn't alter shape or meaning like a Rorschach spot. No, I'd paint what I paint and that is words. Green greets with its enthusiastic "grrr", it latches on, it stretches your arm with its long ee's and since it is so fertile with its "n" that sounds like "and" green n yellow are so mellow ah, yes, green is such an affirmation unless it gets stuck in bread or puts its "in" to envy but green is usually healthy, wealthy, wise? Green is too fertile with red. Oh, RED, she is a Venezuelan senorita, hot-to-trot, rrreddd tight skirt, a tube of lovely flesh, tight that rredd, frilly lace at the ankles, breasts a-popping, Grreenn can't stop dancing pressing herrrr tight, that Spanish rose breath, ooooh, the sweat dropping off grrrreen leaves, the grrreen light flashing "Go", the stalks rising, the tendrils reaching, the dollars as green as grass and as numerous, oh Mr. Green how flamboyantly thorns and all, you hold that Rose! She has dark eyes, like beetles, but sweet as raisins oh, and her body is heat, oh, Mr. Green you are in a hothouse now, the smoooth petals of Miss Rrreddd, how like a jungle your mind Mister Green, all vine and concupiscence, a monkey chattering on top of a palm, and in the palm of her hand you are a little preying mantis seeking just a leeetle kiss, oh, what passion in the Garden of Eden, Miss Red eyes like evening clouds, and the drapery hiding those secrets, what does she think? Is her affection innocent and pink, or is she after blood, red, red blood, and will Mr. Green be blue? Bleh,bleh,blue sobbing,weeping unmanly, so off he hid like the day's sky in a storm, oh peeking maybe now and then but Green turned turquoise first, like a pool when he watched and reflected on the bikini'd Red sashaying cheek to cheek over to the rich purple dude, who was all plum proud of his royal self, and Miz Red, like a carpet, lay down at his feet and he, robed with ego, tread on Red, and she moaned like a grape squeezed to wine, while blue was just an afternoon shadow, a far distant sea blanching like the ocean in sunlight, and then with the shadows of his thought turning steely blue, gray blue, a civil war of sorts waged within. Should he fight the rich purple, who had an inherently violet personality? Mr. Blue, for that now was truly his name, a horse of a different color, and collared. The Red one, like a sunset said goodbye without looking back, and purple enfolded her as they walked hip to hip. lip to lip to a secluded spot on the strand where they blended as one in the post-dusk, and blue, like a flake of battleship paint, dropped off and out of the evening, returned to his room, a bedspread monochrome in misery, a clarinet note twiddling sorrow for that was his toy now, not joy like the night before, when green and red made everything 3-D. Everything popped out and took one's eye then with Love's illusion, but now disillusion, the world was a cold blue iceberg broken off and alone in the sea. The horizon hopefully for Blue's veins ached not to go back to the heart but fall away over Iguassu Falls, and pour like a mouthwash, or a liquid cleaner, so unnatural the vivid blue, a pool in a lagoon, a drip over rock, so enervating was love lost, Paradise a pair of dice, the game lost. Now I'm blue for making Mr. Blue shut himself up in his room and stuck in the letter "u". He crawls, climbs to get out but slides down again, bruising, a deeper shade of blue naturally, knees and arms, and the tender heart grown cold. However, Night is only a shadow of Day, and so I turn around and there is light, all spiffy, fluffy, sweet. Miss Yellow walked by Blue's window, danced on his wall, warmed him in his bed, and up he popped, enamored with Miss Yellow's innocent smile. Oh, that sunny disposition, that daffodil of a girl, that jonquil of a fresh bloom, a new start like an inviting egg! Miss Yellow turned Blue Green again, just like the olde days, a field of ambition, a harvest of love, and the two, green and yellow, wrapped their warmth around each other, impressed the morning like Monet, and shimmered and shimmied like Van Gogh. I love painting words, giving the world a happy ending, striking bells, stroking fur, streaking light into the darkest corners, filling the sacs of "d" or "g" or "p" with a gentle touch, a pastel that rubs the self-imposed holes in the alphabet with substance, not emptiness, no, substance, and how I sit eating an orange, the pulp of reality in a color, and I feel happy with the letter "See". Oh, Miss Red may be considered a loose thread, but she's in bed with Purple and like fuchsia she hangs out in resorts, not unhappy, and I, who am not Mr. Blue, still admire, the weave and cleave of such a color, that still excites on the dance room floor. I sometimes turn purple with passion, like a passage in a poem or Faulkner in his overwrought prose. I don't paint by the numbers, but by the hour. I am an opportunist depending on the way the light shines and the letters hook themselves into words, birds of a chirping alphabet.  The next poem is from Two-Headed Poems, a collecttion by Margaret Atwood published in 1978 by Simon and Schuster. Atwood, born 1939 in Ottawa, began writing when she was six years old and has since become a prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, feminist and activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice. She is the second of three children and. due to her father's ongoing research in forest entomology, spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec and back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was 11 years old. In the fall of 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately-printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard University for 2 years. She has taught at the University of British Columbia, Sir George Williams University in Montreal, the University of Alberta, York University in Toronto, and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English. She is a very committed activist on feminist and environmental issues. Two Miles Away Two miles away, the humid weekend jerks in thin lights along the highway, bumper to bumper, groups and separates at the corner store, which could be anywhere. But this is the hinterland: layer of grass, layer of lukewarm dirt, layer of stones, layer of winter. Oblongs of earth, edged with fences; in the middle of each, two sleepers. Night rises from their bodies and spreads over the hills, musty, smelling of thunder; the air around their heads thickens with ancestors. This is the land of hope fulfilled, this is a desert; like deserts it is nocturnal and planted with bones Outside this house, the hammock weaves one tree to another. For once there is no wind. Sandbox in moonlight, the glimmer of shadowy toys, the green shovel the cracked white pail, the red star. In the turned furrows, around our bed, wild carrots, pinkish-mauve and stealthy, creep over the rug, the cleared space, and invasion of savage flowers reclaiming their lost territory. Is this where I want to be, is this who I want to be with, half of a pair, half of a custom, nose against neck, knee thrown over the soft groin, part of this ancient habit, part of this net, this comfort, this redblack night, humility of the sleeping body, web of blood.  James Hutchings has been with us before. He's 58 and says he has been a truck driver for a while. Jim says he started writing poetry when he was in school, where he played in garage bands and wrote the songs. He feels it was a natural progression for him from song writing to poetry. Metered Dance when the house lights dim through the strobe flash their faces seem comical like a vintage movie scene I try to watch my fingers skittering the fret board but only see every other chord almost becoming confused and losing the beat my voice high above the clamor and crowd this salutation caught in mid flight a black and white fury in a psychedelic world as the floor is lit I look not at their eyes staring above them at some fixed sight I announce the next song and feedback the mike embarrassedly starting the lead in riff red blue and purple the stage hues glow sending a fervency across this wild swinging bunch someone says she's here I strain to catch glimpse of the dark haired orphic that comes to hear me sing in the back standing swaying to the sound her long hair magic I am God tonight....... if it ain't rock and roll it ain't got soul and if it ain't got soul it's dead...  Poet, critic, and translator G. E. Patterson grew up along the Mississippi River and was educated in the mid-South, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the western United States. His collections of poetry include the recently released To and From and his first book, Tug, winner of the Minnesota Book Award, published in 1999, by Greywolf Press, and source of the poem below. His work has also appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and his awards include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. After living in the Northeast and on the West Coast. He now makes his home in Minnesota, where he teaches. Fever In the town where I lived when I was small As soon as the snow melted they would come The acrobats,the strong men and the half-tamed Lions, their fur the color of my mother's skin Girls who could dance on point on trotting horses Inside a ring of curved wood painted yellow Women with small beards pointed as a goat's And rubber-men who had been born in India Who could walk on the hands, stand on their heads Wrap their feet around their necks with such ease You'd start to scream and clap before they finished Walking off stage on legs that had no bones Hardly able to believe they were human And everything you might imagine possible From the distance of a three-dollar seat You could watch the dancers twirl gracefully Watch the red-coated, black-hatted man snap A loud leather whip at the fierce and gentle Lions, their mouths opened wide as your own Bare and barrel-chested men raised their arms To show you they didn't sweat lifting things Much heavier than you would ever be White-faced clowns with broad red smiles and yarn wigs Every color of the rainbow but red Would ram their small cars into one another Would make water spurt from bright plastic flowers Would bump bellies and honk horns and fall down While you laughed, moaned and stuffed yourself with candy You would not eat again until next year And the night after you would spin in bed Foreseeable restless, curling, uncurling Imitating the strange aerialists The thin, tight-clothed heroes of the high wire Tucking and soaring, kicking you legs fiercely In the darkness, perhaps kicking you mother If she had come too close and felt the fever That burned through you every year in the spring.  With a hurricane coming onto the Texas coast a while ago, weather was a big topic of discussion. This is the first of several poems I wrote that week on a weather theme. dear god Hurricane Dolly is coming in from the Gulf, headed straight toward Brownsville, 300 miles south of here she's a small storm, barely a hurricane, too small to do significant damage down there, but large enough to push some good rain up here it's a tricky game we play every dry summer, praying, dear God, if you're not going to give us rain any other way, please send us a hurricane, either a small one or one that hits land on the unpopulated coast between Port Mansfield and Riviera Beach we'd prefer you didn't kill anyone, God, but we'd be happy to sacrifice a few cows for a good soaking rain to green our grass and recharge our aquifer but we'll leave the details up to You  It's been a while since I've used a poem by Charles Bukowski, which is a little strange since he is one of my all-time favorites. In as much as I have a poetic model, Bukowski became mine when I read in a poem he wrote at Christmas for a prison inmate lines to the effect that his goal as a writer was to write the way he liked to read. It is the best advice to a writer I've ever read, advice I have tried very hard to follow every since. Anyway, there's often a lot of pretentiousness in poetry and the grittiness of of Bukowski and his straight-ahead, no-holds-barred honesty about himself and everyone around him, including, often, the literary establishment of his time, is a huge relief. This poem is from The Pleasures of the Damned, Poems: 1951-1993, probably the most complete of the many collections of his work published in the years after his death, including a number of poems from the very end of his life, as he continued to write knowing his end was near. The irony of this dark poem is that Bukowski's greatest financial success was just ahead, not from his poetry but from movie rights to several of his novels, peaking during the years of his physical decline. the tragedy of the leaves I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead, the potted plants yellow as corn; my woman was gone and the empty bottles like bled corpses surrounded me with their uselessness; the sun was still good, though, and my landlady's note cracked in fine and undemanding yellowness; what was needed now was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more; I shaved carefully with an old razor the man who had once been young and said to have genius; but that's the tragedy of the leaves, the dead ferns, the dead plants; and I walked into a dark hall where the landlady stood execrating and final, sending me to hell, waving her fat, sweaty arms and screaming screaming for rent because the world had failed us both.  Now here's a elegant little piece from our friend Alice Folkart as she continues to find her place in her new home in Hawaii. Alice notes that a poem, unlike a novel or the instructions for putting together a bicycle, can be written in very small chunks of time, in odd places. She says often "works" on her poems when paddling her yellow kayak in Kailua bay or walking through a coconut grove in a tropical downpour. She likes her words, she says, with a salty tang and a fresh breeze. Isabella Isabella is only five, but looks older, wiser, maybe it's the hula discipline, or maybe it's because her proud grandpa, her guardian, is the crooner in the Hawaiian band on Friday nights at Honey's in Ko'olau. Isabella, round as a mouse, regards me seriously with her black-olive eyes, sizing me up, checking me out. She brings her white plush cat and her pink Barbie pocket book over to my table, and stands and waits. "Do you want to learn hula?" she asks. Isabella is willing to teach me if I am serious and listen carefully. She leads me to a shadowed corner, away from the stage lights and the bar. We stand, facing each other, honoring each other, she extends her arms straight ahead, all business, points one foot in front of her and nods to me. "Dance," she whispers as she begins to sway, turns her head this way and that following her lightly waving arms and hands with her bright eyes. She glides left, then right. She says, "Good. You can dance." I am trying, stumbling in the wrong direction, arms up instead of down, lacking humility, aware of the other patrons' eyes on us, thinking about my drink getting warm. She whispers cues in Hawaiian, her home language. I don't know what they mean, but follow. This was a lesson I needed, and she knew it. Such a perfect little teacher, such an old student.  Czeslaw Milosz was born on 1911 in Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire as a result of the 18th-century Partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Throughout his life, Milosz emphasized his identity with the multiethnic Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a stance that led to ongoing controversies. He refused to categorically identify himself as either a Pole or a Lithuanian. He once said of himself: "I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian." Milosz immigrated to the United States in 1960 and from 1961 to 1978 was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and continued to write until 2004 when he died. These poems was taken from Selected Poems, 1931-2004, a collection of his poems from through his writing life. One is from early in his career, the other later. Encounter We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive. Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture. O my love, where are they, where are they going - The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder Wilno, 1936 In Common What is good? Garlic. A leg of lamb on a spit. Wine with a view of boats rocking in a cove. A starry sky in August. A rest on a mountain peak. What is good? After a long drive water in a pool and a sauna. Lovemaking and falling asleep, embraced, your legs touching hers. Mist in the morning, translucent, announcing a sunny day. I am submerged in everything that is common to us, the living. Experiencing the earth for them, in my flesh. Walking past the vague outline of skyscrapers? anti-temples? In valleys of beautiful, though poisoned , rivers.  Here's another of my weather week poems. hello Dolly the eye of the storm, not as clearly defined as when still offshore, is north of Brownsville, around the Port Mansfield area further up the coast the outer rings extend south well into Mexico, while, in the north, they are just past Corpus Christi the whole area, as far west as Laredo, will receive a foot or more of rain which will stand for days on the flat coastal plains as rain gets into the western hill country around Uvalde, water draining into the Nueces River will take it over its banks as it approaches first, Choke Canyon Reservoir, then Lake Corpus Christi, both low now from lack of rain, they will serve their intended purpose of controlling flood waters and storing water for drier days Falcon Lake on the Rio Grande will do the same, backed up by the series of levees that will drain any excess released by Falcon Dam directly into the Gulf near Arroyo City (i remember a much stronger hurricane in the early sixties that landed directly on the mouth of the Rio Grande near Brownsville, then followed the river all the way to the Big Bend, dropping massive rain all along the way, leaving levees sandbagged and full less than a mile from my house - nothing close to that will happen this time) here in San Antonio it was very still early this morning and there was a smell of Gulf salt water, blown away by wind gusts since, and now we wait under a dark-clouded sky, wind gusts alternating with moments of complete still, for the inch to two inches of rain we hope to get out of the storm; we don't wish trouble on others, but we do know that, as in all life, for every loser there is usually a winner and, as we hope for the safety of friends and family to the south, we also hope that their misfortune will bring the to us the fortune of much-needed rain  As a 6 foot 4 inch 300 pound former Division 1 football star, Travis Watkins, winner of the National College Language Association Award for poetry, doesn't seem to fit the image of a stereotypical Spoken Word Poet. Watkins spent 4 years as a starter and 2 year team captain of the University of Kansas football team, where he was honored as a finalist for the District V Academic All-American Team, before graduating with honors in U.S. History and African American Studies in 2005. "While attending university, he also managed to find time to volunteer as a mentor to "at-risk" youth at VanGo Mobile Arts, while making a name for himself as a dynamic up and coming performance poet. The next poem is from Watkins' first book, My Fear is 4 U, published in 2006 by Layman Lyric Productions. I Can't Call It I said, Hey, what's up man? Rent, interest, crude oil and inflation Unemployment, poverty and black incarceration Pollution, destitution and deforestation Church membership....and church molestation. But beside that I'm cool man, How you man? I said I'm cool too man, but what's really going down? He said police batons on anything that's brown. Young soldiers in Iraq and anything profound Funding for education, and judgment that's sound. But beside that I'm cool man, How you man? I said, I'm cool too man, but tell me how you livin'. He said day to day off the scraps that I've been given. Check to check, break my neck just to cop'a pot to piss in. Tell it all to the wall, when you all wouldn't listen. But beside that I'm cool man, How you man? I said I'm cool to man but damn... What's really good? He said... I can't tell it. Spring '04  Here's a witty piece from another friend, Jim Fowler. Jim lives in Massachusetts, has eight grand kids. He says he wants to retire, write poetry, garden, play tennis, cook and write some more poetry. Beelzebub's Journey In the Midwestern town of West Fargo, the winter winds shook a dark cargo, Beelzebub and his red wagon. It was headed East with the Devil's beast, a green komodo dragon. It wasn't only strange thing the Devil did bring on this trip to a far-away coven. A medusa so big, it's arms wrapped the rig. It was the dark king's terrible omen. The coven cheered and clapped, for the dragon had napped, after eating the medusa from Hades. And didn't bite, with all of his might, the coven's tender Goth ladies.  Born in 1942, Gladys Cardiff is related to the Owl family of the Eastern Cherokees of North Carolina. Born in Montana, she moved to Washington and attended the University of Washington. She has participated in the Poets-in-the-Schools program. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and her first book, a chapbook, To Frighten a Storm won the 1976 Washington State governor's Award for a first book of poetry. Her most recent book is A Bare Unpainted Table published in 1999. This poem is from Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry published in 1988. Tsa'lagi Council Tree This is a story my father told me when I was a little girl. Hilahi',long ago, before the whites, hilahi'yu, long, long ago in buckskin days, the old men and women of the people met at the place of the Principal Wood. The elders held council, some sitting in the branches of this u'tanu ata'ya. They smoked the old tobacco in a whitestone pipe. The pipe had seven bores, one for each. They spoke of many mysteries and matters of law words that were pleasing to all who heard them. Here, trails from every direction met. Tsa'nadiska, they say the rustling leaves sang green enchantments, red and yellow songs, reminding always to honor ela e'ladi, the earth below, the place of roots. Now we burn the wood of oak trees, and do not believe that bugle weed will necessarily make our children eloquent. But this is what the old man said to him when he was a boy, hilahi', hilahiyu, long ago.  Now, the last of the hurricane poems. (Until the next one.) rainy day thursday for a while it looked like the city's rain shield was holding strong as the streets stayed dry despite the smell of rain and skies the color of pencil lead and swirling winds and a tornado watch for the city and thirteen surrounding counties, but the clouds finally broke open and the rain started and sitting here at Ruta Maya i can look out on the street and watch the rain fall and puddles form and splash as cars and buses push through them, carrying people to where they have to go while i enjoy the pleasure of not having to go anywhere but right here right now and for some reason i think back nearly fifty years to when i worked college summers on a power line construction crew and we were pulled from our construction project of the day to do a repair job out in the country near the Rio Grande where a small tornado had blown down several trees and one of our poles, taking the line and a transformer down with it - we sat in the truck, watching the rain come down in sheets, pounding like Indian drums on the crew cab, while we waited for radio confirmation that the line was dead, one of many safety procedures followed on the job, all easy to remember as all safety training was conducted by one-armed former linemen who had lost a pole-top encounter with a live line they assumed was dead - we worked in the rain that afternoon the linemen up on the new pole while me and the other grunts worked on the ground digging anchor holes and watching for rattlesnakes often washed up out of their nests in this kind of rain - the rain splashing down on Soledad Street offers a more restrained type of age appropriate excitement  Speaking of love poems, I have these very passionate poems by Francisco X. Alarcon from his book De Amor Oscuro, published by Moving Parts Press. The poems in the book are in Spanish with translations to English by Francisco Aregon. Alarcon is a poet and educator, author of ten volumes of poetry and recipient of 1993 American Book Award, the 1993 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize. In April 2002 he received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association. He was one of the three finalists nominated for the state poet laureate of California. Alarcon was also awarded the 1997 Pura Belpre Honor Award by the American Library Association and the National Parenting Publications Gold Medal. He also received 2002 Pura Belpre Honor Award, Danforth and Fulbright fellowships, 1998 Carlos Pellicer-Robert Frost Poetry Honor Award by the Third Binational Border Poetry Contest, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Alarcon's poems are number titled. I there has never been a sun for this love, like a crazed flower it buds in the dark, is at once a crown of thorns and a garland of spring around the temples a fire, a wound, the bitterest fruit, but also a breeze and water-source, a bite to the soul - your breath, a treetrunk in the current - your chest make me walk over turbid waters, be the ax that breaks this lock, the dew that weeps from trees it I become mute kissing your thighs it's that my heart is eagerly searching your flesh for a new dawning My Spanish is limited to nonexistent, but I enjoy the music of the language and can tell that this poem, as is often the case, reads better in Spanish than in English. So, rather than post another poem in another English translation, I decided, for the pleasure of Spanish-speaking readers, to post this same poem in its original Spanish. 1 para este amor nunca ha habido sol, como loca flor, en lo oscuro brota, es, a la vez, corona de espinas y guirnalda de primavera en la sien fuego, herida y amarguisimo fruto, pero tambien brisa y manantial, una mordida al alma: tu aliento, un tronco en la corriente: tu pecho hazma caminar sobre el agua turbia, se el hacha que rompa este candado, el rocio que haga llorar los arboles si mudo quedo al besar tus muslos es que mi corazon con afan busca entre tu carne un nuevo amanecer  Next, from "Here and Now' friend Shawn Nacona Stroud is a poem that previously appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Mississippi Crow Magazine. Other work by Shawn has appeared in the Crescent Moon Journal, Loch Raven Review, The Poetry Worm, and, frequently, right here in "Here and Now." His work has also appeared in the poetry anthologies Poetry Pages Vol. IV and Poetry From The Darkside Vol. 2 and was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize for 2008. Shadows Each evening our shadows escape, the sun lowers, and they steal away under the cover of night. I have seen mine in those last moments, elongated, trailing along behind me. Then I turn around, and he is gone. He unfastened the Velcro that connects us hands and feet, and slipped off down the street. I came upon them, one midnight walk in South Beach. Leaving the world of neon and pastel hotels behind me - I stepped off the bike path, my feet sinking in white sand, and saw them all congregated with their own kind. They pretended to be us as they walked along the beach. Two sat on the steps of the lifeguard shack smoking, and I saw shadows bobbing like corks in the ocean. I walked towards the waters edge, and felt myself fading as I slowly became one of them.  Deborah Garrison was born in 1965 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For fifteen years, she worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker and is now the poetry editor Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books. She lives with her husband and three children in Montclair, New Jersey. My poem this week is from Garrison's first book, A Working Girl Can't Win, first published in 1998. Single and living in New York City when she wrote her first book, she is now married and the mother of three children. Her recently released second book, A Second Child, speaks to those new experiences. The Warning I found out, by accident, about something you'd done to your wife, soon to be ex. You raged at me, said of a lot of things you didn't mean, like "All men are shits. Women just have to deal with it." I said, "This isn't the worst crime mankind has been know to commit." You told me if I ever breathed a word - as though I would! You wouldn't remember, but you were a glamorous figure, the beleaguered young father, telling me at the coffee machine that we twenty-four-year-olds had no idea... You were only thirty-six. But that was old to me then. Once you told me about your tenth anniversary: walking home from dinner together, you'd reflected that the marriage was dead. didn't like each other one bit, or so you said you'd said. I remember telling my husband about it in bed. What was he trying to prove? he asked. I wondered, too, but you stayed in my head - baring the tarnished honors of your sexual rank to instruct me, and the picture of you and her not holding hands, discussing your mutual dislike like a savings bond you'd cash if things got worse. It was the kind of uncalled-for honesty that's nearly antisocial, but momentarily seems the only thing that's real - you, fuck the rest of them who never say what they feel. A critique of conversation between men and women a token of adult respect: you couldn't know how I clung to it, replaying it mentally on our anniversaries, silently thanking you when it wasn't true of us yet.  Enough sunshine and happiness, here's the last for the week, a darker piece I wrote last week. travel voucher the couple at the next table are talking to a travel agent about a cruise - they're about my age and it's clear she's more enthusiast than he - it sounds a lot like the cruise we had talked about, leaving from England, then traveling around the Mediterranean, visiting along the way in Italy, Sicily, Spain and Gibraltar - it sounds like a great trip and we're still talking but the more we talk the more i think about all the places in this country we've never been, New England in autumn, the great lakes, those big sky states on the northern border Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, even the plains states Kansas, Iowa, all that flat land and silos against the sun and wide horizons (at one point a much younger me had a sponsor for the University of Iowa writing program, but fed up with GI Bill poverty, i passed, a drive through Iowa would be a chance to see some of what i missed.) and how much of it we could see at our own time and pace with the same money as nine days on a boat would cost, but it's not about money, it's about coming to that time in your life when you realize you have more money than time and that you'll probably die with money left over but no time in the bank and you realize that age may not bring wisdom but for certain a whole new set of priorities arrives as you see your own time line shortening and the hole they've been digging for you since your moment of birth yawning wider and darker every new day  That's it for this week. Hope to see everybody back here at the ol' poetry ranch next week. Until then, remember, all of the work presented on this blog remains the property of its creators; the blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz. |
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