From East To West: Bicoastal Verse, Spring '08

from east to west: bicoastal verse

Table of Contents: p. 3 p. 10 p. 15 p. 35 p. 44 p. 52

Given to Poetry – Nancy Henry, art by Ruth Robertson 299 word novels – davidbdale Meter & Form – various poets the doppelganger heart – Barton Smock Geraniums Waiting – Marita O’Neill, photography by Laurie Haines Contributors

edited by PJ Nights and Ray Sweatman cover art “Sunflowers!” by Ruth Robertson all works © 2008 by each individual poet and artist

2

poetry by Nancy Henry, art by Ruth Robertson Anniversary You give your left eye a rest and open your right one. I say you look like Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot. I wonder how much a person can drink and not die. I remember the psychic I went to see when I first knew I loved you. She put down the devil card. This devil, she said, is whiskey. This man is a good man, she said, but he is trying to kill himself the best way he knows how. I know you see the desktop folder labeled “Daily Writing”, in which I am not writing daily. I wonder if you find this touching, or pathetic. You never say, but you notice when I take the notebook in my lap, bring me some coffee and my felt-tip pen. You see the little pieces I carve out of myself with my doubt, self-loathing and shame. You may wonder how much a woman can wear herself away with worry and still be solid enough to hold. We try each day to save each other the best way we know how. I don’t think either one regrets our choices, even now.

3

Nancy Henry/Ruth Robertson Division, 1969 I was in third grade when the Blacks ruined the schools, and Mrs. Mitchell was my teacher. Mrs. Mitchell lived in Colored Town two houses down from our maid. When she read picture books, she could do all the voices. Her smile made us want to try hard. Mrs. Mitchell hugged me, which was against our rules: Black people are dirty, and they smell bad, and they can give you scabies. I hugged Mrs. Mitchell back, and she smelled like new Crayolas and fresh string beans. One morning I cut three of Daddy’s roses and took them to school in my Deputy Dawg lunchbox. One was red, one was yellow, and the third one was a Rose of Peace. It was like a little sunrise she told me when she put them in the green Coke bottle on her desk. That night I got a spanking for cutting Daddy's roses for That Black Woman, and the next week, I went to the new white school started up by nice white parents to save their children. My mother said I was not learning my multiplication; that I was forced to sit with little black girls who could not behave. I am forty five. I have forgotten multiplication. Of third grade, I remember only Mrs. Mitchell and how much I cried; how many Mitchells were in the phone book and how I finally gave up trying to find her.

4

Nancy Henry/Ruth Robertson ESL Born in Somalia, he calls me “madam” without irony. First class I ask him to memorize fifty irregular verbs. He returns to carefully recite five hundred. In this town, the mayor once told the Somalis to stop coming; stop sucking up the welfare. My student has six children, and a father who remains in Dedaab’s sprawling city of sticks and sand. Ten years he drove on other roads carting UN personnel around the steamy, teeming camps; Kenya, where his people fled the warlords for a meager peace, and several yards each of plastic sheeting for a home. Necessity made him a clerk, translating Arabic, French, Swahili and by and by he added English to this box of tools-rough, functional, to build a road for his people in exile. When he came to this cold place he rented a taxi, learned three cities in a week and how to drive in snow. I ask each student what program they hope to pursue in college. “Leadership” he tells us, shyly, but with conviction.

5

Nancy Henry/Ruth Robertson Fields of Study He’s thinking “botany”, she’s thinking “geology” Already they’re in trouble. She’s certain her passion can move a mountain and he is it. He’s thinking she’s a vine, crafty tendrils snaking into all his crevices looking for a foothold. Of course he’s wrong, and when she slips her grip from the steepest ledge she bounces right back like the magnificent catamount she is, shrugs off his dust, and moves along. He realizes his mistake too late, and, rooted to the earth, he’ll stand there crumbling for another hundred million years.

6

Nancy Henry/Ruth Robertson Bacchanalia 1979 That spring at Bacchanalia, I was aflame with wine and estrogen and ready for anything, just two years from my fumble with a neighbor boy, his backyard pool, the seductive lie beginning chlorine kills the sperm. It was your slender neck and maybe just that I was drunk and stoned and eighteen. I probably never would have kissed a girl in all my life if you had not staggered into my arms, some frat-boy's weekend visitor, all eager to commence my initiation. I said no. I said my boyfriend. Falling to the grass, you smelled like powder and lilacs all mixed with the pungent musk of pot which was everywhere. Over and over I said how soft you were. How soft you were. Knees and hips and shoulders and places I wonder if any boy ever lingered long enough to marvel at as I did, so soft I never felt a softer thing until I held my newborn daughter at my breast and stroked her head with one careful finger on a morning ten years from that one night a girl I never saw again whispered, that's just right, just right, see how you know just what to do?

7

Nancy Henry/Ruth Robertson Ikebana I'm sure I'm giving more thought to your penis than is seemly for my age of woman; considering its tender floral color and the petal texture of your skin there where it blooms so undeniably between your thighs. How can I not notice this? We've just made love; you are sitting naked in my hand-carved cherry chair, playing solitaire, I lean in close to nuzzle the fresh-bread smell of your bald head. There is this orchid in your lap and we both know I want to take it in my mouth just as we both know you want to play this hand and later have a nap; as much as I know a woman cannot write a love poem to this private manly thing, calling it a lilac spray, a ripely fragrant fruit from Indonesia --a name that's now escaped my mind and tongue, but there is no point in looking up the name because this isn't done. Still we smile together knowing in our private garden it is all romance-the tea, the cards, the words we make together and apart, the ways we tangle arms and legs and tongues to make a net, a nest for love-to catch and hold this tempest crop of passion fruit we once, not long ago, thought far past blossoming and ripening for us.

8

Nancy Henry Another fine night given to poetry The kid mopping up this laundromat is getting on my nerves, swiping that mop by my feet, hip hop radio up real loud, educating me on the bitches and the baby daddies and pimps and chronic and fine big cars, doing his best to let me know I'm the last one here, and if I'd get my baggy unhip clothes out of the dryer he’d lock the doors and get his bitch and smoke some chronic of his own or at least get something at the drive through. I'm not moving one damn inch, until I get the last five minutes out of my fist-full of quarters, and I’m not leaving here without a poem. He looks about my daughter’s age, this kid who hates me more and more with each revolution of the large-capacity, industrial dryer that costs 3.75 for twenty minutes on high. Going round and round are my good towels, thrown down beneath my overflowing toilet by my college girl come home. Come home to make my toilet overflow, to throw my life into an uproar and stuff my towels all sopping with contagion into a big bag where they’ve been fermenting in the closet atop my leather shoes for days. I’m three months into four months off from teaching nights I said I'd give to poetry, which I’ve given up instead to a hysterectomy, and a daughter who is taking a semester off to find her own direction; deciding if she should major in drama, her major, truth be told, since birth. So this night I'm giving to terrycloth and urine and exasperation at a lovely undecided child who left the milk out all day long to make room for Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boys and left my favorite cheese unwrapped to become an inedible, pickle-flavored husk. I am left to ponder what to do when my beautiful size-6 daughter leaves her thong underneath MY bed where she is NOT supposed to be entertaining guests while I am at work, or sleeping naked or borrowing my clothes, the ones she loves, because, she says, they are so baggy. A thong, I think, is a useful thing for an enterprising menopausal mom to use in sling-shotting squirrels off the feeder and rabbits off the new lettuce, or holding up the muffler discreetly so I can pass inspection just one more time now that the car is paid for, or tying back my hair while I wash half a dozen loathsome moldering towels, as I am doing, tapping my foot to tales of bitches and chronic and mayhem involving big shiny guns. The owner of this thong is at a party where she is explaining that her mother is a chronic bitch. In one month I go back to teaching school. This was my sabbatical. There is a poem in this. Please explain. Use both sides of the paper if necessary.

9

by davidbdale Teabag in the Astrodome You’re not picking up. Of the million simple explanations for your unanswered phone, I decide you no longer exist. I wonder, in fact, if you – if any of us – ever existed. There’s so much space within us, so little stuff, were more like wind. Particles hopelessly small, unbridgeable the distance between them, the whole thin cobweb-in-vapor so nearly intangible, it’s a wonder we feel anything at all. So how do you hurt me so easily? Walk into the Astrodome with a teabag in your pocket. Boil a spoon of water while you’re there and walk back out. The tea you leave behind is about right for the likes of us. You’re probably shopping or walking the dog or taking a nap with the covers pulled up and the phone disconnected. I miss that. Or do you know it's me calling and you just don’t want to have The Conversation again? What happens when we touch? Is that skin I feel? Or do forces along your outer edge repel my outermost atoms and bend my fingertip like a rubber glove that pops back out when I pull away; and is that bending the shape of your reluctance? It’s no surprise we have to slap each other to get a reaction. Exactly how close do I have to get to the woman I love before you dissolve into ether flecked with motes of dust? Already if I gaze on you too long or too near, or for that matter question your behavior, the parts of you I recognize vanish. An inch too close, a mile too far, and we cease to be. I promise if you answer the phone I will never question what makes us want to share the same rooms. Hi. It’s me. Just wanted to hear your voice.

10

davidbdale Pity She stands seven feet tall or taller when she stands, to his scant five-and-ahalf, but she will never stand again. Felled by the foul murder of her only child, she will bear him now forever mother eternal across the sawhorses of her monumental marble legs. It is and will be as it was designed: her shoulders, arms and legs too large by half for the fragile head, tilted with pity over his slight frame, that little husk, from which the folds of a winding sheet stream like polished water. Her head, his knees, his falling hair fit within the pyramid of its conception, not a line uncurved, the whole so wrong it seems inevitable, in form so elemental the statue has become an emotion. There are so few, and one of them is marble. She is more complicated than we who have not mothered the divine. The stonecutter may have known her. Only he or water running over stone for fifteen hundred years could seduce a slab into a shape so smooth and troubling. Back broken he hacked her from the pedestal. Half blind he gouged her eyes from the block. Seeing with his hands he learned her as he shaped her with his fingertips polished her with his breath. The son he could not be, but the grieving mother sick unto death yet pitying yet awestruck yet mindless of herself was melodrama he could find a place in, again childless, spouseless always, parent nonetheless to sacred monstrosities hung in public places, despised, revered and ridiculed, except that he was mindful of his place within the place as she was never, and carved his name into the sash where she went nameless, fragile he, fragile like the wind that drives the sand that cuts the marble from the mountain.

11

davidbdale Little Worm My daughter Magda is four years old and a frightening specimen. I’m running out of preschools that will take her. We can’t tell when she’s kidding, they tell me, It scares us. I know: you need an example. Yesterday in the grocery store, darling little Magda, riding in the shopping cart, waved a cucumber at the checkout girl and said, Hey, Daddy, what does this look like? I don’t know how she knows what it looks like, but she has access to books. They had to give her a library card when she completed her own application. And found a typo. She’s doing a play for preschool called My Garden. They’ve cast her as The Worm. She asked me to contribute a poem and here’s what I wrote: A little worm is born with me. He eats me as I go. And everything I think I learn, The worm already knows. My life’s discreet; I eat no meat; The cows die anyway. The worms all gather, in apocalyptic weather, And make a last meal of the one that got away. I fall in love, which makes them laugh. My lover dies before me. I make the world a better place; My neighbors all abhor me. Then I got stuck. Magda said she could finish it for me. Tonight, backstage, I overheard her talking to her teacher who already looked appalled. Mommy died, she told the poor woman, But Daddy was acquitted. She was adorable in her little worm costume, under the spotlights as always, out on that other stage. I heard my poem read aloud, then this: The worm's is not an easy life. She lives on human fatality. She chews on bone and drinks our tears, And crawls through the marrow with a Certain, if inconvenient, undeniable vitality.

12

davidbdale Circle the World The girl who circled the world traveled sometimes by water, sometimes by wind, arrived always lightly carrying nothing but what she knew, departed again when she had delivered it all. If they were wrong, the lessons she taught, she taught wrong lessons well. Once she arrived with a boy and left with a man, but mostly she left the men behind; more often than not she outran them. The minute she knew what a man was about, or a country, she wanted to test what she'd learned on the next one. She broke the hearts of several civilizations, but not mine. Startlingly blond she was, and short and strong, with reflective eyes that picked up their color from whatever she was near. Her voice, too, sang the music of her newest neighborhood, but rang with deep echoes of everywhere she'd been. Her passport might have been issued by Earth. I met her in Kamakura. She'd just arrived from Kingston; the English she had learned to organize a Jamaican mango cooperative she was now teaching to Japanese businessmen at the Literary Museum night school. De one bud in de hand beats de two bud in de bush, she taught them. I thought she was an idiot. But six months later, I had to flee to keep from being the one who was left behind. Neither I nor cellophane-thin Japan could have kept her. We didn't offer enough surprise. She didn't travel to discover that home is where the heart is; she didn't travel to discover anything at all. The one time we've seen each other since, accidentally, on the continent, I told her she travels like a bee spreading pollen. I thought she might sting me. Instead I got that smile that makes me wish I could keep her interested.

13

davidbdale Shapes in the Blue We were twelve and stupid, American kids living in America, lying on our backs at recess. You like that? We lay on our backs side by side in the sun, in the grass, full of youth, looking for shapes in the clouds. There. I saw elephants; you saw dengue fever. Sounds unlikely, I know, but you made a good case for it. You made me see dengue fever in the clouds. I said I saw conspiracy but I couldn’t convince you. You were busy finding shapes in the blue. That scared me. Nobody even looks at the blue. Do you remember this? Or was this some other girl I made love to at recess? Feel the grass, it’ll come back. Here. Let me give you your pill. Careful, swallow. Napkin. I hadn’t touched you. Recess was nearly over and I hadn’t found the nerve. As if I knew the bell was about to ring, I reached out to start myself up and found my hand full on your thigh and remembering it now I’m back there still half-risen, your thigh in my hand like a trout from the creek, school bell clangalangalanging in my ears and knowing I’d never keep up with a girl who sees shapes in the blue. When I’m falling, I hold it like a handrail. I wish you could tell me your version. They’re here for your bath; we’ll finish this later. I’ve never left that scene is what I’m trying to tell you, sweetheart. You never stopped being the girl I hadn’t touched. I know I don’t say anything right the first time but something might take shape between the words if I say enough words. No, go. I’ll just keep talking. You lie in your bath and listen and look at the sky.

14

poetic forms by various poets Sestina It drives you crazy to write a sestina. First off, in order to write a sestina you need six end-words that don’t shout, “Sestina!” One should hide the fact that it’s a sestina you’re writing. I mean, why holler “Sestina!” if you don’t have to? Why give the sestina game away right away? For a sestina needs to be a subtle thing. A sestina should lead readers away from the sestina, make them think, “This is no kind of sestina, it’s a sixteener, maybe, no sestina sustaining itself on sestets. Sestina indeed! I don’t believe it. A sestina doesn’t announce itself, “I’m a sestina, no less! I live on end-words, a sestina to end sestinas! I’m a sustainer of sounds, echoes of a choral Sistiner bouncing off Michaelangelo sixteen or so ways from Rome to Nome.” A fine sestina that would be. Thirty-nine lines of sestina mumbling into the reader’s ear, “Sestina, sestina, sestina.” Who could sustain a poem like that for so long? A sestina ought perhaps to read more like a sonetto rispetto than like what it is. Sestina end-words are teleutons, and a sestina should tell you tons about what a sestina is all about. Certainly, a sestina is about disguise, subtlety, sestina reticence, reluctance to be sestina-

15

meter & form like. Rather, it ought to be a soul-stainer, nuanced, a mind-mellower. A sestina ought not to be the thing, just the sustainer of thingness in the memory. Sestina is teleutonals, not end-words. Sestina is an earful of sense, not a sestina ending in a coda that says sestina, repeating end-words, sestina, sestina, sestina, and a final time, sestina! ~Wesli Court

16

meter & form Paravaledellentine: A Paradelle For Glen Come to me with your warning sounds of the tender seas. Come to me with your warning sounds of the tender seas. Move me the way the seas’ warm sea will spend me. Move me the way the seas’ warm sea will; spend me. Move your sea-warm come to me; will with me; spend tender sounds, warning me the way of the seas, the seas. Tongues sharp as two wind-whipped trees will question. Tongues sharp as two wind-whipped trees will question. (Skin or nerve waiting and heart will answer. Skin or nerve waiting and heart will answer). Question will answer two tongues and, or will: heart sharp as nerve trees; waiting, skin-whipped wind. Brim your simple hand over where the skin is. Brim your simple hand over where the skin is. Wish again, whenever hair and breath come closer. Wish again, whenever hair and breath come closer. Closer, again, whenever; brim where your skin is; hair, wish and breath over the simple hand, come. Spend come warning me, whenever simple sounds will, will; move your question. Answer your heart-sharp tender sea-warm will with me. Way of the seas, the seas! Where skin-whipped nerve trees wind over waiting tongues, brim closer to me. Again the skin, as wish, and two of the breath, hand and hair, or come, is. ~Annie Finch, from her book, “Calendars”

17

meter & form (tanka) having rolled a heavy driftwood log up from the shore the elderly woman turns to face the sun...and sits

Tibetan turquoise now I own this mala worn smooth by constant thumbing of ancient mantras ~Kirsty Karkow

18

meter & form an existentialist ghazal The soot from English factories, a part of evolution, where white moths were picked from tree trunks first, the start of evolution. She had her own white wings, la petite ange, listened to daddy and God – later realized this counterpart of evolution. The blackguards of the families could better evade the birds; the numbers turned to renegades, streetsmart of evolution. We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact, says Sartre of evolution. She redressed in blackwings of the moth, a leather miniskirt painted her mouth a crimson zero, tart of evolution. We must act out passion before we feel it (Jean-Paul again) she did with tongues and lacy yelps, the dart of evolution. Jean kept eyes and mind on her sweet privacies, lest madness of society upset the applecart of evolution. ~ PJ Nights, previously published in “Verse Libre Quarterly”

19

meter & form Dearly Departed (villanelle) New blood trails a red line through the snow. The gaze of crows, the axe head in the lake: I know some things I do not want to know. Torn up ground where he struck the first blow: A deer sniffs at dead leaves, caked in new blood, trails the red line through the snow to the West, to a hut built lean and low that houses root and rot and all the dreck I know. Some things I do not want to know, like what's to come when life's glow fades. Do we seed the leaves and grow back new? Blood trails a red line through the snow. I sight the deer and draw back on my bow. His legs, like cut rope, fall slack. I knew some things I did not want to know, and now I know one more. The slow rise of dawn creeps in. The sun makes new blood trails, red lines through the snow. I do not do not do not want to know. ~Graeme Mullen

20

meter & form pantoum 1 If only wings could fly you with blood-tender tinglings across undeniable oceans' thew. Could fly you transubstantiate across undeniable oceans. Thew and revenge musculature; exculpate, transubstantiate each tear. And revenge muscualture. Exculpate fear. Each tear and revenge, musculature. Exculpate fear by bite, by rip, by cunt bait. And revenge: musculature. Exculpate what necrolustful ravages bear. By bite, by rip, by cunt bait we dare. What necrolustful ravages we bear down graves wherein musked hunger. We dare toss. Wave. Weft death à Dieu va down graves wherein musked hunger drowns not fitful self. Appeasement. toss. Wave. Weft death à Dieu va. My love, cum; though terror drowns not fitful self appeasement, we swim through devil bone my love. Come, though terror, defy scissable flesh. Alone,

21

meter & form we swim through devil bone to drown by dream-meet. Defy scissable flesh. Alone we would cleat to drown by dream-meet. With blood-tender tinglings we would cleat. If only wings. ~AnnMarie Eldon

22

meter & form I Watched Thee (cyhydedd hir) Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot To strongly, wrongly, vainly, love thee still. ~Lord Byron After my shampoo, I ran a comb through, snagged my billet-doux and galloped out doors to the bookshop where I could eavesdrop on her. Under pop-culture rags sprout Basho, Keats and Ted ‘twas this stuff she read, their bargain-bin bed excavated text by tome for words like raucous jaybirds, songs wise or absurd. Tessellated by her voice, the puzzle gelled. Lust unmuzzled, I wished to nuzzle her shoulder, but dared not emote. I’d brought the love note with its Byron quote instead, bolder in ink than swagger. My try to snag her (my need to shag her) was put to shame— neglect to include a fly check, not shrewd! My leading man clued her to my game. ~ PJ Nights, previously published in “PW Review”

23

meter & form Pinky (sonnet) A steady surge of wind and woolly flake Overnight have turned the harbor white, And Pinky out hauling his traps all night Half tight on coffee brandy and Cutty Sark, Scratching his balls, a mouth full of chew Dreaming about which waitress to screw At the topless doughnut shop in Portland; Cursing every mother's son on the radio, A stained chin from spitting in a head wind, Set there indefinitely: a five o'clock shadow. Sometimes, in hip boots and foul-weather gear, He'd bring his catch in and barter at the bar. You're only as good as your last catch! He'd say And try to pick up some women from away. ~K. A. Markee

24

meter & form

She almost got it…

(villanelle)

Your tone, dear, brings to mind a deftly arched back straining for perfection, pushing comfort out. There you are taking on injustice like a smack. I don't understand what it is you lack – what the moan subdividing's all about. Your tone, dear, brings to mind a deftly arched back. It's true – a subtle grace of sorts accompanies your act though you get there by a rather circuitous route. There you are taking on injustice like a smack. I don't know how to minimize what's felt like an attack – what you've told me makes you need to wretch & shout. Your tone, dear, brings to mind a deftly arched back. I'd just as soon move you through bright light to black – somewhere you can honestly deal with that pout. There you are taking on injustice like a smack. Your story seems a jumble of little, bitter facts – menacing anger – vengefulness no doubt. Your tone, dear, brings to mind a deftly arched back. There you are taking on injustice like a smack.

~Lisa Gordon

25

meter & form

The Empress Card (new version of a sonnet) Earth pours the wet, quick scimitars Past my warm fingers and solid knees; My feet, rooted till my crown grew stars; My breasts, branching from budding trees. The power of the Earth engenders me Seeded with moons like avatars, Till I branch out through sceptred bars In the folds where grain, sky, and body fan. Draped robes redden patiently. Raising the heads of tickling wheat, The sparkled texture of the loom That moves itself into a plan Behind my throne, we sit and eat. ~Annie Finch, previously published in “Court Green”

26

meter & form Your favorite day (hexaduad) four cloves foxgloves single note water song leaves lounging listless strong sunbeam breakers shaping forms faced and grounded in ancient earth traced by last month's rain dust eddies drain boundary layer air spread thin enough to flare at the ends pinned down as clouds grinned ~Neil C. Leach, Jr.

27

meter & form (haiku)

wildflowers wilting in my grasp . . . no mail today ~ clearing skies a crow selects worms from the grass ~ a run-down shanty with an open door. . . the sickly cough ~ summer haze sifting through the hardwoods countless bird songs ~ all in black is it a ninja striding down my road at dusk? ~Kirsty Karkow

28

meter & form until Castro buys me dancing shoes (décima de las jineteras) "I won’t repent", Siboney said, for la música can't stop wars in the heaven of conquistadors. Dance the night through in mamey red; if a bull sees me, I am dead. Men choose from breasts in a row curbside. Las jineteras will provide all the love that money can buy. On timbale wings, their street feet fly muchachas from the countryside. I left my abuela the day I bled. No ration cards, I wanted more to buy things from the dollar store. Dance the night through in woman’s red; lie for him on the softest bed. "Salsa for the revolution, then you’ll need no absolution." But with the money love can buy, on timbale wings, our street feet fly far away from retribution. From my seawall, no tears are shed. Sadness drops from the poet’s pen; guitarras dulces say amen. Dance the night through in mamey red; if caught once more, I'd best be dead.

29

meter & form "Choose me" - I trill my small bird's song, 'me muero por ti' all night long for choices tourist cash can buy On timbale wings, my street feet fly to a punto guajiro dawn. ~PJ Nights, previously published in “La Rosa Blanca”

30

meter & form Spring Comes to the City (sonnet) Rising from the courtyard early Children's voices light and sweet 'Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen...' Older brothers jostle a football in the street. At noon the sky is white as pearl The Polish girls in blue with yellow hair smoke cigarettes beside the new forsythia, A patient dozes in a wheelchair. Sunset comes in violet and tender green. The evening star begins to shine. A small girl on a scooter circles like a pink bird in flight. The cool of the night. ~ Grace Andreacchi

31

meter & form Columbian Ode Strophe. When Columbia broke up in the skies over the western states February the first, 2003, everyone watched the tape Loop repeatedly. We sat in the web spun by the spider once More, as often we’d done since the defunct century flushed itself Down historical tubes: maybe we knew nothing would come to pass After all in our dim consciousness. What happens when we expect Something, usually? Not much. It’s the bad joke of the Laughing God Who will wait while the Earth spins in the dark spaces between his toes Till the moment we least look for any tragedy. Then he hits Hard. We think that we’ve grown harder than nails, shields that surround our souls! What a joke! We are knocked flat on our broad backs and discover once More how vulnerable Man is to Fate’s blows. We are fragile still. Antistrophe. No song is sung or elegy spoken as Great sorrow settles over a tragedy, Falls into chasms opened into Misery. How shall we find our mourning’s True voice in keening, hopeless despair, or in Wounds newly suffered  coins to be squandered on Grief governed not by thought but feelings? Time is required for grief to ripen Into melody, into sorrow’s music. Epode. Into melody, into sorrow’s music There will quietly steal another lyric After all of the requiems have ended, After most of the mourners have departed. It will be but a bar or two of heartbeat Just at first, but a murmur in the bloodstream Building finally to a constant drumming Running through the aortas to the fingers, To the toe-tips and belly. It will be like

32

meter & form Springtime touching the edges of a frozen Mountain rivulet which, in its descending Over gradients of downland, brings renewal To the valleys below. The world begins to Stir again and the eyes begin to open Onto vapors arising over waters Lying under the glimmering of daylight. ~Wesli Court

33

meter & form Spell: Ballad of Helen Adam Helen was a ballad singer (heavy as the moon). Night moved over her and killed the sun. It smothered her words to a guttering wick. Nothing answered but the slivered moon. Spell her a low song (heavy as the sun). Her roots moved into the earth far down. It smoothed her with an Anubis rune. Her voice was blood, and blood still runs. She is buried in the milky sea between the coldest water's bones. Deep rock shakes from dusty words. Helen Adam’s voice is done. ~Annie Finch, previously published in “Natural Bridge”

34

by Barton Smock

when the men are sick close your notebook of animals. place a dead crow on a swing, keep pace the pendulum. grant the tin man his claim on rust. nails at rest on new wood, pick them up. use leaves like the wind. scribble over blank lots. understand; cars die. morning your body is that of a horse. the town black as a doctor’s bag.

35

Barton Smock quittance the hat he came in with but not the water it held. it’s a magic we can drink to how one disappears down the gullet of a city. no wind, so sway with belief. a late light stumbles itself on. the tip of a closed umbrella lifts a long dress.

36

Barton Smock the dying they shrug I say to the mouse keep digging. look at these claws it says and also often times the dirt will loosen for something to do. I give the mouse a small shovel and remind it; it is not important that you know my brother. that years ago from the center of town he threw a ball in the direction of this graveyard and it ain’t yet come down. the mouse looks up and probably shakes its head. to be honest I can’t tell much from up here. I sort my little tools and hope I’m right about the sound the earth makes.

37

Barton Smock it’s here I imagine the feet of what scurries in my skull. oh I’m gone like the crack from a bat. like summer. like one more drink before quitting time, before the moon rolls up and the mouse leans that shovel like he ain’t gonna die like he ain’t a mouse.

38

Barton Smock top hat days for your neck, in the morning, I am lucky. presently, coffee. and a pushed open door. sugar on the paw of a neighbor’s cat. my arm, its little cast. problems big as mice and the wheel, regardless, we use. our health far away, rain on the roof of a dollhouse. our day, the length of nineteen-twenty-seven, our evening the foot of a black rabbit.

39

Barton Smock hotel gone man, smoking, on a balcony. custody papers, awarding heat. necktie, loosened like a plug from a fan. bulbs, break. eyes, flicker. body, idle, probably dead. so drain, someone says, the swimming pool. detective, in blood stiffened collar, drifting, seed, through a maid losing a cart to a stairwell. redrawn bathrooms where mirrors down the doppelganger heart. majesty, yours, catching a train. keeping it. an urgent blue movie loving volume the volume of muted children sleeping on cash. minor music of mangled hangers, oh maybe a maestro but instead a maker of keyholes. sir, she calls me. the screwdriver’s shadow reappears. some kid, yawning, makes off with the number on my door.

40

Barton Smock descendant from the house above the lake the boy has come for his red ball. he picks up a stick puts it down and picks up another. nothing will do. I myself with these long fingers could probably make a difference. but I have him falling the little splash of his mother’s wine glass and the stages of her nakedness shifting with each stair as she flees the flickering party I have been watching from my place by the lake the lights in each window like buttons in an elevator I want very much to press.

41

Barton Smock alliance from her mouth a wasp ventures out and then back in. I do not wake her but I do pull the blanket to her waist. in the morning there is milk by the door. sleeps on the deep die of it that once would press her against a curtain into the person behind it.

42

Barton Smock transit we are walking on cold stones with enough writing on them. my daughter and I. she has two bruises from the sky, yesterday. I’m holding my wife’s head on my hip. every mile or so, I trade it for the school book my daughter has. there are questions, but they take a long time to reach me. when we get there, are we going to tell them? are you coming? I think of my two cloudless sons on the day of their fading. say to myself how quick you are, you with your mother’s body.

43

poetry by Marita O’Neill, photography by Laurie Haines Naming Sliding on its side, just missing my bare feet, the boy’s bike flashed red, spraying the air with a gravel fan as the wheels flattened a patch of swaying cord grass at the Back Bay’s watery edge. Hey! Breaking my reverie, he wiped a line of dirt from under his nose and into the rogue wave of brown hair that sagged so far over his eyes he almost sat on me, headless of my hiding place. What’s that bird called? Uninvited as he was into the shallow shadow I found below a cherry tree, I let him creep in closer so we could both better see, almost motionless, the bird leaning, its sleek black beak and masked yellow eyes poised, poking at a silver thread below the water’s surface. Shocking white—blossoms in first bloom— feathers floated into the wind like pedals; I imagined it was for the boy, like me, almost unbearable this distance between us, not to touch, to know. Snowy Egret, I told him, and he whispered it again, making it part of his own body, leaning against the tree, snowy egret. Naming it, the way we were once named in the milky universe of our mother’s womb, or named somewhere even before time, named so that we could be called, placed amongst, insufferably, remarkably bound to each other.

44

Marita O’Neill/Laurie Haines Lessons from Imperial China It is the not knowing that wakes me at night, shakes me out of the dream: a dark mountain, rumbling molten words in its belly; scattered, I sleepwalk into the next room, asking, what did I come here for? water? a pencil? to understand the presence of God? In the dream, it was my job to make sense of the words, create metaphors from the hollows of that mountain’s belly. Like the canary lowered on a string, swinging in its cage, I’m just a city kid with clipped wings, no flashlight, a sky full of fear, waiting in the expanse of that mountain for some clear answers. They never come. And the dream gives no indications, no disconnection notice that the time’s running out. Shi Huangdi, criminal emperor of imperial China, buried himself with 8,000 terra cotta warriors, each face a detailed replica of the living army he left behind, so he could be protected, conquer the battlefields of death’s insomnia, have someone attend to his tea. When my mother died, all I could give her was a dry kiss for her forehead, caked with makeup. Maybe she traded it for something useful to the dead or pinned it to her blouse to remember. And what do we do with the cold press of death left on our lips? What kind of preparation is there for life? And what if after so many words, the word itself doesn’t survive, Vallejo asked. Yet words are all I have: marching like statuary across the blank pages of sleeplessness and doubt, moving like armies from the grave.

45

Marita O’Neill/Laurie Haines Evidence of Light Remembering the Frank Family’s last day, Hanna Schroeder is certain of the table— it was set for lunch. It was she who had to let them in, walk with them to the third floor, watch them pull back the bookcase that hid the door. No! Eric Schuler is emphatic, It was not that late in the day. As their friend, he remembers the morning light streaking in on the east side of the room, the table not yet set for lunch. What does this matter now this table prepared, this evidence of light like the shadow of a star in the night sky? ** Only yesterday were the sandbags discovered. Thousands were filled by American soldiers: ancient Babylon shattered by time and wind into chips of bowls, cups, pieces of road and brick now carelessly mixed with sand. I imagine 3,700 years ago a woman washing that bowl, handing it to her boy, who stood on his toes to reach her hands. On the low table, he arranged them—the cups they washed that morning still glistening with the cold waters of the Tigris. The father returned in the late morning with news: in the public square, a great black pillar, inscribed in cuneiform, the first code of law born to humankind--eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. ** When I was young my mother and father hid the bottles: Budweiser, cold duck, whiskey. And every morning I’d search for them, digging in the trash cans, behind the bushes, underneath couch cushions. Checking always to see if they were empty, I’d imagine placing them on the kitchen table, setting them in rows, letting the nascent light pass through their hollow bellies like a silent screaming.

46

Marita O’Neill/Laurie Haines ** Impossible to erase, light dissolves into night. History crumbles into the ruins of imagination and memory, leaving us sensing, always sensing the passing through, as if when we listened into the silence we’d hear it’s creak like the weight of a foot on the stairs.

47

Marita O’Neill/Laurie Haines Notre Dame at 6 A.M. It is too early in the morning for light to make its way through the slender windows, their tall frames standing over the people like huddled trees, their stillness communicating without words a stoic grandeur. Once in church when I was a child, I imagined the divine might be the robin that flew in just as Father Ward lifted his arms to change bread into body, wine into blood. Bold orange, its panting and pleated chest swooped over us, finally perching on the Virgin Mary’s crown. The hard frown from Sister Catherine told us to concentrate on the mass, to ignore the sleek, magic way the wings coasted above us, the way the bird in its distress or victory, found the ledge of a sealed window and began to sing, its rolling song reaching us through all the pomp as our laughter carried us into the world of wings, singing a certain truth that only a living thing carries with it into the world. Now, the sun begins to draw back the darkness from the rose windows, and light pierces the scalloped pedals and radiant blue of the glass, as if all those Medieval artists, their hands and tools, had heard a certain music, a music so sweet so much a part of another world and this world, they wanted to make a gate between heaven and earth, an entrance like a wing’s intricate miracle of feathers, unfolding before our eyes a symmetry of color, patterns so full of majesty it takes our breath away, and something else, something else inside us flies.

48

Marita O’Neill/Laurie Haines At the Yoga Studio a mouse rummaged through the cold night, chewed a determined hole in the wicker basket, nibbled off the corners of twenty little cushions to get at the rice inside and make a nest of silk. In the morning, the people lay in corpse pose savasana with no covers for their eyes.

49

Marita O’Neill/Laurie Haines Easter Sunday, 5 AM I stood frozen at the copier one holy Saturday, when my colleague asked, So you still believe in resurrection? That next morning, standing as far out to sea as the dock would allow, we gathered as voices of sea birds called through the fog, surrounding us with the early morning hymns of the sea. Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble . . . We sing to one another, recalling sorrows and the dead; tending to wings, mallards splash; muscles breathe through sand; evergreens sway on distant islands, speaking the invisible wind. Long awaited Spring. Spring that transforms seed into oak, grape, fields of wheat . . .as the world rises out of mourning, everyday from the grips of reason.

50

Marita O’Neill/Laurie Haines Geraniums Waiting Now that I know the trees can hear what I’m thinking, I’ve begun watching what I imagine in front of my geraniums, who sit, palms upturned, along my sill and flower so violently pink, I never suspected the buds were tears instead of sighs. I saw on television the image again—the yellow cloud over Hiroshima— it was the third time this month: a week ago an Altoids mint burst into an obscene chocolate mushroom, billowing, I suppose, into flavor. Today, another commercial, the cloud skeletal, only this one was used to show power of stain remover over stain. What will my geraniums, who listen and hold the sun so faithfully in their skins wonder when they see such horrors clouding my thoughts? I’m suspicious—can my geraniums see my dreams? I’m hoping they can. Do they wait for a sign like Eurydice did, watching her love, his back to her, straining for the light that waited just above the last step on the edge of night? Geraniums, don’t despair. Can I count on you to reassure the flailing wind-whipped copse beside the bay? To pass the word along to the marigold seeds my husband waters every day with plastic coke bottles? These days, I recommend we speak directly and only to the soil. Each morning a prayer to the seeds we’ve buried in the still cold ground. Whisper, as if you were the rain, beauty, beauty, beauty.

51

Featured Poets

davidbdale is the pen name of David Hodges. It honors his parents Beatrice and Dale.

David+B+Dale = davidbdale. He is a fiction writer, copywriter, designer, illustrator, selfpromoter and, more importantly, the inventor and only known practitioner of the 299-word Very Short Novel. He resides in Collingswood, New Jersey.

Nancy Henry is a child advocacy attorney and teacher living in Westbrook, ME. Five times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have been featured on The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor and have appeared in hundreds of small press publications worldwide. Her chapbooks Anything Can Happen and Hard were published by MuscleHead Press; Eros/Ion and Europe on $5 a Day are from Moon Pie Press, and Our Lady of Let's All Sing and her forthcoming book Who You Are are published by Sheltering Pines Press. Nancy has a lovely husband, three cats, two great children and a grand-parrot.

Marita O’Neill lives in Portland, Maine with her husband Duff. She teaches high school English at Scarborough High School and received her MFA from Vermont College.

Barton Smock is 31 years old and lives in Columbus, Ohio. He works two jobs, can hold three children, is sure his one wife is the one, and hopes he doesn't have to tell you to read William Stafford. He has been published, sporadically, online most recently at arseniclobster.magere.com and mergepoetry.com.

52

artists & photographers

Laurie Haines is a science teacher and amateur nature photographer in Maine. She specializes in macrophotography using a Canon Rebel 350D. View more of Laurie’s photography at MaineNatureDiary.com.

Ruth Robertson lives and maintains a studio in the Washington, DC area of the United

States. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, she holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree. A working studio artist, she works as a photographer, painter, printmaker and mixed media artist. Her work is included in many private collections worldwide. Her work has been sold world wide through sothebys.com. She is a gallery represented artist, and has work in the permanent collection of four museums. To see more of her work, visit ruthrobertson.com.

Laurie Haines - photographer

53

meter & form poets

Grace Andreacchi was born in New York in 1954, but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years—sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease (Permanent Press 1989), which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra (Serpent's Tail 1993), the play Vegetable Medley (Soho Repertory Theater, New York and Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, Massachusetts), as well as numerous short stories and collections of poetry. Her work can be viewed at graceandreacchi.com.

Wesli Court is the pseudonym under which Lewis Turco publishes most of his rhymed and metered poems. His book, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, is forty years old this year. The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004 came out in the latter year, and Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007 was published last year, both from StarCloudPress.com.

AnnMarie Eldon, an identical twin, evolved from cryptophasic origins in once densely industrialised Birmingham, England. She was taught by her gypsy grandmother to say the alphabet backwards before the age of three. Juggling various personae interiorae, children and hormones and practicing counter-cultural reclusiveness, she achieves adult differentiation and spiritual equanimity within the mediocrity of a picturesque Oxfordshire market town. Poetry at 5 Trope, Argotist, mprsnd, Blazevox, Caffeine Destiny, Lily, Moria, Nthposition, Niederngasse, No Tell Motel, Shampoo, Stirring, Tears In the Fence, xPressed, zafusy etc. She edits Web Del Sol's Writers Block and can be found on the web at http://www.annmarieeldon.blogspot.com

Annie Finch (poet, editor, critic, and translator) is the author of three books of poetry, The Encyclopedia of Scotland; Eve; and Calendars, as well as two opera libretti, a book of poetry translation, and numerous books on poetics, most recently The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (2005). A professor of English at USM, she directs the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA program. Poems, essays, and more information can be found at www.anniefinch.com.

54

meter & form poets

Lisa Gordon has had work in numerous online zines including Mipo, Poetry Sz, Writer's Hood, Junket, Syntax & this zine (Spring 07). In print, her work has appeared in The Women of the Web Anthology (The Sun Rising Poetry Press, 2005), Vallum, The Antigonish Review, & Tears in the Fence (U.K.). She resides in Montreal with her husband.

Kirsty Karkow is retired and lives quietly with her husband on the mid-coast of Maine enjoying watery things. She is presently the vice-president of the Tanka Society of America, www.tankasocietyofamerica.com and tanka editor for Simply Haiku, www.simplyhaikucom, an online journal of haiku and related forms. An award-winning poet, published in quite a few countries, she has two books in print. water poems: haiku, tanka and sijo, 2005 and shorelines: haiku, haibun and tanka, 2007. Both are published by Black Cat Press. Kirsty can be contacted at [email protected]

Neil C. Leach, Jr. was born June 2, 1954 and married February 14, 1981. He is the father of 3 red haired men : Marshall - November 23, 1981 / Andrew – November 28, 1982 / Darin - February 6, 1986. He is without a higher education degree, has resided in North Carolina since 1967, and has been writing since October 2002. Neil is happy.

K.A. Markee has an MFA from the Stonecoast Low-Residency program at USM. He has worked as a boatbuilder, lobsterman, painter and poet. His poems have appeared or are in press in Cider Press Review, Oleander Review, Off The Coast, Rhymes for Adults, 14 by 14, and on Public Radio Broadcasts.

Graeme Mullen

lives in California and writes poems about girls and dogs and, occasionally, murder most foul.

PJ Nights lives in the wild and ravishing state of Maine and is co-editor and publisher

of from east to west: bicoastal verse.

55