May 11th, 2005
LIES, DAMN LIES, AND ANIMAL ADOPTIONS
At the SPCA the directive is out:
when we show a dog to an adopter,
there is no such dog as a "pit bull."
It is a Staffordshire Terrier Mix
a poodle with an attitude,
an outsized killer Pomeranian.
Maybe we can pawn one off
as a nastier-than-usual cat because
we have too many cats as it is.
Public relations: we are afraid
people will be afraid if we
call the dog by its rightful name.
Bad associations: white suburbanites
who employ The Colored as nannies
and illegal Mexicansas gardeners
see in the name "pit bull" some guy
in a yellow suit and porkpie hat
beating the shit out of a dog
to make it vicious. The fact
that he succeeds says lots about
imagery. Ours, his, but not the dog's.
When the dogs are seized by the cops
some of them are put down
because some of them have killed.
The others don't like other dogs but cleave to humans
with absolute trust, not because they're stupid but
because maybe love really is stronger than death.
But it's not stronger than the lies we tell.
Kenneth Wolman
***
1.
re: girl
or re-girl
& girlee
with palest rouge
crayon them blue eyes
your blessed liner
a make-up
fight
the turquoise
halter
top
& worry
2.
mirror answering
gurrrrr to the tune
of hair dryer & Dr.--
my daughter in strategic
important
hurry huff phone
(wolf whistle ring tone)
or of
an old red
T-top
(word is *pone*)
86
Camaro (Mom, it was cheap!)
exhaust rumbling asphalt speed
bumps to White Stripes
in extreme calculated
howling
--a slick James
Dean wave
& chin dimple
(your 64 freckles)--
3.
meanwhile back at the official mechanical
check: two blue
circles:
single
space block
quotes
change blue
of website
citations
to black
& enter
Works
Cited moreover
move to dead-
line hurry the furthermore
on the one hand hurrying
the dean is not on the other
hand a dream
& waiting
to sign
4.
the ruler used
by the official checker
has official holes
circles
& ovals all
under (her)
eyes
somehow also petunias
& tamales scenting the outside
air
& my
thanks to you
(lyric luck of knowing)
5.
I am thinking of sub
title inches on 25 %
cotton
page numbers
stamped & degrees of "rhetorical
selphs" sighing to Santana
as the
official(s)
speech(es)
heteroglot
chris murray Dallas, TX 11 May 2005 after midnight
***
today is may eleventh,
the temperature's a muggy 73...
masses of ladybugs
red blurs in the air
some in stillness
on the screen door
there must have been
a time
when our others
sought something with
as much
desire
--Gerald Schwartz
West Irondequoit/New York/ US
1O:30 pm
***
Limits
There is nothing that can be done
with what is limitless
Even the sky has limits
though the watcher cannot define them.
A limit is solid
but empty and forlorn.
What is limitless
has width and depth
and a far horizon.
It is a bygone,
an ageless stamina
of what is will be and will become.
Harriet Zinnes
***
up north here only
a few days allow
this transformation
how the aspens lined
along the river bluff
mellow guardians
blanched tall standards
bare but not
barren begin
to float in
transparent green
gauze of new
ly unfurling leaf
buds thinly flexing
on the unruined choirs
Douglas Barbour
Edmonton Wednesday May 11 2005
(a recall snap)
***
An Eye on the Time
1
Towards the end
he started trashing all his friends
in the small, the very small gossip-world
available to him. His friends, his
few friends grew fewer, infrequent,
the hours since they had left
longer, silent recriminations more
intense, until he had to tell
strangers about them, who also shunned him,
till eventually he had quite a crowd.
2
Jerry has patched things up with
his landlord, and will be allowed to stay
in the attic room with a hot-plate
a few more months. His kid, when she visits, plays
in the rest of the space, with trunks and old books
and several generations of toys.
But sheıs on the verge
(he tells me) of puberty:
is already finding fault with him, and he has to
get it together somehow
(somehow) get out from under
credit-card debt; make another stab
(despite Schwarzeneggerıs cutbacks)
at collecting benefits
for the old injury; reinstate himself with
the union, which never liked him
and now barely exists; perhaps do some more
organizing I want to avoid his
³organizing,² but the callıs on his dime
(he thinks he has unlimited minutes).
The voice still stunned about
the ex well, a relationship
of thirty years A hint, as always, not
of irony, but that irony might kick in
at any moment, but meanwhile, please
The father still alive, money gone;
the annual phone-call from the brother
Heıs glad, when something sets him off
(something I say), to
free-associate:
new exculpations from the Soviet files;
what Schachtman said in ı40 and Ruether in ı50;
adventurism, cooptation among
the groupuscules; the surprising undeath of
the I.W.W.
I play with my computer as he talks
and worry that heıll ask me for a loan.
He never does. When he moves on to
the Palestinians and my stand on them,
or to our various health problems, I
begin to talk about myself.
How Iım trying to revive
the humanistic ³portrait² style
I was working in three years ago
and encountering the same problems:
details defeat universality,
³universality² itself
seems somehow a betrayal, and
the whole approach is passé. How an
ugliness has settled over my work
which even I am hard-pressed to interpret
as beauty. He listens
as if to murmurs from a brighter world
and when, awkwardly as always,
we cut it off (I cut it off),
he says, We have to struggle.
I sit for some time, thinking,
imagining that I had said
What ³struggle,² Jerry?
There is no struggle.
3
Our mothers had kept in touch,
and when I returned for a week
in ı79, I called her
from a pay phone in the old neighborhood.
Where Jews had been, Puerto Ricans were,
but it was Chicago: the frame remains
three-story sooty brick
although what fills it changes.
Ambulances, salsa,
above which I cried:
³The last time I saw you, you wanted to be
a veterinarian and a ballet dancer.²
She laughed, husky contralto
unchanged in sixteen years:
³I was always running across campus.²
³How did you resolve it?² ³Oh, there was only
one way to resolve it I became an actress.
Now Iım one of eight hundred unemployed actresses
running around Chicago.²
Her biggest role, she said, had been
as a gypsy in an ad
for the Illinois State Lottery.
The gypsy wins, and buys an ermine coat.
³The hardest thing Iıve ever had to do
was to take that coat off.²
She mentioned a husband, and an old kitschy thought
died. I went up to see them.
He was doing well
at something; had been, I learned,
that close to taking his vows
as a Jesuit
when they met; was now a member in good standing
of a Conservative synagogue.
And he looked a bit like me
(more stolid, Polish),
which made me absurdly, not merely generously happy;
as did the fact of her undiminished,
gypsy beauty, the long neck
and secret grin.
Though all I remember him saying,
as we looked down at the Lake
and I made the usual comparison
to the ocean, is that he preferred this.
4
Philipıs mother, meanwhile, has died,
and the house he had repaired for her is his.
He should be trying to sell it,
but the energy that sustained him
and her those last years
has gone. Though he keeps everything tidy.
At night from his bedroom window
he gazes out at miles of identical houses.
He dates, but when he tells them how
he sort of values his privacy, they drop him.
Work is good; he stays till seven, seven-thirty,
and is trying to cut back on smoking and even television.
In the car and sometimes at home he listens
to music that offers complete fulfilment
of joy or violence in three minutes
without equivocation or delay.
How long can I do this.
He doesnıt particularly like to read.
The vague sense of unbelonging
he shares with his most apparently gung-ho,
straight-arrow co-workers wonıt make
him meaningful, or give him a critical viewpoint.
And I care no more for postmodernism,
the snide interrupting speaker, than he would.
When I began writing narrative poetry,
I saw in it a haven
for characters incapable of plot
an affirmative-action program for epiphanies.
But they donıt cooperate.
He stands by the window, walks into the yard,
takes a drink, sees whatıs on,
hurts no one, or only in the usual ways;
and if I try to prod him into thought
he resists passively, demanding all
the rights accruing to a character respect,
love. Youıre supposed to love them.
It will all end in tears, mine.
Religion will get him.
Some people only change or learn by force.
5
Indistinct, furry,
disgusted yet patient,
he bulges an inappropriate uniform
its wide black buttons popping
and from the cockpit of his rusting spacecraft
as he comes at last to report.
So many years out of contact
have made his tone waspish,
without camaraderie or deference; but
at least we need no longer speak
through a hollow cardboard cylinder
beneath a card-table, now rotting
somewhere in the landfills of nostalgia.
³Forget them,² he squeaks. ³They wonıt help.²
³I know,² I say, but he plunges
on as if still exploring:
³I found nothing, not even ruins.
The ontological reasoning
by which you fed and kept me at a distance
my only fuel applies
as much to them as to God.
Yet I still think they exist,
the alien intelligences,
that they are, in fact, pervasive:
theyıre cliché.
Like the vast bulk of the universe,
the dark energy. The dark matter.²
6
Where, likewise,
is Howard, who read
at parties across the Peninsula
even at those on the fringe of our group
(itself the outermost fringe),
attending uninvited and
ignored by normals saying normal things?
He explained every poem
its learned allusions, its fine points
interrupting himself to interpret
and seemed to expect applause;
which he never received
except from his girlfriend, who
was marginally less nearsighted and chubby.
The story about him was
(it never appeared in his poems)
that his father had been fired
for no cause after twenty years, and
unused to these efficiencies
(not then the norm) had
left his office building,
sat on a bench at a curb,
and died. He sat a long time,
tie knotted, jacket neat,
and appeared to be dozing
or mulling a late move to the public sector.
7
Itıs time to open the thing up.
For a crowd scene, daylight, the yearıs first heat.
People park their cars and stroll
along the canal, through the woods,
picnicking, experiencing, wondering
how I will judge them, how I will ruin the day,
but the cloud passes.
Itıs about time for a symbol:
a Scoured Bedrock Terrace Island
offshore, reached by causeway,
with one careful path.
Like a heap of granite books, some spines still upright,
flotsam soil between,
seeds dropped (from everywhere) by birds,
small growth, struggle.
Then the river, the distant bank with more people,
the expected attempt to be more than self or life,
extending to the height of the circling hawks.
It may be time to bring You in,
abruptly, as poems do
towards the end, to show the preceding wasnıt serious
heroic, sure, an attempt at confrontation,
engagement, but
foredoomed, and now weıll go home. An implicit call
at once to be admired, envied and pitied, the
quintessential bourgeois gesture. But youıre working.
I keep approaching the edge of a thought,
but the ³I,² which I decided
I wouldnıt be afraid of, cheapens it;
the symbolic structures I back myself into
pull it back, and the convention
that poetry doesnıt exactly think.
You said once poetry was my way
of making friends, however indifferent or
distant, and that mentioning it
was OK as long as I
didnıt put it or me on a pedestal
pretending, at least,
that itıs only a form of labor among others.
They head back to their cars
or seek free space to fly
kites, or gaze at the water; mostly
liberal, here, some overweight,
like me, sunk in the past,
enduring, i.e. enjoying, the slow play,
trying to avoid essentially
the same topics I am. Time for a hero.
8
Obvious on reflection that
noble haunted ruins canıt
represent false hopes;
only a construction site,
bankrupt, unfinished,
avoided even by weeds.
Frederick Pollack
***
THE MARQUISE OF O . . .
[via Eric Rohmer]
Perhaps you'll give birth to a fantasy?
The father will be Morpheus or one of his retinue.
But how did you come back to life?
Grant me instantly a favorable answer!
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 5-11-05 (7:59 PM)
Although I had seen this film previously, had no expectations of writing
during my re-viewing of it, and had not conceived of a title which could
generate a text, I felt compelled to write down four lines during what
seemed liked an initial experience of a very striking theatrical
performance. These lines hang together and hold up for me after numerous
rereadings. The first take was the final take; there were no revisions.
***
Because I do not write, tulips fill
with rain. I lose track of the moon.
The air is damp and heavy with spring.
Cloud-white parakeet gently cleans
the face of her blue mate. Overnight,
cottonwoods leaf out and this morning
pale blossoms grace the ash trees.
This orchid stubbornly continues
to bloom. On Friday, that unlucky
thirteenth, my fifty-seventh birthday
falls, while this black cat crosses
and recrosses my narrowing path.
Sharon Brogan
***
The nature of space
Is to fill itself up
With anything yet
What is the nature of
the relationship between love and death?
To fill this space
Perhaps the difference between
Or the relationship of
an object's apparent size
and its distance from the heart
raw and still uncompromising
determines the ability to create longing
to describe the motion of planets or
The elliptical path of planets
about the sun
how does a force effect
the acceleration of an object?
The search for cause and effect
through observation might also indicate
the relationship between
an object's apparent size
and distance from
yet distance between
and mass of two objects
tells us nothing
and reveals even less
About the heart
or love or death
We are still
hopelessly unknown
-Peter Ciccariello
5/11/2005 1:25:21 PM
***
THE CURSE
This young woman has done her aging in advance
but it hardly matters, the others also bear the signs
of what gravity and use will make of them,
even with better luck than the usual.
Prophecy's a bitch. I may grow old enough
to know the fates of children.
--------------
The music says, come (says come):
I bring you memory
ready or (ready) or not.
---------------
Over the door across the street is a gilded frieze
of a seagull, perched on a fasces that floats
on golden waves beneath golden clouds. It looks to its right
towards another, above the door on the next corner, which returns
its gaze. Their wings stretch the width of each portal, reference to Horus
and the history of birds. They were gods once. Pilasters, plinths,
lintels. It's "THE PORT OF NEW YORK
AUTHORITY," it says, master of water
and realms of gold.
------------------
Carthago delenda est, I think.
Not that I'd root for the Romans,
but somebody's gotta take us down.
---------------
THREE IN THE PARK
Trained to test
the heft of the ball
before tossing.
Spring. This, he points, is
George Washington, he tells
the African.
One is tempted
not to notice
the pit bulls.
Mark Weiss
***
WEATHERED
"Do you remember a day without weather? Nobody did,
yet so few people put it in their stories - many
poets put it in the poems, maybe."--Andrew Burke
Walk the perimeter road in this place,
get some worth from overpriced hiking shoes
feed on the delusion I'm preserving my heart,
look at the company spyware:
microwave transmitters,
cameras mounted on poles,
squirrels wearing wires.
I think it is cool absolutely undistinguished
rainless breezeless complaintless
the door is left open for the real life
not of other plans but of your own
attention is commanded for once by
my laughably termed (but I don't have any others)
creative life a book manuscript done, assembled,
the over-50 first-book prize
and the poem I've been asked for about a mother
do it the hard way not my mother who is uninteresting
except to a shrink
pick instead a woman bound for the Army stockade
her picture holding her child the look is not maternal
after all
it is avoiding sad the baby looks like a prop
this is not about me (isn't everything else?) but
I have made it mine I have taken it on myself
Why? I am either a writer
or I have a Christ complex.
Or is there any difference?
Kenneth Wolman
***
Tooth and Pile: a Travelogue
A filling vanished from a tooth (well back),
into which my tongue kept prying.
But before taking it to be fixed,
I took it on holiday with me - and The Pile.
In the total black of night and sleep
a pinpoint of pain pricked me awake,
a tiny flame in the nether region.
But the tooth didn't ache.
They went on holiday with me:
three weeks, in every soft strange bed
I was the Princess, the pile the Pea;
every drive in the rented car
through each blissful panorama
of vineyards, beaches, alpine grandeurs,
riven and rent by a tiny pain.
Cruising the Pacific Ocean swell,
some on the whale-tour gaped in motion-
sickness bags, unwell. I held myself in.
While Kaikoura's
mountain snows shone unmelted,
our boatload of cameras
snapped as sperm whales tilted
their flukes and dived, or basked blowing
spume up into rainbows glowing,
while I ached on.
That Polish Pope succumbed
finally in the Vatican,
was mass-hysterically mourned,
a German Pope emerged,
crowding from the news
Baghdad atrocities,
while I ached on.
North and south, both islands -
Auckland to Oamaru we went,
far from both endsĊ
so far from enough.
Next time we may start at Bluff,
New ZealandĊs back entrance.
In my mindĊs eye I see a beckoning
beacon glowing red.
Provided my pain is gone,
weĊll lodge each night
in some accommodating pile
of pale lemon limestone
or rough-hewn granite,
serenely sleeping tight.
I held myself in
and held my tongue, waiting
for the bump and twinge
to subside - in vain.
Prince Charles got married again.
Returned trans-Tasman,
I bided more time.
First I took my tooth to be fixed
(by a charming woman dentist).
And now at last I tell my wife
the secret of The Pile.
Why the long delay?
Something to do with the holiday,
and being a reticent male.
I'm taking The Tube from its carton;
the journey is done;
my body has come home;
I read the words:
"Rectinol: For temporary relief"
The word "piles" nowhere appears.
And "temporary" - ?
oy vey, oh my.
Max Richards
North Balwyn, Melbourne
10am, Wednesday 11 May 2005
***
One thing that used to annoy the hell out of Carol was my talking to holes
in the ground.
It wasn't (which it was of course) that this behaviour might seem just a
little odd, or that Carol wasn't perfectly capable of chatting to a bit of
Florentine roadwork, but she thought the holes in the road I liked to talk
to were *common*.
She'd stand in the background tapping her foot and muttering under her
breath, "That bloody hole never even graduated from highschool!"
"Scusi, is the signora impunning my educational background?" whatever
hole-in-the-road I happened to be chatting to at the time would mutter
worriedly.
"Don't worry," I'd mutter back, "she's American and like that -- probably
can't tell you apart."
"Ah, capisco!" the bit of accidental Florentine construction I would be
talking to at the time would reply, brightening up, and we'd get back to
discussing the exchange rate of the pound versus the lira or the length of
prostitutes' skirts (which given their perspective, was something that
Florentine holes-in-the-ground were something of experts in) -- the usual
stuff that you discuss with a hole in the ground in Florence.
That wasn't the problem -- the problem was this bloody five hundred year old
dead bore in the Boboli Gardens.
For Carol, while contemporary holes in the ground were common as shit, a
five hundred year old dead boar was history.
"Did you ever meet Cosimo dei Medici?" gushed Carol.
"Meet him, my dear?" smirked the ded bore, "I was poisoned by Ficino."
Oh, big deal, given that Cosimo's vertically challenged personal physician's
default method of curing a client with a hangnail was to poison him, it was
virtually impossible to walk through Florence in the 1490s and *not* be
poisoned by Marsilio.
Trying to break into the conversation, I grumbled, "Hey, you ever meet Pico,
or watch Savonarola or Bruno burn?"
Turning to me (in so far a five hundred year old dead boar in the Bobili
Gardens can turn), the Dead Boar simply said:
"Fuck off, red nose."
Baffled the hell out of me -- how can a dead five hundred year old
Florentine whatsit know the punch line of a David Frost's Younger Brother
Joke which was a spin-off of That Was The Week, That Was (it's over, let it
go) in black and white Brit TV in the sixties?
Still baffles me.
Maybe he dated Millicent Martin.
Robin Hamilton
***
Painting Without a Sunset
The sun now
directionless, unique.
You set it in your blueness,
quite dangerous.
You don't
redden the blue
any longer.
The center of color,
where the face pales.
- Jill Chan
***
Possibly you've seen them in shopping centres,
talking to themselves, or so you've thought,
but they are novelists
at the end of a long journey
chatting to their characters.
You're right to be sceptical - after all
you can't see who they are talking to -
you'll see them later when you read
the tale or it is turned into a mini series.
By then they may be on the best sellers list
at the bookshop along with a news item
how the novelist, so well-respected and of
good family, was taken away from
a shopping centre recently and incarcerated -
a complete breakdown, talking to everyone
and no one, including watermelons and celery .
Poets on the other hand . they turn up
at the checkout with empty baskets
and are amazed no one can see their items.
Andrew Burke
***
Love's limbs voluptuous & diversionary
The body a wedge issue
Wet cell & tissue:
No one writes a love poem anymore
"Straight from the heart" an oxymoron:
An iris open, a-flop, lavender, barely a-shake in the breeze
Love's toll to emptiness, a prickled measure
Sheer leisure slowly or, sometimes, profoundly, even rapidly, sprung:
One could go on like this, not get anywhere; the virtue of volumes
Victory over circumstance, a poem but, no joke, an open
Well, you do have to turn the handle and, normally, push
To make it this, a fully open that's not - note the clarity - a door:
Feast on it, love, as you will, yes, then, sweetly, fully, infinitely
Adore.
Stephen Vincent
***
CATFLAP
cat
stands
transfixed
by his flap
perhaps torn
between the
inside and
outside worlds
actually
cat
stands
winding up
his master
yet again
before
his next
nap.
pmcmanus
***
Looking at you
Space runs over space stuck up with paste
Brown paste and through it the silver
Lines grate with gear, circumstances
Us all crowd, us all not know but
Space between the yellow line
As too soon and too far before
Dawn the house creaks out of slack
Sleep as if what is that? Still
Question of corners last night
How could I ever? Coming home
And on this very morn, tired, vapour
Cragging down mournful old steps
Tagging to work, grumble, coffay
Space that is grit, that is turned
Where would I land? Not space
Here where street crowd gander gait
Between, that small space
The only quieting space
Silver sleep circumstance awake.
Jill Jones
Marrickville, 11 May 2005
***
So impossibly far away
Your voice full of oranges
And salt spray
The things you say do not seem real
Here as this leaden sky stalls above us
splatters of rain smashing on the car roof
Rt. 6 west towards Hartford
The rust just beginning to show
On the tips of the Pin Oak branches
The car flying above the trees
Guernsey and Holsteins
In the air about us
Passing a valley farm lip-synched
I thinking how I know
that's where I would live
With my elemental collectibles
Deliberate with the river S curving
Back in on itself
Giving myself time
To curve back on myself
Multiplying everything
I have done in my life
Dividing out the things that mattered
And setting them free
In little newspaper boats
Each outfitted
With it's own candle
I would sit at night
Amid a thousand fireflies
Counting the heifers as they bellowed
Amid my boats
Thinking of how you sounded so tired
In the land of plenty
Sea otters basking in a sun
That never stops shining
Peter Ciccariello
|
