[ Section 3 ] Section 4 [Book Reviews ]
| ..... | Contents: click on blue title to go to the poem Nicholas Giosa, M. D. Dear Theo ( Vincent van Gogh and his younger brother, Theo, lie side by side in a cemetery in Auvers. It was Theo who sustained Vincent throughout his career with money and painting material and who preserved his paintings. ) Now, more than one hundred years after the death of your brother, having stepped in his room, at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de- Mausole in Saint-Remy, stared at the gloom of its barred windows and greenish gray walls; having knelt at your graves at Auvers; I weigh your memory with praise and a true sense of awe, as to how you patiently gave a lifetime of love…whatever his ways. Surely you knew, between the writhe of the cypress, and the “high yellow note,” his time would be cut, the light would burn out, when you wrote: “How your brain must have labored, and you risked everything to the very limit…”. You harbored fears and misgivings, were troubled with legions of doubt, when you cautioned: “Not to venture into the mysterious regions.” Dear Theo, we kneel at your stone with a small measure of love that you constantly gave - as you saved for our eyes, the cypress, the sunflowers, the rooms, the unsmiling faces…the starry skies. 1 st Place - 2008 Wallace Winchell Poetry Contest; Judge Vivian Shipley How To Sleep Listen to the sound twilight ratchets between day-labor and what you thought the dark requires. Listen for the bats, warmer nightbirds than the owl who’s always known your name. Even the moon shaves itself thinner than a time-clock, fading out on schedule. Turn off the light. Breathing is enough, it somehow finds a way through the mesh of window-screen. Being is enough, sinking out of the body, believing the nag at the back of the brain is only headache, the weight above your eyes is only temporal, of this passing day. Listen without seeming, stop trying. All those words you fumbled into line will translate themselves out of human language, into the tongues of dream. Taylor Graham Three Big Words Say Liberty and everyone’s in the street waving flags and shouting slogans while the real movers are cornering the cannons. Say Equality , and see your neighbor in shirt-sleeves, holes in his pockets glancing back at you, and all up and down the line listening for shots in the distance. Say Fraternity , and noon cracks the tiniest shadow, sweat greases everything. A woman starts screaming what sounds like a queen’s cake is a starving child . With barbarians at the gates; government in hiding at the pleasure park; common people swarming the gutters, and cannons holding the heights, it seems no two citizens can agree on the meaning of just one of those three big words, not to mention the little ones. Long Love Sonnet We felt anemic sometimes among all the red-blooded romances of younger friends, and ours just the same after all these years. Now, as you lay in the hospital bed, their passions, acetylene hot at first, have grown cold, and the seams they welded groan, while our wedded love, sick and old, banks in affliction, still glows warm like embers beneath our failing flesh, our ashen hair. William Greenway I Wake to My Parents, Fighting Again Too drunk to read, I douse the light and doze, listen to the typewriter of the rain, its message over and over— sorry . They’re fighting about me again. All night I’ll finger the Braille of their faces, hear them tapping on sills and spouts, feel the house completed by the outline of water. Maybe tonight I’ll give up my grudges and childhood torments in this torrent that gathers and crowds into gutters, into rivers that rise to rain, to fall again and tap on tombstones, beyond hearing, beyond hurt. Cold Nights, Cold Water When I used to bathe by candlelight, it had nothing to do with romance. There was no heat, no hot water, the heaters coughed like a disease. Mother would warm several pots of water on the kitchen stove then rush them to the cold enamel tub so I could wash the day’s dirt from my greasy hair, from the folds of my small, trembling body. Sometimes the lights would go out, sometimes they’d been out for hours, and my parents scrambled in the dark of our apartment to find candles, a large box of wooden matches just so we could see the outlines of our faces. Under the glow of sputtering light and shadows cast from church-bought yellow wax that smelled of prayers, the water cooled and chilled my body even as I rinsed in preparation for the biting air of my bedroom where I put on socks, pants, layers of sweaters, a pair of mittens before sliding in. On those evenings, everything was cold, the water, the floors, the walls, the plates of food we ate for dinner when the gas was cut off to conserve. Even those blessed candles held no warmth for longer than was needed. We knew we’d have to light them once again tomorrow, or the next day, and hope that they would last for one more frigid night. Andrei Guruianu Eating in Grandmother’s Apartment From the kitchen, grandmother shuttles baked cookies to the coffee table level with our knees. That sickly sour familiar smell swirls around her with each measured step, each ripple in her nightgown. She smells like mothballs and old medicine. Her elbows are dry, cracked into patches of pink, scars that look like rose petals crushed into her skin. Without the prescription I smooth on each night, my cheeks turn the same color, a faded blood red. Today, with food between us, we sit across the table passing silence back and forth with our eyes, the intimate, unspoken whisper of understanding. Over the years, many things have gone unsaid between us. Grandfather’s early death, her broken arm, her drinking. So we continue to sit and chew what she’s prepared the same way we used to when I was a young boy spending afternoons in her one-room apartment, sneaking a few sweets before they had time to cool. Not much else will happen today that hasn’t happened before. Instead, we’ll strain to hear each other’s buried thoughts and linger folded in a drawn-out farewell embrace before turning our backs to the clicking of the door. The German Comes to My Mother’s House The soldier stands in the doorway facing the room with its mud floor, its wooden table, its rough cut chairs, and an old woman in a dirty bed. Behind him there is snow falling. The snow on the ground is old. It is brown and caked and hides the things dying men leave behind: dirt and blood and sometimes shit. The soldier wants many things: a wife, warmth, safety, food, and a God who will take pity on him and send His Son to do the killing the soldier feels he can’t. John Guzlowski Today the Gypsies are Burning Their dying is something fierce, like a blizzard wind, like wolves startled into anger and rage by the death of one of their own. Their singing rises in the wind, their red and orange scarves and sparrow shawls swirling in a maelstrom of gasoline flames. Death cannot hold them. These pilgrims need no God to save them, no coin to buy them free, no gray statue on the cusp of time. The wind’s their mother, their home. Casting Pearls on an East Lothian Shore Eggshells and cinders, the tiny shells, coolie hats for some small race of beachcombers where the cold North Sea causes tears to stream and dreams of warmth to die. Fife whispers on hazy outlines across the bay. This is a place of cattle and sheep, not swine, and whatever truth I spoke then was long ago lost in tears. Here fine sand travels on shoe soles and something bracing blows every single promise to the wind. Witness Near dusk in spring I crest a rise and come upon two rabbits in a frenzy near the lifeless forms of their young. I watch from the shadows of my idling car the deepening gloom the simple fact of loss our common language the wildness grief brings and worse the eventual quietude opening like a fierce empty field. Jo Marie No, she told me in her letter, the baby wasn’t planned. It was the hormones she wrote, making her scream at Henry, making him sleep on the couch. It’s why he called her a fucking idiot, why he was screwing his skanky, sized four secretary. It was the hormones from being pregnant at forty-six washing her insecurities ashore like ragged shells. The fourth year of her third marriage, and Henry was working nights. My oldest drove me to the hospital the night my water broke. I was at parent-teacher conferences, she scribbled. Jo Marie delivered another red haired girl into the world alone. And about that conch shell Jo Marie found on the beach? She told me she’s afraid to put it to her ear. How Men Age One man I’d admired taught himself to be a door and locked himself tight. Behind him the room he’d closed off waited in the partial darkness for someone—his wife perhaps—to come along with a key and open him, walk into that room which was just an ordinary bedroom after all and maybe take a nap there. But what would she dream he wondered as he stood in that door frame waiting. And he wondered why she still hadn’t come to unlock him, where she’d gone off to, and what she could be doing without him. He stood there remembering days he’d been happy, years that went mostly as he would have wanted them to go. He listened to the sounds the house made around him: ceiling fans turned slowly, the air-conditioner kicked on, or the phone rang and the answering machine picked up: his wife’s voice telling whoever was calling that no one was home now. Leave a message. Then someone whose voice inflections he recognized talked, but he couldn’t understand the words. And then the beeping from that cheap machine, incessant, and he couldn’t move to turn the damn thing off; he was locked into his frame: that was his life now, everything from now on would be simple and clear, no more fretting and tearing out his hair, no more trying to learn things someone else told him he needed to know. He was his own man now standing there waiting for his wife to come home with whoever she loved now, some stranger who looked like he used to, who used his old name, and open him. That was all he needed right now: to be opened. So he waited. She must be on her way. Kitty Hawk We cross the street and wander over the dunes to find the moon, the separation between sand and sea, only the firmament. The glowing green from the wharf does not divide waves. We listen for ghost crabs to dig tunnels, run sideways from the creeping tide. But tonight there is no moon, no dancing crab, no one. Even the sea grass sleeps on rifts. The world seems new. Salvage Good riddance to my townhouse neighbors: out-of work husband, washed-out wife, three rug rats. Every night at nine they'd crank up their infernal machine, pounding faster and louder until the party wall trembled and the floating staircase swayed to grunts of rapture. Litter and boxes on the street, clothes and broken toys, spread for the picking. A guy in a Beemer cruised by at dawn and rolled the dog-pee carpet into his trunk. Eager teens hit upon a suitcase spilling porno. Even I stooped to rescue a weeping ficus tree infested with brown scale and a bentwood chair in fairly good shape to rock in under the leaves. Tides 1. On this gentle afternoon I set our chairs at water’s edge. You soothe your narrow feet in waves of this receding tide, where aging daughters go with aged mothers to speak of what’s important. Childhood is the land we all return to, and mine was rich:vivid in color, sound, texture, played upon the steady chords of days and seasons passing undisturbed. An onshore breeze stirs the air. The tide has turned, we must go back to ringing telephones and groceries. It doesn’t matter if I said it well. We speak in ways that language can’t define, in rhythms deep and hidden as our blood. Still we sit. The verge turns foamy -- soon it will be lapping at our feet. The sun dips low, burning the clouds to gold. My baby turns within my belly causing me to shift; you to ask if I am feeling well. O mother, well enough. Sheila Golburgh Johnson 2. This is sufficient, this very moment; let’s hold it, make it stay. The vainglory of the sun reminds me all things fade, and I’m afraid. I push myself up; I watch you fold the chairs with your arthritic hands. Someday you will leave me, and not the child turning in my womb nor the vainglory of the sunset’s display will ever equal this sea favored day. The Other Seven Last Words Of Christ 1. Water the fig. 2. Place clean straw in the manger. 3. Herd the sheep to new pasture. 4. Give the cow some hay. 5. And grain for the donkey; I love that guy. 6. Help yourself to the bread and wine. 7. If my mother calls, tell her I’ll be home some time Sunday. The War in Ohio My Vietnam was locked in a cabinet of brown plastic, almost purple, a Zenith the color of a bruise. Pull the switch, and it would stretch open its eye until all southeast Asia was awake in our front room, a rainforest so green, a green so deep you could almost see it in the gray tones of the swollen screen. Lists of numbers settled at the bottom as a man who hid behind a mustache talked about our boys and their boys, the essential statistics , the casualties, the missing, the wounded, the dead. In school I would learn that we beat them right up until the day we lost. Push the switch, and the eye would close, quickly first, then increasingly slowly, until all of Asia was nothing but a light, a single spot at the center of the glass, and our thoughts landed back in Ohio, to the new Holstein calves, a truckload we’d just hauled in from Wisconsin, bucket calves that would be suckling from racks of galvanized pails in our barn; to the Western Flyer bike I had seen during a word from our sponsors—a dream that would never travel our stone road; and then to the scent of our supper boiling in the kitchen and the loud tap of a heavy spoon or ladle on the edge of an iron kettle, a banging that rang, for all the world, like a gunshot. William Jolliff Vigil on the Corner Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Four years into this war, a handful of us stand, salt-and-pepper respectable, gray, well-trimmed, sober as bankers in mackinaws and new boots, not a shred of tie-dye in sight, our neat signs square as cartoon trees against the continual Oregon drizzle. It’s our First-Sunday Ritual. We try to mingle, abandoned to ourselves in public discomfort, stranded by hard old belief, right here at Second and Adams. Our fingers freeze with reason: “Invest in Peace,” “Children Matter,” “Peace is Patriotic.” We straighten red silk ties and rub clean chins, chapped against the wind. The cold keeps soaking in. Passersby honk Volvos. Some smile, some shake their heads, puzzled. Some flash our ancient holy sign, others flick us the finger. We wrap our scarves tighter. At last a beater rumbles by, packed with acned teens, shouting as we knew they would: Go back to Russia, you bunch of fuckin’ hippies. . . . And we laugh. Finally someone found us out, stared straight through what time and tweed cannot disguise. A car on fire with the type most likely to die— few prospects, no money, conscious of nothing but their own anger. We look around our aging crowd, remembering some of the ways a heart can break. Snakes and Other Risks at the Artists’ Colony One on the path by the front door, another at the lake where pink lilies float, they’re long, curled, black, still, now as I run through high grass every stick lifts its head. High on my thigh I find a chigger bite, on my forearm a little poison ivy trail. Above the meadow thunder rumbles. Inside, light streams from windows, peonies welcome, wine chills in the fridge. My head’s a cage where a big boa darts her tongue, coils for the thrust at the dangling rat. The hiss of memory haunts, my own dark places open blacker than this long night sky. Itch no scratch will satisfy. Down those stairs I must slither. Winter I. under the ice in the pond deep a heart frozen fields of grasses caught by drifts — no comfort hunger leaves its footprints in the snow dark skies blast wind clouds for poems that chill in naked trees arms hold emptiness cry out all roads go where they will miles of cold no rest II. who can teach the birds that stay the why of suffering or show wet eyes the how of sadness in the mud under the pond, green frogs wait for spring Greening Winter The mellow of bayberry sputters its final hot scent and the solstice drifts through our windows lighting a new year: the green thaw of January. Our mouths water for juicy July, the kitchen thick with pots of tomato sauce, leaning towers of sliced zucchini toppled into summer skillets, carrots the color of October’s sweet crunch. We hug this warm winter corner, forgetting fertile insects breed like weeds, perennial plagues that curse our crops, roots rotting from restless rain we beg for during drought. Sowing spring, we look to the garden gods. Our cat sprawls across the centerfold of a seed catalog kneading a picture of potting soil. Winominneash Under Harvest Moon By the path along the river, wild grapes hang from a natural arbor formed by a lightning-struck sycamore’s dangling limb. Evenings we walk under them, study daily changes in color from green to mottled red. We resolve that the day the skins turn deep purple we will get there before birds have fed, stand naked under the arbor, pluck sweet, dark fruit, use our tongues to roll bitter seeds out of one another’s mouths. One morning, we arrive in the dark after mockingbirds have gone to bed, before crows have awakened. We take off boots, clothes, lie down. Through a lacy grape leaf canopy, the sky shows pink. But as for harvesting grapes, yesterday the birds ate every one. 71 Mary Elizabeth Lang Quequécum, the Hen’s Odd Chick On Pine Point Farm in Stonington, the duck was run over by a tractor before her ducklings could hatch. Grandfather slipped the eggs under a broody hen, hoped for the best. One duckling survived. He and the chicks followed the hen around for a week, scratching dirt and strutting in imitation. One morning the duckling left the line, waddled toward the pond. The hen flapped her wings, squawked, tried to head him off. Determined, he continued into the water, swam across, the hen flapping, cluck-clucking on shore. Sometimes in my mother’s story the foster mother accepts the swimming in time. But other versions have her still scolding her child when the farm is sold. Cooking Spoon The handle is wood, a dull light grey -- not slick, no varnish, no stain -- worn smooth, sanded by women's hands: my mother's cooking spoon. Was it her mother's too? There is no one left to ask. What happened to the centuries of wood spoons before steel shafts? Although I do not see a screw or bolt, this steel bowl is securely fixed (unlike the spoon, leftover, from my first marriage), not a waver, no wobble in spite of decades of ladling, of dipping into a roil of rice or puddings with their slow lava boils, or to lift an egg away from heat. Telling Time Every twelve hours, high tides rush the sand. Halfway in between, low tides caress the beach exposing crab holes for waders that tease out dinner with beaks narrow as tweezers. Every day, when the sun sits high, a red helicopter from Parris Island flies over the beach, from a distance appearing lower than the highest palmetto. You wake to the first cars and delivery trucks moving on the street by your house, early enough so you can see the sun rise over water, if you want to. Whippoorwills call out spring dawns and whistle again at dusk. Morning sun floods the northeast side of your house, then curls around midday to warm the southwest corners. When summer heat or winter daylight starts to fade, wherever the dog is, she knows you will feed her if she asks. You can see sunsets over the creek, the Big Dipper through palmetto fronds if you learn where to look. Moons roll above the ocean and sink into marshes by daylight. That’s all you need to know. After years that disappeared minute by minute on clock faces, throw your watch away and learn new ways of knowing when you are. Sandra Marshburn On the Cantilevered Deck The deck juts over the garden where hibiscus grow tall, pink flowers hovering beyond reach. The ground slopes steeply toward the river, blue-green this morning at half bankful. In fall sunshine the dog and I sit here, one month after the vet said she would live about three months more, a tumor growing in her lung. Laden with smells, damp air off the water makes her nose twitch, head and body held steady. She’s on her haunches, poised to run. We watch ripples in tall grass beneath the feeder, mice eating fallen seed. She doesn’t blink while a bee takes nectar from hibiscus. Our eyes follow squirrels through a maze of sycamore branches that ends at a dark nest. Honking geese in flight too familiar for her to raise her head. I’ve learned to sit here and wait, to take whatever comes for what it is, haunches positioned, ready to go. The Aging Philatelist Sooner or later you must ask yourself what kind of crazy old coot you’ll become. Maybe you’ll be the sort that saves up random postage stamps and glues them indelibly onto pages that make you think of when you were a kid collector of Kaiser’s yachts from the old German colonies: Kamerun, Marshall-Inseln, Kiautschou, Togoland, Deutsch Östafrika, strayed places where today you cannot even get a good helping of Sauerbraten or a marginal Bratwurst. The imperial yacht, three-masted two-stacker, the Hohenzollern , under full steam, three pfennig brown, mint, scrapped in ‘23 after thirty years of faithful service, must remind you it’s time to retire. Your colleagues are not exactly kidding when they call you their “beloved curmudgeon.” So you paste this year’s four secular Christmas stamps in a neat line, brown, green, red, and purple, across a blank page telling yourself how excited some grandchild will be some day to come across this odd treasure: Note the nice cancellations.
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