Five poems by

Joel Chace

stagehand

ecstasy of multi-tasking scrubbing the groutwork while soaking
freely   loving the fatherland so horribly willing to loot a cello   wan

as a hen   symbols of enchantment flunking the end-of-year exam
but still able to convey sorrow to conserve stout and agonizing
port   could be some critique of a simple cure or of the detour of
a lousy execution day


only a few teeth

on the fence regarding seduction merely maintaining the university
pledge   though possessing four to six dimensions does keep them
seraphic   dogmatic insane plus titillating plus scampy   is there an
agreement that at least one should monitor the offering and that
at least another should oversee the disorder    consider the ossified
obese eardrum pitted and hidden in the pie


upward flow

someone just said the word postprandial what a square come-on nobody
can ever swear whether it's the final name for what the wind brought
in   established as much more than a novice palm reader   sounding
leathery   tremoring up what might have been better left as compost   or

elegant swirling circumspection   apparently though what remains does
look healthier


cartography

gone to Paris for the water   accompanist has contrived manners   what
some people break out with returning as color commentary   down and
around behind and back the immorality of such drumming   then coming
up over the end arriving at the wrong pole   whatever they keep putting
off
in the count placed on the charts   bearing it all like children made
good
in school


protective covering

irony and bogus fiche whether to burn them in effigy   heirs disoriented

benefactor no longer camp   rhythmic displays of satire now describe the

lunar quest   that sort of epic refusal galvanizes a text to tear open
your
face   rich and profound as noncommittal puzzles or parents with nothing

left to gain

Five poems by

Richard Fein


Birthday Jettisoning

Finally down to serious discarding, I
go deep into the closet
and find everyone's threadbare overcoat,
older than my memory of buying it.
In a pocket, a paper
with writing faded almost to illegibility.
Something once was noted,
and I've never been known to throw something important away.
I try on the coat.
It no longer fits.
Now I'm trapped within a hoary skin.
And I clutch
a memento that's as yellowed and wrinkled
as a jaundiced old man.
It's time to pitch this rag heap.
As for the paper, my very unfolding
tore it apart.


Shadow Paths

Your shadow has an unfair reputation.
It doesn't always trail.
It's not simply a negative of your former self.
It's not just a glass-jaw boxer sparring with you.
Sometimes a shadow leads.
At sunrise it points to the remaining darkness
if you turn your back on the rising sun.
At sunset it points to the remaining light
if you turn your back on the setting sun.
At high noon it points nowhere,
but there's enough light for everyone to find their way.

Each day your shadow awaits you,
like a puppy with a leash in its mouth.
Will it lead or follow?
That depends on how and when you choose to face the sun.


Lady,

look at that cattail reed, there, by the lake.
Its cylindrical tip tips sideways
and without underpinning its head
bobs and sways when blown by every crisscross current of wind.
It seems to bow
before another member of its species
which still stands tall and is seemingly faultless.
Our broken reed tries to reach its neighbor,
perhaps it will brush against it.
But the same wind which blows our crooked stick so close
also blows its faultless friend away,
so like swaying cilia
they touch only briefly at their tips.

Lady
my fingertips briefly brush your hair
but you bob and weave away so skillfully.
Lady, lady
I confess love
but
all you do is listen
so courteously.


Jazzman's Nature

In the grand composition from amoeba to man,
Mother Nature is not one for revising,
no crumpled sheet music surrounds her feet.
Mother Nature improvises like a jazzman playing his riff,
not thinking of the coda, not wanting one,
wanting only to flow with the unfolding notes,
swinging with the rhythm, moving with the theme,
blowing a horn, fingering a keyboard, strumming on strings,
composing on the fly, not needing rehearsal.
Jazzman and Nature in a forever present tense,
recalling only enough past to continue the current theme,
and without wondering where the melody leads them.


Dead Roach on the Wall

I am a false density.
Particles of the universe race through me,
like wind through a mesh.
Shards from vaporized planets
exploded stars, imploded galaxies,
my substance veers none of them.
The world between my atoms
is a cosmos in itself.
Dead roach on the wall,
or rather a dangling hollow dried up shell,
swaying like a pendulum,
held up by a literal last leg.
No matter where I move
I am the end point of a line,
a mote aligned with another mote,
that husk of a being on my wall.
And between us speeds frantic traffic,
emissaries of the infinite piercing us with equal ease.

Seven Prose Poems by

Brigitte Byrd


Extreme Injury

It is winter in the house when she knows he is trapped under the frozen
ground.  From the edge of a chair she caresses his hand covered with
freckles his brain frosted with reds and browns of hemorrhage yellows
of necrosis.  She reads les dons font les esclaves comme les fouets font
les chiens after watching La Pianiste and that is something to think about
while she is cold on the couch with the cats. The daughter wears a blue
robe with love.  She is warm under the stars when the moon shines on
the flowers on her knees.  That there is a cricket in the closet is a mystery
and where is the divine revelation. Repetition in her work does not mean
she does not know what she does.  She would rather stick a knife in her
eye than eat another peanut butter cup.  In the dark corridor she says La
cigale a chanté tout l’été and they know the meaning of this winter tale. 
When it is cold in America she wants a mosaic floor over the ocean.


Pebbles/Pieces of Glass

Nothing less.  From the distance she cannot see the details and walks
on burning asphalt to find him buried with others.  It is difficult to leave
the city where he carried the daughter on his back and a suitcase on his
mind.  A glass turtle sits at the bottom of her heart.  It is a red purse
hanging from a door knob and a xylophone going tu-ti-tu-ta tu-ti-tu-ta. 
She carries the old idea that an exotic paper box on the floor starts a
collection a larger one which does not grow as empty as bottles under
a bed.  Why not typing words on a keyboard. Irrémédiablement et sans
violence.  A picture is often a faster way to repossess the senses and it
is always young.  She is a father too in the autumn light.  Elle éblouit
comme une force qui décoiffe l’âme.  Cutting the parents in half works
only when there is an even number.


Diversion

One afternoon there is another one in the car with another dog.  Another
dog and another walk by the lake.  She knew she could fall in love with
a duck and she said it.  If they look in her eyes they will know.  He slips
through the fog.  Empty cups often end up in a lake.  If we were cats we
would sleep by a child’s heart.  No it is not twelve thirty.  A beautiful child
with stitches on her chin and such a fragile neck and they shall never meet
again.  She runs through a herd of tall blonde poodles.  She would do
anything to watch him smile.  She wears her watch upside-down.  I don’t
know why.  He stopped speaking on the day she arrived.  The hand
between her thighs is not lost when the door opens.  She carries her
childhood notebook in his blue bag when it is no longer in a drawer
by his hand.  She breathes in her tears all the past and the future and
there is a birthmark right there in their earliest beginnings.


She Looks as Usual

A bell a drum a keyboard a voice and it is a beginning.  Get off get off
get off my case.  She thinks she fucks the father when she fucks her
and the mother and the others and all of them think that and look.  At
me and her maybe more maybe when she comes and dies with them. 
It is a small world to revive like a celebration like revivre after that after
entering it and before living that life of theirs that is not.  And violins
buzz like her ears.  She slips.  If she is the father and she is the mother
she knows death.  Only a separation another separation and it is there
and they will never meet again they have already met and she is a body
like a performance fused and liquid.


Adagio for Hands

He played the piano when his heart was farther than usual from home. 
They built the Chinese Wall and ate angel hair pasta when rain fell on
the sand.  Il est des façons de dire qui font trembler.  She says her
emotions show in her eyes.  When they drive in the wind to sit in a
music room and hold hands like three women in a Beckett play they
forgot the directions on a table.  She pushes the door open and life
does not interrupt cats dreaming on the ottoman.  It is a matter of tempo
this symbiosis with their hearts. When did we last waltz.  The daughter
wears shoes with heels for the first time and they walk in the dark. Ou
sommes-nous?  Au centre de l’aurore.  She says she read all night when
she opens her eyes filled with meteors.


Stanza of the Father

She never slept in a high bed under a window where the moon brightens
flowers on her knees.  There was a carnival once.  It is difficult to write
when a child starts her life.  She heard they bombed a truck while they
read.  From this pillow this was inevitable.  She sits by her and stares
at the paper each time.  Each time.  There are many books in the house
where he is not.  Looking for something to do she never went to the
Prado.  They feed a lonely eland through the fence when they cannot
bear watching a  camel dying on soiled straw.  Once they made an altar
and she found a Chinese lantern.  Sometime. Sometime she drew the line
when her eyes could not see him by the broken tree. It’s a beautiful fatality
love the way you stand. There is a whisper in her head when the daughter
walks like him.


The Door Was Open

The father is buried in the ground under sand and gravel.  There is a
tradition and it is cold.  That there is a strange fragrance does not come
from the earth and we do not and animals do not.  A star falls into a body
and it hangs in a frame that pulses like numbers burrowed under skin folds. 
Is the movement from man to God is it not the opposite like faith and
where does it go.  There is always an empty place and not often a soundwave. 
A soul maybe if she is not. Present and absent at the same time and always
alone. She covers her fear she enters her body and looks for the father and
he is there and he always was.

Two Elegies by

Harry Guest


Rock-Cut Tomb
i.m. Peter Redgrove

Why go to the high island

infertile even hostile

where skuas swoop to distract you

and a hare lollops over the heather

 

For the grey block

the gaping hole

the stone plug left by the entrance

 

I see

 

Though your concerns were rarely mine

my loves not parallel to yours

I find your way of logging toad-track moon-phase wasp-flight

admirable

like your eccentric mirror to the womb

 

The road we came by runs far across the valley

This ledge where bones lay spreads flat and scoured

Crouching on the sandstone floor

a visitor peers out at clumps of bog-cotton

hears the sea

 

The skulls here saw only blackness

 

We can push the door open

It's made of sunlight

Dwarfie Stane, Hoy, June 2003.

First published in Full of Star's Dreaming, Stride Books, 2003.

i.m. Ric Caddel

Dear Ric,
          Last summer in Japan, your six
responses to a coast you loved conveyed
the salt tang of the North Sea flickering
with puffins to a land you’d seen the year
before, whose clean trains, temples, fabulous
department-stores filled you with awe. I hope
your ears burned at the praise those crisp lines raised
from foreign readers.
                        Poet, rambler, sage,
most generous of publishers, your speech
was spiced with laughter — your quicksilver mind
lit up the silly side of things although
you never once sold short a relish for
out-of-the-way glints of pure scholarship —
Cretaceous flora, contrapuntal song,
Chinese philosophy, Welsh legends.
                                     So
you were against syllabics! I can’t take
one of your heroes, that New Jersey quack!
Cherished companions, heaven knows, are meant
to differ else concourse would sound so bland.

I have a photograph I treasure: you
in black-and-white and thoughtful as you pay
benign attention to some poet’s voice,
a pint half empty in your hand.
                                                 I wish
I could replenish one for you to-day
and listen to you speak so wisely, shed
doubt over my intolerance and set
us treading on a more exacting path.

You knew great grief and have passed on to us
the need to mourn a jagged gap in life
you’ve left. Maybe, who knows, beyond that blank
no-one can vouch for we can walk again
to Wistman’s Wood and talk as spirits talk.

If now all those who knew your work are sad,
you’re missed far more by those who knew you, those
who had that privilege.
                              Love,
                                    Harry Guest.

First published in Jacket Magazine, 2003.