 |
Summer, 2001
|
Editorial policy: I have to like it a lot. --Luke Breit |
|
|
Summer, 2001
|
Editorial policy: I have to like it a lot. --Luke Breit |
Two Poems by Tim McKeeTwo Poems by Heather Hutcheson
Two Poems by Tim McKee
Conjugation
There was a time
When I listened to poets
With only a perfectionist's ear,
Waiting gleefully for their mishaps
And relishing in their cliches,
Ecstatic that they, too,
Were trapped in the tunnel
That lies
Between truth
And words.
I would scan a poem
Simply so that I could depart,
The faintest crack,
The slightest dent,
The vaguest taste of dissonance
An invitation to flee;
The more I saw their failures,
The better I felt about my own scribblings
That lived on napkins
And left only a trace of my heart's intent.
Because when I tried to turn my thoughts
Into turns of the tongue
They turned traitorous,
Transformed from tirades
Into tentative tumults,
From truths to tired theories
And art exhibitions.
I just don't know, I would think,
All these linguistic latitudes
That leave me feeling as if my poems
Don't fit quite right,
A cheap suit on a nobleman,
A patent leather shoe on a princess,
An almost-but-not-quite brand of queasiness,
A drunk with vision kind of night that ends
With a poetic dry heave.
I would fantasize about speaking every language of the universe
So that I could spit truths as if saliva
And leave no one guessing,
A rat-a-tat-tat of pure adrenaline screamed in Esperanto-
My poems would start in Finnish,
Slide into a Mandarin refrain
And finish with a Fulani flourish
That would leave my listeners
Shouting as if the Earth's plates had just shifted.I remember once
I met a Greek philosopher on a train
Who told the most incredible stories
And kept his Greek/English dictionary close to his chest;
The first day he told me a story, and it mesmerized me.
My eyes lit up as he reached his conclusion,
"You see, it's all about...it's all about...ah, hold on-"
He quickly looked up the Greek word he had in mind
And joyfully found the English translation:
"Yes! Yes! It's all about passion!" he exclaimed.
Over the next few days,
The philosopher told me more and more stories,
But every time he got to his finale
His English failed him again,
And every time he turned to his dictionary
And proclaimed,
"Aha! It's all about...passion!"
On the seventh day he looked at me and said,
"My friend, you must learn Greek,
Because I cannot talk to you in this English of yours.
Those seven feelings in my seven stories
Were seven very different words in Greek,
But in your language,
They all mean the same thing.
It makes me wonder how much you English people really understand
About passion."
And yet here we are today shifting sands
In this lunar hourglass,
Using our blades of precision
To slice diamonds
Out of this crude soil,
Spelling without fear
What only the wind can say.
I have learned to listen to these breezes,
Because they too can move trees.
How I wish my Greek friend
Could come by train to this village,
Throwing away his dictionary
And listening to how we've learned to translate passion.
Sketches of Freeman
Freeman stands on the corner
Giving directions to
Imaginary drivers
No one else can see.
He leans over their invisible cars
And holds his chin in a trance of comprehension,
Laying out to them shortcuts he has gleaned
From decades of urban wizardry:
A left, a right, a stop sign, a left, a right,
He will get them there,
For he is the grand traffic cop
On this intersection of congested souls,
A street sign of sanity above the chaos.
"Don't mention it," he replies out loud
To their fictive thank yous,
Shuffling back to his place
Among the sidewalk debris.
Misunderstood madness,
Manic gesticulations of the unheard,
Schizophrenic sketchings of
Reagan's misdirection,
He's been at that spot so long
His soles have grown roots
And mushrooms have sprouted
Between his toes.But here comes Beatrice walking to school
And whistling the 4th grade blues,
Tossing the waxy green apple
From her bag
To her favorite free man,
Freeman the street man
Who dances in his own ballrooms
And talks to Presidents,
Whose dreams are so real
He doesn't need any at night,
That whiskey-smelling, alleycat-loving, opera-singing
Toothless man-
He is the one true curve
In her right-angled landscape.
You see Beatrice has surveyed the geometry of reality
And can only shudder at its symmetry-
She is the one who sits by herself on gray playgrounds,
The one with Fs in citizenship
And notes home about "anti-social
And mildly autistic tendencies."
They have tried to beat it out of her
With schoolsnake threats and raised hands,
"What is wrong with you, girl?" father mother sister brother
Ask over meat and potato dinner inquisitions,
"Why can't you just behave?" principals demand
Beside fluorescent light and
Encyclopedic bookcases.How can she tell them
About the skyscrapers she sees
In the sandbox
Or the trees that grow
From her teacher's eyes?
How can she explain
That when she looks out the window
She's only searching for rainbows in the sky?
How can she tell them
That when they ask for her heroes
She wants to point to the crazy man
Who talks to cars
And mutters mad mantras
To the world's soundproofed psyches?
How can she tell them
That in textbook margins
She draws street corner empires
In which she and Freeman sit on the thrones?She doesn't.
She doesn't even try to tell them,
Floating instead in her own wordlessness
Until after school,
When she can walk once again
To her boulevard oasis
To find her Freeman,
The one free man
Singing louder
Than the chorus,
Her dancing clown
In this department store of mannequins,
His silent hand
Extended
With beautiful, shining gems
Only the two of them can see.
The man, he calls their dreams delusions of grandeur.
Freeman and Beatrice look high, whistle low
And say,
Naw naw, it's ya'lls compromises that are the nightmares.
Back to Index
A Poem by Mary Mackey
Mongoosecivique
The young playwright
lies on his back
with his hands at
his sides
his face as yellow
as old furniture polish
he counts the tiles
in the ceiling
120
the holes in each tile
23
he is surprised
23 is an odd number
but he is too sick
to multiply it by
120
to see if that will make
it even
all the colors are wrong
the walls are purple
the light bulbs blue
the windows so back
the sun seems in
permanent eclipse
he grows afraid
so to comfort himself
he begins to dream of writing
a new play called
"Mongoosecivique."
The play will be set in
1957
in a country he has
never lived in
(somewhere tropical & warm
or perhaps somewhere where
the characters can see the
aurora borealis)
the Mongoosecivique
will be a car
but the audience
won't know that
until Act III
the characters will
speak of it
enigmatically
as if it is a rare
animal
or a beautiful young
woman
Mongoosecivique
the young playwright
climbs in
adjusts the mirror
and drives off toward a place
where the aurora
borealis
streams over the jungle
and all the colors
are finally
right.
Back to Index
A Poem by Harold Schneider
Sir Isaac Newton's Theories of Dating
In Omaha, each kid knows south is downhill.
North is a climb, upstairs, Canada at the top
and then a North Pole, home of polar bears
energetic as e=mc squared.
But south is something else.
If you don't hold on to the banister, you'll take your
night bath in the Gulf of Mexico. On dates,
you hold hands as soon as possible
because gravity can't grab 300 lb.
like it can a midget. You kiss soon as your lips
hit car space on first dates because
gravity has two less holes to suck on.
And you might get a girl to make your
first time in bed historical
when you promise: you'll help
with her high school science project,
show that two bodies circling each other
will soon make friction so magnetic
it starts a human
race.
Back to Index
A Poem by C.E. Chaffin
For Teresa
You are a straw
pounded through a board
by a tornado.
The wind is your home.
It takes all your energy
to lie still.
Feel the weight of you
in the wet sand,
how your patient shoulders
have borne your head
like a bowling ball
without a grip.
The sea freezes
in your footprints.
Gingerly you remove
the ice from its molds.
Never has your path
been so clear.
Back to Index
A Poem by Eve West Bessier
Hot Springs
1.
The warm pool, full
of floating faces
over light-flickered, blue-white
water. Silence.
The careful averting of eyes.
2.
Soft, mineralized fluid glazing
my chin, I see the back of a head skim
across water on a long neck, then suddenly
buttocks and legs,
covered with light nodes of air.
The water distorts forms.
We all are faces on legs.
3.
Four Watsu therapists
float their clients.
Fingers and feet
make ripples, eddies;
a shoulder, a hip, a knee
above the water line,
limbs moving like kelp
or cotton mouths.
4.
Nudeness
feels like telling
your story to strangers
who politely
pretend
not to listen.
5.
I listen.
Not every story is beautiful.
Every story is beautiful.
Breasts. Young.
Small. Funnel-like.
Large, fruit-like,
swinging gently until they find water
weightlessness.
Some bellies tell
of labor, others of the joy
of eating or drinking,
or working weights.
Men with hair on chests, arms
backs, or slick as seals.
Some with long, graying ponytails.
Men moving into the water
like elk with large antlers, balanced
kingly on their heads,
or slipping in quickly,
as if stealth will hide
insecurity, or beauty.
Women moving into the water
like bear matrons, or gazelles.
Some with innocence lingering
just below almond skin, or moon skin,
or moving in slowly like mother goddesses,
flesh quivering in roundness and fullness.
6.
My scars tell their own
stories. Some might read:
children, though I have none;
or the knowledge of pain,
and I've had enough;
or honor, like a soldier's,
for hearing death-music.
7.
Bodies stepping forth from
sanctuary, skin steaming pink.
The inner pool, so hot my body
shudders, refuses
to believe. I go down
the stair, breathing each step
of fire-needle heat
until I am completely
in. My heart flutters,
thoughts almost
silenced by the stinging force
of heat knocking
stress clean out of reach.
Back to Index
Two Poems by Heather Hutcheson
Almost June, Bolinas
the woman is full of summer
and heavy the whole sky in her
head she is a bright bird drunk
from too many warm berries
she is joyful insists she can fly
and dares to show her red body
to four men on the beach
who will never know her
or the blush that carries her
that she carries home
Married
I live with the man who savors
his aloneness. It is the only taste
he can stomach for regret has
polished brilliant ulcers inside him.
How jubilant we are together,
not talking, over greasy holiday feasts,
bloody meats and mounds of buttered
breads. How content we are beneath
the avalanche of our own sadnesses.
This is as close as we=ve ever been.
So we record what it is like, how
our bodies cramp under the weight
of joy, how we warp and nearly break
in the face of the cheerful, the delighted,
the naive. How we become avid ants
packing these sugary details away,
hoarding them, for when
we have nothing left
to fill us.
Back to Index
A Poem by Jane BlueThe Interior Border
1. Journal
G. took me down to the L.A. river to see the art
her friends had made: wooden totems, plexiglassed
words about rivers, fens, lakes, jungles.
A troupe of actors daubed with mud moved
in silent protest down in the tules of the riverbottom.
Turbines reclaimed water as art.
It reminded me of going to the border with V.
in El Paso. An interior border, wild fringes of the city
where gangboys congregate.
When I got back, I learned that Patrick Nolan
had died in Folsom Prison, I wanted to write a poem
titled "Patrick Nolan and the L.A. River."
2. Patrick Nolan and the L.A. River
I don't know if they ever met, but Patrick Nolan
and the L.A. River had much in common:
imprisonment in concrete and steel.
He was a large man, as the L.A. River is large,
though confined; both were capable of killing
in a rage, cut off from the community, the power
of their poetry underestimated; both lived
among unlikely wildlife:
non-native crayfish proliferating in the L.A. River;
wild black turkeys that in silhouette
resemble people strutting on the road
down into Folsom Prison, gobble-talking:
We're free and you're not. Patrick Nolan
spent half his life - 18 years - inside,
making him 36 when he died.
I don't know what half the life
of the L.A. River would be. It began
with the thrusting up of mountains, streams
trickling, merging, the Arroyo Seco
and the Calabasas. Its course changed
more than once due to circumstance and nature,
like Patrick Nolan's, who left behind
over 200 poems. When the Army Corps
of Engineers channeled the waters of the L.A. River
this only eventually increased its fury.
It gathers now from paved suburban watershed
to flow with great strength once more,
unable to seep into the soil,
nothing can escape the river in flood, no one
can climb out of its smooth manmade walls.
3. Journal
Wind, a spatter of rain. Still thinking
about Patrick Nolan. I didn't really know him.
No one really knows a con. I know a murder at 18
sealed his identity: inmate, lifer, con. But sometime
he forged a new identity in prison: poet. Poets
came to see him, published his poems,
brought him paper, pencils. I don't know
if he had any family to visit him, but he
made a sort of family for himself. We all do.
Back to Index
A Poem by James Lee Jobe
Keeping Time
At six years old, my son insists on wearing a wristwatch.
He doesn't know what "2 o'clock" means, but he likes to
know when it is. What is he waiting for? Is he keeping
count till something passes?
I am a foolish man; what have I done
this time?
Back to Index
Two Poems by Molly FiskLove Poem
for John Mendel
Shit, how the body betrays us. Chronic ache in the back
turning cancerous overnight, at the end of a century
we hoped to live through--how bitterness makes us suddenly
hate the sun, the palm tree's blue shadow flickering
in a thoughtless breeze, the oblivious, rolling ocean.
Life doesn't love us back--like a beautiful woman
we wanted too much, it walks on surely without us.
But the disappointment isn't permanent--it's too tiring,
for one thing, and the truth is humans were born to love
this world, we can't help it. We take the living flesh of another
into our arms, whisper into the pink shell of an ear,
our lips brushing the bent wrist, the collarbone's wing.
Or the mouthpiece of a telephone--hollow bones
in our ears ringing with a friend's voice: perfect noise.
We drink what liquids they'll allow us after the radiation
and taste the familiar made new, our throats opening
with mortal joy, like the throats of egrets open
to the shining fish. We are alive. It is everything.
New Math
Think of a number between 1 and 10.
Now, divide your age by that number
and subtract how many times you had sex
in 1971. Nixon was The One, then
(if you thought about sleeping with him,
add 50)--your hair would have been longer
and straighter, your pants belled
and swinging over the clappers of your ankles,
jeans riding down on your hipbones.
Year of flowing scarves, late nights,
chianti. Charred bras. Add the number
of joints you smoked per day and subtract
each glass of whiskey. If you were in high school,
divide the total by--how many times
did you go to the Fillmore? Sneaking
out of the house barefooted, your parents'
eyes glazed on Mr. Sullivan? At that hour
the back of the 45 Union was empty--
trying to count street lights was always
impossible when we were stoned.
Well, if it's more than 12 we'll have to start
over. If you were in college multiply by 4
and subtract each class you never went to.
Add 5 for your dorm room's beaded curtain,
or tie-dyed socks, hand-poured sand candles.
Every peace march counts for 10, and kissing
the pigs another 10 unless you were tripping.
If you still know the words to "Dire Wolf"
throw in another 7. OK--take this number
and multiply it by the number of letters
in your TM mantra and then subtract
the smaller of either your combined
Social Security digits or the years still left
on your mortgage, and add
the Universal Number 6.
That's the answer.
Back to Index
ARCHIVES
In Sublette's Barn - Fall, 1998
In Sublette's Barn - Summer, 1997
In Sublette's Barn - Spring, 1997
Links from this page.....
Calendar of Literary and Poetry Events in the Sacramento region
Luke Breit's Home Page
Poetic Links
Submit poems here or email the editor
