SISYPHUS

SISYPHUS is an online magazine that values original thinkers and honest inquiry.

The Catbird Seat

by

It doesn’t matter where we were,
where we were going or
who we even are. It only matters that 
 
we rode inside on heated seats with safety
features reminding us to wear seatbelts,
airbags ready to deploy
should the call come for protection.
 
Windows kept clean 
so I can I look to my right
at forsythia frothing in yellow,
lupine shading violets.
 
Crepe myrtles drape ditches of daylilies,
demarcation between farmhouse and field.
Not enslaved to a radio DJ, playing what I choose
from my mortgage payment smartphone.
 
Advantaged eyes wander left, witness a murder
of crows, a battle, beak-sharpened formation
attacking with ferocity and fear
tangible in the chaos. The one in center
 
with a garter snake dangling  
from his mouth, seven others determined
to take it still alive and or kill, to conquer.
Look away is all it takes
 
to make it not so, an easy drift
back to Lucinda Williams’ Abandoned
and lilacs busting into bloom.

Appointment with Inner Self

by

At the center of thought, a small
fading light wrapped in this
 
wall of body. Who are you, rendered
so slowly out of myself? The river
 
carries its own bones, holds nothing
longer than its length. The bones
 
sing their song, blood caresses my veins. I
want to find that place that doesn’t
 
know itself where you and I meet after
this brief engagement. Even if
 
I’m a lifetime late, I’ll
meet you there.
 

How Long?

by

            At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday
            and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable
            longing to be both the same and other.
                                                The Book of Disquiet
                                                Fernando Pessoa
 
 
Storms tore down a city’s worth of leaves last night,
and now I’m up to my shins in a litter of green corpses.
 
A hundred thousand of them, more, ripped untimely
from their branches. I shuffle through the layers of them,
 
vivid with the wasted stuff of photosynthesis,
still primed to drink the sun.
 
How long before they know in their cells it’s over?
 
 
I’ve read that lab rats dropped in cylinders of water
will tread only briefly, then simply give it up, go under.   
 
But feed those rats on yogurt, they’ll paddle to exhaustion,
their resignation overruled by resident bacteria
 
refusing to jump ship: a legion of stubborn otherness.
 
 
All this year, I’ve lived entangled in the vying mandates
of this world. My mother says she’s ready now to go.
 
Am I wrong, then, if my heart insists not yet, not yet—
opposing my need to her willingness? These days,
 
hospice counsels us to hold a loved one’s lifeless hand
until the last cell cools.
 
Hearing this, I hurt for past abandonments, 
hands released too soon to the ministry of creatures 
 
whose own directive is to break flesh back
to its elements—
 
none of which was ever love.

 
The world feels alien this morning, the shine of the living
piled lifeless at my feet like suppliants:
 
I have not lived well in the presence of my dead.
Today, it seems an insufficiency of love
 
to hold a hand for anything less than forever.
 
 
But once, there was another measure—
six pomegranate seeds, after which no quantity
 
of love could make the slightest difference: it was
a simpler age. Three times, I’ve gone on with it, my life,
 
and now, again. Daily, I hold my mother’s hand,
knowing too much, too little. My life, like hers,
 
an otherness. However long.

 

The Sum of Your Life

by

Down the street, at the edge of things you know, lie
possibilities you won’t explore, loves unused, friendships
 
unstarted, invitations failed. In the golden light,
years pass, with ghosts of would-be lives
 
superimposed on would-be paths,
like colored filters. What you are and what
 
you aspire to, what you’ve done or tried, all the love
you longed to share with someone who
 
didn’t notice. That day that could have blossomed,
but you were late. What didn’t happen is
 
a part of you.

 

The Fight We Have Left

by

November 8, 2016

Won’t stop at nightfall
won’t grind down

like a stone thrashed
by tides, won’t lapse,

or be denied. This fight
cannot be taken from us,

we will pass it, one to another
inflamed by kindness

or the desire for kindness
or the insistence

that kindness not be futile
we don’t use the word futile, or furious

though we are furiously holding out our hands
with their stone of hope

we won’t let it go.

Nevertheless, She Persisted

by

“Storms make trees have deeper roots.” Dolly Parton

In the hollow, a silver poplar blown down
by Irene, beckons from a meadow.
Her roots face the road and fan outwards.
Like a waving hand, long fingers grasp
for light and carbon dioxide. Some still cling
to the earth, suckling nutrients.
 

Every spring her bare branches sprout
pearly buds. In summer, leaves shine green.
The cool fall turns them yellow, orange, then
brown as they scatter, like a halo around
her head. Winter buries her beneath white
quilts. Only her uppermost twigs left exposed.
 

Always spring returns. It warms the frozen
landscape, softening the bed where she rests.
Altered, she remains unstoppable.
Awake and reborn–she rises.

Arizona Magazine Stand

by

Even though the soldier on the Tactical Weapons cover
      is pointing his locked and loaded ‘extreme beast CQ LWRC 5.56IC – PSD’

right at me, I doubt he intends me any harm.
      With his arsenal of readiness, he’ll be helpful to have around

when the apocalypse arrives. Moving on, I notice the cover
      of Western Hunter which sports

another Anglo-American square-jawed hunk,
      this one crouched beside an enormously dead elk,

looking victorious as if he’s just pulled up a tree
      stump at the Kill Your Own Dinner Café, where, if need be,

he will consume the entire meal raw. Flipping through a few pages,
      I come across him again inside

posing jauntily now beneath a galaxy
      of antlered animal heads in his killer man-cave, where,

along with the eye candy on the wall,
      are tips on how to create your own big hunter game room.

Next shelf over, World of Firepower’s July offering,
      who leaves little to the imagination in a black tee shirt

which is about to rip apart under the strain
      of his grapefruit size biceps, appears to be shooting

his way out of a bunker with the VT16 Executive POW 38
      wedged against his hip.

Admiring his confidence and neatly trimmed facial hair,
      I can imagine skinning a varmint together

under a darkening sky, a sky with a cold shoulder,
      just the two of us. But I find myself equally attracted

to the whitewater kayaker on the cover of Survivor’s Edge
      who, though no weapon in hand, obviously has the rutabagas

to decapitate a moose with five inches of dental floss
      and is promising to tell me how to select the right chickens,

prepare for mayhem, beat winter’s wrath, stock up
      on Armageddon essentials and plan my end of civilization

evacuation strategy. The carnivores inside him are restless,
      and the promise of mass carnage gleams like a knife

between his perfect teeth.
      I put the kayaker back down, wondering how to tell him

that I spend my afternoons pawing like an antelope in search
      of something green to fortify my journey

across the frozen north following herds that are migratory, uncertain
      in the way of one who has traveled many years

without a flock. I am an old coot with a bent wing,
      a nightjar caught in morning light, numerous of my kind –

mylodon, wooly mammoth, glyptodon, camelops, flightless megapode,
      rendered extinct when civilization was still a damp fire

on the horizon, pointless and useless, broiled, seared,
      atomized, and fossilized for scrap with mere rocks and spears.

Like missing kids, their sad little faces are everywhere, their eyes ponds
      that drown us over and over in their fading light. And yet…

so much more man power remains to be explored inside the pages
      of Concealed Carry, Gun World, Recoil, Combat Handguns,

Ballistic, Off the Grid, Doomsday, S.W.A.T., Tactical Gear,
      Combat Arms, Automatic Re-loader, Knives and Home Defender,

as the little conveyor belt keeps moving along our broccoli,
      our frozen pizzas, our beer bellies and our domestic animal parts,

somewhere on the poles another iceberg needs defrosting, and the parking lot
      outside with its ordinary acts of kindness and brutality awaits.

 

Marilee Richards’ collection The Double Zero (which includes this poem) has won this year’s May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and will be published by Bauhan Publishing in 2019.

Refreshment

by

I’ve been invested the last few years in how and why we need new myths and stories for the coming environmental changes ahead, and “Refreshment” is a part of that investigation. I want to believe that there is an almost inevitable return to understanding the ancient connections between mater, matter, and mother, though whether we choose such a return or whether the return comes more violently remains to be seen.
 
 
At the confluence the city grew a thousand years,
the last hundred in full view of the sun.
Iron and glass and perfectly mown grass converse in it.
We walk the hills in the evenings.
 
When in drought we stare from our roofs,
stand in the dust of shaken rugs and linens,
make do with a basket of dandelions,
wait for boats to take us to the headwaters.
 
Praying by the banks, we’re taught to praise
who’s atop the mountain withholding the source.
How many years till his hands tire?
To whom should we be grateful when it rains?
 
Somewhere in a basement a girl blinds herself
that she may see clearly the way to the summit.
What’s her name? Can it even be said? One day
she’ll walk the bridge of our hands to the top.
 
 

Summer Air

by

                     

The impulse to remove all clothing, become
congruent with landscape, willow tree
innocent of guile or: it never has to think,
“Are these ruffles fashionable?  Is my collar
too stiff?  Oh me, the matrons are passing,
do they gaze at me or ignore?” 

                                      Even the rose,
though we might envy it, has no décor.
Stepping toward the lake, the two women
take the summer air on bare thighs and
buttocks, the breeze subtle through their
body hair, they follow the billowing green-
grass path, their minds fitted sweetly
into the pocket of their flesh.  At least,
that would be the ideal.  That would be
what we wish for them. 

                                         Are they maidens,
fifteen, sixteen?  If so, we must ask,
“How did they achieve such a practical lack
of modesty?  Who raised them to be at peace
with their small or large breasts, with the
folds of fat around their ribs?  Or do they
disrobe to titillate their skin, send a shiver
through the slick lips of their vaginas?”

                                        If they are old,
fifty or sixty-five, we hope they love the liberation,
we hope they’ve come to accept that perfection
is a fool’s errand, the air a robe better than silk,
lake water a set of jewels decorating every
crook and dimple of skin until their bodies
shine like fish or angels or reality.

 

Jerusalem Now

by

Sometimes, a poem or piece of prose lends itself to the lyrical nature of music. Please enjoy listening to Alicia Vandevorst’s “Jerusalem Now” on Soundcloud.–Ed. 

In May of 2018, the US decided to move its embassy to Jerusalem. This symbolic move heightened for me the ongoing rivalry over that ground and what it represents. That specific power attributed to that specific place, I believe, can be encountered elsewhere, anywhere, by the person with a sensitive heart. When Blake calls us to build Jerusalem “in England’s green and pleasant Land”, I hear him calling for humanity to recognize the presence of Jerusalem within itself. Why fight over a holy place anymore? Why be bound by such limiting stories? Instead we could tell the story of peace to ourselves.

And see her wild hair is the wind, the day of crossed scents on the hill adorns her as here blows feral rosemary, daphne and rose, and bitter hawthorn and musty broken leaves, and tar fumes and snot and semen and musk glands of snakes and the sweat of the city and the depleted country, the bitters of smoke. She, Jerusalem, will greet her lover, anywhere.

Smell her hands within the fire, in the bakery, in the gym, the court, the temple. She is the field of scent devoid of preference. See her newly woven gown like the table, the bed, the screen. See her heaving every sinusoid. She is the field of vision devoid of preference. Touch her wherever your blood flows and however your skin pricks. Hear her bridal shudder, louder, louder, into words and meandering sounds. She feeds herself to you, anything at your lips can be known as Jerusalem. You choose to savor her in a limited way as your own flesh or as every body.

This Jerusalem of every city, her flesh of every sidewalk, is unveiled to the gentlest footfalls, to those who know she’s there. And they shake and shudder freely anywhere. And wail or kneel or sing or do what they must do, but with an undeterred smile, these lovers.

And does she stand, shimmering at the southern border? White gown in the red dirt that we tread on the bridge, she, the damsel who some fight the dragon-immigrants as if to save, stands among the immigrants, unseen by the newest patrol. A shimmer like heat, she waits with us. She, the mothers and fathers who shade their children with their bodies, whose sweat anoints them. She is the shiver through the mind that checks fear, that opens the way for care at 9 AM at 9:15 then at 10 at noon at midnight at 9 AM again.

And the patrolling soldiers hear her cries— the children in cages cry mama, mama! In their skin, the agents feel the urge to stoop, to sacrifice their badges and stoop and gather them into their arms and find, through mazes of paper and questions and walking and apologies, their mothers, their fathers, the child’s Jerusalem. But they lie to cover the urges. They call the children instruments played, an orchestra, then a bunch of horns to silence. But that is Jerusalem, the beloved place, mislaid, misconceived, abandoned at the altar. A different knot tied.

And is she revealed in the loose gowns of jellyfish that hover where the ocean dies? Is she regal in the clutter of satellites and trash within the planetary orbit?

Does she stride forward across the cleared Amazon with cow hooves round her neck? Or with the slowed atmospheric river like a draping boa? None of these are her wedding gown. These mark how we refuse her, but still she exists, jangling the trash and trashed like a mirror-gown that catches our eye like nagging, or as an echo catches the ear and makes you attentive. You want to find her, even there. You want to shed the blindness of suffering and set aside demands and see her. You want to go to Jerusalem. You want a place to kneel. A pure place. Her bridal descent. A place without any contaminant, not even a trace of pollution. Not a jot of separation. The site of reunion.

And now if the bride emerges, Jerusalem, in every city, on every lane, and the dingy wastes we amassed erupt as art as she emerges, like butterflies the dark, sullen heaps will develop into apologies: Kodachrome valances of plastic, pillars of marbled plastic from melted straws, prosthetic arms from salvaged waste, microbes we cultivate will eat the traces and the cleaned ocean will sway and bask and grow new swaths of plankton.

The River Siren

by

Standing on the river bank— an apparition
that has escaped from the pages of Vogue
or from a mysterious mythical cave where
the gods keep their secrets—long streams
of gold and silver flowing around the golden
glow of her face, with a smile that could swallow
us all, guiding the boats onto her beach,
and soon she will be guiding us down the river
through the treacherous rapids, balancing the boats,
balancing the crew, her presence charming
the treacherous river, creating calm in the midst
of chaos, frenzied water bouncing
off her body, the boat riding on air.
 
Evenings, once we have gone ashore, settled
the boats, and set up camp, she sheds her
ungainly life jacket, shapeless river slicks and
transforms herself back to goddess, her long wild
strands of gold and silver shimmering in the setting
sun, her body sheathed in form fitting sleeves,
floating through the camp, doing what a good
goddess does, ensuring that all is well with
the world, that we are at peace and well fed.
I am drawn to her like a wandering moth
to a dangerous flame, fluttering my attentions,
bathed in her smile and her mysterious
soft resilient sweetness, wanting to possess
this divine creature, companion to this wild river.
 
Once, when we were hiking up a hidden
canyon, I slipped.  She steadied me
holding me lightly with her slender
fingers and I sensed hidden strength
in those fingers.  I realized that if I had fallen
she would have held me effortlessly,
if she wanted to she could have tossed me
over her shoulder, she could have swung me
and tossed me over the canyon wall,
this glamorous creature had a strength —
hidden, contained—capable of explosion.
I sensed that if she exploded she could
change the weather, the river could flow
upstream, and rocks would slide down
the canyon walls, I didn’t want her angry,
I only wanted her smile, her smile
encompassing the world—
or at least me.
 
At the end of our voyage, this guide
this goddess hugs me, I hug her, caressing
her soft body, sensing her hard body, stroking
fingering her seductive hair, her golden
and silver strands enveloping me
entwining me, entangling me.

And then she dismissed me.
 

C’Mon Back Cafe

by

It’s 96 degrees
iced coffee, early afternoon
diligent millennials inside at their laptops
I’m outside in the warm shade
of a large sycamore, a wilting, tired angel
barely able to breathe.
Some of her leaves
collapsed into themselves crisp as dried out bats
but she’s hanging in there.
 
How I depend on her! Her massive splotched
trunks cantilevered over the sidewalk
hold.
So long as she stands, I can make it
in this heat, blissfully peaceful in spite of it,
practicing my listening:
 
A workman intermittently tosses torn-out sinks
and old fixtures into an echoing dumpster
gutting a defunct barber shop. In this strip mall,
an older one, that somehow
manages a homey feel, a sort of plaza — its shabby ivy
twists up the wood posts of the overhang testifying
to its tough struggle—
 
there’s a nail shop, a dog-grooming salon, even
that endangered commercial species, a used
bookstore —all
within range of this silent sycamore’s presence.
 
Where do sycamores come from?
Where do angels come from?
Where have we all come from
blown into a strip mall like scraps of paper
clustering together
on our devices, separately
at the C’mon Back Café?
 
The demolition sounds
irritate me until I let them go
into the surf of passing tires,
 
into the silence suddenly reverberating
when the motorcycle stops.
Strange, I hadn’t even heard its throbbing idle
until it stopped.
Every moment’s a culmination.
John Cage would be all for it.
 
I have docked at this space-station
on my way to the far reaches of the universe,
my wife back home on earth, perhaps
doing laundry or reading. Heaven help us
if strip malls keep proliferating.
This wasteland’s so literal it’s worse than Eliot’s.
 
Have architects all lost their imagination?
Of course, it’s fiscally driven,
integrity’s out the window. Amazon
and Walmart have us so hooked on convenience
and price, to be a local now
is to be a refugee
 
in a lower-middle class strip mall—souped up
but temporary and insulting and hideous
as immigration detention centers, not as horrendous
of course, but similarly degrading—all of it
created by international corporations.
It’s a bloodbath. But you know all that.
 
I am visiting my daughter and grandsons
who were able to buy a house on this planet
a little too close to the sun for comfort.
Thank God it has a Y, with a great pool
protected by very expensive fighter jets breaking
the sound barrier several times a day.
 
You always know there’s a war
going on somewhere, even as I sit here
poised in solitude, I’m surrounded by rehearsals
for war—that are supposed to make you feel safe!
I’d feel a lot safer if they’d just give me whatever it costs
to fuel one of those jets for a week.
To think we’ve been at war since 1990—
Twenty-eight years!
 
This is apparently an indifferent
chaotic universe, but I bet
there’s an underlying order
I imitate by temporarily sipping iced coffee
in peace. There’s a core of peace
at the center of this universe. I can feel it
just sitting here in the warm shade. It’s paid for
 
by my small breathing
that in turn attracts a weak breeze
that causes you, my uncomplaining angel, a bedraggled tree
to ache and lift the whole
garbage-producing population of human beings
with your burning wings.
 
I had to get out of the house.
The Trump pimp, federal circuit court Judge Kavanaugh
in the Senate Supreme Court Confirmation hearings on TV
was slaughtering language with phrases such as
enhanced interrogation techniques (meaning torture
used by Bush administration in Guantanamo)—
 
compared to that, writing poems
even if they’re mediocre or shitty
is a way of sharing the shade of a sycamore tree.
 
Now a garbage truck’s backing up, it’s beeper going
the guy on the ground
beckoning it back with his hands, says
 
C’moan back . . . moan back, now, that’s it, keep comin’ . . . moan back . . .
 
that’s the news for the day
from the Moan Back Café.

Ode to Lucretius

by

This is an ode to a poet who created a work that has influenced thinkers over the millennia, guiding societies and ideologies. Titus Lucretius Carus inspired Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo da Vinci, and many others with his last surviving work, the didactic Epicurean poem On the Nature of Things. Despite the many attempts to suppress the work as heretical , it is still being read today: Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) tracks Lucretius’s influence from his inspiration for creation to the poem’s sociopolitical influence from inception to present. “Lucretius presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena.” Lucretius’s philosophy is also said to have inspired C.J. Thomsen to create research categories of artifacts, widely known as the Three Age System: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. The communication of ethical and societal theory has survived over 2000 years and its ripple effect on civilizations is enormous: widespread and compelling.

Ode to Lucretius (99-55 BCE)             

I have been listening to one of the old masters,
a Roman poet
singing the truths of Epicurus, who tells us
about the way of all things.

Everything comes into existence,
everything goes out of existence:
rocks, trees, seas, mountains, people.
All things are made of atoms.
There is no such thing as eternity.
There is no such thing as certainty.
There are no deities who gave you life.
There is no sacrifice to make.
There is no fate you cannot break.
Death has no claim on you;
banish the fear of the hereafter.
Do not fear the dark of mind.
Tear the mask of fear aside.
The mind is man-made.
Do not give away your freedom.
Let go all the old religious stories.
Set them free.
They do not belong to you.
These are but dreams and scams.

Friendship, service, and civility
light the passageways to a good life.
Discover the world as it is.
Enjoy the morning light;
balance and stability thrive
in a harmonious life.

He is well
who sees himself
at peace in the present.
When you embrace what is,
the tranquility of self is kept alive,
wherein all delight resides.

 

Murmurations

by

“The study of murmurations is part of a larger field of study called ‘swarm intelligence’ or ‘collective animal behavior’ – the spontaneous, synchronous movement of schools of fish, herds of mammals, swarms of bees or locusts, and other animal groups.  The property of a higher order arising out of seeming randomness is a phenomenon called ’emergence,’ and numerous scientists are trying to get to the bottom of it… One researcher who specializes in the study of animal swarms believes that the dance of the dunlins, and other flocks, may be a product of, as well as generate, what is called metacognition, a collective mind that is much bigger and smarter than the sum of its parts.” 

          From THE WONDER OF BIRDS by Jim Robbins

“A drunken fingerprint rolling across the sky.”
       Richard Wilbur

From the beach, suddenly, entrancement!
We call out, point, freeze in our shoes
our warm hats and jackets, as the day wanes
and against its steel grey background, a cloud
of swallows like a spray of buckshot swoops low
to the water, changes direction and color,
black to white, hundreds of tiny simultaneous
impulses flipping like the snap of a Venetian blind
and they are off, swirling behind us up the beach
as we tip our heads back, mesmerized: metacognition,
iron filings pulled around the sky by an invisible
magnet: One Mind.  There is some kind of joy
in what we can’t explain, how they do not bang
their bodies together and fall, how they know
when to turn, lift, flip, no long-necked leader
honking at the apex of a V, and anyway no time;
in 15 milliseconds they alter course, bank and dive
as one enormous being.  Our mouths open grinning,
incredulous, not knowing how to believe in
something that we feel
but cannot possibly know.

 

After You’ve Won Your Election

by

Someone unexpected will lie to you.
Congratulations, you are now
a means to an end.
 
Surely you have heard the adage
if you want a friend in politics,
get a dog.
Better would be a cat,
which will ignore you;
a necessary lesson in humility.
 
It is not unlike a river.
The questions are how you anchor yourself,
and whether you become entranced
merely
by reflections on the surface.
 
Here’s a secret. A problem does not exist
until articulated in public.
 
Observe
Weigh
Speak

America

by

“America” is translated from its original Serbian by author Dr. Ljiljana Bibović (1937-1986).  Granted a Fulbright scholarship to study in America, Dr. Bibović was a member of the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in the early 1980s (“A&W Sutter Street” was published in issue #19, p. 60) and a student at the University of California, Berkeley. “America” is from a recently published legacy collection, Stopped Moments. Although the majority of poems are in Serbian, there are also verses in English.

America,
well carpeted.
America silent with no smile.
I am walking along the cold corridors
from one sign to another.
It is silent.
It does not welcome you.
The customs officer weary of questions
is letting you into the new world.
In the nightmare of pieces of luggage,
all of a sudden a human voice,
the voice of a man in uniform beside me.
America has smiled at last.

Water Snakes

by

The poem transforms an episode from my past, swimming in a pond where a girlfriend and I had to avoid poisonous water snakes. We weren’t naked and it wasn’t at night, but those details raise the erotic stakes in the poem. That’s where Sir Thomas Wyatt comes in. Wyatt’s poem explores the interplay of pleasure and risk, as does my poem. Although sixteen not fourteen lines long, my poem also operates within the idea of the sonnet, partly by creating an echoing couplet by quoting Wyatt at the end.

 

Sliding naked into the pond, you warned
me that the water snakes were poisonous.
But we couldn’t see them. They were as
black as slimy sticks corrugating the dark
surface. We hovered like solemn ghosts;
you, your seaweed hair, floating,
there and not there, an apparition
underwater, a blurred imago wanting
to emerge; and I, an incandescent light,
drained of color, scanning that way and this,
too rattled to appreciate the sensual
enjambment of pleasure and risk, which
is skinny-dipping at night in a country pond.
You laughed at my hesitation, swam over, insinuated
yourself around me, and lavished the kind of liquid kiss
which whispered, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

 

CASUS (KELHAM BEACH)

by

 
 
 

 

 

For Charles Entrekin

“Insula, insulae…”
 
As an exercise, exaggerate in Latin.
 
I was getting used to the idea
of walking, reading the text
down through the forest
to the sea—
 
Think how impressed you’ll be
when I can quote Catullus!
 
Passer, Passerculus, Passerella…
The woods are full of sparrows.
 
And sometimes what is called
affectionately
the “real” world
is precisely—
you have to point to it,

as stepping

from the forest, there abruptly is
the sea—
the yellow-green, indigo blotchy cold body
of thought, from which (we have been told)
we have emerged.
 
The soul, peninsular, has wet feet.
 
“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”

 

If you are interested in the Lewis Carroll inspiration for this poem,”The Walrus and the Carpenter,” you can find the link here. The recorded reading is excellent.

Bringing Back Water

by

Thank you, poet and dear friend Jack Crimmins, for going out to bring me water that winter night I was doing a reading at the Quicksilver Gallery (where they only served wine). It was dark and raining and yet the only water to drink might have traveled the seas all the way from the Sitka Glacier to China and then back. 

That night you went down the street
to bring back water – sweet
smell of rain
on your shirt, the good water
from who-knows-where
in its killer-plastic bottle.  Wind
through the open door — leaving
returning.  Now stars,
too early for the old moon. 
There is a wilderness of pure joy
beneath all sorrow.
It’s where things begin.

 

Originally published by On the Commons (2013)

The 27th of January, 2017

by

—after Kinnel

A Friday (the day of Frigg,
Norse goddess of wisdom)
that sags gray as brains, the
day closing this long week
since an uncertain absurdity
began to un-settle itself in—
(blurting like boils from under
maize-ish, cirrocumular mesh,
ranting, being ranted, mouthing
black smoke, inhaling black hearts,
splaying deal-breakers like pollutants
burping out over America First factories,
self-delusional centrifugal elipticals)—continues,
so a 4-year interim begins: protest marches, opinion polls,
endless petitions, reorganizations, reactions, confrontations, wiser
fights, phone calls, letter blitzes—but, also, through-it-all candid accord?