NICHOLAS BREDIE
The Searchers
an ars poetica
and the mesas rise
sepia like the stacks
of books, broken backed,
in the study of the Cabbalist.
There he sits staring,
myopic, at faded pages,
running his hoary finger
along the lines, a needle
grazing cut wax. The tin lily
of the gramophone speaks
the ghost dance, the unwritable,
recorded by a Sioux a century dead.
The Sioux sought the sayings
that would sweep writing from the land
at the hands of zombie braves
not unlike Prague's Golem
emblazoned with the elusive glyph.
But me, I'm riding, writing,
with John Wayne. We do not
seek the sacred. Simply the lost.
And when we come upon it
foreign and covered in greasepaint
will we know it, or kill it
as it cannot be entirely ours.
————————————————
Poem ending with a line by Guillem I
Time corkscrews the combe
catching
another sloped ville
at each switchback. Send
the
Spaniard up with a fiver
for wine; cold, bad, red.
Two or
three empties already
bilge filled, knocking the
boat-bottom,
along with our Proud
Mary, rendered in pseudo-
French/Spanish
and sung so not a rosy
cheek on the river remained
unblushed,
or sunburned;
whichever. The stones of Castelnaud
care not,
having heard
the best of the twelfth century and
remained
silent. Nor
do I care, penning these nothing verses,
not for you
nor me,
love nor youth, slumped asleep, both in the boat
and in the
sunshine.
———————————————
Freckles
Her freckles are the stones
of Ryoanji's rock garden.
Some say they stand for
the spirit islands; their moss,
mist rising from the ocean
of chipped granite raked
round them. Still others have said
tiger cubs crossing
the sea, being the title,
should be the final reading
But interpreters'
eyes see only fourteen stones
regardless of how
they look at the sacred garden.
Metaphysical conceit
shields their sight so
the fifteenth stone stays hidden.
Only after giving up
on grasping it all
did I find the final one,
beneath her left breast.
————————————————
Suburbs
for Robert Smithson
Atlantis is out in the 'Jersey 'burbs
millions of mirror shards oriented upward,
probably been paved over by now.
All the better you'd say,
asphalt highways are the tar pits
of the modern day.
Entropy proof as the ruins
fabled beneath the Sargasso Sea
unlike those structure that rise into ruin
in your hometown of Passaic,
ever inhabited by iron dinosaurs
erecting one dull adjective after another.
But that didn't bother you either,
in you messianic moods. Let the earth
have it all, as you'd wait for time to stop.
As it did I imagine,
when the propeller stopped over Amarillo
and you gazed out at you work
uncaring about its fate
as it eddied out into the lake.
———————————————
Romance for Strings
Its hard to grasp the gravity we have.
An attraction inescapable
if we enter the others event
horizon. So we stay at arms length
with the adult equivalent of cans
connected by string, catching vibrations
and resonating like empathic
particles a half galaxy away.
But what if I were to say all there is
is two sheets to the wind and coated in strings
weaving and warping realties fiber.
We live in two two dimensional worlds
which only seem like one of three and all
this would be solved if you would only collapse
into me.
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JESSICA FJELD
The Sidewalk
after John Ashbery
Man, your cardboard horse has been kicking the
pedestrians
though I do like to see a spirited animal. You yourself need to buck up.
Nobody likes to see a lopsided metaphor limping down the street,
spoiling the view, his fingers in all the mudpots of the West,
wearing the smell of week-old booze as if it warmed him. Only when the
five-and-dime
shutters up beneath a fall of ash and maidenhair
will anyone give voice to vice. Is that then your tune?
If like a mockingbird you would sing some other aria
we could take you downtown in the pony cart. But let it alone,
a dollar won't buy you out this time, and together we'll invest in
municipal bonds
won't we, shan't we? As it turns out, these are
trusty and compliant, though infected with the clap.
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MATTHEW HARRISON
Sonnet 138
When David Lehman tells me what the
last line of the poem will be halfway through,
I skip to the end, just to see if he's lying-
the 20th century has destroyed my faith in poets
is a line just a little too obvious to use in a
poem.
See, I told you so. You'll soon learn that'll be my
last line. You tell me over the telephone
that you're an insomniac as if that's supposed
to make me have fallen less for the way
you ask are you okay two extra times, like
I'm lying to you. I am, but just because you're
you in Nashville, and I'm here in New York
missing you like a butterfly seeing a cocoon and
wondering how I went from eating leaves to
fluttering all the way to Mexico to breed and die.
I admit, it's a good question. The teacher says
a curve can be parametricized by an interval.
The sky can be parametricized by a tea cup.
A flower can be parametricized by Antarctica.
How pretty. Tom's friend worries that his
poetry is too languagy. Dick Armey became
a Congressman because he grew tired of
university politics. Greenland is not really the
size of South America. Can you imagine
this really makes sense? I made a coat
for you out of butterfly wings, but moths
stole the fabric for dresses. I carved your
name in a heart made of sugar cubes, but
it melted away in the bath. I wrote this poem,
but I'm afraid that the paper is on fire.
The parachute fails to open. The friend says
see, I told you so.
————————————————
A Discourse on Methods
Beat cream cheese severely, like a small
child whose mother has run off with
the postman. Too little may cause
coagulation during cooking. Too much,
a hurricane on the far side of the
world. Kung-sun's tongue stuck
to the roof of his mouth and wouldn't
come down, Chang Tzu's dreamed
it was a butterfly. Put down your
notebook. What are you writing
for? What are you writing for?
No, those weren't worms,
it was a dragon. No, it wasn't
a dragon, it was the rain. Remember
the summer I spent not making
out with you in a park full of
Boy Scouts? Stir in sugar
and vanilla. Remember spring rolls
(add eggs) the night I flew home
from LaGuardia and threw away
my shoes? Mix well, memory
and desire out of the Not-Even
-Anything Land, clockwise if you're
in the Southern Hemisphere, otherwise
with a spoon. I'm not quite sure
what I'm saying, I'm looking
at your breasts. I understand it all
except the blue paint in the corner.
That year, everyone knew El Niño was
Spanish for Gesundheit. Bake at 325°.
It's not really poison, she's just going
to fall asleep. It's not really music, just
the bleating of the stars. Close your
eyes, I'll tell you when the curtain falls.
Hold my hand, I'm holding a fishhook. Adapt
the nothing therein to the purpose at hand,
serve cold garnished with raspberries
————————————————
To Sarah Matthews, In Memory of Her Birthday
The last time I checked, all measures
were stopgap which is lucky,
because all I've left these days is gaps.
Scorpions hide in caves, flowers tether
the clouds to the grass, earthworms
keep the dirt from falling apart. As a kid
I wondered exactly how far Iraq was
from a hard place. The past changes continually
if you argue with a CD club or a mortician
who doesn't love you any more,
and futures have been down since July.
Your hair braises your shoulders
like a tipsy chef de cuisine becoming overfriendly
with his escargot and I wonder what he's escargot
that I don't. In Hawaiian, aloha might mean
hello, goodbye, or I love you
making it perfect for one-night stands
and telemarketing. In spring,
buds rust open and robins return
their Christmas gifts. In Memphis,
I wonder what you're doing
driving on two broken heels
and half a bottle of morphine. Must
you always phrase your answer
in the form of a question?
It took me four months to realize
that your feet sometimes touched
the ground when you walked, and still
I was convinced it was only
the very top. Did Cinderella's slippers
have high heels? Even the songbirds
disappear at midnight, although they
aren't part of the wish. In a forest, if lost,
stand very still. Moss will only grow
on the south side of your leg, so
you can tell when it's time to change pants.
My cousin wears pajama bottoms
like those you wore in November—
birds or flowers I assume, because dinosaurs
wouldn't be caught extinct in pastel—
and I realize, like an absurdist pieing,
this.
————————————————
Dearest Barnabas,
The winds tonight are gripping, staggering,
stupendous—
Against the Capitol, I met a lion, who glazed upon me and
then went surly by. Remember ye not that I was with you
yet and told these things? Remember ye not the essential
questions of theory and practice that have occupied critics
for the past three hundred years? I think I understand
the half-eaten steps of running in the slush, shoulders forward,
sneakers out from under you. But who buried this fish in the ground?
Who tied the donut to the string hanging from my doorway?
Again. Your eyes peek out, strange men in brave
hats
staring through venetian blinds. Reasons and reasons for reasons:
A needle crawls towards the balloon, the room fills up
with poison gas, we keep finding goats in the oddest places.
O what is man that thou art mindful of him?
You are bold and precipitous. I am dry, and
seldom
fall from the clouds. Eyes like something; breasts like a
missing antelope; pancreas roughly like a gall bladder,
but a bit louder and more to the right. We beseech that you
attempt a colloquial, witty, and emotional discourse,
for never at any time used we flattering words but were
gentle, being affectionately desirous among you.
But still the Lord rain flaming fire on those
who sought
to embody in their work the "dream of art." And yesterday,
the bird of night did sit at noonday upon the marketplace.
We find a goat, drunken earthworms drill holes in the sky—
It doesn't have to mean anything, for what is our hope, or joy,
or crown of rejoicing, but grace and peace from Paul,
and Silvanus, and Timotheus.
Isaac Bershon,
The International Herald Tribune
————————————————
Lamarckian evolution—every horse strives
to be a bullet train, every rock dreams of peeling
vegetables. Lie on the floor and act like a shadow, turn over
a rock and look for New York. And then one day you wake up,
and rather than lungs, you have gills, flapping strips of bloody skin,
and you sit there, blood dripping down your shirt like a sideways sunset
or a new facility for testing red markers. You're gasping for breath
and wondering what the postman thinks.
They'd give me simple instructions and I'd
try to figure out what they were. Milton flew too close
to the sun and his eyes melted. I always had a suspicion
that porcupines float in water, like pincushion zeppelins,
an over-stretched metaphor. Sheep become rain clouds,
potatoes grow eyes.
The wind picks up. The swing voters tilt eerily
to one side.
They wobble, but they don't fall down. So she sells her hair to buy
her husband's watch a fob, and he's traded the watch
for two shots of Jagermeister. Midnight pretends to be an emotion,
the vermicelli you're cooking bubbles like lava,
and each day you walk a little farther into the ocean.
back to top
JANET MIN LEE
Some Philosophy of the Minor Evils
I.
The age permits: all second stories open to the public feet,
as if they could read tales written on the sheets:
there are greater considerations of our age than the privilege
to boudoir knowledge. I contemplate with tidy irritation:
they count white mushrooms in a garden,
thinking they are pearls for being round;
they pick up a single earring on the table
that they braid into a fable of romantic strangulation:
the hero is the handle of a pot,
who, unused to the brutalities of men, cracks and is consequently sought
for its wisdom.
II.
Who commands that speech should rise every morning
purer and more innocent?-O you, most snuggly slippered, you sense
its meekness on your floor mistaking it for Truth.
But see: it is too self-amused to bear your questioning, too
self-assured
to notice other print.
I have no mailman, and if one came by,
should my lack of interest surprise?
My Muse likes her garden outings in the morning:
she carries there her fountain pen.
But how she pales,
how she stops
at a narrow headline!
III.
Indoors, the lamps light themselves out of pity.
They could be the hope of a goal
shining from among the paper clips, the post-it notes, the clicky sound
of pens;
where the desired end is the fruit bowl.
But in the end, one writes poetry not for lost sailors, or the sea,
but for the movement of the grass that no one would have known existed
if not for the violence of the lamps.
IV.
A visionary moment beneath the shade of a curled blade of grass-
the tip of Ultimate Expression: they squint
or gaze and marvel through the magnifying glass
the easy green shading in the course of hours-
a momentary awe comes and passes:
they press to dry it
and flit sideways to fit the brightness
of a mushroom in a bottle: they do it with strict measurements
that break the beige into six palettes:
this is a vision caught on the commas of a simple line of verse.
V.
In an afterdinner stroll, among the orange trees,
one may muse about grave world-affairs and the need
for peace-but, a neighbor stoops to the gardens
to clip small daisies along with other weed.
Her talents amaze her guests: "Such grace!
in her steady wrists, an easy epic violence!"
They praise the elegance of the deed,
their murmurs haloing a self-contented smile
like moths cluttering.
VI.
The age persists: our private moments are for all to view,
while the grand gestures over an awe-destroying plain
remain invisible. My wooden chair leans against-
in short protest, but dust elsewhere rises like a thunder.
And though the news scatters the external (for our faith),
their seeds cannot endure
in days full with the rude reminder of our age,
an age sinful of Biblical grandeur.
My soul falls quiet when the night-wind comes
with philosophies of the minor evils,
that are but the shadow of a greater evil
of minor philosophies.
————————————————
Sense of a place:
Most natural, the belief that the sea will
provide:
how else to explain countless pocketed pebbles,
or
shells forever laced with accidental frills like skirts
scraping on ghostly widow-walks still circling the shore,
that is one part sea, one part orchard, one part sewing,
or the boiling of water, or the coming of tea;
that beneath the reflection of a spoon silvering
the china,
dry brushstrokes of thin blue and veiling yellow
patch into the pleats of shells, perhaps
into the surprise of the soul unaccustomed to the dull
matted shades behind the midday glitter;
for leveled colors following the usual breath
trace the outlines of daily language: prairie tans and flats
that, pupils enlarging to the scope of the sea,
leave a sense of grey mirrors vaguely wrapped on pearls
reflecting something that is not the sea.
————————————————
Portrait of Power in Green Fields
I live with the birds and their opaque
remembrance,
which they scatter,
solemn like the stroll of nuns lost in their remembrance.
They rule the garden, and have no shame:
all proper divinities,
each with a kingdom.
And in their circumference, their past mists
around them like a halo,
and everything is still.
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