closer, every day closer, till the city
fell quiet, faceless boys streamed in, no stopping
them, black clothes, tire sandals, eyes unlit,
jungle boys no bigger than their guns came
from darkness to empty the city, empty
everything, kill everything . . . and then
five years later here you were, tart-tongued,
smiling, sassy, the queen of Khao-I-Dang
Camp, reaching through the wire, to me, alone.
for Sunly
Richard Parisio
On a Photograph Taken in Newark, 1929
I imagine he was bored. His job, taking pictures
of auto wrecks for an insurance firm.
He paused a moment here, let vision
of the row of buildings blur in the nimbus
of his cigarette. When it cleared
the alley between tenements
blocked by a slumped fence caught his eye.
Someone wanting in or out had pushed or pulled
then tramped the wooden pickets down.
The fence bears plastered-on advertisements
for entertainments, modern products pitched
to the idle or the curious passerby.
No soul in sight, a thought flashed
in the black box of his head: before
I built a fence . . . He set up his tripod,
fixed the vanquished barrier in his view,
pickets splayed like whales’ ribs on a beach,
the soot-dark alley brooding like the sea.
He held his breath and flung the shutter open:
the flash he made was lightning with no rain.
Before his shrouded face the scene
came into sudden focus and the secret
coded in these appearances
fossilized upon a copper plate.
Brown Creeper
Below the plate glass ramparts,
on the simple sidewalk, no tree near,
lay a mouse-sized clump of feathers.
Out-of-context bird, what whispered word
for forest brought you here? What lust
for space enticed you past your borders
into this mirror of the sky. You crashed
into our reality, you paragon of drab,
you match for bark and shadows.
I lift you by your spiked tail feathers,
good for hitching up trunks,
admire your bill’s curve, perfect
for probing crevices for spiders—
what else could you expect here in this city
but sudden death? For an exile
like you, brown alien, mesmerized
by mere reflection, where is real?
What refuge from sun-dazzle,
tumult, glass, and steel?
I bear you through these Newark streets
till I can lay you in a concrete
urn with pansies. Forget the crude
jest of a citizen of this rough place
hollered as we passed: “Who’s got
two slices of bread for that?”
Best melt into the soil of this planter,
dream your way back to leaf-
filtered light. Your body, intact,
pressed into the day, has made a shell
to tilt up to my ear: I listen
past the city’s screaming haste to hear
your lilt, your forest song.
Mentor
Outside my morning window spills a wren’s
song, like a waterfall. No—effervescent—
like a spring that bubbles
from an unseen source.
Maybe I never really heard till Art King,
understated, most unwrenlike man,
pointed in the song’s direction, touched
a finger to his ear before he named the singer.
So many others, more accomplished:
orioles, tanagers, grosbeaks, and of course
the thrush—we first heard, then tried sighting
like augurers, scanning treetops for a sign.
Ready to retire Art King knew each bird
by its song, but hearing failed him in the upper
ranges: one of us young teachers, when we touched
an ear and pointed, might just get a shrug
from Art in answer. One such impossible note
he might or might not hear belonged to the tiny
Blackburnian warbler Art King called “the firethroat.”
The bird glimpsed was a match struck
in the leaves, a shock of orange flame
that blazes in the brain’s deep folds
four decades later. After those walks we each
went off to teach our classes—but enkindled,
as though we cupped a secret candle
against the wind all day. This morning
I salute the plain brown wren, though I can’t see him
answer with a tail flick from his thicket.
Triumphal
Master of nonchalance, the mockingbird
now stays through our northern winters
as if to say, we have entered the new
dispensation, the age of extremes,
when even this endless winter
bears the seeds of endless summer
like acorns under the snowdrifts.
The mockingbird goes for suet,
Leaves sunflower seeds to yankees, pine
siskins flashing sun-yellow from streaked wings.
The mockingbird’s hollow bones remember
the sultry south, where Spanish moss
beards the live oaks. He pours the honey
of his song into thick air, milk of moonlight.
Silent today, he bides his time,
can afford to, for the altered world
suits him fine: never mind those icy
blasts, it’s clear how things are going.
He’s been assigned to call out creatures
in endless mimicry, a roll call of the vanishing.,
The rests in his rollicking aria attest
to the mostly silent: tortoises, polar bears.
Growing up in the city’s outskirts I recall
his nonstop tour-de-force on summer nights.
Our bird-loving father feared the wrath
of neighbors kept awake might stop his mouth.
Fat chance. From his rooftop aerial pulpit
the revivalist preacher in his long gray coat
sang out and declared his own redemption:
here I am, here I am, singing, singing,
whose world, whose world, whose world
is it now?
The Honey Seeker
La Araña Caves, Spain
Sheathed in mesh mask, white suit, gloves, even high white
rubber boots, I kindled dry leaves and sumac berries to a smoldering
burn in the smoker. Working the bellows, I pumped gray
clouds of smoke around the hive before I dared to lift
a frame away. Mobbed by a posse of bees, I watched their city
with its capped wax cells filled up with slumbering larvae
rouse to repel the siege. I checked for dead or ailing
citizens, signs of mites, found none—left them in the peace
of their amber hoard, their throbbing, multitudinous life.
That day I took no honey, felt no sting, but was a gazer
only, witness to a bounty past my grasping, distilled
from the humming field, the crucible of flowers.
Six millennia have past since I went naked
to scale the limestone cliff to reach this womb.
On the cave wall, in red ochre, see my legs, my long arm
dangling, basket clutched in one hand while the other
plumbs the niche. I am stung and stung but hang on,
reaping, fool and thief and angel. I was chosen.
&nbs
p; Jennifer Leigh Stevenson
Honey I’m Headed West
On the night I was born,
my daddy played a gig
at a bar called Cowtown.
So it’s right I’ve got me
a warlike mouth,
a honky-tonk heart.
I’m heaps of trouble, smoke
Benson and Hedges
like a lonesome locomotive,
drink bourbon from a truck
stop coffee cup. My soul’s
just some no-tell Motel
with most the neon shot out
of its shivery sign. Or a mirror
that’s lost some of its silver.
When we met I told you
I’m a dead end on a dirt road.
But you didn’t pay any mind.
This summer stands
as the wettest on record
but nothing’s getting green.
June bugs throw themselves
at the bare bulb on my porch,
trying to hump it to oblivion.
Cicadas preach white noise
from blue ash pulpits, but
none of us are wise enough
to hear their truth—
that the world will end
before the evangelists do.
I, too, call and holler
for you, a small town
Siren with an ivy crown.
Load up the truck with all
you can fit, I tell you—
it’s time to go. A sparrow
nested in the awning over
your front door, and some
cold-eyed crow’ll eat those eggs
one at a time. But hey, you
and me both know: wild
isn’t the same thing as free.
Undone
We open on an unmade man
sleeping artful in an unnamed bed.
A gentle ribbon of sunlight
sighs through the blinds
from his shoulder
to his hip
to the sheet
like some kind of ceremonial
sash and sword. He didn’t mean
to be here.
A fly buzzes frantic in the window
and the ceiling fan clanks.
We now part the steam
to visit her in the shower.
Over the pedestal sink hangs
a mirrored medicine cabinet
with a slot inside to toss old
razor blades. Her pale skin gleams
cream. She slicks her palms
over her hair, blinks, her wet
eyelashes dark and heavy.
She hums a lonely melody,
one that has fluttered
unfinished at the edges
of her for weeks. She picks
and picks at it and when
it comes to her
it just
opens in her hands.
Last night, his fingers brushing the barest
paisley on her neck, he kissed her jawline
with such cinematic longing that she climbed
onto him and said, Stop keeping yourself from me.
The Dangers of Prose, Love
I lick my finger,
flip the page,
“fray to fight
fray to unravel”
so I have some choices.
Either way it all comes apart.
Your work is shining, methodical,
blown glass turned from a molten
thing into tender tiny creatures
that fit in my palm.
I can almost see them breathe.
Not my poems, though.
I want to write
blunt force trauma
with a gauntleted fist,
smashing reckless,
jaw aching with anger,
wrecking everything.
But Baby, I never can conjure
you. Something phrases
should curve around light
and easy: your wicked
mouth, your cinnamon smell.
You rhymed and dined me
and dug in my dark
trying to find me a muse.
I got nothing like that in me.
So I take my forearm, sweep
it across all you ever said before
but it doesn’t matter. The sound
of 100,000 crystalline words
shattering
can’t cover up the echo
the thrill of your voice
Circe in Business
I wear all black, a high-necked frock,
and a straw hat to thwart the southern sun.
My plants, such lovelies, in rows
taller than I, bow now in summer
breeze. They forget how deadly
they are in their beauty, waxy
berries bright, leaves trembling.
I’ve made quite a name for myself.
Flowers in high violets, yellows and other
likely hues, (those colors are suspect
those colors are a bruise.) But no
matter. I wear leather gloves,
pinch those flowers and berries
at the base. Apply a little heat to help
the harm along. Women come to see
me when rage vignettes their vision,
walk along my wares, smooth their hands
over the glass bottles and decide just
how he should go. I don’t do gentle,
so you won’t find any soporifics.
Hemlock, certainly, if you’d like
to watch him gasp, or belladonna
to sink him into a delirium, dilate
his pupils as though he were tumbling
in love again, but by then could
you bear it? Wolfsbane hurts,
as I understand it, stirs up the belly,
sends saliva to froth in his mouth.
I don’t need magic anymore
so it’s lucky I don’t have it.
This, my dear, is true,
for every one of you
who seek me and weep:
Later in your Paris Green parlor
you’ll look in the mirror
and see a face tight with triumph,
wild eyes dark and bird-bright.
Mark me. Not more than a drop
to stop his heart. And don’t get
caught. Get even.
Quarry
Why do you want to talk now?
I’m barefoot, dusty and bleeding.
I replenish my stones.
I speculated so long in labored silence . . .
When I realized the weight of all these words unsaid,
when the chasm growled between us, filled with cruelty
and doubt I still couldn’t shout
and I couldn’t scream or say anything true or fraught.
I tossed a rock down into the yawn below
(where our pressure broke the yard),
watched that rock fall and gather pebbles
and momentum and felt bored. You rendered me
irreverent, chained to a shrug and a hum.
You once whispered kindness but
now you are a wooden placard
hanging haphazard over my front door:
“Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here”
burned into the grain.
This morning my back porch opens into this canyon.
It’s not powerlessness, or fear, but rather an
unbecoming. Eyes burning across the crisis
until they fade into embers of distance. ‘Til
calamity supersedes life and you and me
and we failed to be.
All this earth over our bones.
All that time.
We replenish our stones.
Laurel Eshelman
Tuckpointing
The Virgin Mary up at St. Mary’s is wrapped in a drop cloth
the color of ston
e. It is pulled over her face,
drawn down around shoulders to her feet, the corners seized
and tied in a bunched knot across her waist.
She is mute, visionless in the blankness of sacking, muffled
from sparrow calls in the cedars.
No eye may look upon her.
In a week her son sets his sights
on the city, dashes in with the crowd
and no caution. In two he is
besieged and bared.
March snow weighs Mary’s wrappings down
upon her. The shroud sags—
her right hand, pale stone appears,
three fingers raised against shadows.
Her staying power pierces like a sword, the fibers darken
over her breast. Snow splays
across her naked toes—
a white dove
shelters there.
Home Game
A winter rain pounds the roof
like the clamor at a home game
when the basketball is stolen,
dribbled downcourt and launched
on a long smooth arc.
As night gives in and ice lies down
the crowd hushes and awaits the ball’s descent—
by midday the siren at the volunteer fire station wails.
The township maintenance guy slides the alley,
mechanics from the garage sprint the highway,
boys we shouted for in the old gym as they set up the play,
lofted the risky three-pointer.
They rev fire trucks to the curve beyond the ridge
while they gear up, readying to ply deliverance.
The memory of feet stomping wooden bleachers
in the stifling gymnasium embraces those shivering
on the shoulder.
—it rushes the hoop
and swishes,
the crowd rises,
their voices hoarse
with praise.
Outpatient
She lies on the table.
They slather her with gel,
slide the ultrasound wand
over every contour line of her breast,
then prod.
She remembers her morning walk,
the dark calves being driven off,
the hot scent of hair and hide