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From Poetry Northwest, Fall 2001




A Mind Like This

is like looking through that drawer

for Scotch tape and coming up instead

with the instructions for the digital watch

you threw away three years ago, a maze

made of cheap pink plastic and three ball bearings,

the scissors you warned them were only for fabric, a roll

of the paper tape they gave you to close your eye

for sleep that spring you had Bell's Palsy, and half

a pack of basil seeds.



It's missing the Big Play because you're busy watching

the lovers quarrel two rows down, look up

as the crowd surges to its feet around you,

touchdown. It's knowing they used sets from King Kong

as tinder for the burning of Atlanta

while being uncertain of your best friend's birthday,

forgetting the name of your fifth niece, but knowing Carlo

was Emily Dickinson's dog. When a mind like this

hears that Burleigh Grimes was the last pitcher

to throw a legal spitball in '43,

you'd think it had spotted a sapphire in the gravel.

It's saving pocket lint and bottle caps

while bread and diamonds thunder down the chute.



It's a theater where pleasure and frustration

are mutual understudies, a computer

which refuses to interface seven fifteenths of the time.

It's dutifully viewing the list of cathedral features

in Strasbourg, then watching the memories dragged like sand

from a beach besieged by wave after wave of years,

until only a bit of carved stone remains, a fragment

small enough to lodge in a human heart.

Of course you didn't take a photograph.

And of course sensible friends return with cameras

full of statues and windows and twenty-foot clocks,

asking vaguely, "Where was that again?"

Be comforted. This ridiculous mind will save

your incised memory of the tenth pulpit step,

preserving for you how some particular hand

carved under a stone leaf, small in all that grandeur,

his round-skulled puppy, sleeping, chin on paws.

This week's round-up courtesy of Hip Writer Mama.

I'm not dead to the irony of posting a poem like this in the Summer of my own years. What the hey, as they say. It's a sonnet, I think.



The Year Hits Perimenopause


Autumn has decided what the hell.

She knows the symptoms and already frost

has tarnished her. She's not a fool. She knows

however much she feels like May the snows

are coming, so before this chance is lost

she's going to wear red, show off her tits,

plump apples, bulge pumpkins. She is going to swell

each bunch of grapes to cleavage and shadowed musk.

Fuck decorum, honey, take a bite.

Take two. Each day is shorter than the last

and colder, so her unimpeachable night

is thick with glitter, rhinestones, sequins, glitz.

She thinks that maybe she'll even try her luck

and use her license for a few young bucks.

This one's going out to the ladies and lad-inclined boys out there. It's a sonnet, hitherto unpublished with an honest-to-god kidlit reference smuggled in there.


Crone's Delight


Down at the shop we call them Junior Mints.

Just a tongue-tip of sugar and eyelashes,

chocolate and cheeks and mint and muscled forearms,

broad shoulders tapering down to the hollowed

small of their backs under baggy t-shirts.



They're Junior Mints because you wouldn't want

to make a meal of them, have to hear them talk.

There's no nutrition there, no tendon, fiber

into which to sink long, yellow teeth

and hold on, bucking--

just a smear of sweetness

to idly smash against the roof of your mouth



We stare at them from under level brows

or with one eyebrow cocked ironically

all we want. We are invisible

to them, their mother's or grandmother's age.

We look them over. We are not their mothers.



You could eat a whole boxful, thinking of something else,

and never even notice what you were doing,

until you shook its hollowness, surprised.

Hansel had a delectable lower lip.

Today's selection, much like last week's, comes from Poetry East (Spring, 2007).


Gaudeamus, Full Band Version

Eric Clapton’s Layla is a mess
I love, wailing guitar lament refuted
by rich piano, the guitars relenting
in the end but no real resolution,
just a dwindling, a musical entropy,
like a toddler slipping from tantrum into sleep.

I’m a musical moron who would rather play
Bach in the background while I brush my teeth
than sit with a symphony orchestra, missing my knitting.
So why do I tear up every time I hear
that high note in the final line of Brahms’s
“Academic Festival Overture?”

It is, after all, a glorious joke,
response to being told a thank-you postcard
in exchange for an honorary doctorate
is insufficient. Very well, Brahms responded,
and sent that ponderous title to them, scored
for the biggest orchestra of his life.

Size matters. I downloaded a favorite song
and thought I’d been wrong to like it, felt memory
had gilded it, or that age had drained the pleasure,
like ears or tongue dulling until my son suggested
“You’ve got ‘acoustic.’ Try the ‘Full Band Version.’”
Brahms himself never went to college, but

when he was twenty he spent one glorious summer
living in Grottingen with a friend who did.
Everything looks better from outside,
golden in lamplight. Brahms was no academic,
but he remembered those passionate bullshit sessions,
the argument, the laughter and the songs.

Especially the songs. So he chose a format,
formal, intricate, interweaving themes
and variations -- but those themes are drinking songs.
The faculty begins to twitch and fidget.
The kids grin, then begin to sing along.
Young Clapton began with climax and worked backward;

Brahms, being old, knew how to postpone pleasure
until, strings running up and down like squirrels,
permitting himself cymbals, the brass grabs you
by the hair and slams you on your feet
singing, whether you know the words or not,
“Gaudeamus Igatur,” “While we are young,

let us rejoice.” Let the faculty fume,
their egos cheated of glory. Let Clapton pluck
an unplugged tribute to his own lost youth.
Old Brahms blows out the back wall with the joy
of being young, then tops it with that note,
that smile concealed behind the big gray beard

This was a poem written for my friend Katie Givens Kime on the day of her ordination. Katie married me when she was still in seminary (no fears, it's legit) and me mum attended this particular ceremony. Her wedding anniversary isn't until the 29th, but I figured we'd give her a shout-out beforehand. You may find this work in Poetry East (Spring, 2007,)




Benediction, Off Beat

I’ve come to see Katie ordained, but I smell trouble.
Apparently it takes five ministers
and each gets to speak. Presbyterians.
I settle back. This is going to take a while.

Every time I doubt this country learns
anything, I try to remind myself
how white people used to sound when they clapped along
in the Fifties, the beat random as rain.

There are moments. A mentor urges her
not to become a Katherine. “Please. Stay Katie.”
A seminary friend, eyes wide, proclaims
“Katie! It’s over – you can read fiction now!”

Eubie Blake said he didn’t mind white people
too much “but they surely do clap funny.”
Yet by the eighties even Nancy Reagan
could clap in time, though relentlessly on beat.

The one part of the service that is Katie’s
will be the benediction, we should only
live that long. She manages to say
“I will, with God’s help” fifty-seven times

with full conviction. Her parents present her robes,
black piped with her signature scarlet. Her grandmother
hand-sewed the scarlet stole her grandfather drapes
around her. At last we’re coming to the end.

The piano player starts a stride left hand.
The wisp of a soloist belts a verse, a chorus.
I’m wistful, thinking what a gospel choir,
their congregation, could do with that joy.

Whoopie Goldberg said “White folks – they get
excited, they try to move.” Our choir director
once urged “Feel free to move on the second verse.”
Episcopalians. Not a pretty sight.

but Katie raises her arms above her head
and while the piano vamps she blesses us
with both hands. I can feel it hit.
She closes just as the chorus comes around,

the key changes, out hearts rise up and she
swings wide her upraised hands and starts to clap
on the downbeat, blesses us, gives us permission to slip
out of our separate skins, to move, to be moved.

Collect them all! Someone asked me the other day if these are in a book. No, they are not. *cough* Sure would be a good idea, though. *cough cough*

Tripping
for Vicki

Sugar, we're leaving tonight.

Don't worry about the kids--his guilt will nest them

cozy as goslings until you come home sound.

You can bring them shiny stones and souvenir spoons

and beer cans from Enid, Oklahoma.

But tonight we're gone,

windows all the way down cause we don't care

what happens to our hair, the night trees passing,

their hands clasped over our heads,

music on the radio so sad the headlights swim and blur

and then so hot we shimmy in our seats,

have to stop the car,

get out and stomp until the music ends

too soon.

We'll scorn the interstates, stick to the back roads.

Not outlaws, though--that wakes their posse instinct,

and besides

the hours are long and you have to be willing to travel.

We'll be the underground, we'll infiltrate,

slipping into town with the groundwater.

They'll think we've always been there, past the edge

of town, out by the water, where the porch

has two rockers,

one with, one without arms.

The pillowcases smell of wind and grass, the water's well.

There is no time there--we'll return the night

before we left, no matter how long we stay.

Your job will be

to name that big dog nudging at your hand,

prop your heels on the porch rail, and to watch

the fine pearl silt of happiness float down

into the crater blasted in your heart.

When it is full, we'll go.

This one's going out to my sister, by request. She's probably the only person who can request specific poems, it occurs to me.


Backstage Duty at the Junior Civic

These desperate outlaws, these corrupt officials

are so young they take stairs two at a time

for fun. The Sheriff of Nottingham, a tall boy



with curly hair, not old enough to drive,

gives me a smile where I sit invisible, knitting.

He goes in to get his makeup done.



I know his mother's dying, her skin, her organs

slowly turning to stone. He told my daughter

she cries and he doesn't know what he should do.



The Makeup door's propped open by a box,

battered and strapped with duct tape. Someone wrote

"Crash Box" on the side in Magic Marker.



A kid is curious. The makeup man

picks it up and lofts it underhand.

Landing, it sounds like the Apocalypse.



It sounds like the wreck of a stagecoach carrying

a galloping cargo of anvils and chandeliers.

It's glorious. They nudge it back in place.



We're brought up to be brave, and brave is silent.

We strangle on silence, but what words could we use?

Here's noise commensurate with catastrophe.



I want one for myself, want one for Aaron,

for his mom, for everyone who knows

they're cast in the big fight scene at the end,



have read the script and know that they will lose.

So that, stripped of costumes, we can climb

those last steps panting, heave our box and howl.

From The Hiram Review, #63. As per usual, Blogger can't handle the line breaks. Apologies.

I'm In Love with Leonard Woolf

his rectitude,
his long, thin face, his notorious horniness,
the palsy that trills his soup spoon on his plate
when he's underdressed among trivial people.
Oh, I'm in love with Leonard, but he thinks
I'm frivolous, not inhaling politics,
exhaling social programs.
So I've taken Virginia to Myrtle Beach.
I'm careful with her sunblock, and I make her
wear a gauzy ankle length pareo,
skimming the thin straps of her narrow sandals.
I buy her pastel drinks with umbrellas in them.
The karaoke was her own idea, though:
"Bus Stop," by the Hollies.
We stay six days,
then Leonard comes to get her, stiff in tweeds.
I hope the heat reminds him of the island
whose province he administered and loved,
and left for love and still must carry with him.
Her bronze shoulder blades embrace him; her wide hat
and huge sunglasses don't reveal her eyes.
She radiates well-being. A single drop
of sweat gleams in the shadow of his temple.
I'm watching to see if he'll reveal his lips.
I'm hoping for a handshake, the chance to feel
the tremor stress magnifies, Ceylon
in the palm of his hand.

I think you know the drill by now. The following was in Poetry Northwest, Volume XLI Number 2, Summer 2000.

Bartricks of the Overeducated

These guys get nasty. Some nights it's like watching
Hemingway bend a fork in his flexed arm,
throwing it on the table, challenging Hammett.
I've learned the warning signs: postmodernists
bear watching, Sartre signals trouble. Kierkegaard
means grab the cash and dive behind the bar;
you'll be combing slivers of contempt
out of your hair for days.

Once or twice in your life you'll see it swing
the other way. At two beers James agrees
to give 'em either "The Shooting of Dan Magrew"
or Auden's "Limestone." With three he'll alternate stanzas.
Paul's singing "Rise Up O Frisian Blood and Boil"
in Frisian, with his feet turned nearly backwards.
As the applause dies down Kim takes the floor,
demands silence, announces he'll recite
pi to thirty decimal places. They start
pounding the tables when he passes twenty.
Backthumps and beer as Dave's friends goad him up,
drunk enough to do his Dylan Thomas,
sober enough to succeed. Di's bellydancing
for a table singing "Stopping by Snowy Woods"
to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway."
A smell of scorching means Rybicki's turned
himself into a sheet of flame again.

These guys are the Wallendas of tone. They know
it all depends on upping one another
without falling into ridicule
or dignity, piling delight on unsteady delight.
It's a nine-man tightrope pyramid
paced over broken glass and rattlesnakes,
blindfolded, backwards. A sneer could bring it down.
On the other hand, hearing gasps, look up,
watch one lose his footing, lift his arms
and glide the last few yards onto the platform.

Bonne Poetry Friday to you. From my most immediate ancestor:

As published in Poetry East, Number Fifty-Three



Amplification

There’s no need to be sentimental. Say the heart
is a lamp burning whale oil or kerosene,
clean, bright enough for needlework or reading.
Not feeble, not dim, but certainly domestic.

Outside the night bulges with dangers, both the prowling,
predatory, coming-to-get-you kind
and the rooted, the lurking, the submerged
waiting to rip the delicate bellies of boats.

And the heart, we’ve said, is a lamp. Then certain people,
particular jigs of the pulse, some speeds of breathing
create around the heart a Fresnel lens,
a system of prisms and mirrors twelve feet high

which reflects, refracts and magnifies that lamp
as it floats frictionless on quicksilver, turning,
dervish repeating, repeating a circuit of joy,
its light now visible eighteen miles out to sea.

You know the drill. It's Friday. Friday is, in kidlitosphere time, meant for poetry. Me marm's a poet. Poetry Friday. Easy peasy. Today's was published in The Hiram Review, #63.
Due to the constrictions of Blogger, lines do not necessarily appear as they did in the original publication.

Consider Hairs

Your nose and your ears keep growing as long as you live.
Think of it: Lilian Hellman forced to tote
that great zucchini, Auden’s unfurling ears.
Cute is a survival mechanism;
consider harp seals, ask parents of two-year-olds.
So it's no wonder the carapace of age
frightens us; almost certainly we will not
develop sufficient charms to compensate.

Not for hairs, so often embarrassments.
These aren't the secret hairs of adolescence:
pubic disruptions, smooth armpits suddenly becoming
caverns dense with Spanish moss. Those shames
are secret. No, the hairs of age are public,
chins and moles for women, ears for men.
Eyebrows you could braid or bead.

But why
should only those hairs flourish which are unwanted?
If a wise providence chooses not to encourage
six brave hairs arching lonely from ear to ear
across the gleaming scalplands, well, all right.
But why couldn't the forces of disintegration
have evolved to encourage bourgeoning eyelashes, too?
Just as cheeks grow softer and softest, why
couldn't eyelashes come to resemble reeds
fringing still dark pools where lions drink,
grow heavy as Shetland ponies', as giraffes',
finally closing of their own soft weight.

My mom.
Just to avoid confusion, this is my mom. My mom, my mom, my mom.
And here's your shot of poetry for the week.

From New Poems from the Third Coast: An Anthology of Michigan Poets [Wayne State University Press, 2000]

Aftereffects of Bell's Palsy

Having a good and bad ear comes in handy.
My bad ear, victim of a surgeon's saw
screaming through bone to free a facial nerve
has lost the very highest range of sounds--
bats, telephones, sirens at a distance,
mosquitoes if they're male, small children whining,
regret, ambition's wheedlings, most tactful hints.
Banshees can keen on my ridgepole all night long
and, exhausted, watch me leave for work,
brisk and refreshed from sleeping good ear down.

My undiminished left ear can perceive
the beginnings of nightmare in a sleeping child
two rooms away behind a closed door, hear
the click of covert glances at a party,
the first drop on the roof of the first rain
of April, surmise the maiden name and color
of the eyes of the grandmother of the boy
my daughter sits thinking of, based on her breathing.
It can hear loneliness seven lamp posts down
the street, slamming like a screen door in the wind.

[Aftereffects was also included in Primavera, Volume 21 ]

This one's especially apropos at the moment. My husband and I officially got "together" on St. Patrick's Day. Mom wrote this poem long before Matt and I married, but my mother-in-law liked it so much that I've always associated it with our own wedding. It's not that far off from what happened at the reception anyway.


Our Third Wedding Reception This Year Hits Its Stride

The floor’s packed, partners optional. They play

“Down on the Corner,” segue into “Shout”;

we jump and hunker, our silk dignity out-

grown and molted. Now it’s “YMCA.”

This homosexual anthem has become

in the heavy hand of some god of irony,

the current wedding classic. The elderly,

the shy -- this dance accommodates everyone,

like a favorite uncle, somehow still unmarried,

who flirts with great aunts, spins the flower girl,

waltzes gently with his fragile mother,

finds car keys, coaxes laughter from the harried

hostess, so the rest of us can clap and twirl

and briefly notice that we love each other.

From New Poems from the Third Coast: An Anthology of Michigan Poets [Wayne State University Press, 2000]

Happy Poetry Friday to you.
Four, count 'em, four remembered weeks in a row. The system works.

Anywho, here's another one from Susan Ramsey.

Originally published in Poetry Northwest, Vol.XLII, Number 3, Fall 2001

Washing My Husband's Kilt Hose: A 32-Bar Reel

You wash wool with shampoo. If you learn nothing
else today, learn that, to use shampoo
and water the temperature of a baby's bath.
What I have in the sink here aren't argyles,

but proper kilt hose I knit stitch by stitch, gray
for daytime, formal whites, choosing among
dozens of possible cuffs, customized gussets
to accommodate the bulging calves

of Scottish country dancers, whose heels must never
touch the floor, perpetual Barbie-feet
moving through jigs, reels, strathspays, till sweat and effort
equal ease and grace. The ones who say

"the important thing is just to have fun" miss
the most fun and the point, which is not fun
but joy, daughter of the difficult.
It's the kind of lesson climate teaches,

climates where sheer survival is success,
complaint as bad as cowardice, the humor deadpan,
self-control a given, not a goal --
an attitude empires find useful. Thermopolae, Dunkirk;

to delay catastrophe they place the best
regiments behind, the Spartans, Scots,
murdered or interned for the duration.
The Spartans combed and died. The Scots composed

a dance for captured warriors, "The Reel
of the 51st." Bemused Nazi guards
watched them practice, muscles taut as barbed wire.
It's hell to dance. These socks are stomped to felt,

dancing defiance of Nazis long since dead. No one
would knit these hose for any amount of money
a Scot would pay. Only one currency
is deep enough. I pat them out to dry.

Happy, Poetry Friday. Mama Mia presents the following.

This one ran in Poetry Northwest in Vol. XLII, Number 3, Fall 2001.

Outside Interests

The scarlet birdhouse you gave me for Christmas
was, that first year, rewarded by a wren.
We braced binoculars, charmed to watch them wrestle
long straws sideways through that narrow doorway,
wondered how they accomplished anything,
so frequent was that bubbling, sudden song.

The next year a rose breasted grosbeak
moved into the kitchen cupboard, behind the cans
of lima beans. Dinner was difficult,
but the sense of privilege compensated.

When the nesting pair of sandhill cranes
chose the living room sofa, we gave ground,
sitting on the bed to read the paper,
to eat our take-out, the barred owl on the bookshelf
asking "Who cooks for you?" New interests

drive out old. The cats left long ago.
Goldfinches scallop through the living room,
a lemon arpeggio in one window, out the other.
We tell ourselves the Canada geese are good
graphic design, if not quite furniture.

Listening for the field sparrow's decelerating
ping-pong ball, we turned the phone off. We
don't miss friends unwilling to debate
the relative thrills of hosting a white-throated
versus a chipping sparrow. They left
some time ago, huge pale eyes turned inward,
murmuring about our loss of habitat.

All sorts of poetry-related thingy things for you this fine and frisky Friday morn.

First up, another poem you've ne'er seen before. Me madre explains it thusly:

"Prairie Home Companion Joke Show was on last week -- it was listening to one of those years ago that made me notice the recurring words "joke," "blonde," "bar," "lightbulb" and "rabbi." A sestina doesn't rhyme; it takes the six end-words of the first line and reuses them so that if the first stanza is 123456, the second stanza is 615243 and so on until they've worked back around, then you have to reuse them all in three lines at the end -- and, if possible, keep anyone from noticing it's a sestina."

Enjoy!

Tell Me If You’ve Heard This One

Surprise is what we value in a joke
we think, a different reason for the chicken
to cross, a deeper basement to the blonde’s
bemusement, some new group screwing in a lightbulb,
odder animal walks into a bar,
the final wise word from the patient rabbi.

A priest, a Baptist minister and a rabbi
walk into a bar. Barkeep says “Is this a joke?”
Sure, and a good one, a world where every bar
is just as apt to host a talking chicken
as an ecumenical conference, but no lightbulb
ever flashing on above the blonde.

It’s compensation, making fun of blondes,
just like giving the punchline to the rabbi.
The proud are humbled, the oppressed triumph, the lightbulb
goes on – we get it, and laugh. A joke
turns power upside down until a chicken
can be the hero and walk into a bar.

And everyone seems happy here, bar
none, not just the always-welcome blonde
but those who’d be justified in feeling chicken
about walking in, the solitary rabbi
stranded amid goyim who wouldn’t get the jokes
he tells at home, grateful that these lightbulbs

are dim. You’d have to be a pretty dim bulb
not to know that everyone in this bar
has been the butt of the lowest kind of joke,
history’s hotfoot, fate’s yanked-out chair. Blondes
took over one dark night and riddled the Polaks, the rabbi,
Cletus hazed Rastus, but yo’ mama fried that chicken

so good everybody was happy, even the chicken.
It’s verbal potluck: Luigi brings a bulb
of garlic, knock-knock the drummer delivers pizza, the rabbi
adds a little schmaltz, everyone in the bar
is flaunting their roots, eventually even the blonde,
The melting pot’s a plate, a glass, a joke.

“Rabbi, how many moths to screw in a lightbulb?”
asks the blonde chick at bar, “Only two.” “No joke?”
“But like us, you’ve got to wonder how they got in there.”

We're trying something all new here at Fuse #8. In the past I've not paid particular attention to Poetry Friday. I have no poetic gifts. My knowledge is low and I am easy to distract when anyone waves shiny objects in front of my face. What would be perfect would be if someone could supply me with a steady stream of really well-written poems that I could place on this blog once a week and that nobody else could possibly provide.

Prayers, as they say, have been answered. Now, the last thing you are going to want to hear is that someone's mom is a poet. As my mother pointed out, "everyone's mom is a poet." Point taken. My mother is, however, a published poet. And she's damn good. So I'm basically tapping my own family's resources here. And the first of these is going to include sometime children's author Louise Erdrich. How's THAT for a connection? Eh? Eh?

In terms of the following piece, "Louise Erdrich Learning Ojibiwemowin", poet Susan Ramsey writes the following:

"This one ran in Rhino. The NYT ran a column of Writers on Writing a while back, and Louise Erdrich wrote about the difficulties of learning Ojibiwemowin, saying she wanted to get the jokes. It was full of fascinating bits I kept wanting to go back to, and a pantoum is a form where the second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the 1st and 3rd of the next, the new 2nd and 4th becoming the next 1st and 3rd and so on. There's no length limit, and you're allowed to change the lines a bit, but it ends by, as usual, bringing down lines 2 and 4 to be lines 1 and 3 -- and going up to the unused 2 and 4 from the first stanza as the final 2 and 4. More fun than crossword puzzles, when it works."

Please know that due to the limitations of Blogger, I can't indent these lines where they were originally indented. My apologies.

Louise Erdrich Learning Ojibiwemowin



Two thirds of Ojibiwemowin is verbs

and nouns aren’t male and female, they’re living or dead.

(She’s learning the language so she’ll get the jokes.)

The word for stone, asin, is animate.



If nouns aren’t male and female, but living or dead,

what you think you know begins to shift.

Their word for stone, asin, is animate

and that universe came from a conversation of stones.



Of course what you know will have to shift

since every language has its limitations.

What’s geology but a conversation of stones?

and even we know flint does speak to steel.



But every language has its limitations:

French doesn’t really have a word for warm,

flint will only speak its sparks to steel,

there’s no word for privacy in Chinese.



French has only tiede, which means lukewarm.

Can you have a concept without the word?

Certainly there’s no privacy in China.

So English added chutzpah, macho, chic,



until we grasped the concept, owned the word

by borrowing it so long it felt like ours,

which takes chutzpah. Macho is learned, and chic

can’t be taught, but both take a straight face --



borrow one until it feels like yours.

It’s useful, too, for poker, tango, jokes,

all teachable skills improved by a straight face,

by knowing what will concentrate your power.



What improves your poem, tango, jokes --

she’s learning the language so she’ll get the jokes --

is knowing what will concentrate your power:

two thirds of Ojibewemowin is verbs.