POEMS of SIX POETS
(Winter 2016-17, Volume 4)
(Winter 2016-17, Volume 4)
Brandyn Johnson
Neighborhood Nocturne The neighborhood is a barking dog rippling the galaxies of streetlight scattered on smooth sedan hoods. Trains moan like lost humpbacks. Teenagers practice cartography of shadows and unlatched windows. How much gets done by moon of muted TV. I, too, was once a shadow splashing a trail through snow. Lights chime like spokes in spinning bicycle tires unless the wind is sleeping. From somewhere: laughter, a car door, a car door, keys, door, canary curtains burn white. A cat nuzzles rusty gutter lips and disappears. And me, loosed from sleep, lone campfire ember coming to in darkness. Of what am I the echo? Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Tom Fielding
The Soul’s Infinity Reaching beyond the last star, Moon hanging limp above the bay, The hillside dreams in shadows While the pines stand watchful Against the night. And the night has its complexion too Of darkening waters And the silent course of distant water birds Whose wings are like souls in flight That cross beneath the further heavens. And thought passes with the wind Among the rustling leaves Of sycamore and oak and rose, Bending the subtle Hebrides to mind, Spinning the wind flower’s vast reproach Against the versatile and detested dandelion. By a clearing In a corner of the garden Where there are deep shadows To conceal the hated hemlock’s breath, The rhododendrons are lurking. . . Waiting. The stillness is invasive, almost forbidding, The hour is frozen upon the wall, The long ivy descends-- The spiders, are they still sleeping near their webs, Or do they plot some treachery against the morn? What creatures live beneath those fallen leaves? Glimmers of thought proceed From tendrils and mossy ledges Beside wet damp stones and decaying wood The mitered-eyed insect Sparkling, vigilant, its mind… frenetic. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
James G. Piatt
Life? I collected broken replicas of rusted memories and stored them upside down in my display of tarnished mistakes as I banged out Etta James’ songs in E flat major on a guitar missing a string, while Bob Dylan whispered poems in his raspy southern voice in a melancholy bar on an imperfectly sculptured street in downtown New Orleans where white people listened with tin ears and falsetto jazz knowledge while trying to be more progressive than Berne and lighting fire to bar stools in the smoke filled haze of the late night to show how hip they were… and as I rotted away in my oxidized metaphorical grave I was still wondering what life was all about. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Brett Mertins
Short Song for a Stomped Cricket Few who hear your rhymes can bear the rub of wing on wing—a blurry black bow mating a trembling string; a record’s needle skating groove after groove—in an odd slide at love. Your two long days at work behind our hub, our quaking office copier—duplicating chirp over tonered chirp, anticipating your fair return—returned the classic drub. Today, you’re crushed not far from your sad shrub-- bent staples stemming a balled brush of dust-- where yesterday you squatted, serenading. Who lured you out? Did Beatrice, our olive- skinned temp, wear white? Was it for you, you guessed, blonde Laura, in line to copy, was waiting? Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
George Moore
Half Hull of a Scuttled Boat on the Beach Now, deep in the dunes, two years of hurricane tides, of storm surges, wind, have lifted the fiberglass shield inland to monument on a south shore island. Two years, I think, before the mast, a working sailor’s boat for sure, drug runners or refugees, scuttled at sea with the load or long escape complete. Dead shell washed up on the beach as we arrived, spent a season wishing it were back in water, sloshing inland and then out again, but never quite to those first curls of surf. Pushed by degrees into the dunes, a side of beef, a giant surfboard, a flaking particle board of what was once seaworthy. How we forget, as the depths of sands, rising and falling through the ocean whims, we walk the same beach each day but it is not the same. It comes and goes as we do, mills quartz to crystal so that crabs can dig their holes and hide from the gulls. As we do, and the half hull, stubborn remnant of some extravagant dream, or just a poor fisherman’s recycle, a once Proud Mary, the child of a dream, seaworthy, gleaming in new paint. How we forget, the things left undone in the back of the mind, passages and waves, the gentle roll of hands holding us up and then we are pulled down. Each meal each day like the gulls, each wave bringing and leaving something of itself. The manner of planets anchored in their spheres, the hull washed further upland, pushed into earth, surrounded by dunes and feather grasses. But in the middle of the grasses you call to say your father died and the sea no longer seems complete, a bad metaphor, a weak link, something sooner forgotten, a stain on the absentminded earth. And the poem evolves, devolves from this natural landscape of change to this sudden awareness of its importance, the human view, the hull lulling off shore one day and the next brought to its burial by the waves. But now the meanings that the poem grabs, wrestles with, captures only to let go, are confused into a wash of feelings, real and somehow imagined, the shoreline like a bloodline, the headland an arm reaching up from a bed, the soft sand a skin into which the soul whatever it is, is absorbed, consumed. The half bowside new weathered at its edges, no longer recognizable as boat or hull, no longer a part of the sea but its remnant, a coin that a wet mouth throws up on shore for the mind to play with, tumble, turn over in the mental hand of a moment, and change to death, to the passage of time, the totem that links poem and sea and a father’s passing. And why then does this seem so cheap? The wreck of nature and nature’s final process, the stars that are exploding and dusting themselves now into new stars and galaxies. How is anything related to a personal death? Why does this language of poetry fall short of monument, speak when the hull is silent, fail in its oversimple attempt to say that the moment is all within each of us sweeping faster by storm to the shore, drifting up on the dunes to rest immobile, waiting for daylight, for hungry gulls to circle, asleep so much of the time that we see only passages in seconds, in days. And recognize that this was once a boat sailing on the same surface of the world that has carried us through time, anchored us, at last, in each other’s passings, we are the hull, the fragment, the sand that eats at the fiberglass remains. The same wave happens again and again. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Des Clark-Walker
Interfaces Restless ocean, wind over, gusty splashy-crested swells, white wavering free falling foam then, upwelling. Reflecting sea, a molten mirror breeze enlivened, sparkling, light leaping and flash dancing to the horizon. Resisting land, eroding, tidal flooding, wet ebbing, slow thrumming surf a turbulent three-phase contact zone. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |