MARIA MELENDEZ Issue 12. 2009. Page 6.

TO SURVIVE INSIDE THE WHEEL OF DAYS

“Crocodile mama, crank open those jaws,
let twenty wriggling pipsqueaks out to swim,” we say

to a human soul that’s lay too long in its swamp bottoms,
to a spark of God suffocating in a muddy mind. If 

the soul’s chilled by a deadly bond to what should’ve been lost, 
we call, “Mountain wind, snap gold from the aspen nodes, 

cover the summer-dun fields with flutter and color.” In our 
bethel of remedies, we, the blue-striped lizard ladies, 

welcome all bedraggled spirits — those with hands 
that do nothing but pick at blisters, the whimperers, those with hair 

that’s forsaken its snake-power, all of its nerve – and we feed them
the savory decay of a desert sheep baked on the boulders, 

horns and all. We keep the coyotes away so they, 
the human souls, can limp and dither their way to a meal,

and when they’re sated, we bathe their hands in the salt-and-sage-
spiced blood of jack-rabbits and ask them to do what they came here for: 

“Scrape off those brittle old skins you slither around in,” which aren’t 
their bodies, but the doubts of their bodies, crusted and constricting. 

We cache away earthquakes, stone knives, burst clouds, flowers, 
cures for every form of heartache . . . but try to make 

a grab for us, we’ll break tail and run. Instead, 
step sideways into our sandstone home, light as a dusky 

breeze that’s come from the river. If you wait with the flooded 
senses and tensile crouch of a kangaroo mouse, we’ll find you 

varnished with shadows, your layered fears a carving surface 
for our primal glyphs: paw, talon, feather, scale, maw.

BODY OF STUFFED FEMALE FOX, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious, 
glass eye embedded in its slitted red, skin
husked and sealed forever in a vacuum — 
the false gray sedge where no dog hunts
and it’s lost its sleekness as it’s lost its sun.

She ages terribly behind her glass.
Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious,
so why should we admire or hate her,
husked and sealed forever in a vacuum,
the frozen attitude of cunning

strung over wire, the razor nails replaced
and aging terribly behind glass?
Imagine the raw, wet wounds in the body
she could open up. Why admire or hate her for them,
why not call her existence, simply, honest:

an animal practicing its craft designed by nature?
Now it’s strung over wire, the razor nails replaced
with plastic as her forest was itself replaced
by us, the raw, wet wounds we tear into its body.
Years ago, signs across the neighborhood

listing all the cats found mutilated declared
a man was busy practicing his craft, nature redesigned
by violence. We have to find the killer, they said, 
before the forested park fills with bodies, 
the cats turned into girls and the girls into women. 

Months later, the signs were torn down, the notices
listing all the cats found mutilated declared
a mistake. The culprit was a fox. But now, behind glass
we’ve found the killer: the violence 
we think we cannot be or feel more than, 

the once-red body that fascinates us 
turned female, signs beside it torn, the notes
on its habitat in disarray due to construction.
The culprit is a fox. Behind the glass
lighting flickers, throws down shadows so that

we cannot see her. She raises up a paw
and the once-red body that fascinates us
freezes in its shabby immortality, stands disfigured 
in its habitat, in disarray due to our construction
of a world that keeps her always different from us;

in our imagination of ourselves, degraded.
We cannot see her. She raises up a paw
as if in supplication, cone nose tasting the air
frozen in its shabby immortality, disfigured
by the box we’ve locked it in, as we’ve locked in her,

imagining how she’d slink from the forest to drink
at a puddle of rain, the picture of herself degraded
by a car’s sudden headlights that cut across the surface.
She lifts her head, cone nose tasting the air
as the wind lifts too, riffling the grasses, the trees,

the fur at her throat; a movement which,
as she stops to drink at her puddle of rain,
could be herself or God or nothing: an absence 
in the headlights that cut across the surface.
She looks into her puddle of rain

but cannot imagine more, does not need to, like us,
a wind riffling through grasses, a movement 
like rain running down a glass room.
Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious. 
She could be herself or God or nothing. Instead, 
she’s husked, red. Sealed forever in a vacuum.

RARA AVIS

My mother was born with wings on her ankles. 
She’s been cutting them off since she could hold 
a butcher knife. They grow back. She cuts them off. 
She can’t fly. The wings are useless. They reappear 
with the promise of flight, the false hope of escape. 
She tries to ignore them. They itch like scabs. 
She cuts them off. She dreads the day she loses 
her strength and lets them grow untamed. She fears 
she might be tricked by the arc of their shadows 
into believing in their power, the moon and the stars 
inviting her, the open window examining her faith.

LUKE

I’m driving back to the McDowell Colony over
the night roads of New Hampshire: Route Ten
from Hanover to Newport, turn right at Goshen
on route Thirty-one, my little Sube straining
up Lovewell Mountain, lights puncturing fog
and snow at the same time, road lost, yellow line
faded because they don’t have taxes in New Hampshire:
Live Free or Die. I crest a hill and there’s
a dog, dead, big German Shepherd, snow on his fur,
dog blood frozen on the road. I stop the car.
A man comes out of his house through the snowy fog:
he’s old, he’s in long underwear, he’s weeping, he
says, “You killed him, mister, you take him away.”
I tie a rope from my bumper to the dog’s neck. 
“Don’t drag him,” the man says. “His name was Luke.”
I haul the carcass into the rear seat and drive,
blood on my clothes, blood on my brand-new car, 
searching the radio but there’s nothing but NPR:
Garrison Keillor reading from Robert Frost, He will not
mind my stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.
Bullshit, I say to Luke. He will. He’ll call the
New Hampshire State Police. What does Frost know? He
is as dead as you are. I stop next to some snowy woods
to throw Luke out, but I can’t do it. I am divorced.
My kids are off at school. He’s all I’ve got. I turn
south on 202 and reach McDowell but there’s no one up,
a light in just one studio, somebody writing late.
It’s snowing again. It’s cold. I open the rear door
and pick Luke up, but he seems lighter, he feels warm,
I open his chest up like a winter coat. I put it on,
I pull his back over my shoulders, big Shepherd head
over my own. I am amazed that the eyes work, the nose
breathes, the mouth opens when I move my lips. I walk
to the lighted window and look in. He’s in there with his
Pepsi and his computer, trying to write a poem but he can’t
get the last line, and he can’t sleep. I rub my nose against
his window. I want to play, I want him out here, I want
a stick thrown over the wet snow. I pull the fur tighter,
I rub a paw over the pane, but he won’t hear. He lights
up a cigar, what does he care, he’s got the photos of
his ex-wife, his kids, why would he need a dog?
It feels like time to get down on all fours and find
some action, but the only light comes from the blind moon,
blind smell of snow, woodsmoke and porcupine, somewhere
a distant horse, giving his harness bells a shake. Maybe
the cooks have started breakfast: smell of brown sugar,
strawberries, French toast, then something bitter, maybe
one of the visual artists coming into heat, I’m not quite
sure. It’s fun. I frisk my tail. I follow my nose and run.

When Asked Why I Write Poems About Japanese Mythology
   — A letter from the suburbs of Seattle to the suburbs of Tokyo

I will send my voices out over the water
where the same cedars that litter my coast
used to tower over yours. Once green,
your cities have nibbled forests into bonsai. 
Our hinoki trees are shipped across the ocean
for your sacred temples now.
Postcards of volcanoes rise from a blue sky
in the background of our homes, we share
zones of tsunami, seasons of weeping cherry. 

I read about women’s spirits 
haunting peony lanterns in the forest. 
Men follow them, fall in love 
with women long dead. In shallow graves 
rotted with tree roots, they still sing. 
And here in pages hammered 
from your language into mine,
sometimes with clumsy fists,
I have listened to the bush-warbler
mourn her children, the fox-wife’s eyes
in the darkness have warned me 
of the growling of dogs and fire. 
And when they disappear in silence,
it is not really silence. Their echoes
burn themselves into stone,
into the living screens of my childhood,
fill my mouth with ghosts.

Ghosts sit in my mouth and sing.
Our grandfathers were at war.
I grew up in the birthplace
of bombs that poisoned children,
burned holes into your sacred earth.
Their poison is part of me.

In the shelter of a shrine, a small girl
holds an umbrella. She becomes a white bird.
She whispers and a thousand cranes, 
a thousand burning flowers
pile up inside me, spill out onto these pages.
Forgive me, ghosts, for my hard,
unbeautiful hands, for my tripping tongue,
as you demand a healed future, some untorn prayer.

SOMETIMES I SEE MY COUNTRY

First, you must understand how I live in a borrowed country, 
The sky wide as a storm, but one that never gets off the ground.

There is far too much room out west to get lost in. 
Back east, our sky supported itself on clouds of late summer oak.

Winter, we knew, would bring that world to its knees.
Trees starved year after year. Sometimes, we hardly held on. 

But still the hills broke, frozen waves against fields.
Dry corn stooped and shuffled its brittle limbs.

In a country like that, the sky seems to fit. 
Sometimes it gathered itself into rain that fell between hills
To be reborn a river. 
People wore the right clothes: leather boots with hard soles.

And all the times we came to wear ourselves out, you could believe it.

It’s just that the sky here doesn’t fit — it’s not that I haven’t touched it. 
It works its rain into me like nails. Timber here is that soft.

Out back, past the star magnolias, I found rhubarb growing near
Some dumpsters along a warehouse wall.

I thought of my grandmother, who planted rhubarb and corn
In a sky so large she couldn’t keep it from pushing through the fences.
I carry that garden around in my heart —
I don’t know, I guess I just like the toughest plants.

I moved to this city on a whim.
I thought I might learn to love its car lots, 
Its newspapers blown under busses, the men who rest their carts 
Under the dogwoods and drink their Steel Reserve.

I thought I might believe in my fortune: Soon you will be sitting
On top of the world. I haven’t the strength to argue.

I lost many things that move: a lover, a dog, money, respect.
Meaning everyone else lost all respect for me.
All my hills gone bald, my skull prickling with bare oaks.

Is it any wonder sometimes I see what is left of my country?
That it makes sense to me why the skin of the fruit grows bitter?
Home, we think, is where you hang your head, or hang around, or just hang.
We live under a fantastic sky, it’s true, but here they call it 
Poverty with a view.

In less than a week, all the stars fell from the trees.

THE GOD OF THE NORMANDY COAST

When the God of the Normandy Coast
sits down for His afternoon pastry,

the waiter asks Him if He wants coffee
or wine with His snack and if He notices

the dead man in the car just off Main
and Grand. The God is rearranging napkins

into white crosses. Such neat little rows.
That is why He is the God and you are

the dishwasher watching Him through slits
in the dumbwaiter. He chooses wine,

which was predictable. The dead man
comes up to Him, sits down, asks,

“Well, what’s the verdict?” The God
shrugs His shoulders. Over fifty years

now and still the shrugging of shoulders
You’d think the only real dead were

in the past. You feel like shaking
His shoulders, shouting, “Come out

of it!” But you are dead too, waiting
in line, washing those dishes till they shine.

NEIL AITKEN Issue 8/9. 2007. Page 16.

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	forward to the end of the line.  The compiler ignores anything in a comment.


At the company town hall meeting,		                         //in the movie theater again
we see the same slides. The financial guys	                         //old plots, new faces
spin the numbers again, a visual rhetoric	                         //fake stars painted on the scene
of gray bars rising adjacent to red. Someone	                 //dull plastic, factory-made 
tells a politically safe joke, and we laugh on cue,                   //generic and eggshell-empty
our hands already under our chairs 		                        //hostages to paychecks and bills
searching in vain for a taped envelope of tickets                   //or any way out of here
or some coupon for a show we will never 	                       //not in this life, dear Buddha,
have time to see. A trim woman who is stuck	               //with an echoing palatial home 
in her mid-twenties comes forward in her $3000 suit,          //and its invisible seams
smiles, and tells us nothing. It’s been another great year,   //resplendent in its impeccable lie
we hear through the gleam of clinically bleached teeth,      //perfectly timed clicking
but the market has been tough. Too bad about bonuses.    //nothing gained, nothing at all

WITHOUT WORDS

When we were not speaking,
I wondered how to tell you without words
where I was going, how I would walk
outside and breathe slowly
to catch my heart before it raced
into the swamp of singing
that prowls about us.
It was before we invented fire,
before words,
before the shape of words.
When we did not speak,
the air still burst with visions,
animals purring, yowling,
chaos parting air and water,
the moon rising from underground gardens.
When we did not speak,
our fists formed meaning —
unmistakable, furious
curled into our mouths,
too blue to utter,
too red to grasp,
too green to listen.
We wove baskets of grief,
killed ferrets and doves,
skinned them and ate.
When we learned to speak,
the words became round beads
we put on strings, chains of meaning
to hang around our necks —
too many syllables rivering
through our veins like prophecy.
We invented god to interpret the heavens for us,
realized our tongues are small instruments
if we wish to speak to the stars.

THINGS
     for W.S. Merwin

     If you look for me in this street

     you’ll find me with my violin

     prepared to break into song, 

     prepared to die.
          from “For Everyone,” Pablo Neruda
                                     
You translated his love poems and went on to other things —
Beowulf, The Cid, Lorca, your palm trees, your own work 

while Neruda lived here in those years, building his third home, 
adding room after room to fill with things and more things. 

It is easy to forget the dusty beach towns — Algarrobo, El Quisco —
their graffiti and crowds when you turn off toward Isla Negra. 

Cypress and monkey pines cling to the cliffs. Black volcanic rock 
juts from the Pacific below; seaweed whirls in wild blue water. 

It is February summer. I want to take it all in, the things, his 
‘blue shore of silence’ above his ‘university of the waves.’ 

A giant glassy-eyed fish watches from the roof. An ancient 
red train engine guards the walk’s pink profusion of flowers. 

A caretaker’s house he bought in ’39 with earnings from books 
sold since his teens, he re-designed it to look like a ship, adding 

rooms to hold his collections. Though terrified of water, 
he gathered everything he could find from ships and the sea. 

‘I traveled building joy,’ he carved on the weathered wood
lintel under the red tin-roof. You enter walking the seashell floor 

in the foyer, then cross sliced tree trunks sunk into the concrete 
floor of the dining room. Shelves on every wall hold rainbows 

of colored glass: three hundred old bottles from France, hundreds 
of green, blue, and red glass piano leg protectors, dishes from Turkey, 

Russia, Sweden. Ships in bottles, masks from everywhere, closets filled
with colorful hats for costume parties. The heavy wood dining table still 

set for nine waits for Neruda to take the biggest captain’s chair. 
“I am the captain of dry land,” he often said, looking out from his
many telescopes, collecting hundreds of painted ships’ frontispieces.  

Six thousand shells he gave to a museum; another spiky, spiny, 
pearly thousand reside here in his shell room. In his study, where 

he wrote only in green (the color of hope), washing his hands 
before and after writing, he kept cases of blue and yellow butterflies; 

big, ugly beetles, the Chilean beetle, longer than a finger, his favorite. 
He wrote surrounded by photographs of his mentors: Baudelaire 

to the right on his carved desk; Whitman, ‘his poetic father’ on the left;  
Lorca, whom he loved and grieved in Spain on the wall above. 

And meerschaum pipes, hundreds of their carved white heads resting 
in cases. Murals of stone and rock on the way to the horse room, 

his ‘happiest horse’ sculpture, larger than life-size, acquired after 
forty-five years of negotiation, inviting his friends to his horse party 

asking them to bring the horse gifts when the horse’s parlor 
and men’s bathroom pasted with dirty postcards were finished. 

Enter the Kovache (‘cozy’ in Mapuche language) room filled 
with wooden animals  ‘A house of toys,’ he said, ‘to play with 

from morning to night.’ Not just his own interests, but the local
women he helped, whose hundreds of pieces of embroidery he sold

on his travels, the thousands of Spanish Civil War refugees he paid 
for and re-settled in Chile. You catch your breath outside sitting 

on Tiburon, the red and white wood fishing boat he built for cocktail 
parties overlooking the Pacific. His passions are clearer now — poems

about his socks, an ear of corn, a tuna on ice, a chestnut on the ground, 
salt, a lemon. Things. So many things. I have tried to take it all in 

as a gift to myself, to you who made him ours long ago — these common 
things still singing above the sea to a very uncommon man. 

BOB HICOK Issue 6/7. 2006. Page 12.

IN MICHAEL ROBINS' CLASS MINUS ONE

At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River.
It raises its hand.
It asks if metaphor should burn.
He says fire is the basis for all forms of the mouth.
He asks, why did you fill the boy with your going?
I didn’t know a boy had been added to me, the river says.
Would you have given him back if you knew?
I think so, the river says, I have so many boys in me,
	I’m worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day. 
Have you written a poem for us, he asks the river,
	and the river reads its poem, 
	and the other students tell the river 
	it sounds like a poem the boy would have written,
	that they smell the boy’s cigarettes 
	in the poem, they feel his teeth 
	biting the page.
And the river asks, did this boy dream of horses
	because I suddenly dream of horses, I suddenly dream.
They’re in a circle and the river says, I’ve never understood
	round things, why would leaving come back 
	to itself? 
And a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it
	against the river, and the kiss flows away
	but the river wants it back, the river makes sounds
	to go after the kiss.
And they all make sounds for the river to carry to the boy. 
And the river promises to never surrender the boy’s shape 
	to the ocean.

RELATIVITY

Leaves are jumping from the trees.
At the sales meeting I wonder if suicide is catching. 
While Dave in his cumulus shirt reviews figures 
on the growth rate of suckers, I leave the room 
through a wormhole of boredom and have a child 
named Carla. In the seconds I don’t listen 
to the horse galloping through Dave’s lips, 
Carla plays softball and grows into a woman 
who is symmetrical and happy. Dave sits down 
and leaves are still brightly killing themselves. 
I think of dialing 911 but am plagued by the sense 
I learned a different way to cut a PBJ, 
just for Carla, a style no one else knows, 
that she’s inside the light years, looking out 
for me, imagining I’m just over the hill, tie off, 
under a maple catching every bit of orange 
before it shrouds the ground, as I do 
each fall to weave the dress she calls 
“fire fire, I’m on fire.”

PHOTOGRAPH OF JOHN BERRYMAN ON THE BACK OF LOVE & FAME     
   I have no idea whether we live again
   — John Berryman

I see the man who wrote his 11 intemperate letters
to the Lord is the man half grateful near his end,
a man almost at ease and deep behind his whiskers here.
A charmer who won’t be completely run to ground,

grizzled as the granite going to pieces at his back,
he’s channeling his last cloud-split reasoning
directly at the doubtful sky, uncovering any worth
or last ditch redeeming chance, and carefully

subscribing to that. Who then knows about the soul —
chipped away with age, grey with cosmic grit,
some evanescent paste holding together beyond
our bones? I have some interest in this late line

of questioning, that desperate dodge and grab at
conviction while balancing on one foot, the sinking
weight of everything you likely know on the other.
I have a friend who revered and loved the man, as,

I imagine, God intended us to respect that knot
of light burning in the rare and fervent few among us.
33 years ago, Berryman posed, nonchalant
before the lens in Ireland — Latinate, distilled,

high lonesome ad jazzy riffs mixed with reflex
and a syntactic ear for idiosyncrasy, inward
somnambulism — a sober self-estimate that held him
steady amid the wobbling flames, dreaming

in the distracted atmosphere with love and fame
trailing a ways off from where he later waved
then stepped away, dawdling toward the glory
of the dust. For a man who could not much love

himself he came generous with his love and trust
at last in God. O, time wears us away to little
more than salt or sea air — here us elsewhere, but how
to know which metaphysical hammerlock’s going

to pin us down the years and force capitulation?
Yet, he’s still credible, walking the edge, a famous
sparkle of doubt in the eyes, teetering in the blind
up-drafts of belief — both sides of the street in play,

sand beneath the soft soles of his feet. He expects
to fall and will blame, ex post facto and no doubt
rightly, logically so, God, when he is not there,
to swoosh out of the unphysical aether to hold,

metaphorically, his hand, in His infinite one,
that ardent strope of flesh and blood above
the common traffic of the world, where sooner or
later all our blood and bony minds fall to wreck,

one afternoon. One day to the next, I find myself
as reasonably sure as Berryman about the afterlife,
and I would, at 50-something, line up behind him,
my right hand raised into the air in hope of one.

But my heart’s not finally in it; it’s still half bitter
like a root vegetable they always said was good
for you, and so will not likely lift me, heavy out
of this world, as his must have — singing praising

purely the fog thick invisible source, the blind-
spot in creation sustained by desperate lines,
and he dead-grateful for his gift, disavowing
eloquence alone. Yet somehow her firmly clutched

in one mildly shaking hand a glass half-full of Faith.
For any proof, I have only, as I said, the friend who
knew him, this photo, his clipped and thorny song —
the conflicted pledges of an absent minded God . . .

ARS POETICA VIII: AFTER HIKING MANY MILES TO HEAR THE MASTER SPEAK

When asked for a definition of poetry, the master said, “beware all 
     enterprises that require new clothes.”  
When asked for a definition of poetry, the master took his hatchet to the 
     shed and shredded two quarter logs for kindling.  
When asked for a definition of poetry, the master kissed the questioner 
     on the forehead then cuffed an ear.  
When asked, the master said, “In the shadow of the mountain, snow will 
     last long into August, however hot the afternoons.” 
When asked, “Six girls without pants is not an excuse for wisdom.” 
When asked, the master sighed and replied, “There are things in the 
     world that can kill you, and one of them is rats.” 
When asked, the master rose from his wooden bench and sliced a kitten 
     in half.  
Shouted: “The last thing Icarus thought.”  
When asked the definition of poetry, the master points at his heart, 
     “Somewhere, wildflowers and trout, somewhere the sparrow lives 
     without fear of its shadow.”
 

ROB CARNEY Issue 4/5. Summer 2005. Page 39-44.

THE MOTHER OF THE MOUNTAINS

     But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the
        thickening center; corruption
     Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet    
        there are left the mountains.1
                                                         —Robinson Jeffers
	
I. Hearing Takes More than Ears 

If a mama bear gets angry, imagine the Mother of the Mountains.
Mess with Her children, She’ll dust off an avalanche; 

step out of line, She’ll realign your bones. 
She’s a blue-eyed beauty,

and the mountains have their Mother’s eyes: deep lakes. 
Gaze into them, you’ll see their thoughts like fish—

quick schools, slow rainbows-—look deeper, 
and you’ll learn to dream like a stone.

What does She feed them? Rain for breakfast.
Anything else? She peels them the sun for lunch.

And at night? Big helpings of quiet, 
then the Mother of the Mountains sings them to sleep with snow.

The trees are Her grandkids; She brings them birds to play with.
Whenever it’s their birthday, She gives them an owl

’cause though She’s a blue-eyed beauty, She’s still kind.
Even soft . . . even fragile. . . .

Wolves howl to Her to show their gratitude. What about you? 


II. Not Even the Mother of the Mountains Knows How She was Born 

She might have been fire and twilight—fire in the Earth’s womb, 
waiting like an egg, and everywhere evening 

seeking a way inside.
She might have been fire and ocean.

Or just the answer to fire’s question, Why all this heat?
She can’t remember,

but She wears the colors of those elements:
red and orange and yellow, and under them blue.

She can’t remember.
But Her children are burning rock; we know that much;

and Her love for them is the water we drink
and that love made the valleys we live in. . . .

None of us know where we come from, not really.
Questions climb higher than answers.

Still, the Mother of the Mountains raised Her children up skyward,
giving us places greater than ourselves to look.


III. Some Mountains are Strays. None are Orphans. 

Of course She’s happy when they stay together,
but the Mother of the Mountains understands being apart.

You can draw Orion with your eyes each night;
it doesn’t change the fact they’re separate stars.

You can join any group—there are millions—but joining
can’t subtract you; you’re still one.

One peak in the Andes.
In the Himalayas. In the Alps.

One astonishing face of the Tetons.
One shoulder of the Okanogans.

One slender arm
or curving hip of the North Cascades. . . . 

But you’re no more beautiful, maybe less, than Mauna Loa
off in the ocean, surrounded by all that blue.

You’re no surer than Kilimanjaro
though he stands apart from a continent,

away and above, like his Mother, in thinner air.


IV. The Mother of the Mountains in Disguise 

Sometimes She puts on eagle’s wings and comes near.
Not often, and not to give us an omen;

eagles and mountains are both brown and white, 
and that’s all. 

I’ve seen it: 
Once, at the summit, She circled above and flew on. 

Another time She was riding the wind straight down . . . 
like the wind is a river, like the wind has edges

and waterfalls. 
Then yesterday She perched on the roof of my dream:

my back yard wider, the mountains closer,
the stream running cold 

where I’ve always imagined a stream.
I woke up thirsty, 

and those first drops splashing on the window screen
made the whole day smell of rain.

It wasn’t a sign. Don’t be an interpreter.
Desire has meaning like a bird has meaning; that’s all.

Who wouldn’t be an eagle? Who hasn’t looked at what they love
and felt a lifting, or gliding, or plunge?


V. Adding It Up 

1.  Bears belong to the mountains, not to us.
2.  And lakes belong to the mountains, not to us.

3.  The full moon silhouettes the mountains first,
     and when bears bend down to drink, they drink its light.

4.  Forests are the mountains’ children,
     so we’d better write good stories for our shelves, 

     stories that last as long as trees last, that grow 
     in widening circles. . . . 

5.  Deer may take from our gardens.
6.  We get back magic in return:

     a small amazement, illusion of floating,
     a sudden now-you-see-’em, now-you-don’t.

7.  Sex at the top of a mountain makes a boy;
     at night, on the lakeshore, a girl.

8.  We can’t ignore what’s happening. 
9.  Feeling’s not a choice. It’s everyone’s job.

10. In that hour before daybreak, even a city might concentrate,
     might quiet itself awhile

     and sense an older, deeper pulse.


VI. Rising and Falling and Rising 

The Mother of the Mountains has long red hair, long as the horizon.
Mornings, when She braids it, She sets the new world turning.

Evenings, when She combs it out,
Her hair is the western sky.

It is here, in this night time,
that Her dreams come open like the stars.

I like the one about a man and a woman,
how their bodies fit together, and sometimes their minds.

Sometimes the woman has long red hair
and the man is standing at the window

and she crosses the space between them
to look out too. . . . 

Sometimes she’s reading at the table,
the words appearing like days—a page at a time;

skip ahead, they’re still empty.
When he asks her what comes next, she doesn’t know.

It is here, in this dreaming, that the Mother of the Mountains
is like us: full of love and aloneness.

And it’s this dream She’s had, about a man and a woman,
if the city wakes blanketed with snow.
 

VII.  Wolves Howl to Her to Show Their Gratitude. What About You? 

When people remember what counts most,
they measure time by their children.

So to speak with the Mother of the Mountains
takes 28 days. You must learn to be patient.

Ask the lynx. It carries that waiting all winter,
then turns that waiting into speed.

Ask the moon, never closing the distance.
Both of them know fullness won’t last long;

there’s always more beginning, more going;
tell the Mother of the Mountains something new.

Tell Her your story if you have to,
but make it tie the river to the wind 

and lift up the green smell of moss
and the memory of someone’s body

you never got to touch
and the jumping drum of your heart. . . . 

If one day you see a heron—a long blue stillness
at the water’s edge, or a blue impossible flying—

then the Mother of the Mountains did listen.
And Her answer is yes.





1. Jeffers, Robinson. “Shine, Perishing Republic,” The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001. P 23. 

Mail Order Bride

A strange star, liquid skies, no smoking please.
I make you good wife: slender figure, coffee eyes.
You will recognize me by the flames
surrounding my head. 
You will recognize me in a little black number.
Insert obligatory comments here 
about excess of love and varicose veins 
but love itself is a blue and protruding thing.
Panties . . . this is where it all starts.
I want a gentleman with strong forearms.
I want long talks late at night,
a clean scent, the cool ruin.
I want an annual income of at least one-hundred thousand.
I’m most happy when dot dot dot
The first thing people usually notice about me is dot dot dot
I like weekends at the beach,
the arp of seals, gasping the sodium 
but what’s a mermaid to do with so many crushed anemones?
“Eucalyptus wind!”
Someone shouts from the high cliffs.
There is someone out there.
That someone could be you.
She smiles often, makes friends easily,
her peeves are well hidden in polite societies.
“Will you marry me?” I say        three second delay.
A plane, a snore, blue candy in wax paper.
You will recognize me walking on coals
near the terminal.
You will recognize me by my red hat.
Miss now Mrs. 
Now immigration procedures 
now frantic signatures. We are fumbling and fumbling
unzipping the zippers that lead to nowhere. 

The Selected poems
        All things are tragic when a mother watches!
                                                          —O’Hara

I won’t concentrate enough for the joy in novels
& would much rather set my gaze on Hopper
or at least his grave where he lies with Josephine.
Look at me, smoking a cigarette, it’s much better
for breathing & easier for the mouth than words.
It’s true I pushed our chairs apart, but haven’t
I said that already? How oranges are delicious
with seeds? I see a blossomed tree in the landfill
& I like “The Hunger,” but skip the longer ones.
It’s true I never liked your fun, how you picked
that fabulous nose, at a dinner table nonetheless.
I am not the violent man, but I’m man enough
by evening to leave this blood across the walls.
Oh yes, living: the ant in the shadow of the heel.

As Water Reflects What is Above My Head

Our woeful rowboat, Kismet named,
the stars above and below us.
Everything drifts. 
The oar that was in my hand
is now not in my hand. 
My little stacks of paper blow away. 
Something tickles the edge of my eyelid.
The water’s surface trembles. 
The moon reappears in the left-hand corner, 
hardnosed, a robber-baron, 
collecting acres of night
the humble stars have reserved.
This is how it looks from here,
that the moon is greedy and a thief. 
I wish he would be kinder.
My oar floats across his upturned face.
I wish I were a poet.
I want to say something 
foolish. Something flinches.
What a large cage the sky is.
How opaque the bay, and pale
in parts, how it sparkles 
like nailpolish on a girl I saw once 
in a shopping mall in Dallas.
How she is but a speck, how I am. 
How each word is essential 
and tiny. That the universe too 
is essential and tiny, so small
that even my oar disturbs it—See 
how I touch the water in one place 
and it echoes at the other end of the world—
Oar you are so pretty.
I promise to use you as kindling 
as soon we reach the well-earned shore.

One Thousand Chipmunks

One thousand chipmunks
woke him up from a deep sleep

and he mistook them
for angels

when he could simply 
have been amazed at a thousand 
chipmunks in one place.

Godchild

The woman who gave me to God can’t pronounce my name
anymore. Every word was pulled out by the roots.
My godfather, my dentist, used to take me up in his plane, 
used to frighten me with his love. He made me tiny rings out
of gold pulled from other people’s teeth and could fit 
all of his giant hand inside my mouth. Now, my mother tells me 
he is lost on his long legs. Since his wife folded in half, he sits
all day in a dark room rolled up in smoke while the t.v.
shouts and sings and makes no sense.
He named my dad, Curly; my brother, Squirrelly.  Her name
was Queenie, but I am just me and I can’t tell when
he lifts his head up and looks towards my face
if he recognizes that I am his, or feels the same tug,
like bone pulled from bone when I say the word, love.

THE DAY WAS LIKE WIDE WATER

     winding down, a flat gray luster at the last of it.
     Neither of the phones was ringing.
     Flashes fell like a dull weather on the end-table’s leaning heap of mail.
     They were holding the cage open off-screen so the wolf could lurch and stumble out onto the grassy flatland.
     The dogs had let up for a while, the mouse had stopped scrambling inside the bathroom wall.
     They were panning through the sawgrass, the sky sealed off entirely with thin scud.
     The hour was pressed smooth as nickel.
     There was not one message, and nothing overdue.
     It could be spent without consequence, soft and flat and manageable as it was.
     A reply invited, but not required.
     It could be dropped without any jangling alarm.

THE EONS, IN THEIR MILLIONS,

after the story’s one free instant of rising, the singularity, the place where 
   it all seethes uncountable and free, untouchable by law, after 10-43 
   seconds
the eras weigh back down in a gravity like middle age,

the cargo plane stalls tail-down toward the teeming residential streets of a day’s
   overloaded front-page language,
the phrases continually come down, hardening to prose before they hit, 
   before they break, telling what’s left to tell,

the denouement, the fifteen billion years of physical law,
and what flourishes at the end of that long verdict.

J.P. DANCING BEAR

Issue 3. Spring 2004. Page 5.


GACELA OF ANIMAL THEORY

Every time I explain Schrödinger’s cat to the animal
right’s activist, the theory scurries away like a mouse
when she asks, who does such a thing to their cat?

The nature documentary shows the lion cub attacked
by a pack of hyenas, after it cried for long hours into darkness
for its missing mother. It is not the camera that is cruel.

What was the tiger’s crime?—robbed of his skin, his claws
and his penis. Having lived where a farm might someday be,
hungry for the cattle we raise for our own bellies.

My grandfather had a hollowed elephant foot for a trash can.
I went to bed with dreams of a herd of three-legged elephants
thrashing the brush, looking for their tusks and feet.

The sheep, at night, sleep in their dreams of losing their legs
and becoming cumulus, floating like gods over the moaning
faces of slaughterhouses. The moon cradling their fears.

No one knows the animal padding the long terrain
of moonlight, splendid in its coat, is a metaphor,
a device, a vehicle in which the message arrives.



CORY McCLELLAN

Issue 3. Spring 2004. Page 19.


HEART-SHAPED TELEPHONE

“Hello.”
                  
                  Prisoner inside my mouth
                  biting words into my tongue.

“Do you have the time to take a short survey?”

                  Light travels slow without windows.

“What local radio stations do you listen to?”                            

                  If I lie still long enough
                  my aorta will tremble,
                  some birds answer their own calls.

“How many hours a day do you spend watching television?”

                  The octopus’ eye is similar to mine,
                  people still live in Pompeii,
                  trees without leaves are holding their breath.

“What brand of coffee do you prefer?”                                                                   

                  When you’re thinking olive blossoms
                  I can smell the oil on your lips.

“How much do you contribute to charity?”

                  I once bought an opal necklace

                  to prove I don’t believe in ghosts.

“Are you happy with your current credit card?”

                  The future is still trying to escape
                  from lemonade-sour shivers.

“Are you the man of the house?”

                  I am a wind chime underwater.

I always liked the smell of
Christmas in church
not the Christmas that you have to bow
to a pot of frankincense
or the Christmas when
a woman with Tourette’s sits
behind your pew
yelling fucking bitch all mass
but the Christmas when
a really beautiful woman
sans panty-lines
sings “O Holy Night” so
numbingly, that the night
really does seem holy.
I wasn’t sure what to make
of the other woman’s outbursts—
she couldn’t possibly
be mad at God. Maybe she was pissed
at Mary—loose woman—
having an affair with the Almighty
and now we all have to be saved
because of it, because God
couldn’t keep his hands
to himself. We were all perfectly
happy being heathens, we liked
when the world swallowed us
into its flooding belly and we swam
until our arms just gave out
our bodies
sinking to the bottom
where we hear that incessant
beautiful humming
maybe Ave Maria
which the smooth singer
can really belt out. Poor Mary,
she never wanted children.
Imagine your son nailed to a cross.
If I live to be as old as Jesus
I too would hate the horizon
like I hate a toothache
reminding me
my body is rotting.

I will never, despite the spinning,
fly off the Earth. 

It’s just not possible.
The grip that holds it all together—

all the oceans and coffee cups,
wheat fields and butter knives,

porches and the cats on them, cats
who’ve seen it all before;

all the mornings turning birds into music
and streams turning stones into music

and women turning me into music
when they smile, when they tell stories;

all the sunlight and shadows
and moonlight and shadows;

all the many moods of rain, 
and so much more—those hands 

keeping things together
hold me here, despite the unlikelihood;

despite odds of infinity to one, 
they’re a surefire bet. Big hands. Galactic.

Hands building winds in the wind shop
then sawing some down into breezes. 

For every thermal updraft, 
fashioning a hawk.

Hands shaping mice in the mouse shop for food, 
seeds and cones in the wood shop for food 

with enough left over for forests and orchards 
and maples for the pancakes of the world.

Or arranging flowers in the flower shop,
or inventing the smell of cinnamon,

or creating the flavor of peaches, 
the purring in cats . . . none of it necessary, 

no explanation or meaning. 
Which means they’re an artist’s hands,   

means you and I are paintings, 
means daylight and darkness are our frame, 

and we will never, even with the spinning, 
fly off the Earth while we’re alive. 

That’s a fact, but some facts are magic:
Like our minds. Like sex. 

Like every evening the sun sets. 
Like grapes are for much more than vitamins. 

Like a cat’s tail, up and casually flicking, 
is telling us the cat feels at home.

After an unhappy year or two of marriage, I gave birth to a blind baby, and I didn’t love it. Out of your paternal passion, you swallowed it whole.

Afterwards, we sat around a yellow tablecloth and exchanged empty nothings. The wailing in your gut grew louder and louder. Finally, you ran to the bathroom and purged up our baby. It’s a girl!

Your black-eyed daughter whimpered, and you put her to your breast. What could be nourishing her but your untapped reservoir of love? You wept into her wheat hair, onto her starred skin. You gave her a name.

At this, I put on my wedding gown and began to accompany this scene on the cello. It seemed the least I could do.

My colleague’s competence began to depress me. A nice-enough chap otherwise, he remembered all course requirements for his advisees, could quote our department constitution at length & recount the intricacies of our annual revisions of this document. He could & would outline precise actions of our faculty senate from a decade before. He’d wax ecstatic or with melodramatic pain about the Modern Language Association schedule of events for next year. He corrected & filed minutes after coding them with colors for easy reference. His brain & heart were filing cabinets.

I went to him often. Edward, I’d ask, do you recall the time limit for the completion of a thesis? the new catalogue number for my course The Poetry of Poetry? the Board of Trustees’ policy on leave-of-absence without pay? Of course he did, & saved me much time as I followed my meandering feet from office to classroom to meeting room or wherever as I went about my distracted associational way, facts falling from me like dandruff, and the whole university order only the wisp of a legend in my mind.

I’m not exactly a dope. Even when it comes to facts, I’d lived defensively & armed myself, since graduate school, with these wasps—by the acronym PEAL AGS (peel eggs) I’d learned the Seven Deadly Sins in order of their deadliness; I knew the birth & death dates of maybe twenty authors, the names of the tribes of the Iroquois Confederation (by another acronym, COOMS); the name of Rip Van Winkle’s dog, the publication years of the nine editions of Leaves of Grass that appeared during the spontaneous one’s lifetime. But I have not been a fact specialist, & try not to worry much when my genius—no man ever followed his genius so far that it misled him, says one of the Concord masters—disposed me to forgetfulness. I have a hundred poems by heart.

Edward held firmly to the details of our department & administration. Beyond this, students I respected as glowing coals told me his classes were a recitation of just how many steps Alexander Pope took from study to toilet & back during the revision of a particular line in The Dunciad, & what the diminutive hunchback wore that morning, & what comma was placed where—never mind the effect—that afternoon. The text itself lay largely unexamined in the totality of its caustic & witty splendor.

But one day Edward appeared in my office with lipstick on his face & his hair mussed, his tie askew, his eyes those of an illuminate. Cynic, I at first wanted to ask him if he’d been between the sheets in a motel with his beloved erotic University of Chicago Manual of Style, but my fellow-feeling went out to him when he stammered a description of what had become his new & unexpected estate in the country of love.

May the lord of arrows bless him & keep him. May he be riven with blossom. May his students now breathe some of the loveliness of Pope’s couplet art.

MELISSA RHOADES

Issue 1. Spring 2003. Page 23.


DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY

Back home, my new wife makes fine lace. I keep
a scrap of her work in my brine-soaked breeches.
Black waters pitch and the hull creaks
as I head for spice stores at Malacca’s beach.

The scrap of her work in my brine-soaked breeches
is soiled from these sickened months
of heading for spice-stores at Malacca’s beach.
The taste of molded hard-tack licks my tongue

and soiled from these sickened months,
we had to leave nine scurvied men with the Boers.
The taste of molded hard-tack licks all our tongues
and the Captain won’t say when next we moor.

Although we left nine scurvied men with the Boers,
we’re all bleeding gums, thin skin, and fleas.
The Captain still won’t say when we moor
and some dirty dogs talk of mutiny.

But for all our bleeding gums, thin skin, and fleas
sweet land comes, a line on the horizon.
Now, no dogs talk of mutiny,
not with palm trees visible from our galleon.

Sweet land! Malaya fills the horizon.
Scrabble at the riggings, keen to anchor.
Palm trees look heavenly from the galleon.
Once ashore, we drink till we slur,

scrabbling around port, keen from anchor.
Sweat runs down our backs. In the shade
we sprawl out, still drinking in a slur.
At dusk, I thrust into a dark-skinned maiden,

sweat running down our backs in the shade.
Black Malacca reeks of nutmeg and mace.
Again, I thrust into the dark skinned maid
and moan. Back home, my new wife makes fine lace.



Scott Poole
Issue 1. Spring 2003. Page 35


MY SUGGESTION

When the car broke down outside The Dalles, Oregon,
my suggestion was to get the spear from the anthropology conference
out of the trunk and stab the damn car several hundred times
in the tires, hood, lights, roof, trunk, windshields
and doors. I lamented that we didn’t have a hundred spears
so we could leave them stuck in the car every time we stabbed it
thus giving it the look of a giant porcupine with wheels.
I thought we should get some hot oil from somewhere and pour it
over the top of the vehicle. Why not
beat on it with a shovel until it took the shape
of a giant metal head with wild spear hair?
Think of all the people that would pull over
imagining the giant melted head a “tourist event.”
Consider the traffic, the police, the imitators
burning their cars in joy, the art critics, wine
and cheese events in the half-light of the canyon,
people in black milling about, talking about raw energy,
Renoir, Cézanne, Rodin, everyone French.
We could just hang out there
in the caves way up the canyon wall and watch,
eating popcorn and rabbits, making buffaloes our pets.
Oh would I love to ride a buffalo down the hill
with a six pack hanging over its neck so I could huck
a can at a tourist and say “Gentle traveler. There’s a special music
when you run your hand along the spine of a salmon.”
Let’s just attack every car that drives by with
spears, dynamite, and giant boulders like German deities,
and then run back to our ancient cave womb and
make love so beautiful it changes the shape of the planets.
She looked at me, then called a tow truck, thank God.




CORWIN ERICSON
Issue 2. Winter 2003. Page 5.


The Alphabet Cannot Hold

The suspicious letter bleeding
from the death of thousands of cuts,
the suspicious letter that isn’t one of the twenty-six,
an A bomb’s lurking silent B, a Q without its U.
Zeroes are grounded, words unravel
into anagrams and crumble into runes.
Alphabet City is littered with nametags and singed
documents; meanwhile, the man with the S on his chest
dangles from an empty thought balloon.
FDNY & DKNY and remember the X hats not so long ago?
Swarms of acronyms circle vigilantly. Black boxes dense
with last words, alphanumeric keypads coding
“love you” and “get out.” Eyewitnesses say
“boom or bang” and describe smoke as white, black,
unknown substances, manifests laden with mismeanings.
Letter carriers are poisoned and speakers are sequestered,
Congress sings on the steps. The POTUS is back to nucular,
poetry is chalked onto rubble, police lines
are not crossed, this is not a crusade,
the assassins will be smoked out and euphemized.
Cities are mounted by death tolls,
their issue is unimaginable, unbelievable, indescribable;
W’s advice is to live your life
and then wash your hands with water and soap.




Issue 2. Winter 2003. Pages 56-59

UNIMAGINATIVE

But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth . . .
from “Dejection: An Ode” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I chose to speak on the panel “Keeping the Imagination Alive”(1) simply because it had the word “imagination” in the title and not “work” or “budget.” Thinking I was on intimate, friendly terms with my imagination, I thought it and I might orate a bit and then field questions from the audience in a collegial fireside manner. As I often find with creative collaborations, my partner was hardly up to the task, despite its legendary reputation.

Imagination gets defined as: “The formation of a mental image of something that is neither perceived as real nor present to the senses.” Furthermore, the American Heritage tells us that the imagination has the ability to “confront and deal with reality using the creative powers of the mind.” The implication is that imagination is capable of rolling up its sleeves and working off the cuff; that it’s there to help, no matter how unusual the situation is. I thought I would be a natural, that I’d be just a hammock and a butterfly away from lucidity and insight. I rolled my eyes inward to observe the clever elves as they cobbled together a work of genius but found instead a rat king, a mare’s nest, a sketch pad of harebrained doodles, eels escaping through the grass.

I looked at my Coleridge, Emerson, and Stevens books that were to serve as fetishistic goads for the creation of this work. They remained disapprovingly silent. I looked out the window and spied my imagination in the yard, eating grass and exposing itself to the neighbors. I looked on the World Wide Web. There, I found its spoor; a search on “‘Corwin Ericson,’ imagination” registers one hit, some sort of vestige of a magazine’s table of contents. Mostly, though, imagination seems to be dressed up to go to work on the Web. It’s most often paired with “solutions,” as in “We offer imaginative solutions to your data storage needs with a variety of redundant array packages.” I am dubious. Maybe my imagination could hold down a job like this, but more likely, it would get something else to punch the clock for it.

On the Web, imagination is also found frequently to be shacked up with cheap children’s arts-and-crafts projects. Toilet paper tubes, popsicle

sticks, styrofoam balls, poster paint, mucilage. Children are often told to “use your imagination.” Adults know this really means “fuck off,” but we grown-ups want to phrase this sentiment in helpful, instructive terms. If children are sick, they may use their imaginations in bed, staging Robert Louis Stevensonian battles on knee-summits and blanket-crevasses. Usually, though, a child is told to take his imagination outside, where he can find a stick, which he could pretend is a Game Boy or a cell phone, or a gun. If a child uses a stick for any of its natural purposes, like whacking, poking, or burning, parents would be remiss if they did not discipline the child by imprisoning him in his room with only his imagination to keep him company.

Boredom and isolation are the real known associates of imagination, not the upright alibis of problem-solving and artistry. I imagine that if I were to be locked away, the first items on my agenda would be to be tortured, raped and then killed. If, by some lucky chance, I were to be given the opportunity to be my own worst enemy in an isolation cell, then it would be my imagination that would save my bacon. I’d relive the carefree days of my youth spent traipsing the great outdoors, stick in hand, whacking and poking all I wanted. But wait, this is not imagination finally helping me, this is memory; the idylls of my stick-wielding youth are kept in my memory, and I am staying sane in my cell by remembering, not imagining. In fact, it was my imagination that put me in this horrid cell in the first place. Before it had its perverted way with me, I was sitting in my comfortable study—my imagination has punished me, abandoned me in an oubliette, even, for just thinking about it.

My imagination, when I look at it coldly, is shiftless, idle, leering, annoying, impolite, poundingly dull, hopelessly vague. It offers me little relief from the lumber of living because it comes up with worse. For instance, my imagination regularly fails to offer me sumptuous dining when I’m eating Ramen noodles. It would be nothing to imagine myself eating in some ideal noodle shop of the mind, but no, it’s busy distracting me with what I should have said to Zoran Zubic, a hostile technical writing student I failed eight years ago. And I overboil the Ramen and have to eat cereal for dinner. And the milk’s sour and I can’t even manage to imagine that it tastes better, since the sour milk is making me imagine pink hairy cow udders and that squirt-squirt sound and then I’m nauseated.

It likes to entertain itself by making me think I’m clever—I find myself thinking, what if there were animals that one could eat, and they had a hide one could wear or even build tents with, and it produced

secretions that one could drink, and its very shit would help one grow food? Oh yeah, cows. Thanks a lot, imagination.

My imagination seems to be at its busiest when it’s trying to see through clothing, or convincing me that there is indeed SOMETHING AWFUL OUT THERE. What my imagination needs is a job, frankly. As it loafs around my mental house it makes a mess of things that need to be kept tidy so I can perform all of those rent-check generating tasks that it scorns. When it delivers me something pleasant, like erotic stimulation, it’s almost always in the form of an inappropriate surprise, and it seems to want congratulations for it. My imagination is the only part of me that has no concern for the preservation of my health or even my life. I suspect I’d be a well adjusted, better socialized person without my imagination.

Perhaps we have art to save ourselves from our imaginations. It could be that only art drags us away from our petty solipsisms, lends us the impression that there are higher purposes. That could be the job that imagination could work at, keeping itself busy making art to save ourselves from ourselves. But if imagination is limited to the creation of mental pictures, I’m not sure what use it has in poetry. Sensation, cogitation, ideation seem more useful. Poetry is built out of words, not pictures. Is imagination divisible from thinking, sensing, and emoting? Did the feverish, opiated, self-obsessed Romantics make it into a god so that we could fear it properly?

The thing is, though, its power lies in contradictions, in associative leaps that ignore reason. Its cooperation seems invisible but its complaints are deafening. I chafe against reality and all the miseries of corporeality, but I find myself grateful for the phenomenal world to save me from my peevish imagination. One goes outside to play, while one’s imagination slips back inside to watch TV. One sits down to write a paean to one’s imagination, and it responds by throwing one in a dungeon. Whacking and poking with a stick is an entirely satisfying and real experience—why does the stick need to be confronted and dealt with by my imagination? As an adult, I have found even more visceral and fundamentally satisfying ways of whacking and poking with my stick. There is nothing more real than sexuality, nothing that makes us more blatant, no more real a way to connect with another person. Even when alone, one’s power of creation is made plainly obvious. With my stick in hand, or elsewhere, I have the ability to experience genuine unimagined euphoria, so who invited my imagination? Where did these closetsful of chaps and thongs come from? Why is my high-school French teacher here? Why does she have a saddle? Why are we in the shoe department of Kmart? Is that your mother? What I know for certain is painful or humiliating or impossible seems fun, worthy of intense speculation. Something so simple, so pleasant, so utilitarian that any animal on Earth can do it, I and my imagination make complicated, fearful, metaphorical—contradictory. That’s how my imagination confronts and deals with reality. That’s how art is made; without imagination, we’d just make more babies, more copies of ourselves, thinking we couldn’t do any worse.





1. This essay is an adaptation of a lecture given for the panel “Keeping the Imagination Alive” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Master of Fine Arts in English Fortieth Anniversary Celebration, May 9, 2003.





NICK MOUDRY
Issue 2. Winter 2003. Pages 12-13.


a poem

To be not sad is the landscape. My left arm
has been missing several days. To be
not sad is the landscape. I am everything Asian.
Do you have a comb? To be inside is to not be

sad. It is hard to imagine. There is no
difference between me & that tree.
Inside the tree there is still. The computer
is working fine now. It is hard to imagine.

Everything I like about me was inside my arm.
How can you organize human? Inside the tree
there is still. To be human is to verb things.

Passive only gets you so far. It is strictly
Asian to conceive a space that is moving
& we are still inside the century of the paragraph.



It’s true I was sad all day. There is no
such thing as pastoral. I hope the noise
stops soon. I am everything Asian
& hope this landscape does not exist.

Each tree is alone. There are many types
of men. Trees live inside me.
Asian poems are sad. I believe there is truth
under the mountain or so I am told.

This house is old. There are no Asian people
here, just me. I am responsible for the geography
of this place & want to believe it is great to be alive.

They tell me you live inside every airport.
I wonder if there are trees there. I wonder
if there are sad Asian people in the trees.



I made the funny Asian trees out of water
I know. There are many types of men. I am
a sad machine. To live inside
them is to not be sad. There are photographs

of me on display inside the airport.
I am not as big as you might imagine.
There is smoke inside the hospital. The noise
will stop when the computer stops.

This house is old. It is not Asian.
I live inside it with the funny Asian trees.
To be inside is to not be sad. I was

born in Waterloo, Iowa. The pillowcases are torn.
You must do your best to sleep. The airport, it is
the newest thing I own, pillowcases on display there.



The farms are all in Waterloo, Iowa. They grow
Asian things there, like me. You must do your best
to sleep. I put all the photographs of the trees
inside the house. The noisy trees

will one day cease to be Asian. I have eaten
all the good fruit & the bad fruit & want
to believe it is great to be alive. I am alive
inside the geography of “a poem.” Listen:

I wonder if trees grow on farms or in airports.
I wonder if airports grow. It’s true
I was sad all day. I want to be alive inside

the geography of “a poem.” Photographs of airports
show me inside them. There has never been a poem
called “a poem.” I am a boy & you, you are far away.





STEVE MUESKE
Issue 2. Winter 2003. Page 27.


After Reading of an Amazing New Device That Brings Back the Dead in Lifelike Holographic Images
—Weekly World News, 7/15/2003

Someone has left the box on again, and there Aunt Mertle
bends to the bright task of baking rhubarb pies. She wipes a hand
on her apron, looks toward the stairs where those still alive

have dropped anchor, their little dream boats afloat
in the wide lake of sleep. And soon Uncle Fred,
dead these seventeen years, is done splitting wood for the fire,

hands folded over the ax-head in that moment
following work when the muscles still sing
and the mind is freed from the habit of motion.

How young these habitués of the laser look, how comforting
and familiar. Here cousin Matthew will never know
the slice of a boat propeller, and Anne can safely ignore

those pricks of pain in her arm. After two weeks at the lake,
he’s mowing the lawn’s shaggy hair, and she’s sitting
at her desk overlooking the wildflowers,

organizing a protest to save the city’s trees,
while the stars of another decade swing round the house
and slowly disappear in the orange flame of early light.




NOMINATED BY AN OUTSIDE READER

DENISE DUHAMEL
Issue 1. Spring 2003. Page 46.


BUNNY SWEATSHIRT

I’d just moved to the East Village to become a poet
when my cousin, the artist, sent me a gray sweatshirt
on which she’d painted a bunny with those kind of paints
that don’t wash off. The sweatshirt was a thick cotton,
which I liked, but the bunny was a pale pink
with lots of detailing. Her note read, “Enjoy your
first real apartment! I remember you liked bunnies
as a kid.” I was broke. I really needed clothes,
but I lived in the East Village for Christ’s sakes.
It was 1985—I couldn’t wear that bunny sweatshirt,
even with any kind of irony. I tried to peel the bunny off
with my fingernail, then with a steak knife,
but I was ruining the cotton which was starting
to come off in clumps. I turned the sweatshirt
inside out, but the bunny bled through the nubs—
now he was just facing left instead of right.
I took the sweatshirt to the laundromat
and washed it on the hottest setting,
but the persistent bunny lived
without even fading. So I went to the craft section
of Lamston’s and bought my own fabric paint—one tube
of black—and slashed away most of the bunny.
I think I left just one of its eyes. My mother called to say—
did I get the sweatshirt? Wasn’t it beautiful?
She reminded me to send a thank you note.
My cousin was selling her sweatshirts on consignment
at the mall, her fabric paint signature
right under each rabbit, turtle, koala, kitty cat,
kangaroo. My family was proud
to have a real artist in the family.