Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013

  The Last Good Thing We Do

  for Amy King

  Turning my day inside out, all I hear is the pounding

  that woke me up late last night, or early this morning,

  the sound of a hammer to a piece of wood

  that makes no sense in a February land of concrete.

  The garbage truck it wasn’t, that nightly nuisance

  hauling away the bottles of drunks

  and the excesses of a culture that prides itself

  on purchasing power. If a thing breaks, it hardly matters,

  there’s ten million others like it—one of a kind

  is a thing of the past and the show will go on without you.

  Disbelief is understandable, and also not worth the debate.

  Have a look. There’s a line of stars extending out the door,

  around the corner and over into undetectable galaxies.

  A fiery mixture of redheads and gas giants and blond

  ice planets coldhearted down to their greasy, mean-spirited,

  middle-aged defiance. Maybe some comet of realization

  will undo the habits that harm them, but the chances are

  so not good it makes the lottery look like a shoo-in.

  We should get together and hash it out, spec a plan

  to make amends and stop ignoring wounds,

  but who would take such a theory seriously?

  When has anyone ever wanted to get together

  over a glass of water? We could give it a try

  but I bet three flies and a lesson in gardening

  one of us would signal the waiter and place the order

  to wine it down. And that would be the end of that.

  How easy it is to bring hands to the table

  in contemplation of work, interlace fingers like the fates

  of neighbors and throw them up in helplessness,

  or hopelessness, or a botchy, beleaguered despair.

  Because nothing can be done. Because no one in this

  field of compassion is in a position to do anything about it.

  Because it’s out of our hands and we haven’t the calluses

  in our nature to grab ahold of the ropes and tug.

  The subject is the earth and Atlas has an achy shoulder.

  And yet mothers who have no kids are this very minute

  teaching rooms of them how to behave. Prophets in

  hand-me-downs with newsprint pamphlets are knocking

  on doors trying to save as many souls as they can.

  Businessmen are buying young men farms to work

  and aging bikers are salvaging soup from vegetables

  sent toward the compost heap—to feed the foodless,

  to serve their country, to show a man that someone, somewhere

  cares whether or not you starve. There’s enough good will

  in every small town to make even the blond bitch weep.

  And there’s enough carelessness in every indifferent heart

  to lead us explosives-first into a species-leveling bloodstorm.

  And sadly, sadly, sadly, that may be the last good thing we do.

  Discomfort and Its Undoing

  Discomfort, mere (ha, mere) discomfort, never mind pain, discomfort alone will make of us irritable idiots, men and women who take the easy road, the wrong road, the road that leads to trouble. And we will curse the road for being the way it is, and our feet for having trodden it in such sad, disintegrating shoes.

  And when we get to the end of that road, or a stopping place of realization, we will know it was the wrong way, and everything will be met with disgust, revulsion, the inclination to swallow all beauty and spew. The dissatisfaction of living will make our tongues unable to stand the taste of our own mouths. We will spit in the dust and get the spit on ourselves and glare at the sun as though it were the bright idea behind all of this.

  Unless. Unless something gets in the way of our anger. Some messenger who intersects us—a tangerine for instance, just a tad overripe, forgotten at the bottom of the bag, might be the hook which untangles everything that went wrong. Then, as though peeling back a rind, the mind will section-by-section come clear. The senses will conduct the weather’s music, and to their liking, even if the clouds hang heavy and low.

  A foul wind might dog us, might drive us ever more contracted into ourselves, but we won’t wish it ill. We’ll lick our lips and lower our heads, listen to its whistle and commit it to memory, remember our summer together and say thanks, I know the going is rough, but you breathe for something too, I’m happy to share the road and I have a feeling we’ll get there in the end.

  Tori Jane Quante

  Watson and Crick with Double Helix

  I’m behind the lens.

  Crick says Should we pose?

  He mocks professors with a smug grin and pointer,

  while Watson plays student,

  mouth agape with trepid ignorance.

  They are school children on picture day;

  Shirts tucked in like

  mother told them to,

  electric balding heads of hair,

  neckties pulled a little too tight.

  In their bodies, DNA is unzipping

  and gathering up its other halves.

  Somewhere along the twisted necklace

  of their genes is that “pearl” of a paper,

  the one that simply held a mirror up

  and pointed it inward.

  Their faces are beginning to break

  into laughter right as I snap the shutter.

  Oh, to be so young

  and so sure you’ve changed the world.

  To be dead right.

  Creatio ex Materia

  It’s not the kind of thing you can accept outright,

  genesis, happening in your trashcan.

  I imagine it started at the beginning.

  Darkness over the stagnant water, the trash can sludge:

  banana peels and coffee grounds, used tampons

  and the cat’s feces, liquefying together

  in the neglected outdoor can until something

  started growing. Something new.

  Phospholipid bilayers forming at an alarming rate,

  the advent of spines and skins, all happening

  unnoticed, as things often are,

  over the course of a week.

  So when that woman, that rank smelling creature

  emerged from her womb of garbage,

  innocent of all but warm, putrid smells,

  her thick mat of hair growing woven like a tapestry,

  hips slender as a child’s, body tarnished and hard

  like a once golden Greek daughter of Chaos’ own

  how could I feel anything but awe,

  even as she munched on a half eaten banana?

  No, this was no daughter of a god.

  She was mine. This creature—

  she is what we breed when no one is watching.

  I know now, that

  out there, in oceanic miles

  of garbage, landfills overflowing

  with an abundance of new life,

  a nation is rising up, born of our neglect.

  The eternal matter is this moment,

  giving way. Creatio ex purgamentum,

  the gods whisper in their sleep.

  We have left nothing else.

  World Leaders at the Premiere

  The evening has just begun. See how those

  monumental men, pillars of the Earth, stroll by?

  Here’s Vladimir, a vision in undulant gold,

  the skirt of his dress a caress,

  and fox fur scarves, no one has told him they’re out of fashion.

  Who cares? We love you Vladimir.

  Notice, even the Dalai Lama has come off his mountain.

  He’s chatting with Pope Benedict, takes his hand in both his own and shakes


  the fragile man vigorously by the arm, disrupting his pointy hat.

  And everyone’s darling Barack is wearing a slick little number

  in simple shimmering black, curved

  to the contours of his graceful neck and back.

  King Abdullah stops for an interview.

  Tonight he says (he’s wearing Valentino, the fall line)

  Tonight we celebrate. And maybe, we bury the hatchet for good.

  Because, of course, who in his right mind

  wields a hatchet in Valentino?

  They gather in the theater now,

  file into neat lines of red velvet seats,

  and jostle for armrests, suck in as others squeeze by.

  Light flickers against their painted faces,

  catches the gleam of their nails and jewels.

  Elijah

  In the video he’s running. He stumbles in sand,

  barrel rolls back onto his feet and keeps running

  and looking back and running until

  he stops, his eyes and

  his whole body searching the air.

  For what? What ladder rolled out from the sky

  is going to spirit him away from here?—

  The wide Arizona desert. The car spinning its wheels in sand.

  The police sirens drawing in close, closer.

  Then he turns his back on the camera,

  the one he must know is watching from a helicopter above.

  I also want to turn away,

  but I don’t. I inhale and keep one breath.

  I hold perfectly still.

  Seconds later, he’s put a bullet in his brain, and he’s still standing,

  a broomstick on the palm of the earth.

  I start to think he’ll stay there and wait for that ladder after all,

  or for the sky to swallow him.

  Drinking Wine with your Neighbors

  It is Sunday, after church.

  A mammoth of a woman totters past me wearing

  the most imposing yellow mu-mu I have ever seen.

  She is a sun, a goddess among us.

  I sit here

  redefining my concept of beauty

  to include this woman, her massive presence,

  inelegance, my god, how my eye is drawn

  helplessly inward and upward

  to the edges of vision and reason.

  And suddenly I think of heat collapsing

  into fall, muscadines fermenting on the vine

  even before they are pressed into wine. How

  can I think for even a moment that these things,

  sun and grapes, streets and

  this temporary home, are not the embodiment

  of blessing?—

  A sun, a goddess,

  Reaching upward and outward—

  It is well, it is well, with my soul.

  G. L. Morrison

  Icarus’ Father

  Daedalus never understood the danger of joy.

  He was imprisoned for this misunderstanding,

  for making a device for the Queen’s pleasure

  when the King had ceased to please her.

  The architects of pleasure are wingless

  and short-sighted. The waxy geometry

  of flight does not account for the angle

  of wind against the skin or the sum

  of sunlight. Logarithms of desire,

  the delirious arithmetics of living,

  dividing the sky between the sun

  which will devour all our days

  and the cold, blue sea. We fly akimbo

  skimming the irreconcilable balance,

  neither bird or fish enough to navigate

  those distances. When I fall (and I will

  fall) I know my father will fly on

  without me. There are more sons

  to be fathered on an unarrived shore.

  Tomorrow is a margin in a ledger.

  Baba Yaga

  three times this house turned its back

  to the sea and its door toward me

  what choice did I have but enter

  the hunger outburned any hope or risk

  outweighed the distance

  I came to know as regret

  what choice did I have but lay

  my chin on the shelf beside yours

  filling the room with our far-flung bodies

  stretched as deliberate as sleep

  my memory of our arms and legs open

  fills the house—your head in the kitchen ,

  hands flung into closets, one foot in the garage,

  the heel of the other furrowing the yard

  these rooms could not contain what we filled it with

  and seemed to grow smaller around us

  my house is still filled with the sounds of our sleeping

  this was Baba Yaga’s dream: that I was a hunger

  you could never satisfy and not the woman

  who followed the top she sent spinning

  into forests, toward other houses

  the truth is you were that hunger I fed myself to

  until not even bones remained

  and so had nothing left of myself for you

  Relentless Blue

  I look for you in this poem with both hands

  every word like the fingers of a blind sculptor

  searching for your familiar face in the sightless clay.

  If I were a painter, what I want to say

  to you would be a shade of blue that couldn’t be bought

  only blended by loving curiosity and relentless patience

  blue as sun rising on the ocean after a storm

  blue as dawn, obsidian about to shatter

  in a wet cacophony of color. Azure

  love. Sapphire uncertainty.

  Hungers marbled turquoise and lapis lazuli.

  If I were a sailor, this poem would be

  a hundred days at sea.

  Lips cracked with salt and silence.

  Above me—in the wet, endless sky—clouds row by

  with a cargohold of storms and birds for barnacles.

  Gulls shriek like lonely women.

  Every star is an omen, I navigate by touch.

  Below me—in the wet, endless sea—is everything

  I dare imagine, everything that will ever

  and will never be: wide and spiny as puffer fish

  infinitely blue and filled with stones, fish, and sunken

  treasure; the skeletons of clouds, birds, and stars;

  sharks, mermaids, and the myriad of scuttling mysteries.

  This poem is adrift in tomorrow’s current

  somewhere off the coast of yesterday.

  Your hand on this page is bone china,

  the pottery buried with Pharoahs, Klimt’s

  yellow kiss, swollen mouthed as O’Keefe flowers.

  Your hand on this page is the woman who waits

  in a cottage overlooking the sea

  where every hundred-day journey hopes to end.

  Joe Freeman

  In a Wood

  The onset of winter and

  All around me the furtive

  Stacking of woodpiles as the

  First snow gathers itself

  Behind cloud banks in the west.

  A poor squirrel am I that

  Neither scurries nor hoards,

  Ear cocked to a restless heart song

  While winter entraps me unawares.

  Leaving the Oasis

  Desert’s edge, and I balk at

  The hissing of shifting granules:

  Whispers of desolate miles

  And parched-throated doom.

  Decision made, it is too late

  To wonder if my dromedary

  Skills have survived at all intact

  Their long sojourn in the shade,

  Or if I face mirage, delirium

  And the heart’s
desiccation

  Amidst the migrating dunes.

  David Butler

  What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?

  —W. B. Yeats, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”

  We were the first of six,

  Sequentially paired, two to a room.

  In even-numbered destiny

  We lived in forced proximity

  Some twenty-odd years—longer

  Than you lived with anyone,

  It seems worth noting now,

  Now that you are gone,

  Beyond reach of all but memory.

  Odd how word of an early death

  Gets out, finding old companions

  Or lovers long out of touch—

  As if, out of nowhere, they’d

  Felt a cold wind blow and looked

  To find its source, turning up,

  Against the chill, the collar of memory