Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013

  From a shared youth, a once-long-ago

  When all things seemed possible.

  Their tributes call to mind the promise

  Of your early days; the golden circles

  In which you traveled, in a time out of time,

  Beyond recapture. I grant now what

  I begrudged you then: you were the

  Best of us, gifted of mind and body,

  The center of every company, destined,

  It seemed, for great things or, failing there,

  At least happiness—at least that.

  All of us deceived, looking back, perhaps

  You most of all. Some missing gene,

  Some somnolent flaw, lay in silent wait for you.

  It stole upon you slowly, unrecognized,

  Disguised as the excess of youth, a canker

  Of burgeoning power, unbeknownst, that

  Hollowed you out from within. Unmatched

  With any heart true enough to anchor you,

  Or call you back, you foundered—

  more vulnerable than ever we dreamed.

  Growing up in the long shadow

  Your talents cast, I burrowed deep,

  “An inner émigre,” like Heaney’s wood-kerne,

  “Taking protective colouring

  From bole and bark, feeling

  Every wind that blows,” husbanding

  The sources of my slow-building strength:

  The un-David, the blocking back,

  The-one-that-could-be-relied-upon.

  Lower profiled but better moored,

  I became, for as long as memory serves,

  In all that mattered (save strict chronology),

  The eldest; strapping on the first

  Of the many obligations you shed,

  One by one, year by year, until,

  At the end, your passing was strangely

  Without context or consequence,

  Barely a ripple in our daily lives.

 

  Our shadow brother, long since

  More wraith than real, you slipped

  Away one night as if determined

  To spare us any further trouble

  Or drawn-out goodbyes; no fuss

  Or bother that would be unbefitting

  A life so empty and bereft of purpose

  As yours had become (thus holding onto

  A sort of pride, a kind of dignity).

  Would that you could have spared me,

  As I’m sure you would have wanted to,

  My leaning over the lip of Adams Falls,

  Shaking your ashes into the thin stream

  That dribbled to the shallow pool below;

  So weak a flow that it could barely

  Carry you: your remains a gray sludge

  I had to shove over the ledge

  With my fingers, ingloriously apt.

  Even so, one good rain will

  Wash you down Linn Run into

  A soil that knows much of rebirth

  And renewal. If Ree was right

  And we all come back again,

  Know that I wish for you smoother

  Sailing next time through; fewer gifts,

  If need be, but more staying power,

  And the same gentle, generous heart.

  Farewell, my brother.

  Legacies

  A contentious day at preschool.

  “She has a stubborn streak,” I offer.

  “Not from you!” their smiles opine,

  And I smile back, as if to concur.

  What can they, who see me

  Only in corpulent middle age,

  Benign and becalmed,

  Know of the fire that once

  Burned blue from within

  In a youth inseparable from

  My thought, quoting Yeats,

  Because I’ll have no other?

  And how often you were singed

  By that unforgiving flame,

  Flaring like a solar storm

  Each time you fell short,

  Or stumbled, along

  The twisted, stony path

  That led us both away

  From that single, calamitous, event.

  Sojourners

  What if between this life and the next

  A soul, if only for a moment, knows

  Where it’s been, and where it’s headed:

  A blinding instant of self-awareness,

  A glimpse of The Big Picture it spends

  The next life trying to recall, a fading

  Imprint on the closed eyelid of a soul

  Plunged back, ready or not, into the trial

            by existence?

  What does it feel in that moment,

  That grace of respite, catching its

  Breath before heading back down?

  Relief, to know there’s meaning to it all?

  Reluctance, to be stretched on the rack

            once more?

  Or, most likely of all, longing,

  Unreconciled and inconsolable,

  For the life left behind. The hands

  Now forever unclaspable, a parent’s

  Or a child’s; memories of a lover’s

  Touch, warm breath, whispered

  Promises, circling then disappearing

  Down the drain of eternity. Recollection

  Stripped, identity shed and reentry

  Accomplished, naked and soiled, again.

  George Longenecker

  Bear Lake

  Just three lights shine on the opposite shore.

  At ten the waxing moon is only a dim sliver,

  the sky still too bright for me to see stars.

  White pelicans fly low over the water,

  their wings beating slowly, so close

  I can hear feathers against air.

  The stars brighten and the pelicans

  are still flying as I fall asleep.

  When I awaken after midnight

  the Milky Way lights the sky to the horizon,

  from Idaho south to the dry Utah hills.

  A plane blinks red and a single

  satellite moves east to west.

  All the rest is stars.

  I lie on the desert shore

  watching stars who shone

  billions of years ago.

  Eons from now somebody

  may be watching our star.

  By then we’ll probably be gone;

  maybe we’ll have blown ourselves away.

  It’s hardly important to the Milky Way

  whether one star shines—

  but perhaps it matters

  that twilight comes already at four

  that across the lake a porch light comes on

  that already the Milky Way is floating into dawn

  that already one white pelican flies low over Bear Lake

  perhaps it matters—

  all the rest is stars.

  Samarra

  A boy looks up at the gold-domed

  mosque in Samarra as he does each morning—

  it’s stood a thousand years, it’s reflected

  the sun at dawn and dusk, it’s echoed

  thousands of morning prayers. He falls

  backward in the explosion, his head crushed

  beneath a fragment of ancient mortar and gold.

  Bricks scream through the air and obliterate

  prayers. The blast shakes minarets

  which sway and crack in the explosion.

  One of his eyes looks left to the Euphrates,

  the other to the Tigris, but he doesn’t see

  gold leaf that rains down and shimmers in the sun,

  doesn’t see dust that rises where the golden dome

  had been. Blood trickles from his mouth;

  who knows to which river it will flow.

  I saw it in the news the next day—

  but probably it’s already
r />   been forgotten in the long history

  of Babylon and America,

  another small war,

  not news anymore.

  There’s prayer as sirens wail:

  Return your artillery and blood

  from the Tigris and the Euphrates,

  reverse the explosions,

  turn back the sunrise.

  Return the child’s sight

  so he may watch the golden dome of Samarra

  come gleaming back in the morning sun.

  Completely Full

  As we board, the flight attendant announces

  that our plane is completely full. I want to ask

  how it can be more than full, for isn’t full by

  nature complete? We leave Florida completely

  full, next to me a mother and her young son.

  Two hours later I’m jolted from my nap. The plane

  bucks with turbulence, bounces, then brakes hard

  as we land on the icy Newark runway. The whole

  time the mother holds her son’s hand and leans

  close against him. He says only it’s okay Mom.

  It is this then, the taking of a child’s hand

  that is more than full, more than complete.

  He puts his other hand on hers.

  We have landed and the plane taxis to the gate.

  Salt and Sorrow

  A kitchen in a residence in Aleppo, Syria damaged Sunday in fighting.

  —Narciso Contresas photo, The New York Times

  Walls are blackened, there’s a refrigerator

  with rust at its bottom, stickers of yellow

  butterflies and blackbirds on its door.

 

  A dish towel hangs on the door handle

  and atop sits a vase of purple paper flowers,

  On shelves jars of spices still stand upright.

  We can’t see what’s upright in the rest

  of the home, if its power is on,

  or if walls and windows are intact.

  Charred ceiling plaster covers the floor,

  no mortar shells or shrapnel though;

  a jar of beans lies unbroken and a tiny drawer—

  maybe for salt, we don’t know, but nobody

  can live without salt or sorrow,

  no matter where. On a lower shelf rest

 

  three small pairs of sneakers—

  we can’t see the children,

  their parents or the photographer,

 

  they must all be somewhere.

  Outside—but outside is not in the picture—

  we can’t hear if there are explosions and artillery fire.

  On the wall hang pans, a strainer and measuring spoons.

  Why do some things fall and not others?

  All the utensils are blackened,

  but we can’t tell whether from cooking

  or just war. In a dish drainer cups dry;

  they’ll need to be washed again

  if the family returns—

  if they live—their blackened

  kitchen sent naked around the world.

  Squeaky Fromme Remembers

  I’m one of only a few women

  who ever fucked Charlie Manson

  I’m one of only two women

  who tried to kill a president

  I wore a red dress

  the day I almost shot Ford

  (I wish I’d shattered his head)

  I loved the world’s most famous killer—

  (I wish I’d been the one to stab Sharon Tate)

  plunging deeper and deeper

  deeper and deeper—oh Charlie

  stab me like you did then—

  I had him more

  than Patricia or any of The Family

  the year of my trial

  I got more mail than Charlie

  I was the only woman

  ever to escape from Alderson

  (but they caught me)

  I’m free now

  (parole sucks and I miss the food)

  my photo’s in the Ford Presidential Museum—

  you can Google me—

  I get more hits than Charlie

  (sometimes I’d like a hit of acid)

  I did more drugs than Betty Ford

  you know I was in a Broadway Musical?

  Assassins

  the actress wore a red dress

  I’m more famous than anyone in my family

  than anyone in The Family

  except Charlie

  Charlie, Charlie

  I’m free now

  I almost assassinated the President, Charlie

  I’ll come in my red dress

  stab me, make me bleed

  Benjamin Dombroski

  Because Your Questions on the Nature of Memory Have, at Times, Threatened My Buzz

  Ahead, the coal train enters a long curve

  and here we watch it slow

  as if into the memory of curve. Below

  the river courses through evening

  and the island goes skeletal

  in shadow. Woody

  spit of land from which captured Federal troops

  once watched this city burn—

  a light not unlike tonight’s lowering

  on the horizon—and nothing grand

  in those flames, what they promised

  then; an end nearing

  only in the slow exhaustion

  that all fire reveals—ruins

  to comb beneath empty

  warehouse windows. It must be easier

  here than at the yards upriver—

  no one walking the rails,

  cutting wide arcs of light

  through the woods. So, from the balcony

  we watch the boys creep through scrub pine

  and up embankments, disappear

  in the trains’ chuffing.

  You tell me you’ve known coal

  the promise of heat. You’ve written it.

  Heaped in car on car of freights

  pulled easy along the rim of these bluffs,

  I think of it as memory

  of the mountains which held it.

  Bored, these boys hop the trains,

  only to leap from them when again they slow

  through the far side of the city

  on their eastward slide to the ports

  at Hampton, the bay

  and sea. Doubtless you’ve dreamed the sea

  a kind of memory. And the coal,

  which carries to the sea

  the weight of mountains, wears tonight

  ragged coats of melting snow.

  Oh, frozen wards of snow

  carried down the mountains.

  Oh, motion. Oh, absence

  and he longing for shapes

  of things the snows have covered.

  I reach for your glass and refill it.

  I reach for the night and stars.

  I reach for the train. Let us speak plainly

  now—as the wind dies, and the noise;

  as the tail end of it disappears

  like a dark thread

  pulled through evening.

  My mother called yesterday

  with news of the fourth

  suicide this month:

  a girl this time, who stepped in front

  of the 5:38 carrying traders

  home to their suburbs by the sea.

  In her voice I heard the reach

  toward what question

  the child’s mother must have asked.

  No, she didn’t ask it.

  Nor have we talked of the others.

  Though I know

  she wonders. I wonder. You must wonder.

  But we talk instead of a room

  walked out of, row of empty dresses

  hanging in a closet. Or laundry; the scent

  of someon
e else’s idea

  of mountains in springtime.

  If a mother needs answers, let her

  find them. Let us have another drink.

  And if we must speak of ghosts,

  tonight they shall be the ghosts

  of a boy’s hands on a window as a train starts:

  fingertip, palm-print and the world

  pulled through them like a sheet.

  Tie and rail bed, parking lot and platform clock.

  Bright sheet of the world

  through which a few gulls glide.

  South of Paris

  . . . perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.

  —Cesar Vallejo

  Horrid to die on a market day

  in a foreign town, like this one

  in the Loire valley, in November, with a light rain

  passing its secrets to the slate roofs

  and opened umbrellas.

  How ill, beneath the plane trees

  and between the stalls of vegetables

  and strange meats,

  the fish and foreign, fish-like faces,

  among gestures of buying and selling

  how black, even surviving the Thursday

  after feeling suddenly behind you the presence

  on the cobblestones

  and balking at a case of aged cheese

  before asking in broken tongue for a taste.

  Afternoon with My Nephew

  Pushing your racecar through the grass,

  you say, shooo, the car says, shooo.

  The plane says, grrrr overhead.

  Its shadow is t-shaped, or boy shaped,

  when older, you’ll run with outspread arms

  through a field. Its shadow says nothing.

  The birds say hello, even the buzzards say hello,

  but you can’t hear them, they’re too high.

  Their shadows are eaten by the air.

  There are people in the plane, you know.

  A pilot, yes, and passengers too.

  What do they say? All kinds of things.

  They’re coming back from a war which isn’t yet over.

  And if they’re talking about it

  we don’t hear them either, only the plane,

  which keeps on saying the only word it knows.

  Ryan Kerr

  Pulp

  There are hours of tonguing the loose tooth

  before I decide to remove it with my own fingers.

  In my memory it feels much the same

  as the resigned detachment of sectioning a grapefruit.

  The same resistant tug of sinews

  clinging either to ivory or the fleshy meat.

  It is reluctant and stubborn,

  bringing with it nerves and tissue,

  coaxed by a child’s impetuousness.

  The dance of spit and blood

  in the stainless steel sink.

  The tooth is a lesson.

  The pulp and papery matter of childhood.

  The space of wistful, smiling mouths.

  Trimming