But the ptarmigan, the under-bird, the ground-feeder,
The last one being carried off in the teeth of a fox,
Says Me, I can still feel the wind.
I can go-back and feel it.
5.
Some nights this winter a great-horned owl was wont to perch outside my bedroom window.
I’d never once see him. But his call, working like boiling water over the ice-thick air,
Caused me several times to think he was right beside me in bed.
The Great-Horned Owl: As large as our largest hawks, and fierce-looking.
So much fiercer than my ptarmigan bird, nights he hooted to me through the glass,
I imagined him sky-stalking, with preternatural foresight, so that the motion of the stars
To him, was as jewels scattering across a floor.
Untrue, but the image struck me nevertheless, because I was smaller than he was.
Because he could see me through the dark, and often told me so.
Lee Kisling
How the Music Came to My Father
Sort of a miracle, you might say because
I never saw or heard him practice. Just one day
there he was playing an accordion in his baggy pants
and white shirt looking like he was holding two bags
of potatoes, squeezing the air in and out of them.
The miracle of it—so sudden and unexpected—I now
picture God reaching down his wavering finger to touch
some other man with musical sensibilities, some father
two doors down, but accidentally touching Glenn.
And there he was, blessed, in our crackerbox house,
playing some nickering old-world polka and a passed-over
father down the street pulled his belt from his pants
and went looking for his boys.
The cosmic error was corrected eventually by
whoever it is that fixes God’s mistakes. We went back
to our yelling and the whippings and the accidental
Myron Floren moment passed. The world I knew
made sense again, and the holy finger must have
only barely brushed against him—he never said this
is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. And now
he’s in a sort of band of accidental squeeze box angels
on 42nd Street in heaven and there is a champagne bubble
machine, and sometimes they go marching in their old
army uniforms down that gold paved road,
shaking with palsy, tickling the ivories,
singing Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.
Kindly Give Up
Kindly give up these seats for the elderly and the daft,
arthritic abuelos singing pharmacy songs.
Kindly give them up.
Where they have been you are going.
Where they are going you are also going.
Give them directions, not to there-
they will find there easy enough, soon enough,
to where else they are headed before there
with always bags of stuff on the bus.
Kindly give them your seats
your help, your hand, your memory.
Eyes magnified by thickening lenses, leopard spotted.
Less admired certainties, less effective remedies.
Less likely recoveries, less remembered memories.
Like strollered babies eying their peers,
they watch each other disappear.
Landmarks of long lives, having passed by here before,
creased old maps, now everything’s changed,
what with the by-pass and one-way streets to the shiny
spotless hospital on the hill where
Once upon a time
cows stood.
What is most depressing about cemeteries is the heavy yellow
machinery—once just a couple of bums with shovels
lowering themselves, making it last.
Please give up thinking of their movement as mass transit.
Picked-up pilgrims along the road, slowly boarded,
carried to clinics, casinos and churchyards,
deposited on corners. Speak to them
in Polish, Spanish, or Serbo-Croat.
Nod in understanding,
yes, yes.
Babies once, transported in arms, never alone,
tiny fingers, pink toes wee wee allthewayhome,
soothed, sheltered, spanked, adored. Kindly make
a place for them, give up your seats, soon
the return, to the corner of
Here & Gone, en memoriam, the gray
guests of honor.
Borrowings
Here is the imaginary library
where you can borrow a father—a book
you didn’t finish. Old books about fathers
and grandfathers with brittle pages,
pictures and maps of Kansas and Iowa
may show signs of wear. They are anecdotal—
the price of a horse, the hot weather in September.
Here, the reading room.
Empty chairs and morning sun
slanting through the windows,
the slow quiet turning of pages. Shhhh.
No howl here—no keening, no Shall We Gather,
but someone has written these books because
someone needs to read them.
I will be your father if you’ll be my daughter.
a loaner to get you around the town;
oh what a family we could be—
understudies, bound to say
sorry, I loved you,
and goodbye.
Write 50 Times
(for Dave Moses)
1. I will not chew gum in class. I will
2. not chew gum in class. I will
3. not gum in class chew. I will
4. in class chew not gum. I will
5. not sing The Marseillaise in class.
6. I will not, just incidentally, ever work for the telephone company.
7. And I will NEVER put my hand in my shirt like Napoleon Bonaparte.
7. Well yes, I suppose it all started with the gum chewing.
8. And some things just happen, of course.
9. I will remain gum-free, attentive, and responsible,
9a. but possibly not in class.
10. I will not chew gum at my Uncle Inor’s funeral.
11. Tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm. Thanks for asking.
12. I will not chew more than one stick of gum in class.
13. I will not, as a rule, respond well to petty discipline in class.
14. I mean, who the hell really cares about gum chewing?
15. With all due respect.
16. Or bloody prime numbers. Or King Whatsit. Or wretched poems.
19. Like going to school ever did you any good.
22. Bongo the Clown probably makes more money than you
29. and he drives a red Camaro.
34. Christopher Columbus chewed gum and he discovered Virginia or someplace.
37. Actually, chewing gum is a sedative.
38. It helps me concentrate.
39. It’s a health issue really—I could get a prescription.
41. You don’t want to see me when I haven’t had a chew for a few hours.
43. Thousands of people work in the chewing gum industry.
44. Good decent Americans with mortgages and car payments.
45. Next I suppose we won’t be permitted to sleep in class.
46. What’s this class about, anyway?
48. We the People demand to have the right to chew gum!
49. Give me liberty or give me some gum!
50. E chewibus pluribus gumbus!
Jose A. Alcantara
Finding the God Particle
When we are
finally standing face to face
and flesh to flesh, remind me that I want
more than your body, more than your mind.
Remind me that I want the infinite sweep of you
the full onrushing charge of you
the m-c-squared of you, the big bang of you.
Remind me to give you the indivisible parts of me
the strange quarks of me, the charm of me
the up and down of me.
And though 95% of everything else is darkness
let us be nothing but a tangle of vibrating strings
caught in the claws of a curious cat.
Alone
I fell asleep by the river again.
Thirty-eight degrees. The Stranger
in my lap. How is it that the same sun
that gives this sweet lethargy
brings another man to murder?
A single shot, a pause, then four more.
As I watch the ducks drop into the eddies
I know the sun is not to blame, nor the moon,
the fires, the droughts, or the surging tides.
We act. We do what we want.
Sometimes we get away with it.
Sometimes we pay a price.
A Day in the Life
It’s her birthday.
She opens a tiny black box
bound in a blue bow.
A billion billion stars tumble out
some yellow, some red
some big, some small.
They fall, in all directions
into a bottomless black bowl
where they burn burn burn
until she makes a wish
and with her cold breath
blows them out.
David A. Bart
Veteran’s Park
I walked there at daybreak
to view the colossal bronze
of a young ensign, bereft, his rifle
capped with another’s helmet.
May thirty-first. This was once
observed as Decoration Day
but today there are no starry pennants
or tri-colored sashes pinned across
men and women who rise from folding
chairs to gingerly salute. This place is empty,
almost. A teenager is learning to drive.
Sparrows make their ablutions in the sand.
And there. My dead father, standing away,
teeth and glasses restored since I saw him last.
But it’s someone else, of course,
some other elder serviceman
yet to be taken Over There.
Bicycle parts and a broken cement
culvert lay in the creek—mortar and caisson.
Struck by its lanyard, a flag pole is ringing.
Somewhere a lawnmower idles—
my father’s song—the droning made dulcet
by distance and wind and how I like to imagine
it is the sound made by the morning star.
This Week
Our daughter lost her incisor.
It rattled in the plastic bite-size
treasure chest her school supplies.
Baptists examine their thirty
foot steeple taken down
for repair. It rests on its side
across the parking lot.
Instead of sleeping on it
she buried her tooth in the yard.
Soiled fingernails, a red gap
between thorn canines,
like a novice vampire
interring a fang.
Without its mitre, the house
of God resembles any other
middle class dwelling.
On the church roof, spotlights
hit a white spire of moths.
My wife found only sleeping hands
tucked under the pillow.
Regardless, the tooth fairy left a dollar.
After work I drive
past the church.
Sideways, the steeple
points the way home.
The Game
The drill team built a half-time prop,
some sort of rickety fuselage parked
in front of Wildcats spelled with Solo
cups pushed into chain link fence.
Wind carries the clatter of drum practice
across the street to this coffee house
buzzing with after-school girls.
A petite scholar pouts for a boy on her laptop,
hands cupping her au lait, taking the brew
like a philter. Bedheads peruse an art book
trying hard to be unimpressed by 1000 nudes.
When an unfamiliar classmate enters
they turn but pretend they don’t see her,
even though they are dying to be noticed.
There is a father sitting with his very little girl
who’s eager to greet them all but it’s time
to leave for the game. As he helps put on her coat
he recites, with each button, an oracle
assuring his daughter that every closure
will bring something unexpected and new:
a gift
a ghost
a friend
a foe
a letter to come
a journey to go
Green Ghost
Her hand made spontaneous scribble
of things to come. On the grocery list
our grandmother wrote no not him
not the one. Moments later Oswald
shot the president.
She miscarried seven times.
She claimed their spirits awoke
and could be heard after dark.
At dusk she smelled cigarettes,
said the revenant of a smoking paramour
had come to her kitchen window.
She once pursued a sad infatuation
to Mexico, returned with a photo
of the catholic priest and a devil mask
she hung above her bed.
She put grandchildren in the guest bed
to sleep but we stayed awake to play
the board game stored underneath.
The glowing phantom spinner pointed
its finger at whoever had a turn but
we never learned to play. We just watched
Green Ghost spin phosphorescent
then jumped into bed before our grandmother
looked in, dabbing her red-rimmed eyes,
muttering about missing pieces,
the lack of rules and small voices
in the night.
December 13th
She wears a pair of pink strap-on
marabou wings and whatever she’s staring at
is something most of us hope we never see.
I recognize her from Cora street’s wildflower
median. She knelt there for days last summer
and announced Do Not Mow—
repeating the posted phrase as if to teach
a bird to talk. She looks like she grew up
from a fifth grade classmate I remember,
one who skipped cracks to save her mothers
back, a girl with boy’s glasses and breasts
too soon. Shoppers skirt the sidewalk
where she stands this evening in a stained
white formal, a store window at her back
as if she’s part of the display. Her perpetual grin
reminds me why mannequin smiles show no teeth.
This displaced bridesmaid shuffles into the street
where her damp hair gleams red with Christmas light
and she becomes someone else. A serene ingenue,
ecstatic in her ordeal—Saint Lucy, unaware
&
nbsp; she has been crowned and the crown is fire.
Greg Grummer
War Reportage
The war began about six feet from victory
and crawled there over the eyes of a child.
In the beginning soldiers walked up the road,
never minding that as they did so the road got them
pregnant with map in their own private Gethsemane.
Then a mother, crucified on coming unwantedness,
bled son from the poem nailed into her trees.
Therefore, one by one, the Europes came to explain themselves.
After that we hoisted up crows and made love in stones.
Satan picked up the throat of the town
and drank from it until there was no more sleep.
The town died then woke up again because of its smell.
“That’s when Satan returned, sir,
and ate what happened in the field.”
But here in the camera one can see
where bleeding and bleeding, and where “so on.”
One can see where two men revenged themselves on a dog,
where a moiety revenged itself on a people, and where a ditch
revenged itself on a shovel by spitting up church.
But then you knew all that, from the gap
between fingers and from the distance between wolves.
You knew it, but you forgot it somehow.
The Night Before the Battle in Which I’m Killed
Someday it won’t be moonlight
coming down to this field
but it will be the actual moon.
The moon will fill the land with its priests,
igniting ditches and water
buffalo with desperate passions.
Trees will strain with the hatefulness of the moon,
snapping under its high tiredness.
The moon’s pilgrimage down to this field
will split the brains of crows and carp
will die with that kind of light in their eyes.
Someday the moon will present itself,
along with its card, as the last actor of grief
in this waiting room of bones and milk.
The world’s infantry will be as surprised
to be visited by the moon as pigs entered by demons
and driven off a cliff.