that’s not so far from the common cause I feel
for affordable care,
a holy spirit I long for
as I sing in the silent night,
or while I read the Times
Don Quixote
excuse me Walter Mitty
guzzling at the fountainhead.
I know the hunger and thirst
to purify this flag.
I’ve seen it all in the Before I read.
They’re telling me with everything money can buy
I’ve lost and my father’s grandfather’s great-grandfather’s
monumental struggles trashed
targets of cheap shots hollow points.
20-something punks smirk in crocodile shoes
boss PhD’s review their speeches
investigate prosecutors not investigating non-existent fraud
create new forms scientifically crafted bullshit
moving needles
finding legs
life sacred CREP-form.
I’ve lost but
I could sell out my ass.
They’d love that.
It’s not enough to win:
Everyone else has to lose
or else they just can’t feel good
about themselves.
Everyone else has to ignore mere math mere fact
and hail bend over for The Unseen Hand
that gropes and violates.
Everyone else has to kiss the oily lips and beaches
of this petrochemical Savior
Christ You’ve Never Known
You Can’t Recognize.
and now
I can feel my soles already flying like angels,
daily news slipped under my chin
the crowd mocking my union authorization cards
while the hoods whisper in my ear
one last time:
Abjure.
Barth Landor
What Is Left
What is left of being right
when in the long run I am wrong?
At first I was just right
until at last I was just left.
Is it wrong to exit stage left
if the prompt is not in the script?
Merely to do no wrong
is a good way to be left,
although even the right way to be good
may still in the end be just wrong.
I lie down on our bed’s right side
while you go to sleep on the other’s.
If your right hand knew what your ring hand left,
then at least I am right that I am wrong.
Dalgairn House
Heaven came up for rent at thirty pounds a week
with no deposit down. We were freshly wed
and student-poor, and so we signed a lease
on paradise: we made our ascent
to the sunlit upper story of a Scottish
mansion on a hill in the Kingdom of Fife.
Brambles ripened in the hedgerows
and strawberries sweetened in the fields.
On the lawn that welcomed even pheasant,
a small boy nursed a patch of herbs.
All was fertile indoors, too:
stacks of books grew read, and the ribbon
of my little Olivetti seeded letters
for a garden of words I gave to you.
In the home beneath our feet, the noises
of children rose to our ears like Kansas corn,
while above the heads of our landlord family,
you turned to tell me
that one of our own had taken root in you.
That idyll ended long ago.
Garret companions in our salad days,
honeymoon scholars gaining fluency
in languages and love,
in our vinegar years we turned into
strangers even in our common tongue.
One of us yielded and one of us failed to,
both of us strayed and one of us stayed.
When one of us found—or lost—one’s truer self,
one of us wept as one of us left.
So the calamity happened.
But I tell you that this did, too:
we made bramble jam from berries
we gathered on country lanes.
We had little to our names.
We read psalms aloud before bed
above the room of a child called Jimbo,
that myopic and timid sibling
of important older sisters,
the pale boy who still lives in my mind
(we moved after a year and never returned)
In a fragile state of innocence.
Abigail F. Taylor
Never So Still
See this wire-boned boy climbing
to the mangoes? Papi below
sings—Oh Dusty Venezuela!
Picked fruit falls to his blistered feet.
He bites into it, peel and all.
Ruben eats in the tree. Sublime
juice tickles his wrists. He, aglow
with Papi’s New World tales, clumsy
in an old half-toothed mouth, retreats
to dreams: America! Baseball!
Papi taught him this, to throw fast
and hard. To love equally so.
Ruben, at sixteen, poor, tired,
and yearning, sent to shore to play
the game. To honor frail Papi,
who died between his first and last
crash into home plate. There were low
years when he fought to inspire
the song of himself in bad ways,
and listless days were choppy
with old promises. Then Ruben
swallowed up his grandfather’s soul,
became that man of effortless
joy. And he loved so vibrantly.
He had a son and was happy.
I met him in the taste of sin.
His cross pressed to my breasts. His bold
grin and my paid for recklessness.
I miss our spare talks, privately
passed like school notes, that were sadly
never enough.
At Ruben’s wake, his son sat quiet
and lonely in the front pe
w. He
marveled at the rosary breathed
into his father. I wanted
to say, he was never so still.
While the Streetlamp Listened
She took
his callow face
and tipped it, nearly kissed
in the sacred glow of night. But
dawn came.
And he
felt her age press
into forbidden fruit
and her husk of wine-dark hair. The
lark sang.
Wichita Falls
Can you remember dawn’s dreary mist
as it curled and settled into the trees?
Autumn had a peculiar way of falling before leaves.
There are no loons on this side of the world,
but I think of their hallowed calls
fighting against a separate, peaceful cold.
She had paid for a cabin far off the road;
a hope of stitching back together a loveless
marriage she herself had caused to unfold.
But you and I found comfort in pitching camp
beneath a dripping candled moon.
Do you think that he returned to her arms
that night, their faithless kissing as joined up writing
or like that morning mist hugging brittle bark?
Perhaps they stayed as distant as the loons.
Either way, we woke with dawn.
Our dog, the only one to grin at such an hour,
rutted through pine needles, then leaped
into the thicket, while wind chimes
took on the beat of unseen hooves.
We, as children, were never allowed to stray.
It was the duty of grownups to strangle themselves
in the undergrowth of wayward passions.
Still, we followed the dog.
Despite the light, all of it slept:
The brambles. The hollied hill. The pale red robin.
Only the beck spoke over moss and stone.
We found the dog laying at the water in lazy company.
These fawns and young bucks, not quite into their points,
drank with caution.
As we called out, our echoes shepherded the deer
to distant corners, while the dog bounded to us
and licked flashes of bare skin.
He took a way back to the dark cabin
beyond the trees.
You pressed last night’s coals to new tinder
and we tried to scramble eggs on a dry skillet.
A good fire had been made by your hands,
but breakfast turned brown, improved only
by a dashing of salt and the clear air.
He stepped onto the closed off deck.
His eyes blank against the breeze,
so remarkably outside the man we knew.
He saw us and dissolved into a familiar face,
then returned inside to prepare something better
than what we had eaten.
Do you remember how we spoke like this was home?
Our souls slumbered there with cold pine and warm fire.
We understood the dog’s contentment to roll in sweet mud,
follow the deer, and ignore the shrillness of women in winter.
At peace in the wandering.
And you told me the cabin had a design like jazz.
Frozen in marrow. Harsh and vibrant.
Had I known then how to tell you the rhythm of this wood,
I would have shared everything.
George Longenecker
Polar Bears Drowning
the news isn’t so bad today
two crows perch on a large stone in the meadow
then fly off looking for a few morsels
but the pasture is barren
the war isn’t going as badly as it could
meanwhile I wait for the tax refund
which a lot of people will get this year
except people who have no income
but it’s not so bad since they pay no taxes
the two crows perch on the stone again
haven’t there been worse wars
I really don’t mind reading the news
as much as most people
many more people have died in other wars
that’s good news
this coffee isn’t too bad
and the weather isn’t as bad today
so the mail probably won’t be too late
it’s not as bad here as in some countries
polar bears drowning on page four
probably the president will do something
I think he cares about bears
the war isn’t going so badly now
the check will be in the mail
if it comes today
those crows haven’t moved
but one flaps its black wings
so it must be okay
A Protest Rally for the
Bold-faced Hyphen
Protest the extinction
of the Bold-faced Hyphen!
The once-numerous hyphen
is all but extinct.
I have seen them
flying together in pairs,
making a mad dash
to safety—
fly, fly away quickly,
before you too become extinct
and forgotten—
or held captive and misused,
for that is the apostrophe’s fate—
held prisoner in plurals,
on road signs,
in mis-punctuated ads.
Mourn the apostrophe’s demise.
Solidarity!
Save the apostrophe
Save the hyphen
Free them from their sentences
Now!
Free the apostrophe
Now!
Save the Bold-faced Hyphen
Now!
The Garter Snake
lies coiled on quartzite
high on Worcester Mountain
it’s barely warm enough
for a reptile to emerge
onto its favorite stone
coiled facing west
in April sun
waiting for flies
for months he’s waited
sheltered in a granite crevice
covered by three feet of snow
now he’s ready for sun
who knows why people hate snakes
but human hatred runs deep as Genesis
hard as quartzite veins in stone
this year new people to hate
with the same old swords, nooses and missiles
his long beige stripe is still
his brown scales barely quiver
he watches me but doesn’t
even flick his tongue
when hate’s all around
and it gets too cold
I’d like to leave it all
crawl into a crevice
with the garter snake
maybe someday when the sun’s warm again
slither out across stone
onto the mountain
Alligators
Around the bend in the canal
we startle an enormous alligator
sunning, awakened by the clack
of our canoe paddles, he splashes
into dark water and slides beneath the canoe.
My heart beats faster—you were scared
she says—well he was only six feet away—
but other alligators ignore us, barely
turning their cloudy eyes, unwilling
to relinquish their sunny places.
Alligators are accustomed to daily
canoeists paddling the Loxahatchee,
maybe they know it’s Sunday and surely
they know east, where the first sun warms
their cold hides as they slither to the bank
to bask—I offer him coffee from my thermos—
Coffee with sugar, alligator?
Sugar plantations and suburbs
have drained the Everglades and the Loxahatchee
nearly killing off the Seminole and the alligators
who now emblazon football pennants, sweatshirts
and coffee mugs: Gators! Seminoles!
The alligator basks and smiles,
he knows who’s drifting to extinction first—
we canoe around the bend where five
more alligators sleep in the sun.
I Want To Be Your Tom
Each night I climb your fence
I want to yowl at the moon
to growl and hiss at any other male
to crawl into your bed
I want to purr and lick inside your ears
to sniff you all over
to look in your eyes
to smell you so strongly there’s no other scent
I want to lay with you and put my paws around you
to lap you until you cry mrow tdrow
to feel you in heat, to feel you purr and yelp
I want you to dig your claws into my fur
And if you’ll have me across your fence
I want us to have ten kittens
I hope you dodge every car and dog
I want us to curl up together and purr when our fur is gray
Ben Cromwell
Sometimes a Flock of Birds
for Gwendolyn 3/11/14
I don’t believe in God
because if he exists,
he’s an asshole
for giving me cancer
among other things.
But I love you more
than one animal should
be able to love another.
Sometimes a cloud passes
revealing the mountains
minted in new snow,
and the sun shines down
on us for the first time
lighting your sleeping face.
Sometimes a flock of birds
breaks from the treetops
and flies pellmell into
the blue distance.
My arms are indelibly marked
with your weight,
your shape.
Whatever is in me,
whatever I am at root,
whatever I hope
might one day be revealed;
You are.
Assisted Living
I don’t want this to be too sentimental,
so fuck you, Grandma.
I’ve been thinking about the dead,