Visit Ghost Town

Hey, all, Ghost Town Issue 10 (from CSU San Bernardino) is out, and I have work in it, alongside many super poets, including Craig Santos Perez, Kristin Bock, Judy Kronenfeld, Suzanne Lummis, Stephen Massimilla, Hedy Habra, Elizabeth Knapp, and so many more! Thanks to editor Chad Sweeney for including my work in all this gorgeousness.

Mathematics

"Art is fire plus algebra."  ~Jorge Luis Borges

***********************************

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.  ~Poincare

***********************************

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. ~Henri Poincare

*****************

Confessions of a Music Box                          Bruce Bond

No larger than a bird coffin,
the kind that opens its one wing
onto a sky it cannot take to,

save as the thin and silver trickle
of a tune, a feather fanning
the ghost goodbye, as if to say, yes,

it’s true, how the ancients saw it,
that music is the sound numbers
make on the verge of extinction

or sleep, whatever comes first,
that it sends its arrows through
the ear’s window, clean through and yet

attached, brightening the glass.
That’s why a monk I read loved
music, not merely for the holy

signatures, the geometry
of tones that are its body, but how
that body dies again and again,

how it slips its box like steam, like gold.
Ask any star in the Greek
toy chest of stars, any sphere,

and it returns you to an image
of this, to the singing of a thing
you wind, or someone winds, the grind

of a song it never tires of.
A lullaby. How like a box
to hoard its measure of nothing

we speak of until, that is, the box
of dark inside breaks, confessing
the way an old grief confesses

or some nocturnal heating vent
pouring air between its teeth.
But then... if you call this news,

it is never news enough.
Only paired phrases like a doll
house on fire, like the small

murmur of a child at her bed,
talking to a god she has only
heard of, a father locked up in

the rhymes of parables, of hymns:
and if I die before I wake.
Either way she dies, she wakes.
*****************

The Prophecies of Mathematics                  Gary Fincke

Not even his wife wanted to listen
To Francis Galton explain that prayer made
No difference, that insurance companies
Knew the facts of longevity, and there
Was no adjustment for people who prayed
And the various buildings they lived in.
Not even, but he said it anyway—
The pious live no longer than the bad.
It's always this way with Jeremiahs.
In the prophecies of mathematics
Are equations for hours in the sun,
Alcohol in the blood, early marriage.
There, among the numbers, lies the total
Of the truth of ourselves, and I admit
I've counted the daily steps from my house
To my office through six possible routes;
I've counted the frequency of letters,
Rooting for underdogs like b and k
To outdo their predicted sums of use.

Trivial? Stupid? I estimated
The minutes, once, until the end of school,
Wrote seventy-five thousand, six hundred,
In my September notebook and followed
The lurch of each long minute on the clock
For three periods of world history,
Latin, and plane geometry until
I rejoined the classroom of common sense,
Abandoning the women who number
The knocks on a door to seven, the breaths
Before starting their cars to six, knowing
Nothing about the habits of Galton,
Who kept track of boredom by numbering
The small fidgets of a congregation,
Who counted the brush strokes as his portrait
Was painted, who evaluated place,
At last, by the beauty of its women,
Selecting London like a pageant judge,
Leaving it to us to tally the days
Till what's longed for mayor may not arrive,
Keeping calendars of Xs that end,
Each time, on the eve of possible joy
Like a merciless cliffhanger for faith.

*****************

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.  ~Gustav Flaubert

*****************

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry. 

~Martin Gardner

****************

The Dome  by CHAD SWEENEY

When we were the poorest,
mom paid my weekly allowance
in birds. That one is yours, she whispered

so as not to disturb it.
If you clean the oven
I’ll give you that red one.

In a few months
I owned all the birds on the street,
blue jays, finches, a lame owl

cowled in the clock tower.
We had to walk farther each Saturday
to find a new fountain or thicket

so mother could pay me what she owed.
We stood on a bridge.
Our soldiers were marching away,

singing
and trying to sound brave.
Their numbers were staggering.

I invented a mathematics
to understand them.
I subtracted them from summer

and it was winter. Most of our houses
were gone, and the birds too.
The university had been bombed

with my father inside, attending a reading
by some Polish poets.
The poems were so sturdy, he said,

they held up the dome of the ceiling.

****************

“I know that I have an instinct towards math and cleverness in structure that I work against, and so I try to make something … I make this whole structure which takes up a cork wall of index cards, and then I feel that is the architecture of the book, and what you do with architecture is that you cover it completely . . . And why I am driven to make something this complicated I don’t know. It’s just a pleasure for me always in all kinds of reading and fiction to know that there is some kind of clock ticking in the background. It could be rhetorical device, the way that language goes in the book. That there’s a pattern to it, because it’s nice to feel when you close the book that there’s a pattern to life.” 

~Andrew Sean Greer in an interview with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm 

****************

37. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

from DEFINITIONS OF POETRY by Carl Sandburg

****************

Landscape

Monument                                                    Natasha Trethewey

Today the ants are busy
          beside my front steps, weaving
in and out of the hill they're building.
          I watch them emerge and—

like everything I've forgotten—disappear
          into the subterranean, a world
made by displacement. In the cemetery
          last June, I circled, lost—

weeds and grass grow up all around—
          the landscape blurred and waving.
At my mother's grave, ants streamed in
          and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising

above her untended plot. Bit by bit,
          red dirt piled up, spread
like a rash on the grass; I watched a long time
          the ants' determined work,

how they brought up soil
          of which she will be part,
and placed it before me. Believe me when I say
          I've tried not to begrudge them


their industry, this reminder of what
          I haven't done. Even now,
the mound is a blister on my heart,
          a red and humming swarm. 

*******************************************

Landscape                                                            Chad Sweeney

I subtract one color at a time

to arrive at green.

Green cardinal.

Green snow.

This green is excavated rather than built.

Looking you begin to feel

disappearance

what culture feels when exposed

to time---

a pit

in the air, a climbing up to

no altar.

The clover,

the teeth of the horses,

shine.

Green burns in the green cloud.

*******************************************

Lightfall             Pamela Alexander

All the light was north, snow on skylights,
the year I lived in the painter's studio.

Scrub forest behind the dunes, a litter
of deer tracks and shotgun shells.
I tied an orange bandanna around
the husky's neck.

//

I knew the dark place was wrong. I walked the letters
of my name, which I did not recognize spoken.

Low corridors. 

Me. Her. The I
I could not find.

All the trees had fallen the same way
in the storm. A landscape pointing.

Anyone could happen like that.

//

The husky ate a bee
out of the air, snapped herself shut
on compound eyes, wing-blur, button
of darkness and buzz.

//

A rabbit streaked from under my feet.
Its nest fit my loose fist.
A cup of winter grass, still warm.

Home is the first everywhere,
the place we go out from.

//

The bee flew lower. Pollen graining its legs
drizzled onto linoleum shine. The room

was a different color for each of us. My shadow
bright blue-green in bee sight.

How could it not recognize the window
colored open?

//

I longed to be among trees. They wavered
beyond glass, beyond wire. They could not
be changed into words. They could not be changed
into anything. Even a camera couldn't see
the thick air around them, how it carried
sounds whole like water does,
how it supported slow birds.

//

Bee against pane, translucency
of wings. Centuries flew
against the glass. Then we found
the larger place: earth, that blue ark
afloat in the wilderness of space.

We cannot count ourselves out.

//

How beautiful it was
before we knew. How sweet how

A faint music falls from the stars—

no it does not.

*******************************************

Set Theory                                                 by James Mc Corkle

Number following number,                                                 oscillations Neatly described, heart’s plunder Or loss, following,                                 that old saw, again and again, And the route taken always is the shortest Between two points,                                    between what must be And that lapsing cloud, a continental Dimming, and then stillness,                                                  and always the afterward, Trying to place it, a landscape, verdigris, Cerulean, lightened azure,                                              indigo the deepest point, The sky beginning to open, if We could see them, stars ascending Serially, marking                               time’s season, Boolean sets, you then not-you,                                                        and that Graphed line between, thin veil, Memory lifted, lifting                                      over the garden’s trees An equation of synapses,                                            but now just that— Before the beginning of darkness Settling on                    the leaves of hawthorns, Carnelian fruit, neither Loss nor gain, but that astonishment You are here, between This and what is                              fired—cinnabar to cadmium—and gone. ******************************************* Landscape is the culture that contains all human culture.  Barry Lopez *******************************************

Eye Eye

"Into the Tunnel"     Chad Sweeney

Beyond the shipyard the pounded metal
of bay water, a helical structure of gulls,
and one great arm

sweeps the clouds over the edge.
I’ve wanted to be that decisive
as during the first moments in a new room

I look to find the windows
then go and stand beside them.
Factories stir fire into sky,

an airplane skids across
wrapped defensively in its sound
as a man is shouting into a tunnel —

a man with a name tag on his suit
and two drill-holes in place of eyes 

is shouting, Hurry son, the pipes have burst!

He is right to be afraid.
Water churns around the boy.
Excruciating to see this happen

and to not embrace them both.
What will you shout into the tunnel
given this one opportunity

when we all promise to listen?

********************************

Your eyes are on your side, for you cannot see your eyes, and your eyes cannot see themselves. Eyes only see things outside, objective things. If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about. The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is the universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. The mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there. This is very interesting. You mind is always with the things you observe. So you see, this mind is at the same time everything. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p. 134

********************************

Romanticism              Ashley Elizabeth Hudson

Held the telescope to your eye
late into the snowless night
and squinted into the cataract moon.

Oh it's that distant, as the boy who hung
the dingy white sheets and proposed
to the girl who wanted snow.

After the daylight peeled the label
off its clear blue glass and neurotically
became the night. Outside the body,

the disease was a heliotropic iris
offering its hope, as long as you stared
into the microscope.

The boy spent all day draping old linens,
and I suppose a trailer park is a kind

of snow globe, sex a sort of diamond. 

********************************

Taper, or Mary Tells All She Knows              Jeanne Marie Beaumont

A string to me says spine. I am patient
in long labors. In taking pains.
Dip, drip. Let them hang.
Repeat the steps.

I adore the odor of beeswax each day.
Authentic & pure as I suppose a
martyr would be. I'm none.
At dusk,

I light the tallest all along the stone mantle.
It is true I am a wisp of a woman,
smoke comes out my mouth,
my head heats up,

and sometimes if I hear a word that's especially apt
my eyes bounce like breezed flames.
But you shouldn't confuse
me with them.

These were born in the clean shrine of tedium
to accumulate evenly, cane straight.
Burning, they fly the flags
of thin victors.

And when they disappear—as is written—
leaving behind them no trace,
this is no miracle but ex-
pertise. 

********************************

Gloucester                                                             Ann Snodgrass

This seascape's now more cataract
of tired eyes—swept as it was by
too many winds, too many clouds
that are no longer.
Sails rise, fail.
It's time, then, for the children
to take over. Strange how they
just can't lie.
We, on the other hand, who came
here to forget, watch nameless
seabirds dive—soar—
dive, finding nothing.
Sails rise once again, fail.
It's certain then: anyone
could see that a child
would draw me—

even my own—as an outline. 

********************************

Obey Gravity      Cynthia Arrieu-King & Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

A turnip puts a leg down in the earth
swift fingers of wind in her hair, crying
pebbles but not for reasons.

One star holds the sky pinched into place
the next keeps the beach from floating
another: a sea in satiny motion

colliding with shredded moon, salt
resisting large-bodied intentions to
  drag it down. Anything with lungs

can float there. Tripping forward,
anything with legs can hold its breath
for two summers or drop a penny. Anyone

out there? Anyone afloat in the snow globe
of someone else's memory: obey gravity.
Don't tip the turnip, the world up. Top-down,

shift your golden flags to indicate direction,
hold up your ounce breath invisible as a
hand pulling the blood through the tunnel

of artery of muscles, telling the eye beware,
the dawn the good-bye dreams, minute
the pillow's last kiss. The body, heavied


storehouse for gazes, pressed tight with
embraces, loaded with water, bugs, burlap—
thing to be stacked against floods. 

Color II

Questions for Silence                                                  Paul Guest

In its first thin tide. In the place
to which it's come like a stranger.
Where the day is a map
you cannot read, crickets begin
in the warm night to whirr
green songs they could not unlearn
had they minds to grow bored.
The willow tree shudders
as though it were sewn up
with twitching nerves, with wire
bright as new-minted pennies. Where
do you go to gain the ear
of the moon, its ravaged face
lamented by no one? And
what do you tell something so old
it cannot remember
being once part of the world and not the sky?
What would your shadow care
to hear, to come close, to touch
hand to wall the tremor
of a passing train? If it had bones inside it,
you know it would flee.
So what are your words worth
to the hurried traffic,
to everything blurred,
to the ice cream truck
and its sweet patrol,
its song spilling out like a toy,
even in the dark? For all the sunlight
passing from the world
like a thought, who might you sing
to timid sleep? However long
you waited for rain
to rinse you of light's molten color,
for the elbow of the river
to bend back
to your life, the grass whispers,
you waited too long—
and all the while it speaks
it grows. 

*************************************

Time and Materials                      Robert Hass

Gerhard Richter:  Abstrakt Bilden

I.

To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk;
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.

On this day a blur of color moving at the gym
Where the heat from bodies
Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.

2.

The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,
   In progress, of everything
That is not these words
   And their disposition on the page.

The object o    f this poem is to report a theft,
   In progre    ss of everything that exists
That is not th    ese words
   And their d    isposition on the page.

The object    of    his poe    is t    epro    a theft
   In   rogres    f  ever    hing    at    xists
Th    is no    ese    w rds
   And their disp sit on o     the pag

3·

To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,
To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.

"Action painting," i.e.,
The painter gets to behave like time.

4·

The typo would be "paining."

(To abrade.)

5·

Or to render time and stand outside
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment
To have the sensation of standing outside
The greenish rush of it.

6.

Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
Or desire can rip a life apart,

Some wound of color.

**************************

Landscape                                                            Chad Sweeney

I subtract one color at a time

to arrive at green.

Green cardinal.

Green snow.

This green is excavated rather than built.

Looking you begin to feel

disappearance

what culture feels when exposed

to time---

a pit

in the air, a climbing up to

no altar.

The clover,

the teeth of the horses,

shine.

Green burns in the green cloud.

**********************************

Did We Betray the River                                                      Dionisio D. Martínez

Did we betray the river or did the river betray us? You've noticed, I'm
sure, how, under certain conditions, a ladder leaning on a wall is a draw-

bridge waiting for a sailboat that keeps delaying its journey, calling
the man who operates the bridge, layering elaborate excuses so neatly

that the man only hears one excuse: the boat's coming, just not yet, not
while the water's in control of the situation. The man waits—drawbridge

up, traffic on hold. Sometimes the world is all patience and silence
and there is nothing you can do to stir up trouble. The driver who keeps

a knife beneath the seat is tapping on the dashboard a song coming from
another car. This is an exception. Others are praying to their private

rivers, as if the one just ahead were not there: seeing is too easy: one
acquires increasingly complex needs, like the taste of earth just

turned by oxen who know the plow as well as a man knows his river. We
know this blue's an illusion: the things that shelter us are colorless and

hover just so, not quite halos and not quite hats, and they can all be named
even if the names are arbitrary, even if they're not quite words. Our boat

waits for the water to go from blue to brown to ocher, as in a Turner
vision—a realism so crude it borders on beauty, the way beauty

was meant to touch us: with its repulsive allure, its unwashed mirrors of
heavy morning fog. We have to look head-on, and learn to forget again. 

**********************************

Nasturtium                         Gigi Marks

is a ring of simple petals
in a single o of surprise as if saying,
this is not what I expected.
is color in one shade that doesn't flinch
but meets what fate hands out,
the slender stem broken and placed
in clear water in clear glass,
so that there are no more days outside
near round-faced green petals, and
there are no bees and no seeds to
form, and the earth that seemed
so certain always right below is gone,
and all it seems to say is I see with my
one way of seeing that I will live what life
I have left in someone else's house.

**********************************

Hummingbird                                                            Barbara Crooker

He comes every day, in his crushed-emerald cape, flashing in front
of the kitchen window, quick as a thought, and just as elusive;
one blink, and he's gone. Try to show him to your mother,
who's come by for tea; she doesn't turn quickly enough,
doesn't see his throat, red as a stoplight, doesn't see him
dart in and out of the bee balm, honeysuckle, trumpet
vine. Her skin is thin as a folded roadmap; she's setting
off on a new journey. The tea trembles in its porcelain boat.
She is getting ready to board a great white ship
whose sails are already luffing in the wind;
the hawsers creak and groan, the crew
is ready to cast off. But she is still casting on,
yarn the color of spring grass, yarn the color
of heart's blood, knitting afghan squares
for the homeless. She sips her tea. He flickers
back into view, takes a long sweet drink.
He signals stop, then go; stop, then go,
both directions at once, confusing semaphores
that spark and crackle in the brilliant, merciless sun. 

Father

Forecast       Karin Gottshall

I remember, before the snow started,
thinking I wish it would start. The sky darkened

shadow on shadow. The cats, as usual,
slept through the morning. Then snow so heavy that even

my father, who was a kind of Noah—all resolve and solitude,
cabinetry and salt—couldn't have steadied me. I remember—

and this was back when the sham fortune-teller sat
turning over cards, saying you will be lonely—

thinking it could be worse. Thinking loneliness
is nothing more than a cotton slip

and uncombed hair. A path you dig in the snow
once the snow has stopped. Thinking then let it begin. 

******************************************

The Cave Painter                  Elizabeth Onusko

Memory is a series of caves

in which perspective invents itself,

learns the language of images,
mixes egg white with hematite,

and presses to a wall
a pigmented finger or piece of lichen

to record what it sees.
Holding a torch, she roams

the network of passages,
trying to find something she recognizes

amidst the thousands of images
drawn haphazardly over each other.

She interprets the juxtaposed layers literally,
takes comfort looking at things

that never happened,
like her five-year-old self holding hands

with her five-year-old father,
because the images seem whole

and therefore reliable.

Sometimes the torch doesn’t last,

and every step brings her further

into a black so complete

it’s no longer color but sound.

Panicked, she sits on the ground,

arms around legs and mumbling.

This is how we find her

when we enter her room,

a white nightgown puddled on linoleum,

and this is why she doesn’t –

know who we are.

******************************************

The Methodist and his Method   by Chad Sweeney

Underground in the cemetery
my grandfather preaches to the other corpses.
They clap inside their boxes

nicely arranged in Sunday clothes
in long rows like pews.
His words stir hope

that conditions may change.
Each man has been given his row boat,
he says,

to lie back in and watch the sky
braiding and unbraiding its light.
No one is safer than we are. 

******************************************

Ocean Beach at TwiIight: 14        Dean Rader
       

Who's to say the stars understand
their heavy labor, or the moon its
grunt work across the hard curve of absence?
Who's to say the gulls taut on their tiny strings

believe the air? Everything seems surprised
by the fat slab of pink strung up against the blue:
the dogs dark in night's water, the fishermen
buoyed to the beach's pillar of stillness.

Even the teenage boy playing in the spoor
of foam and backflow pauses longer
than expected, his father's voice dissolved

in the din-drop of surf and sea hush. Night
is no curtain. When he stares out across
the wave of waves, who's to say he looks inward? 

******************************************

Shuttlecock                                             Gary L. McDowell       

A poem about my father
will always begin my father.
A poem about my father and I
will always begin when I was young.
My father never told me
I limped a long time
after my bones had knit,
favored one leg more
than the other, egged myself
forward, one knee knotted,
never told me my fists
were too small for fighting,
too small to be blamed
for violence: the grasp and tug
I made at my mother’s hair,
that tug to pull myself closer,
to grasp something other than air.
My father never told me
I was a body, I was a herder,
never told me that when bit
I should swear, swear,
and take showers at all hours
of the night.  My father never
told me that I inherited
his dancing thighs.
A poem about my father,
when I was young, will
always begin in October.
In October, we flew kites
in the frantic rush of winds
that never toppled us.
My hawk never had its feathers,
my father’s eagle never lost
its feathers.  Our birds, so different,
soared and never threaded
our story to another story,
never forgot who we were,
us, me and my father,
when I was young.

******************************************

I Scandalize Myself                     Iman Mersal

translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

I must tell my father
that the only man for whom "desire shattered me"
looked exactly like him,

and tell my friends
that I have different pictures of myself,
all true, all me,
that I will distribute among them one at a time.

I must tell my lover,
"Be grateful for my infidelities.
Without them
I wouldn't have waited all this time
to discover the exceptional pause in your laugh."

As for me
I am almost certain
that I scandalize myself
to hide behind it.

******************************************

Bird Advice                                         Jill Alexander Essenbaum

There you go again, head in hand
and wringing out the vandal curl of your hair,
the only sparrow Jesus has his eye on.
Of course we'll eat your breadcrumbs.

Mostly, you drive too fast. My little heart
beats more quickly than the dawn of a terrible day.
Revise your poems to include more of that.
Long live the lilt of my right wing.

God has numbered every feather.
I sing because once, I thought to do it.
When the wind warbles in strange tones,
the air has found something of itself to regret.

So. You don't believe. Strange species, you,
the North American Doubter, migrating
southward and in volumes like an irruption
of nuthatch. What shall you make of that?

Your cat is quite mean. You must
learn new songs of despair and delight.
Your dead father is an anthem in the skies.
All that you yearn is instinct. 

******************************************

The Mortgaging of Self Is Done                                    Aimee Sands

And the floors dreaming in wide,
drowned light. The drifting and bobbling,

nodding you off in another direction,
broken sideways, sideways

broken. Farther. Father. And the staff
of good intentions that sprouts leaves,

feathers, the formal calm that surprises,
gauze outflung and laid.

The miner that comes with a light, knees,
questions, gunpowder. The stifling,

the unbinding. Moral, normal, matted,
matched. The pelt of suffering,


hung in its usual place. 

Mother

Zero Plus Anything Is A World
~Jane Hirshfield

Four less one is three.

Three less two is one.

One less three

is what, is who,

remains.

The first cell that learned to divide

learned to subtract.

Recipe:

add salt to hunger.

Recipe:

add time to trees.

Zero plus anything

is a world.

This one

and no other,

unhidden,

by each breath changed.

Recipe:

add death to life.

Recipe:

love without swerve what this will bring.

Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.

Like a cello

forgiving one note as it goes,

then another.

**********

Getting Close

by Victoria Redel

Because my mother loved pocketbooks

I come alive at the opening click or close of a metal clasp.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, a faux crocodile handle makes me

   weep.

Breathy clearing of throat, a smooth arm, heels on pavement, she

   lingers, sound tattoos.

I go to the thrift store to feel for bobby pins caught in the pocket

   seam

of a camel hair coat.

I hinge a satin handbag in the crease of my arm. I buy a little

   change purse with its curled and fitted snap.

My mother bought this for me. This was my mother's.

I buy and then I buy and then, another day, I buy something else.

In Paris she had a dog, Bijou, and when they fled Paris in 1942

   they left the dog behind.

When my mother died on February 9, 1983, she left me.

Now, thirty years later and I am exactly her age.

I tell my husband I will probably die by the end of today and all day he says, Are you getting close, Sweetheart? And late in the afternoon, he asks if he should buy enough filet of sole for two.

From a blue velvet clutch I take out a mirror and behold my lips in

   the small rectangle.

Put on something nice. Let him splurge and take you out for

   dinner, my mother whispers on the glass. 

**********

The Major Subjects           Lawrence Raab

Death is easier
than love. And true feeling, as someone said,
leaves no memory. Or else memory
replaces the past, which we know
never promised to be true.

Consider the sea cucumber:
when attacked it divides, sacrificing half
so that half
won't get eaten. Can the part left undevoured
figure out what to do?

The natural world is always instructive,
mysterious as well, but often
hard to praise. Love
is also difficult—the way it slides into
so many other subjects,

like murder, deceit,
and the moon. As my mother used to say
about anything
we couldn't find: If it had been
a snake it would have bitten you.

Fellow poets, we must
learn again to copy from nature,
see for ourselves
how steadfastly even its beauty
refuses to care or console. 

*********

'A woman knows when to be inside and when to be outside, her mother’s only useful lesson, and of course when to be neither.' Guy Davenport, from “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg” in Da Vinci’s Bicycle

*********

The Dome  by CHAD SWEENEY

I’ll give you that red one.
When we were the poorest,
mom paid my weekly allowance
in birds. That one is yours, she whispered

so as not to disturb it.
If you clean the oven

In a few months
I owned all the birds on the street,
blue jays, finches, a lame owl

cowled in the clock tower.
We had to walk farther each Saturday
to find a new fountain or thicket

 

so mother could pay me what she owed.
We stood on a bridge.
Our soldiers were marching away,

singing
and trying to sound brave.
Their numbers were staggering.

I invented a mathematics
to understand them.
I subtracted them from summer

and it was winter. Most of our houses
were gone, and the birds too.
The university had been bombed

with my father inside, attending a reading
by some Polish poets.
The poems were so sturdy, he said,

they held up the dome of the ceiling.

*********

Family Portrait                                James Allen Hall

If I could turn the photograph, bring my mother's face
to the bright eye of myth, my unflinching lens,
you'd see she's mouthing the words: Take the picture already.

You'd see my father's lust, his loathing
molding her body into some four-legged
photogenic thing, whipped and adored.

You'd see my mother emerging from the ghost world
limb by limb, carrying on her bowed shoulders
Eros and his sadomasochistic twin.

In the dim violated light, she's marked
by a man who can't let any part of her go.
In the light my father makes in the dark,
I was mothered into art. 

*********

To See My Mother                                                Sharon Olds

It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone. If she hadn't looked so exalted, so
beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly
hopeful, more than hopeful—beyond
hope, relieved—if she had not been suffering so
much, since I had met her, I do not
know how I would have stood it, without
fighting someone, though no one was there
to fight, death was not there except
as her, my task was to hold her tiny
crown in one cupped hand, and her near
birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,
nests. Winds, stems, tongues.
Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,
my mother's dying was like an end
of life on earth, some end of water
and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,
till only that still, ocher moon
shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.

**********

Sleep Chains                 Anne Carson

Who can sleep when she —
hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
fan her restless decks.
Cicatrice by cicatrice
all the links
rattle once.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

*********

Lament for the Makers                                                     Frank Bidart

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek

within itself what to make

My father's ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

                  •

Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.