New poems from our print contributors in the U.S. and abroad.
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
Isn’t this the Either/Or Fallacy? You can either be
saved or lost? Angels appear to assist only some of the men and not
others, who are wrested off the ladder by devils in silhouette,
as these men, monks, climb the Heavenly Ladder of St. John Klimakos
in ms. paintings and in due course icons drawn from the devotional manual
of the same name by the sixth-century CE desert saint:
dancing men, rung on rung ascending in thirty steps to the presence of Jesus,
who holds his hands forward to receive them.
As they stretch and strive toward the divine,
don’t they also, some of them,
kick back with their heels into the faces of those on rungs below? Inadvertently.
(It looks like it — or does it? As Sirarpie der Nersessian expressed it in Fine Arts 127, Spring 1959 CE)
Don’t think about it: parcheesi, yardstick.
Don’t think about it: just gaze: escalator, vertigo, staff notation of crescendo.
Don’t think about it: put one foot in front of the other,
consociational in time and place even with us, differing in degree,
these shapes are as letters of some alphabet, cipher, code —
the adventure of the dancing men, characters
lit from outside the galaxy, lit from within.
Caroline Knox‘s eighth book, Flemish, appeared from Wave Books in April 2013.
Monitoring Erosion—A Phenomenology
Demesne runs away with topsoil,
and the audacity of claims.
For all its openness, barbed wire
makes for a near-transparent
closedgarden. Strutting or huddling
therein. Night storms make an extra
layer — neither night nor day.
As these hills run away into
the river system, the reverie
of possession is given its due:
images stall and lapse into metaphor,
and all the false truths of belonging
are grit washed from the rock beneath;
then the rock itself breaks into grit.
Don’t be astonished by the intricate
carvings of water over hard surfaces,
the etching and marking of mapped forms.
Geometry is elusive when it appears sound,
mutable as allegories divined from cut & swirl,
though it’s true the infinitesimal
yields large, even the grain missed in the wash
tells us more than the large movement
that led to it being stranded.
Or the revelation of a fossil:
all that is embedded in our knowledge
restrained by fear to acknowledge
prior occupation, ongoing presence,
then ambivalence of demesne.
The House Huddles
The house huddles further into the hillside
To escape the heat, heat-stressed trees
Giving up the ghost: flyblown summer’s
Growing body-count. We are still as can be
Inside the ticking house. Sudden and brutal
Expansions, metal fatigue as rooms depressurise.
In this is the mystery of stellar bodies
And the actions of gravity and dark matter.
Mystery is pure science. Waiting for night
When contractions will force us outdoors,
The house crumpling, not huddling: still hot as hell:
To be hurled out over the hills and plains,
Marking new points on the compass:
Trees struggling on, suckers reaching up
Out of burnt stumps and rootstock.
So dry we fear only the effect of rain:
The dread of surprise, the violent results.
John Kinsella is the author of over thirty books of poetry and prose, including The New Arcadia and Peripheral Light.
Parting with La Figlia Che Piange
“One day we will meet in New York,”
you said,
standing on the highest balcony.
“One day we will meet in New York,”
you said,
leaning on the rusty rails of dawn,
and four in the morning receding into five.
“One day we will meet in New York,”
you said,
and clasped your shawl to you inside
the autumness of Beirut,
the most, most autumn city night.
“One day we will meet in New York,”
you said,
the wind made you close your eyes and
turn, as I realized
I was parting with La Figlia Che Piange
and had an urge to tell you as you left,
“Stand on the highest Beirut balcony—
lean on the rusty rails—
weave, weave the moment in your hair—
clasp your shawl to you and close your tired eyes—
feel the autumn wind and turn
your back on the roofs and familiar skies:
but weave, weave the moment in your hair.”
Balcony
There is coffee. It goes well
with the scene we’ve set up
in our heads, somewhere
with just enough darkness, just enough
lines to reinvent.
There is coffee,
it’s strong and the night
is stronger. It falls
equally upon us and upon
the city, and the city is stronger. There
is the city,
it riddles the dark with infinite
droplets of light.
Our fingers brush
the liquid threads it weaves.
We’re on a balcony, the tenth
floor. From such height everything
seems small and all is larger.
From such height one can begin
to understand, one can
get lost. From such height there is no
difference between the weight
that settles and the one that
lifts.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet with a BA and an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut.
After Labor
The next season flaps its soon drawn awns,
All prices slashed. Unmeasured in the wind
The cleft of unchecked mast lines,
Syncopated signatures, clacking in
Autumn’s no hint, summer’s no longer.
Beach-walkers strafe the dry, shucked shore.
In the distance a single skiff ices the jetty’s craw.
Terns stitch the one torn cloud.
Not quite sound, not quite its absence.
Like some barometer, graying in cedar,
Only this register: Everything’s over
By a toe. A few feet above water
Some light mistake glides about the harbor.
Homage to Sherwood Anderson
Each year some new mall fountains up, the Food Court assimilates
Its corporate heart into the lost pasture of the village square.
Swine once scavenged there, and men, flapping in leather helmets,
Hurled hard bodies at one another. Further back they swung
Fat sticks at rocks. The milk once loved udderly froths at Starbuck’s.
Some soccer Mom spoons $5 worth of guilt from a daily cup,
Her covenant with the mantra and hue of some lost American Dream
Of the Beautiful. How can she find it, now, when they couldn’t then?
The world past, the one passing meld into the mile she has already
Hoofed this morning. They have named a shoe for her. Not quite
Ovid’s ideal, not quite Emerson’s. Mall Walkers they call them.
If only you are listening, you can hear her mutter, Too often, George,
You stay too much indoors,though that is not exactly what she says.
Hello, I am Billy Pilgrim. I am her husband. This is my translation.
I have been to Chicago and back again. I am originally from New York:
Call it Ilium. Where I must go again. I simmer in the tent of my own head,
In this oasis, under The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s spread. My wife fattens
While I steam. Retired by trade, I fix the vision of anyone who does
Not dream in the spit and polish of some Tralfamadorian Porn Queen.
Come in. Come in. Let me grind your lens. It is really my mother
I am talking about. It is Dresden. I would really rather speak
Of something else. I am Willard. I am Bailey, some kind of George.
Or the Reverend Curtis Hartman. It has taken me this lifetime
To find the divine manifesting itself in the barren shelves
Of the last two shopping days left before Christmas.
When my wife wanders I rush through the aisles
Sharing my vision, these silk accouterments, the sheer possibility
Of Kate Swift’s body, the wildest dream of my wife’s family’s
Undergarment industry. Who would ever imagine
The wonder of such interiors, bamboo flourishing in winter,
Ohio offering through its maternal crack
The fecundity of its dark soil, trunk of some living palm
Thrust in the break of the Food Court’s tile. In Dresden
At least a few people crawled out of the steaming buildings
Despite the best intentions to stew them: Hello I am Odysseus,
Come to throw out my own grandchildren. The Northwest Passage
Cuts this way again, suspension cables, the railroad spanning
Manhattan, Brooklyn, striking the tuning fork
In which we hear the O of the Orient, that dollar, that dream.
You who have congregated always by the sea, lift up your sushi,
Your curry, your whole bread. I ask you to consider the luxury
Of the American interior, how even now it pearls in our sleep,
Victoria’s Secrets not quite beyond the Half Moon,
The Hopewell’s reach. Banked by your great river,
In Tompkins, Battery Park, stay with me awhile, hear me out.
Stephen Haven is the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America, selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the New American Press Poetry Book Prize.
Physiognomy
There’s a moment I nearly believe your dermis
is representational. Upper lip thicker
than the lower, you’re a lifeboat of inflated
grief. Your eyebrows buoy suddenness too soaked to sink.
Your nose, tall like a flaw, nestles warmth. You’re honest,
a retiree of redemption, have jobs decent
like definitions. I cross your nasal bridge which
is just a nasal bridge. It’s windy there, my fake
panache aches. If I were a nation of owlets,
I’d own you as my diplomat for your forehead
broad as a chopping board: sign of longevity.
What carved the short crow’s feet? Your reluctance to shave
or the clutching onto foresight? Of course, bad eye
cream. Don’t frown – I’ll land on your jawbone with jargons
that renew the old curve. The face is a model,
a potential. I’ll bring glue and meaning. A blue
swipes across your beard like karaoke lyrics.
I make myself your content when your face sings not.
Nicholas YB Wong received his MFA at the City University of Hong Kong and is a finalist of New Letters Poetry Award.
