Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013 Read online

  In his back yard, near the budding crab apple tree, a little boy holds a Mason jar of fireflies up to the sickle moon to watch them disappear as they flash.

  On a bed far into the night, a dog flinches in its sleep. Lying on his side, chest rising and falling quickly, pawing the air. A hand reaches out from under the quilt. The woman touches her dog’s shoulder. Runs her fingers down his flanks until he breaths easer. She closes her eyes believing that dogs dream only of running in spring fields.

  After an hour, the lights were switched on. He looked up from where he had parked to the shaded window of the apartment. Tire treads clapped across the brick lines of the cobbled street. Several people smoked on a dark covered porch. It was too early to call her. He could taste fall’s coming.

  Rain. A late spring rain at dusk, straight falling. Tender. A little girl with a backpack on her deck in rain boots making paths through the Silver Maple helicopters. A treasure map leading to the edge of the world.

  Reunion

  The closest we got

  was a 2 hour car ride to

  camp at the lake

  some Fourth of July after

  I had dropped out of college

  before I crawled back.

  Sprawled in the seat of my LTD

  Marlborough ashes blown in the

  highway wind, he dozed

  sweating tequila on my upholstery.

  Camping meant sleeping

  in the car at night

  for an hour between bottle rocket fights

  and water skiing

  behind a fat-assed pontoon boat.

  He worked double shifts for AMF

  making more money

  than my father ever would.

  “Do you remember the day

  our draft numbers

  were first read on TV?

  I would have died first,” he told me.

  We were only sophomores in high school

  that day we watched

  in 1971. We didn’t follow

  anyone to Asia.

  Catholic school brought us all together. “No, Sister. I don’t speak Spanish. I speak Mexican,” he told his second 1st grade teacher. She was the only one who smiled. Together.

  My mother warned me of them later, when we shared a little league team. He taught me to swear in his tongue. I shared the Italian version. Sister never knew.

  An old aunt once told me that Disneyland opened the year I was born . . . the closest I would get to that world was watching Mary Poppins at the Paramount where mom sent us to avoid being blinded by the lunar eclipse. He couldn’t afford to go. I met him later at the park to shag flies. Together

  That Monday, we served early Mass for Monsignor. Latin Mass for the old women who spoke their rosaries in whispers, rising and kneeling in arthritic unison, accepting bits of host on shriveled tongues. Leaving the church with wetted fingers signing themselves in some hope.

  He passed out in the sun on the 5th.

  “My people don’t burn,” he announced

  to the rising moon.

  Sweating beer on my upholstery

  heading home from our last road trip.

  A woman loved him in Arizona

  It shocked him, I heard.

  She named their son after his father

  so he cried in his pride, “Bless me Father

  for I have sinned.”

  But Sister was dead then and the

  Monsignor.

  He came back one last time

  We met at a bar so many of us

  that August, where my own daughter,

  working as a barmaid for the summer,

  brought drinks to us. He didn’t know

  who she was until he

  touched her cheek, her neck,

  and she bent to his ear

  whispering

  while he looked me in the eye

  until he could no longer stand it.

  Even she knew he would be the first to go.

  Spider

  I find you in the bathroom

  watching the depths of the sink cross-legged atop the

  counter beside your reflection.

  “I don’t want to have this conversation again,” it tells me.

  I wonder how you have folded the length of your legs into that bundle leaning forward, head tilted to hear the echo of the drain? The whisper of a May breeze circling the sink?

  I expected tears.

  You tap the sink with the end of a brush. It is a hollow sound. “Can we

  talk about something else?” you ask.

  Four of us, still as porcelain.

  You unfold a leg. Stretching it to the yellowed tile floor. Like blowing out a

  match, you exhale into the sink. “I can.” I see the side of your face staring at me in the mirror.

  “I hate spiders,”

  And you blow again into the sink, forcing the spider closer to the drain.

  You might kill it there, and leave it like the flies on your

  Mother’s walls so long ago.

  Left them to harden, too insignificant to be fed upon. She could appease you in

  youth. Now there is no one.

  My silence

  channeled you to sleep splayed over the couch, feet bared extending

  beyond the worn blanket. Your face in its nightly pose, the color of lily petals

  folded up for the night, the color of the empty sink.

  Standing on the Bridge

  No sunrise yet. From the bridge rail

  a lightening sky

  reflects in the crawling river darkness

  I wonder how streams of fog rise out of the waters

  hugging the bank—a gauzy shawl

  my grandmother wore on late summer nights

  when she sat alone on her porch. I felt I could see

  olive skin beneath it.

  A solitary egret, shadowed in the darkness,

  seeking breakfast, stands

  one foot on the sand bar

  the other in the river

  with tiny twigs of legs

  scratching drawings in the sand.

  Her head, the hood of a cobra

  unswaying as she waits.

  Autumn nears with the coming sunrise

  breathing cinnamon through the trees too low to

  melt the fog. Looking down

  the egret has flow. I missed its fishing story.

  It saddens me

  that the trees have yet

  to turn and molt. I hope to notice that day,

  and when the egret strikes.

  Stephanie L. Harper

  Unvoiced

  The words from the dream are

  Wisps in the air like broken

  Spider webs wrapping invisibly

  About my face and forearms

  The fake sunrise tarp draped before me

  Ripples like a summer mirage

  Half-soaked into the rural street

  And then   as if I were not supposed to

  I step through and place my foot

  Solidly into an evening of dark specters

  Waiting outside of their existence

  To become what I am

  There

  I am the cool turpentine

  Wash of grays seeping over

  A dusting of brown sand in the road

  There

  I am the night falling upon

  Neglected pastures of weeds

  Sputtering up about the silhouettes

  Of tree stumps and old swing sets

  There

  I am the street lamps’ sallow illumine

  Peering out sensibly from between

  Foolish tree skeleton embraces

  There

  I am still the child

  Twisting acorns into the asphalt

  With the soles of her shoes

  Squealing gleefully into the night

  I, Your Progeny

  I cannot get my mind

  Around the meanin
g of your ninety years.

  If I multiplied my age, my experiences,

  My life’s richness—

  Math not being my strong suit—

  I would be making your age, events, and richness

  Quantifiable,

  As if you were simply

  A larger, scatter-plot version of me,

  Your number and density

  Increasing

  With every cycle of rebirth and dormancy;

  Repeating

  Over acre upon acre

  Of variegated shades and shade;

  Each of your small, too-subtle suffocations

  Receding

  Into anonymity

  By your sheer enormity.

  Even if my calculations were viable,

  I would be entirely lost

  In the matrix of your possibility.

  But here,

  Where my roots have taken hold,

  Where this slice of sun streaks in,

  In this cross-section of you—

  I cannot count the leaves

  That glimmer golden,

  Or burn blood-red,

  Nor plot each point of light

  That breaches the canopy and reaches

  The dank floor.

  I am not one-third, not one-thirtieth

  Of your richness,

  Not even a quantum speck

  Of your boundless soul,

  Yet, dazzled here,

  Neither am I invisible.

  I quiver, here,

  In your engendering light.

  Wise at Thirty-five, Revised at Forty

  Preserved like wax museum sculptures,

  Erected in their own, obscure enclave,

  These two, distinct ages pulled off quite the

  Elaborate spectacle—circling

  One another in yin-and-yang-fashion,

  Gurgling and sputtering dramatically

  Toward a crescendo of neurotic

  Self-consumption—until the violent

  Vortex of their fervent dance dissolved in

  A brief instant into oblivion.

  Still, I relish the living left to do,

  While constantly reliving the living

  That can’t be redone, intently watching

  Today’s waterfall spill over into

  The uncertain basin of tomorrow:

  “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace . . .”

  Shakespeare was wise to the relatively

  Insignificant fact that tomorrows

  Keep coming, regardless of how we spend

  Or squander, mete out, or justify them,

  Forgetting their order, or which ones were

  Real and which were dreaming, or whether there

  Is quantifiably a difference.

  I have tried and failed to live up to that

  “Mysterious,” skulking expectation—

  Convinced it was my duty to perform

  The scenes from a moral composition,

  Which I now know I scripted for myself:

  Whether I’d tried pink-nosed and dreamy-eyed

  To face into an icy, winter wind

  (To look like the cover illustration

  Of the children’s book, Eloise in Moscow),

  Or to bound—stripped down to nothing but my

  Bare disillusionment—through the fertile

  Valley beneath a sun-streaked, summer sky,

  I’d always been shocked to discover the

  Dance was neither beguiling nor beautiful.

  How did I manage to cultivate and

  Reap such a harvest of indignation?

  For an age, I sulked in self-abasement,

  Practicing absurd, measured detachment,

  While swathed in a café’s lulling morning

  Warmth, huddling with coffee and crossword.

  I once watched through the glass as a curled, brown

  Leaf flapped fitfully in the street, as if

  It were some willful creature with purpose

  And life blood coursing through its wrinkled veins.

  Though I feigned amazement, as it darted

  In and out of traffic and leapt anew

  With life after each self-orchestrated

  Brush with tragedy, I all the while knew

  (Though I may have started at its final,

  Quick, clever tailspin, as the wind blew it

  Out of sight forever), and loved knowing

  That on most days, a leaf is just a leaf.

  If once I rather resembled a rock’s

  Unmovable crest, emerging stubborn

  And solitary, from a rushing stream,

  My ceaseless shadow blotting out the sun

  From the leaves cascading by beneath me,

                I now glisten and shiver in the

                Constant splash of cold humility.

  Roger Desy

  anhinga

  —feeding a brood

  an anhinga knows

  itself enough to know

  the most important thing alive

  is not itself—instead

  being part—a part

  of what it made

  of what it was and is

  —feeding nestlings

  it feeds itself—

  later—brooding done

  apart from itself

  nothing else matters

  —after diving for prey

  —flocking the shoals

  to a single stone

  roosting with its kind

  it preens its own shadow

  undulating in the mirrored glare

  —napping on guano

  its wings alone

  drench dry in the sun—

  —come winter—

  alone—after its turn and time

  —it dies unseen unknown—

  no predator torments observing it

  —nothing in particular seeks out

  or notices

  floating—or blowing sand

  —feather—quill—or barb

  —no calm—or fog—or squall—cirrus

  or haloed moon disturbs

  even submerged—weighed down by seas

  — buoyant despite itself—it’s gone

  through the hurricanes

  of its own migration

  R. G. Evans

  Hangoverman

  Every day an origin story—

  an ordinary man swallows a potion

  he knows is dire poison.

  The change begins at once:

  he writhes through blind bliss,

  tears his clothes (and sometimes bleeds)

  as the poison moves through his veins.

  His strength grows great.

  His strength remains the same.

  His secret wears a mask.

  Everyone knows who he is.

  At last, eyes red, bottles emptied

  by his superhuman thirst,

  he enters his fortress of solitude,

  wherever it may be tonight.

  His bed. The floor beside his bed.

  The sidewalk where he fell

  on the way to find his home.

  And all this just a prelude . . .

  He awakes, having never really slept,

  alter ego dead, home planet nearly destroyed,

  the ability to suffer his only super trait, thinking

  With great impotence comes great irresponsibility.

  At least the Drunkmobile stayed in its dock tonight,

  waiting where it’s waited since the beginning,

  and in the beginning was the drink,

  every day an origin story.

  The Usual

  In a faraway bar in a faraway town

  the bartender thinks I’m someone

  I’m not. She smiles, arches an eyebrow

  and says The usual?

  What would I get if I were this man

  she thinks I am—a shot a
nd a beer?

  Somethng with more finesse?

  I wonder how long his usual would last,

  this man who looks and acts like me.

  I remember my usual and the mileage it got me

  though all the time I was riding on “E.”

  My usual was darkness and long draughts alone,

  hairpin roads and a hand too light upon the wheel.

  I pray this stranger’s usual let him fit into his world

  better than I fit into mine. The bartender’s waiting,

  a wall of bottles holiday bright behind her. The usual?

  she says again. I nod and walk out of the bar

  into this stranger’s land where a lake as large as the sea

  is drying up.

  After April

  She spent the whole first weekend in the dust,

  rummaging through clutter. Animal,

  she’d say to empty rooms or to the mirror

  as she passed. Beer cans and cigarette scars,

  scraps of food and flies. She couldn’t explain

  the way some people lived. Memorial

  cards and flowers came. Memorial

  Day passed. The yard urned brown as dust

  by Independence Day. She could explain

  her sadness when she lost an animal,

  her grief when surgeons left a puckered scar

  in place of secret parts. And even mirrors

  she found she could forgive—it wasn’t mirrors

  that tore her life. St. Jude Memorial

  Gardens. Machines that turned the sod to scar.

  a few brief words, some prayers to ash and dust.

  That was the place that made her animal

  softness hard to bear. And who would explain

  how tears can burn as well as freeze, explain

  there’d be no toothpaste-spattered mirror,

  no piss-stained floor, no reek of animal?

  He won’t come back. Those words memorial

  enough when she knew they weren’t true. Now dust