Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013 Read online

  had settled everywhere. She felt it scar

  the house the way asbestos fibers scar

  the lungs. All dust. All ash. She could explain

  his leavings until he left this dust

  behind and disappeared out of the mirror

  of her life, left rubbish as memorial

  of what they had. She mutters Animal

  today—not him, but every animal—

  and stubs out cigarettes to leave a scar

  on desks, buffets and chairs. Memorial

  beer bottles and cans sit for days. Explain?

  What explanation can satisfy the mirror?

  What explanation cuts a path through dust?

  She is an animal who can’t explain

  new skin, new scars, or how the mirror

  weeps in memorial, reflecting dust.

  Alucard

  In the black and white universe

  of 1943, any bad actor could hide

  himself just by spelling his name

  backward. In this way the son

  of Dracula became Count Alucard

  and no one was any the wiser.

  In brains cursed by the love of

  wordplay, a verb like lives becomes

  nouns like Elvis or evils.

  One of the evils of the Universal plan:

  that the undead’s sperm

  could vampirize an egg.

  The Son of the Man of 1000 Faces,

  Lon Chaney, Jr., ill-suited in a tux—

  and what kind of vampire

  wears a moustache?—tell tale

  droplets, a crimson confession.

  Black and white logic: we see no blood.

  We’ve seen plenty of blood in our day,

  Stillbirth. Miscarriage.

  Yet Dracula / Alucard . . .

  What bride would ever provide

  the ovum and the path

  to let such palindromic birth proceed?

  Late fetal DNA-land—

  was it a bat I saw?

  Dad,

  don’t nod.

  Devil never even lived.

  Cigar? Toss it in a can. It’s so tragic.

  Maybe that other undead son

  was in on the joke when he said

  The last shall be first and the first shall be last.

  What kind of god—what kind of dog indeed—

  grants the devil a son and drives stakes

  through hearts like these?

  On the Battlements

  There’s a photo of a young girl and a man

  on a fortress top in Old San Juan.

  The meek clouds, the placid blue sky

  seem like lies in the aftermath of storms—

  las tormentas—that rocked them all the night before.

  The sea is calm and picture-perfect,

  the picture itself a perfect kind of lie.

  You see a father and a daughter

  on the battlements of the old Spanish fort.

  The fort is photogenic, a tranquil postcard ruin

  of conquistadores’ might. The father’s pose is casual,

  grinning in the shadow of his cap.

  The daugher’s face is pinched,

  almost smiling in the sun.

  What you don’t see is

  the woman’s hands trembling on the camera,

  the daughter fleeing after the shutter’s click,

  screaming I’m scared, Daddy, I’m scared,

  the father’s face contorting, shouting

  Come back here right now.

  You don’t see the blood stains

  washed by centuries of storms,

  dark clouds in the distance,

  las tormentas yet to come.

  Frederick L. Shiels

  Driving Past the Oliver House

  One day late in 1966 in quiet Hattiesburg,

  Phillip Oliver, nineteen, shot

  his step-mother four times

  in the face and chest with a ten-gauge,

  Drove what was left of her

  in the back of the family’s Ford pick-up

  out to an empty lot

  on the edge of town,

  Unloaded her and emptied

  a five gallon can of gasoline

  on her and dropped a whole blazing box

  of Ohio blue-tip kitchen matches

  down on her and

  backed away quickly.

  He then drove to the police station

  downtown and told everything. That’s

  how the newspaper reported it, at least,

  that’s how I recall it.

  Funny thing though,

  it was also reported that

  friendly Phillip, cutting lawns and

  doing odd-jobs, just out of high school,

  Said he “didn’t mind the lady,”

  they had argued some that particular morning.

  “His father had remarried a little quickly,” he thought—“maybe,”

  and that was that,

  or so, I remember.

  In any event, driving by what, for many years,

  was the “Oliver Place,” a non-descript brick Ranch

  at Adeline Street and Twentieth Avenue,

  and not favored by realtors,

  was never the same.

  Star Birth of the Word ULASSA

  Just now, May 23, 2013, I have in my conceit

  created a brand new word, Ulassa,

  at 8:05 AM. As I write,

  Ulassa is like an infant star that burns white hot hydrogen and

  joins—who knows—988,000 English words or more,

  As a new birthed star joins our known universe of—who knows—

  22 septillion other stars,

  give or take a few quadrillion,

  150 billion galaxies

  150 billion stars

  Do the math humbly,

  Ulassa—

  The Oxford English Dictionary will say it means

  “the short sense of escape we can experience,

  when something really bad has happened”,

  like, a childsister has gone missing or

  we hear we may lose a foot from frostbite,

  so in those short escapes from ongoing pain,

  We get will get ulassa,

  from meditation or the bottom of

  a rum cola—

  or the red coals

  of a summer campfire,

  the molecules of carbon

  drinking oxygen.

  Ulassa in the dictionaries,

  will have no real etymology

  for a while,

  Having first breathed air only

  on this morning of

  May 23, 2013,

  Ulassa will enter poems

  and maybe yoga classes,

  will become a cocktail and

  an expensive perfume, eventually

  a breed of cat, or surely the

  name of a racehorse,

  even a minor crater on

  the surface of the moon,

  Ulassa will live for four hundred years.

  104 languages, give or take,

  will borrow and ingest it,

  Before it burns out like a star or “odd bodkin”

  from Shakespeare, just remember,

  It started Here, on this day.

  Morningwriting

  8:59 a.m. I know I need a poem’

  so, fountain pen and pad at the ready

  sitting slantwise view

  on our tiny back deck

  the morninglit green curve of my tall cinnamon fern

  bold, bright, near-yellow the way

  the sun insinuates itself on it

  weaving through upward layers

  of east facing trees

  that let light shimmer this frond poised

  as if it were a ballerina highlighted onstage

  the hanging basket of mauve miniature petunias just above

  almost obscure, that sun does not yet favor
them

  their moment on the stage will come soon enough.

  And now I’m ready to think about that poem.

  Dedication

  She breathed deeply, then wrote:

  “This book

  would not have been possible,

  without both my slyness

  and fortitude,

  in evading the distractions of

  my husband’s badgering, drinking and

  threatened suicide attempts,

  and my children’s sweetly

  relentless neediness.

  Candles and Cathedrals

  The many Notre Dames of France blazed

  with candle constellations

  nine hundred years ago but

  that’s just the start of it these

  chiseled mountains rose from

  Rouen, Chartres, and all over north France

  Because candlemakers existed,

  construction went into the summer nights

  even if the project took two hundred years

  Because carters, joiners, stone-masons, glaziers,

  had to build, to move

  Because butchers and greengrocers

  had to feed the builders and movers

  Because musicians, singers could not wait the decades out

  to send their polyphonies not just up to God, but

  to these early hardhats and townsfolk,

  dragooned farmers working,

  yes even by candlelight, but

  That’s just the start of it, we do forget

  that string quartets, Erasmus, Luther, Dante,

  lacemakers, servants delivering night toddies

  and seeing to chamber pots—

  this all was not squared away

  before the sun went down, so

  those slender tallow cylinders

  topped by redyellow flames over

  tiny halfmoons of blue heat

  pushed civilization forward,

  Not waiting for gaslights or Edison.

  Richard Sime

  Berry Eater

  He wears a belt around each leg crotch-high,

  red hardhat, aviator glasses, chain saw on his hip

  as he leaps from branch to branch, lightly

  alighting from time to time to adjust his ropes,

  when he’ll grab a handful of those berries.

  Mulberries—we’ve spent too many summers

  slogging through the purple paste that coats

  the stone stairs and iron railings of our

  Villa Charlotte Bronte, a confection

  of buildings linked by walkways and arched

  bridges along the Bronx bank of the Hudson.

  The berries come from trees, large trees that

  grow like weeds, raining sidewalks with fruit

  from June until September, but even so

  I’ve never tasted so much as one berry.

  “Are they all that good?” my neighbor

  hollers up to the man as his agitated

  husband, who’d just as soon have the tree

  cut down, pokes his head out then disappears.

  The man pops another berry in his mouth

  while he scans the tree for more ripe limbs

  to hack off and send crashing to the ground.

  Wiping juice from his mouth with the broad

  back of his sun-stained hand, he yells down,

  “They’re the sweetest when you’re on top, man,”

  then pins another victim in his thighs, and saws.

  Bitch

  His ear is pressed to his Muse’s

  breast, but she coughs up nothing—

  a few yelps of love from a dog

  (his dog, female, a bitch they’d say,

  yet gentle), love based on scraps

  from the table, a dry place

  to sleep, someone to untangle

  burrs from her coat, to sit still

  as she tongues toes, nose, any limb

  unclothed—all just dog data, no

  heart. To his Muse he says “Leave,”

  then glances down: The dog sits

  at his feet, marmoreal, front legs

  stiff, back legs askew, belly bare

  and hot, just as he remembers.

  A full hour he stares. Not one

  muscle moves. No, he won’t write.

  Opera Night

  They’re all like that: Ruse, mystery

  morals. I came to, pieces of it still

  in mind, Così something or other,

  but the rest—the front, the exterior,

  the unflappable—they’re all here.

  I’d say, Il faut renoncer chaque syllabe

  if I spoke French. Why not Prussian?

  Why not sub-American? Whatever,

  evasion is essence. Nothing matters.

  Everything’s inconsequential, but . . .

  All in its place. Your underwear’s

  in the laundry room. The ensembles

  are breezy and serene. An affectation?

  Mediterranean deceit? Turn rightside

  out before dying. Lower the boom.

  Dog Day

  My bed a raft. She’s on it with me and her lamb,

  black ears, dead squeaker. I’m resting my

  fatigue. Damaged joints, inflammatory.

  Used to be, I’d hang off to the floor, her lair

  when she was underneath, anchor myself

  with one hand, scratch her belly with the other.

  Now I grab the lamb and launch it

  across the room, out the door,

  though she’ll return it. Such gentle jaws.

  The bed’s head is elevated, two bricks

  prone, a plank across, head

  over heels: For my hiatal hernia, when too much

  food is stuck inside. Today I’m full

  of words, my friend’s words, her folk voice.

  “Feelings, bind,” she writes. A wish,

  a prayer, an invocation. Her words draw my thoughts

  to the floor, the tilt of bed, the smell of stain

  and wood down there, the cool, the cheerful shine.

  It’s been hot. Close, we used to say,

  my room a stale, unventilated

  sigh. Even the living room, double-height,

  banks of windows on the Hudson.

  Down there I saw a dog, my neighbor’s

  red and white Brittany, focused, focused

  on his ball, panting, pacing, tongue lolling off his teeth

  to the ground. She rose and limped to him,

  lofted the ball again toward the river.

  Mine’s female. (Ah, these females.)

  Once she crawled into my lap when I was filled with

  I don’t know what. Satan? She there

  on my lap with this fury inside. We sat still,

  the two of us, a kind of draining. Now her chin rests

  on the lamb’s white chest. Only the squeaker’s

  dead: The lamb’s alive. Five summers in her jaws,

  the quiet chewing, peaceful

  and delicate, a song.

  Jennifer Popoli

  Generations in a wine dark sea

  Instead of fresh herbs, what I rub on my skin now

  is nettles, I cry out and delight in the dramatic effect

  The adolescent is standing before me, is not me,

  his eyelashes pretty now he leaves them alone,

  He’s moved on to finger cracking. He ought to understand,

  the age is right, is it not? to say to him, let’s talk now

  about travelling cumulous clouds, moon riding day sky,

  hair falling in dust, cats brushing legs like foliage,

  tropical night breeze, whirling, spinning maple seeds,

  crunchy autumn leaves and one small lone blue feather, reappearing

  in unpredictable places, pressed between the pages of books like forgotten

  euros, Let’s talk about damp yellow g
rass recently nourished, slumber, lotus-

  eaters and opiates, acres of coconut trees, Let’s talk about eyes sharp as a puma’s

  and moving limbs more precise in the darkness, a lifted curse, a shattering vase,

  a slice of papaya, a still dark brown face, flapping through a sanctimonious night

  and memories of many lives, let’s talk about dirty quartz and the smell of

  seashells while washing hair, flecked eyes that sparkled with a spice like

  pimento, lips wet with fruit, the scythe that hacked the clouds into streaks of

  plasma, the plotless story, the sequential paintings, your ticking hand that ruled

  time and weather, the world splitting into a series of images, all times and

  possibilities, in one unique frame, the ruffling of hair and heart possession that

  echoes across the aeons.

  Lost fairy

  They poisoned the Argentinian trumpet vine

  because it got too comfortable, sprouted everywhere

  like a weed, and replaced it with some other flowering vine

  more white and well-mannered. I suspected them of racism

  but it was their house. When I moved here, the flowers seemed

  to be in my face like the advertising, although the convolvulus always

  tended to remind me of Borges. No more discreet kangaroo paws, subtle

  Geraldton wax, bedraggled wattle. Here the bedraggled wattle is me, amongst

  those other belles, the saucy snapdragons, self-sufficient succulents, ubiquitous

  petunias, spicy nasturtiums, whose population seems to dwindle in every suburb

  where we live, along with the European dandelions, washed of residual herbicides and thrown in our soups. We are foragers, tribespeople

  with little ones strapped to my front and my back, a stolen cumquat

  or rosemary leaf perpetually between my teeth. How did dente di leone

  translate to dandelion? The plant has teeth, it’s rough, roughage.

  I slurp the nectars, check the parallel lines on the leaves before

  chewing native sarsaparilla, tear my sandalled feet to ribbons

  in the sparse strips of bush between train stations, teach the kids

  to hoist themselves over a tall rock. We run away here when we can’t stand

  being at home. I pretend for a moment that I haven’t been domesticated,

  pretend for one afternoon, I still have big, purple, feathery wings.

  Other lives

  A staircase leading to a new continent

  The smell of a man’s body, never known

  but so vividly imagined

  Practising the words “I love you”