Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013 Page 2
When this plane goes down, I want to be sitting beside you,
your hand atop mine, my hand resting on your thigh
when the air cracks in two and the oxygen masks drop
and the attendants float around the cabin like lost balloons,
the ones without enough helium to lose themselves in the sky,
when all the screams become one scream and we push it
behind us and start to fall, your hand atop mine, my hand
resting on your thigh, toward the trifling patchwork of farm
and park and baseball diamond, or toward the circuit board
of a city shivering. We can fall toward the men and women
who live as though the world is already burning, the ones
whom god has called to rise from this scabrous plain, or the ones
who sell their brothers and sisters daily to the mulch pile
for another chance at glory, no, not even glory, for another
chance to rule and power is the only rule, power grinds
mountains into dust and dust into fuel and fuel is the beast
that carries them into the fortress, locks the gates and pays
the mercenaries to walk the walls, it tints their sunglasses
and wraps the wires they stick in their ears. Or we could fall
toward the center of the ideogram, the heart of the advertisement,
the mainspring, the all-seeing eye, and pray for absorption
so, rather than die, we might multiply and occupy the other world,
the one we make with our bodies in space, the one that floats
up from our bodies like scent rising from a rose, the map
that we carry and share and inscribe together—but that is not
a life, yearning to be another stain on the wine-press, one more
palimpsest lurking on channel 132, 257, 308; instead,
let’s just fall, your hand atop mine, my hand on your thigh,
and look at me so we might live each in the others’ eye,
an infinite recursion of selves and eyes, each smiling the same,
each ringed with hair alive in the wind that strokes the earth.
The Mower Obeys The Covenant
—after Marvell
The grass keeps on growing,
and I keep on mowing,
and then there’s the room where I cry.
The carnivals come
and the cancer creeps up pantlegs
and lovers draw their curtains
and go about their days.
The grass keeps on growing,
and I keep on mowing,
and then there’s the room where I cry.
I work, I follow the covenant;
I am a homeowner and a responsible
digit. If only they knew
how I longed for a sea of blood.
The grass keeps on growing,
and I keep on mowing,
and then there’s the room where I cry.
Instead, the food court.
Instead, I watch the carousel
turning, a galaxy of fiberglass horses
collapsing too slow for the eye.
The grass keeps on growing,
and I keep on mowing,
and goddamn I wish I knew why.
Jonathan Travelstead
Prayer of the K-12
Lord, let me start with one pull,
my bar shuddering in your calloused hand
as you ratchet my disc
to the scream that melts cast iron.
I pass through it, a ghost through rebar.
Chattery teeth, set on the floor and released.
On a house of cards, a tidal wave.
So much you have engineered, Lord.
I beg you let loose my chain
so with my carbide teeth
I can chew through the paper of this world.
My god! let me do what you made me to do,
and growl beneath your trigger finger.
Let me tear this place in two.
Prayer of the Maul
Let me sweep aside a factory wall, Lord,
cinder-blocks preventing passage
to an engine room scrolled in flame.
I am the grunt before thought.
My load is greater than your stamina,
and though I am your simplest machine
if you let yourself love too much
what is inside the mountain
I am sure to burst your colossal heart.
Even in my dreams
I am a juggernaut ready to destroy all things.
I pray only that you heft me
from that place between your shoulders.
Let me be the one chosen.
Jennifer Lowers Warren
Our Daughter’s Skin
He left for Tikrit when milk,
not language, was pooling
in our daughter’s mouth.
A drowsy suckle.
He is prepared for saw-scaled vipers
and scorpions curled
in the toe of his no-shine boots
but not her dialogue.
She is sand skinned
and camel haired,
everything glistening.
He’s seen the underside of baby shine,
dark grit, bodies turned inside out.
He knows her skin is just casing
and beautiful features are
just pieces, ground sausage.
Tightly packed.
Easily scattered.
God’s Hips
I have hips like God’s.
Ample and unbroken,
a thick sway.
Children slopped out of me
and into cupped hands like
yolks slipping, shell to bowl.
God gave birth too,
oceans and continents crowning.
Stars fell from his strained divinity
like tears. He sweated light.
Thighs spread. Elasticity tested.
Omnipotence intact.
Operation Iraqi Freedom
After an IED they search
and wager,
comparing body parts,
one against the other.
My husband finds the
biggest chunk—
five hundred for the face.
They favor circumference
over length.
Eve Hitchhikes in Hawaii
I pick her up at Haleiwa Beach Park,
home to the North Shore hungry.
She carries a plastic bag
full of strawberry guavas
and three cigarettes,
half smoked and stubbed for later.
A conservationist.
She reaches into the backseat,
touches the inside of my daughter’s ankle,
legs turned out in sleep.
She whispers,
“Soft like Abel, Cain’s toes.”
We talk about spearfishing
for Ulua and trapping the feral pigs
that rut along the ridgeline trails.
She leans deep into the floorboard
and pulls her shirt up,
showing me her coral scarred back.
Then rising with a smile,
crooks both arms against her body
as if still nursing
both brothers.
Eve’s Response
“Well I met him under the tree while Adam was wallowing
in his dreams of God and the grass.
I was bored, Adam was oblivious and He was handsome.
He tongued my innocence.
I was an eternity too young to know the difference
between the systematic tick on the clitoris
and the slow tap of someone knocking
against the wall of my heart.
I sucked syrupy mangos from his fingers and went back to Adam
with th
e juice still on my lips.”
Jeff Burt
The Mapmaker’s Legend
Life cannot be limited to the Compass Rose
And the scale and the symbols of demarcation,
hues presenting heights of apprehension
and lows of depression, places to stop
and get off if only to wheeze, appreciate.
All the careful study of the distances and graphs
will not prepare one to travel, and cannot describe
the years spent dwelling in a single dot
desperate and willing to depart.
The sun’s face in the center of the Rose
will not shine in the valleys of loneliness
you will run your fingers through
like an imaginary woman’s long hair, who sat before you
and was gone before you could see her face.
Only the symbol for railroad tracks will be true,
the lines with crosses that look like stitches
that run up and down over all terrains
seemingly holding the map together,
closing wounds and scratches and leaving scars
of remembrance, your head cracked open
by an inadvertent elbow at school,
the glass imbedded in your palm
when you smashed the pane hearing cancer,
the bypass for your heart broken once too often
that meant you no longer wanted to love,
the second set of stitches for your heart
because you couldn’t live without loving.
Tribute for Phyllis
She punished the laundry, scraping the jeans of her boys
knuckles white against the washboard
flapped and snapped dishtowels and rags like a randy bully
in the high school shower against the butt of the basin
and clipped the clothespins with revenge to hold the sheets
that had been bleached and softened and breeze dried.
She could make shirts weep and undershirts cry
and boxers mourn as they pinned on the line.
Disease flew from her ferocity, and comfort came
when she’d hold the swaddling clothes to her nose
and sniff and smile as if something holy had taken place.
When she walked down the river the rocks remembered
and the riprap still murmurs her praise.
History
The Greeks would jump and dance about
mawkish-faced and freaks afoot,
and Prospero the Roman had an ugly face
scourged by smallpox and missing an ear,
so was a natural for amusement between acts of play.
But Prospero the Roman had seen an egret
from the Nile stand on one leg peering into water
then slowly trade its balance to the other,
so in his pantomime he played the bird
to which crowds booed and threw things at him,
but several asked for a private performance,
so he followed storks and cranes in landings
and takings off, the slow circling head of a female swan
as she knew her young had died,
the nightingale with upturned throat
that sang until its voice exhausted,
and when his time for performance came
he mimicked the storks and cranes,
and did the egret to murmurs of appreciation,
and the crowd was pleased, left gasping,
and for his finale performed the nightingale in song
by stretching his neck upwards as if to God
with his arms like wings forcing out the last of his breath,
then the circling of the swan
with his body, and left the audience hushed.
When he performed before the Emperor,
with executions and maulings of slaves on the fare,
he was whisked off stage after the act
and banished for life to a quarry outside of Rome.
But a thousand girls had the seen the mime,
and when brushing hair they would stand on one foot,
when walking down stairs would hold out their arms
as if cranes landing in a field, when imagining a lover
would strain their neck and appeal to God,
and when unrequited, slowly circle to the ground.
The Lost Pilot
Nestled in the far distances
my imagination had roamed
in the nether land,
still I am near to and nearing my home.
Frieda, my grandmotherly neighbor,
waves me in, the lost pilot
returning from the army air corps.
Yet after the fantasy recedes
its repercussions linger:
I step over a fence
and it rapidly disappears,
the steadily burgeoning sun
wades through formidable leaves,
air widens, and twilight shadows
fly over drought-shrivelled grass.
The paint on a primitive church shines
pudgy and white,
billowing like a parachute.
I smile, listen:
the wood is not laughing.
In the dry hot wind button-black susans
tango and rock,
dust waltzes
to unheard-of music, Frieda’s wave
a metronome of my heart.
With each thing both fanciful
and real, how flat the imagining man,
a solid body with spirit
which cannot by any artifice
detach itself from flesh
and vanish in a vaporous ascension
to the promise of joy.
How, when we can believe
all the feather, bone
and beak of our existence was born
of a central egg, can
we not set the mind skyward,
free in its flight?
Like gravity the daily routines
pull down magnificent creations,
and it is one continuum
between fancy and fact,
the two ends of the pole
with which we balance
unaware of any safety net,
the tipping of one end too high
sure to flip us off the wire.
So I feel: it is hot.
While there are no limits
to the distance a dream may take,
the clock of my body yanks
me back to the small seam
of time I continually try
to rip—a far journey
in a short span.
And though reentry
to the war-torn fortress
of a common world is loss,
an unshielded burning,
the greater intensity
of rapid associations
reduced to a linear conversation,
it is the condensation,
the subsequent recalling
of the imagined event
which makes the fantasy desired.
The ether I once was
vanishes, and I reappear
glistening and whole, joy
rising to the surface of my face,
death and logic submersing
to become a sediment
from which I can only toss and swell above.
I am liquid, a lake,
and the trickle from the hose
is a river replenishing
my arid head,
and a beer is the storm
dousing the kiln
of my thinning throat.
Three Threads
In Mason jars the machine, the wood, the metal,
the button-head, slotted, crossed,
whorled, knurled, tipped
to explode, bound,
locked, washered, starred, bolted, nutted,
used, saved, reclaimed from rust.
All these threads, mechanical stitches,
filling punched, drilled holes
to keep the world from falling apart.
I have not found a fastener
for the hole since you’ve departed.
Patricia Percival
Giving in to What If
after Steve Scafidi
If I only wrote about what I knew, as once
Plath wrote of moons, mannequins,
and the grievous words of yew and elm—
I would tell of the last call my brother made,
when he said he wouldn’t come for Christmas
and I tried to change his mind, and he insisted,
and I had the flu and didn’t, maybe, hear
the tone of his voice. Or I’d only write
of diapers, cakes baked, and failed tomatoes,
or of fees simple, encumbered and joint.
But I prefer to imagine life
in the animal kingdom, where,
as I understand it,
they get by without what ifs.
Here I can drift, a sea turtle
on ocean currents, weightless
from Thailand to the Golden Isles,
and not once consider
the half-ton of gravity
I bore across the sand
at nesting time, and will again,
when the moon draws me ashore.
As a crane I’m blessed with a mate
who chose me for life and is happy,
who doesn’t brood about the crane
one creek over, the one with plumper knobs
on her knees, knobs he’d like
the other males to envy
during annual migration.
I am a crow, immersed
in the collective mind of the murder,
and when the phone rings
someone, at least one of us,
has heard that tone of voice before,
remembers the up-shot, and tells me,
your brother needs help.
Go now.
Waiting for the Good Humor Man
Houston, 1962
Prone beneath mimosas,
the picture-book God
of rules and hellfire
deferred to the grace
of the natural world.
Pompons rained on me,
already dazed
by the scent of heat
rising off asphalt,
the smell visible
as a mirage
in a foreign legion film.
And though I don’t believe
my catechism, as I did then,
I’ve kept my eyes open to visions,
mild thunderbolts which saints
might call the voice of God:
After a storm, starfish
littered the beach at Sanibel,
hundreds of six-armed bodies
expelled from the deep.
And fifty years ago, I saw