Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013 Read online

  is blank, not ruled, and that paper—its white narcotic

  emptiness—takes me back to the soft-spoken clerk.

  Lisa DeSiro

  Babel Tree

  You’ve heard of the tower. Well

  I tell you, on my street

  is an evergreen that speaks

  as if in tongues, sounding

  like a mob of children

  crammed inside a classroom.

  Who would think a tree could have

  so much to say? St. Francis-

  beneath-the-boughs,

  presiding over his fellow

  statues—cats and raccoons—

  steadfast behind their fence,

  provides a captive audience

  for the prim trimmed evergreen

  whenever it’s infested

  with that unseen sounding

  like a multitude of tiny chimes

  rung inside a church.

  Truth is, this tree serves

  as a container, a mouthpiece

  for common sparrows

  who “when interrupted by

  suspicious noise”

  shut up.

  I tell you, they do. And who wouldn’t

  be surprised

  if a tree fell

  silent

  the moment he or she

  walked by?

  Felled

  The hard-hatted cutter climbs with rope and chainsaw,

  lopping off branches like hunks of hair

  from the top down, until only a shorn torso remains.

  Back on the ground, he circles the trunk,

  incising. The engine whines.

  Two other men stand at a distance holding cables

  tied to the highest stump. A third holds up a camera.

  When the saw pauses, they gather

  together, leaning back,

  pulling, arms taut. Takes all their strength

  to make the elm tip, then topple. A colossal thud

  shakes the whole house.

  Spectators on my neighbor’s porch applaud.

  They don’t see me at my window

  trying not to cry because this one tree—

  that seemed alive while dying, that stayed standing tall as a tower—

  has, in less than an hour, been rendered

  horizontal and now

  lies helpless as a human body.

  The black birds never minded

  it was leafless every season.

  But a petition circulated.

  I signed.

  Bereft

  That we won’t go this year to Payne’s to buy

  Boston ferns (three for the backyard gazebo,

  one for the front porch) and a few red geraniums

  and a single green spike (for the terra cotta pot

  by the driveway); that we won’t open the shed,

  pull out the muddied gloves and the wheelbarrow,

  weed on our knees as if in prayer; that even though

  we will never again share these rituals, spring will

  return nonetheless and the earth will continue

  undeterred, giving her garden the usual flowers:

  daffodils, peonies, roses; that the black-eyed susans

  went crazy during summer, as if nourished by her

  ashes, my father tells me, months later, still

  amazed; that she isn’t here to see.

  Greetings from Paradise

  Here, breeze-rustled palm trees make a sound almost like the sound

  of brown oak leaves clinging to branches tousled by March

  back home where winter lingers.

  Here, it’s already spring. Grass greening the ground. Full-blown

  blossoming, purple roadside weeds, fuchsia, jacaranda,

  jasmine scent all over the island.

  Here, some flowers look like birds and some birds look like flowers.

  Even the plainclothes crows strut their stuff with sunlit flare,

  glossy as polished patent leather.

  Here, a loon joins me for lunch on the bungalow patio. Seagulls

  keep me company at the beach while I stroll by the water’s

  edge, my feet sinking in sand.

  Here. Read this. Then send me a message if you’re there, if

  it’s truly a garden, if they’ve given you petals for wings.

  Tell me what it’s like.

  Going to Visit the Dead

  I know you’re here somewhere, intact.

  God has given you back

  what you lost—

  your breast, your ovaries,

  your vision, your weight, your energy—

  everything. Almost. Lost

  is also what we seem to be:

  me in the passenger seat,

  my Bulgarian friend in the back seat,

  her mother driving.

  The landscape expands around us

  wide and flat. We pass

  an orchard adorned with martenitsa:

  red-and-white tassels worn during March

  for good fortune, good health;

  tied to trees on the first day of April

  as a sign of winter ending,

  spring beginning. I know

  you’re waiting. I’m afraid

  we won’t find the way. I can’t speak

  their language, yet I understand

  when my friend says

  Sunlight feathers in your hair

  and her mother agrees—yes, wings—

  Michael Fleming

  Reptiles

  Evolve? We’ll evolve when we want to. We’re

  reptiles—we decide. No mother love, no

  promises—that’s the rule. Don’t get too near,

  don’t think too hard, don’t think, don’t think we owe

  you anything, cause we don’t. Where were you

  when we hatched? God, you should have seen our shells,

  one perfect world piled on another, blue

  shells, green—it’s true: we made our way. To hell

  with your nipples, your kindergartens, your

  wedding bells, your rings—oh, we’ll show you rings.

  We’ll show you claws—remember those? The more

  you hurt, the more we—nothing. Go ahead, sing—

  we don’t do music, don’t do memories—

  why, when we’ll outlast you? We don’t do fair/

  unfair. And we don’t do thermostasis.

  Go ahead, cry—we’re reptiles, we don’t care.

  Adventures

  Be admonished: of making many books there is no end.

  —Ecclesiastes 12:12

  For making books, you need to have a certain

  appetite, a certain longing, you

  need to look, to be quietly alert,

  not quite earthbound. It helps to have a few

  ideas, to be sure, and to know the rules,

  exceptions to the rules, movement of tides.

  So many books! But then, so many fools

  adrift without them, mapless. Darkness hides

  from light, muddle fights with meaning,

  illness sleeps with ignorance—it was

  ever thus, and so little time between

  reckonings, just love and books to shield us

  from the rough, mindless elements as we

  set out for adventures on sun-drenched seas.

  for Fannie Safier

  The Importance of Vowels

  Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. . . . In Syriac, the word hur is a feminine plural adjective meaning white, with the word “raisin” understood implicitly . . . not unsullied maidens or houris.

  —Ibn Warraq, The Guardian, January 11, 2002

  The maître d’ is sharply groomed, in tie

  and tails, he greets you warmly, Welcome, sir!

  We’ve been expecting you! And as you eye

  the virgins at
the bar, selecting, certain

  of your righteous consequence, a waiter

  approaches with a bright, blinding smile,

  and on his fingertips, elaborately

  wrought, a silver tray with something piled

  beneath a silken napkin. Sir! he says,

  plucking off the silk, Before we begin,

  your seventy-two raisins! Let us praise

  Him! With that, he vanishes in a thin

  blue wisp of smoke. The virgins are gone. You

  invoke your god. A low voice answers, Who?

  Traffic Stop

  It’s just these glasses, officer, I swear—

  they’re progressives and I’m still getting used

  to peering through this tube of startling clarity

  amidst a blur of color—blues

  like this undersea mountaintop, these reds

  like bloody marys, these greens like Vermont,

  like forests suddenly summer, like dead

  presidents, like love—out here where we want

  to be beautiful, here where it’s just me,

  you, and the universe, a voice to say

  that all is well, everything’s fine, you’re free

  to go now, ma’am—you can be on your way.

  Hot Cherry Pie

  I always stopped there, the Madonna Inn—

  that pink and copper shrine on the way down

  the missionary coast, along the thin

  thread of mother church’s outpost towns—

  San Francisco, San José, Santa Clara—

  rosary beads a day’s walk from one

  to the next, or now an hour by car

  but still with sacramental purpose. None

  of that franchise crap for me. I pulled off

  the freeway, San Luís Obispo, hungry

  for hot cherry pie and hot black coffee,

  body and blood for a soul wrung

  out and wasted. Then that one time I spotted

  those kids—a boy at the men’s room door,

  poised to push, his eyes fixed on a girl not

  quite his age, maybe a bit older, or

  a little further along in the game,

  obviously the one in charge, standing there

  at the women’s, stock still until she aimed

  her eyes at his and whispered: Go. I dare

  you. With that they were lost for good behind

  those doors—or for better or for worse, who

  the hell knows? I paid up and continued my

  mission to Santa Bárbara—to you.

  for Ellen R.

  Michael Berkowitz

  As regards the tattoo on your wrist

  It’s not that I don’t believe you. Rather,

  call it some natural curiosity,

  born of a childhood’s nights

  spent beneath the starry curve

  of the sky, that makes me

  want to discover

  for myself

  whether Orion really is

  the only constellation

  traced out on the curves

  of your skin.

  Ad Cassandram

  Let them come with their black

  ships, princess. Let them come

  and let them take back

  what is theirs. You are not theirs.

  I will love you and I will protect you.

  Let them come with their black

  horses. Let them harness them

  to their chariots, let them rein

  in their flaring nostrils

  with bit and bridle.

  Let them ring the dust

  around our city

  with the tracks of our dead.

  It will take more than horses

  to bring down our walls.

  I will love you and I will protect you,

  my beloved. My beloved,

  beloved also of the deathless

  gods. Most beloved by the most

  deathless: master of the strings

  of bow and lyre.

  •

  Cursing the aim of another’s arrows, he cursed your own aim: that it might always be true, but never find its mark.

  •

  Let them cover the sky

  with a dozen dozen arrows.

  I will love you no less

  among the shadows. But

  do not put your trust in shadows

  and in dreams only you can see.

  There is no one else who will.

  I will love you and I will protect you.

  I will love you but I will not believe you.

  Begotten of the Spleen

  And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone;

  I will make him an help meet for him.

  —Genesis 2:18

  And so God reached past Adam’s ribs,

  and from his spleen was woman born.

  And gone from Adam was the melancholy

  that the Lord had seen in him,

  but for Eve there was nothing

  except that same sadness.

  There is a way in which you look

  off into the distance

  that weighs against the lightness

  of the heart behind my ribs

  in your presence, that I can describe

  only as the sinking of swallows,

  who do not remember this

  morning’s sunrise, into evening.

  villanelegy

  well

           (i said

  hell

  he fell

             on his head (she said

  it’s just as well

                             too soon to tell

  (they said

  what sent him off to hell

                                              or heaven (hell

  we said

                 he liked his drink too well

  and so he fell

                          (they said

                                            hell

  there’s nothing more to tell

  so toast to heaven for the dead

  and for the living, well,

                                            hell

  Julie

  When you think

  about it, if you

  think about it,

  what did us

  in wasn’t your

  anger or my

  apathy, but that

  if in the second line.

  Michael Brokos

  Landscape without Rest

  I step aside as a boy pedals

  fast downhill, our path blazed

  by cedar chips, his father

  ambling at the crest, and fret

  against the grip of my own

  vectors, the straight lines, strict

  dimensions, days that race by

  too easily for the neighbors,

  too scrutinized for me; but don’t

  we make a fine match, strike

  a spry exchange, don’t we

  light a fused flame, how they

  keep the tires of their bicycles

  inflated, and how no one ever

  showed me how to ride, and

  the way these widening lanes

  make way for flashes of rubber,

  flares of cottonwood leaves.

  Singing Stone

  —After César Vallejo

       My cigarette proves suitable

  since I, too, am burning to a stub. How dizzying,

  how carcinogenic to wield the world between

  my own fingers, my own star going down in smoke

  for a few moments

  until the ember begins to flicker, and the world

  takes its last drag,

  s
tooping down to put me out in an empty furrow.

       Lying in an open grave,

  through the abiding veins of light I can see

  my back story, my body

  carried away in a trade wind racing across

  blotted out mountains

  made of stars

  that Paris keeps turning towards itself,

  stars that turn over thousands of times more

  of their own accord

  in the Andes, Trujillo, Santiago de Chuco,

  caves collapsing

  and my villagers’ bones asleep in their red hats.

       Downpour descends on me

  as forecasted, my voice dry from trying to greet

  the raw and forgotten

  in music not precisely music, only the ashy

  expectorations of panpipes and corequenques.

  Hunting Season

  Out in the clearing, the cold

  season’s coming on, a walled fog

  of lights and my bones

  courting evasion, coerced

  into stealing away

  from a public suddenly

  steadfast on staking me out.

  I’m sticking close

  inside the high embankment

  of the river, but they will

  find me, and take aim.

  The facility with which

  I shift through the seeming

  boundlessness of the forest

  appears to play in my favor

  but in effect forms

  the groundwork of the game, of my

  bulls-eye. I sense their scopes

  sighting in on me when I bend

  down to drink from

  the smallest streams.

  The sky letting go of its

  last warmth, limbs their leaves,

  storm clouds leaning into

  trees—the terrain

  betrays me in the same

  distention that my instincts,

  being so sought after,

  forget how to seek escape.

  Wingbeat

  Not the procedure of inverted perch;

                            not the flitting at the feeder

  brimming with sugar water

               dyed bright red. Not the reverence