Sixfold Poetry Winter 2016 Read online

  And charmed a way for her people

  Out of holocaust

  The Jews weren’t annihilated in Persia after all

  She thwarted schemes; they didn’t perish

  But their defense went on the offensive

  And the almost-annihilated became annihilators

  Esther spoke up again and

  (Please God, in time to stop the wheel

  Of blood feud revenge cycles from turning)

  Decreed instead another party

  To turn mourning into dancing

  Replacing war with a holiday

  (Teaching us not to fight for salvation

  But to dance for it)

  Esther I think had a wicked sense of humor

  A gallows humor

  And God seems to have a gallows humor too

  Giving us the gift of just one certainty—

  A certain death—

  Then spinning a Resurrection tale

  We are invited to believe

  In a scarlet thread and a golden dawn

  Thorny crown and crystal throne

  Bloodied crossbeam and rolled away stone

  God is Absurd

  Which is perhaps why I—the only way I could—

  Believe

  Only in a dancing Jester God, a Jokester with the Perfect Prank:

  To love us, each and every fucking one

  Alleluia

  Paul W. Child

  World Diverted

  Earth takes us in awhile as transient guests;

  we live by habit, which we must unlearn.

       Anna Akhmatova, “There Are Four of Us”

       (translated by Stanley Kunitz)

  The river where the Sioux boys dashed the carp

  upon the rocks because they were trash fish

  was dammed up and diverted.

  The boys I feared and envied

  not because they were Sioux boys

  but because they skipped school,

  fishing irreligious all day long,

  are dead in gunfights now, parched with thirst from type 2 diabetes,

  cirrhotic in the penitentiary,

  reading Zane Grey pulp with yellowing eyes.

  The house I lived in as a boy

  in the South Dakota town of trains and steeples,

  came down in a maul of clattering hammers,

  clutter of grey plaster, laths, and horsehair,

  a house so broken by the generations

  of Irish bully-boys and coal-haired shy colleens long-dead

  I doubt that anyone even noticed

  the hole I bored with penknife in the bedroom wall

  to watch my virgin aunt Peg in the bath

  while the world took turns,

  a peephole moon cast shadows on the snow,

  and icicles wept out their days upon the muntins.

  The cathedral school in which I learned my Latin and long lessons,

  timid as a chapel mouse beneath the towering eyes

  of black and frowning nuns,

  closed when the young priest

  with the shock of chestnut hair

  whom in my genuflections I tried so hard to please

  but whose eye always narrowed

  on my pretty little brother,

  was sent for some mysterious reason back to Flandreau,

  with the last tall nun on the last day

  when I slammed down the lid

  of the long-suffering wooden desk

  at the last 3:30 bell and raced down to the river

  to watch the Sioux boys dash the heads of carp

  upon the rocks, the shattered orange-pink scales,

  the cloy of fish-slick stones and slip of mucus,

  tangled filament and hooks, sad, broken lips.

  If you look for the old cathedral school, the house, the boys,

  you will not find them where they were

  in their accustomed places in that northern town.

  If you look tonight for the cold winter moon,

  you will not find it where you left it,

  shining on the trainyards and the roofs of rooming houses.

  And if you look for me tomorrow,

  you will not find me who I was.

  The world has unlearned all of its long habits.

  I never was the world’s guest; the world was mine.

  The Fault, Dear Brutus

  The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars

  but in our cells, ghost ships shuttling our wills

  upon the busy enzymatic tides

  to the far outposts of the bone and nerve.

  My cunning and my hatred of smug men,

  that balding, simpering queen of Bithynia

  whom Nicomedes pinned down on his couch,

  a despot lubricate with Asian spittle,

  the great man twittering like a conquering moth,

  were stitched into my chromosomes at birth,

  a hate so great that even as a boy

  I took on Sulla’s brat in fisticuffs

  and would have kicked his shins and blacked his eye

  if our tutor had not separated us.

  And now while we fret idle, driftwood fools,

  this ponce plays pretty at the falling sickness,

  foaming at the mouth, when it’s convenient,

  knowing that a strapping young centurion

  will force his sword between his yellowed dentures

  to keep the prick from biting off his tongue.

  And this is Rome?

  Friend, the things that we might do together,

  I, jackal-headed, dangerous, and you,

  a handsome man born in a wicked world

  where beauty cruelly tyrannizes men;

  I, busy in the history of knives

  while Porcia stabs your palate with her tongue

  and twists her fingers in your glossy curls.

  This temporizing will no longer do,

  for scheming with slack nerve is impotent,

  and beauty has responsibilities.

  Let’s make this despot his own haruspex,

  his final words not et tu Brute but

  my uncoiled entrails tell me that I’ll die

  of daggers here upon the Senate steps.

  (His self-reflections never trawl too deep.)

  I know a vates who is serviceable,

  has ominous dates at hand for any month,

  and falconer for hire who’ll let his birds

  out for a nighttime shrieking. We’ll consult

  the almanacs to find the perfect day

  when the moon blot out the sun in an eclipse;

  the comets, bloody rain, and all the rest

  we can manage easily with lasers.

  Our will will find some willing conduit,

  a scruffy earringed small-town English hack

  who’ll make a shilling on the London stage,

  and if his Cassius is pimply-faced,

  his Brutus snuffling through a crooked septum,

  and if we cringe when they fall clumsily

  upon their wooden swords, at least they play

  at our brave deeds—but only if we act.

  Sure, old kings will still go mad upon the moors

  and drunken porters piss on Scottish doors

  because they do, because they always have,

  but if our fate be stranded in the cells,

  the blackamoor won’t suffocate his bitch,

  those dago teens won’t feel each other up

  and kiss themselves to death in the cold tomb,

  that moping Danish prig will fail to act,

  resort instead to Prozac for his moods.

  So, brother, if you find your will is stalled,

  a trireme stilled in cytoplasmic seas,

  if you don’t have the requisite x-y,

  I know a woman who is man enough

  to make her point by stabbing her own thigh,

  a manic vira
go who understands

  the hate of tyranny cannot be quenched,

  as you must certain find out when she snuffs

  the orange coals of her tongue in your pretty mouth.

  The Muse I Married

  The muse I married, my prophetess and seer,

  who once arrested lightning from the gods,

  now gossips at the fence with Kathy Kuhar;

  sinks to her Slavic ankles in the backyard mud,

  her hair tacked up with clothespins;

  whinnies out I saids, she saids, he saids

  and clucks about the Devlin girl’s behavior.

  The mad, divining bride who shook in fits

  when random gales of gods blew through her,

  now hikes up her skirts at every chance she gets

  and dances to amuse the neighbor girls.

  Oh where is inspiration when the crazed

  Cassandra of North Sawdust Drive

  who stood upon a scaffolding of stars and seas

  and screeched out oracles

  now snores in front of flinty television skies,

  her eyes rolled back like clamshells,

  while I warm coffee from the day before

  and pack the children’s lunchpails?

  Oh where is inspiration when the mad suburban sibyl

  who, frenzied, read the flights of birds,

  hair scratching like barbed wire at the sky,

  now gabbles on and on and on and on

  with recipes for budget-saving chicken,

  bawling halfway up and down our street in self-congratulations,

  giddy with the noise of her own tongue?

  Or have the gods themselves descended

  to shouting out the weather and trifling cures for head lice,

  to recipes for scouring sinks and haggling over prices,

  to meddling with a pretty girl’s fall from grace?

  The gods, I know, will always speak in riddles,

  which we may never understand.

  But must I scribble down this silly hinny’s chatter

  to catch at the divine wind?

  Astyanax in Dactyls

  Hiding in bellies of airplanes, the wicks of their eyes soaked in petrol, the

  Argive terror come once again with the dawn bloody-fingered and wearing white

  helmets of tusks stitched together like dominoes made out of shiny-toothed

  boars, the blind killers, to topple the topless two towers in a frenzy of

  fire the city of commerce and industry, boulevards, subways, and

  tony boutiques in an orgy of butchery, huge broken knuckles of

  gashed stone and spears of plate glass tall as Trojans, the vast bloody cakes of red

  flesh raining down in a glutting of swords while the knees of the towers were

  buckling, the Hudson become once again the Scamander still burning, the

  sacrifice billowing up to the ravening skies of Manhattan.

                                                                                                            Those

  breakers of horses some two hundred fell from the floors of the towers to

  graved paving stones: Some were pushed by a crush at the windows, some blinded by

  smoke smut too stupid to know they had come to the edge, and still other ones

  leapt for their lives to their deaths, choking better to drown in the air than to

  drown in the wash of the suffocate petrol. Some jumpers held hands as they

  drafted down. Friends? perhaps lovers? or two who had shared the same cubicle

  twenty-three years without saying hello but determined that though we must

  die by ourselves they would not die alone. And the pimply-faced red-headed

  boy from the mailroom too shy till this moment to speak to her takes by the

  hand the plump married young mother of two from the Bronx and through snaggled teeth

  whispers her, “So it is time. Shall we go?”

                                                                                     Videos show these lost

  fallers of Ilium drifting down raglike or fluttering excited, some

  playing at somersaults, aerialists frolicking each in performance (though

  one woman modestly holds down her skirt to prevent it from splaying in-

  decently). Each of them woke by himself to the nightmare of gravity,

  rush of an ear-wincing wind as he tore through the awnings of sidewalk ca-

  fés, each torpedoed, and burst through the windy black pavements of Troy and to

  blackness forever, there fallen or thrown by the Argives debauched in their

  carnival killings the sirens’ hosanna from Patrick’s Cathedral, the

  tocsins exhausted.

                                              But one from the clouds of the ninety-fifth floor in the

  office of Marsh and McLennan, professional services, stepped off the

  window ledge so nonchalantly he might have been strolling through doors of a

  lift. Of all those who fell terrified plunged from the towers that day only

  he understood that a falling must fatally follow the building of

  towers, that even the towering father whose horse plumes will frighten us

  into the bosoms of nurses and wives, knew that even he falls and be-

  comes but a chine of raw ox-meat, his wounds kisses puckering from sharp lipsticked

  spears and the killer with Greek eye-slits drags him around and around the two

  towers behind an orange bulldozer dead.

                                                                                 There was nothing so routine as

  rising that day from his desk, to collect all his papers, to walk to the

  window as if to remark that the weather looked ominous, step on the

  ledge and to fall through the atmosphere, fall without fireman’s net or the

  webbed net of fate fixed to catch him, he catching an image reflected in

  glass of the towers a boy who had falln from the sky like a dying young

  god who was Troy’s other hope.

                                                                          What did it matter that children are

  casualties, paying the tax on their father’s mad vanities? What did it

  matter the boys his own age with whom he had been playing just yesterday

  baseball upon the acropolis lawn, those two brothers Thymbraeus and

  young Antiphantes entwined in the knots of sea pythons because their old

  man had called Greeks Greeks?

                                                                       What did it matter the bitch pathological

  liar with barbed wire hair who had screeched out that bloody Achaean hearts

  beat in the bellies of planes, who were hopped up on poppers, cantharides,

  pills, that among them the son-thirsty son of the man who had dragged the boy’s

  father who screamed like an eagle had vowed to avenge his own father’s weak

  tears in a moment of womanish sympathy, gotten of woman and

  woman himself but born mad to be brutal who found a new faith to give

  cause to his bloody psychopathy. What did it matter that she would be

  strapped to an altar by sweat-matted Locrians, greased with their spittle, and

  raped to the nub?

                                                What
did it matter that just before falling he

  saw in his dizzying eyes in a red New York harbor the burning of

  water the thousand unsettled who followed like formicant insects with

  purpose one man who was bent under burden of piety, man on his

  back like a haversack, clutching the hand of a candle-capped boy, the man’s

  wife left behind in the orgy of fire become a dead wick of black

  carbon returning to fetch her Versace hand bag, while he clutched in the

  other the lares, penates, the fond household gods of Algonquians and

  old Dutch patroons, Peter Stuyvesant? What did it matter the refugees

  willing to risk the horizon, the skyline was riven with masts while the

  spires of gods of that city were burning behind them, the falling man

  knowing that they too would build up their towers in other walled cities of

  wide lanes and tram cars, that they too would tumble down buildings in orgies of

  blood to be washed by the sea to the shores of new empires and knowing their

  impious jets too would cut the pale throat of the sky, that their hop-headed

  warriors would pry the veiled priestess to unholy shards and America

  forfeit its right to be tragic?

                                                                   This was the man of all men who knew

  falling that towers will always be raised to be razed until history

  waves its last flag, its last widow dies clutching the medals her husband won

  falling on alien soil in the last sputtering war until, everything

  vertical made horizontal, the earth becomes flat yet again and its

  gods are all dead.

                                                Would it have mattered if seeing him falling past

  stories a god interfering had reached through the greasy opacus of

  ashes, had scooped him from air and then set him down gently in Smyrna two

  hundred or five thousand miles away in the fields of white clover and

  silos, of gambrel-roofed houses, the tilted green valley where Pleasant Brook

  flows through the veins of the poets to mix with the sludge of the Tiber?

  Afterwards helmeted rescuers up to their eyes in the ashes of

  brokers, accountants, cinereous boys who had shuttled the lunch carts from

  story to story, the tarry mascara of blonde secretaries, the

  noisome black flies in the dead air of soothsaid September, men carrying

  corpses upon their bent backs like rucksacks, could not find him amid all the

  potsherds, the broken amphora with pictures of men running naked a-