Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013 Read online

  to learn to steadily unpack

  the navel oranges exactly as they sit

  on the table, to draw the precise distance

  between the two pieces of citrus,

  how light catches the pebbled flesh,

  the flecks of shadow that fall

  into miniscule valleys, the lamplight

  that dazzles one pole of fruit bursting

  with miniature oranges tucked into the globe

  of larger fruit, the midnight that darkens the other.

  Bridge

  In her dream her son is dead.

  Candy cannot call his name

  as she once did when,

  four, he opened the iron gate

  at the park in Paris, careened down the hill

  past the waffle seller and the black swan

  toward the boulevard, cafes, gleaming cars.

  That was before she learned the names

  of machines she can now forget: Renault,

  Audi, Toyota Chevrolet, GM, Volvo.

  She can forget the spelling rules,

  the multiplication tables, the names

  and dates of all the presidents of the USA,

  the names of girls.

  None of them will do any good.

  And then it is morning.

  He is twenty-one. Candy doesn’t know

  where he is, not exactly

  though certainly he is in America,

  probably in a car, and she—

  surrounded by fog rising from the pines trees,

  from the hemlock, from the James river,

  from the Shenandoah mountains—

  taking her coffee down to the water

  hears a single engine in the distance.

  One rusty pick-up truck approaches

  with farm tags on the gravel road.

  A hand flies up and waves to her

  and moves past her where she stands on the bridge

  in the only location she knows for sure.

  Expedition

  Audrey shuts the book on Shackleton,

  the photos of his men: playing soccer in snow,

  the Endurance foundered in blocks of ice

  beyond them; gathered around the fire

  on Elephant Island, their weathered faces

  lit with wonder as they listen to stories

  waiting for the rescue team;

  petting the stripped tabby cat

  that Shackleton finally shot

  after calling it a weakling.

  She would have been the cat

  Audrey thinks worrying about the daughter

  she raised alone, who careens

  on the slick back roads of America

  in her Japanese car. She rises from the couch

  throws aside the weight of quilts

  to choose the spices from the carousel

  on the dining room table, soothed by

  the tiny achievement of the small

  wooden spoon in its bowl of salt,

  the four ounce canister of tandoori spice,

  glass bottles of whole black peppercorns,

  cinnamon, nutmeg. She stands at the center

  of a rag rug woven into a labyrinth of sienna,

  green and blue, boiling the collard greens,

  soy paste and tofu. Her daughter sings hello

  as she arrives, elegant and oblivious,

  from the storm, pets the purring tabby

  that sleeps at the head of the table.

  Satisfaction

  Not forgetting of course rising from the body that once thrilled you

  with the same delight you now recognize in golden retrievers 
chasing Frisbees

  or calves born at the penultimate day of spring frisking in pastures

  carpeted with blue violets, lime colored grasses, dandelions like helium balloons.

  Glittering space shuttles land safely in limpid blue oceans like transparent silks.

  The heroic astronauts resume the paperwork of their everyday lives

  to a tedious fanfare. The golden puppy now sleeps half the day.

  The toddler bites into the velvety pink Easter egg to discover salt.

  Friendships once fields of sweet clover, gone stale,

  weigh down your body like moldy hay bales left in the rain.

  What do you do with entire continents of disappointment

  once exhausted by the early rages?

  John Cage said if something is boring for five minutes

  do it for ten, if boring for ten do it for twenty, if it is boring 
for twenty,

  do it an hour, and so on for eternity. I think he had an answer

  to cherry blossoms after the spectacular show and the 
heartrending petal fall.

  Peter Kent

  Surliness in the Green Mountains

  I like to complain

  about too little steamed milk

  in coffee. And ill-timed

  cloud cover stripping the blue face

  off the ocean. I know

  I’m fortunate. No cancerous calamity

  has found me. No car crash

  has maimed me. Pulling away

  from the drive-through, my drink’s too hot

  to taste, to judge. I turn

  the wheel toward the hem

  of mountains, where clouds press

  like sour insistence: I have a duty

  to attend, a funeral for a colleague’s father.

  It will cost me

  two of the days I’ve rented the house

  on the cove for a holiday—a holiday

  to still the flurry of a life that feels

  like coins spilling to the pavement

  through a hole in my pant’s pocket.

  I should have gone to Jamaica.

  Someplace beyond obligation’s

  reach. A foreign paradise,

  blinged by palms and voices

  redolent, familiar, but off kilter.

  It helps to get places

  where traffic lights seem superfluous

  as they do in Montpelier. Though,

  I often stand before travel books

  on Budapest—petulant and wishing

  to be swallowed by its pandemonium.

  Cities are survival’s hallmarks.

  Slaughter and roast everyone

  rooted in them, and they rebound,

  resilient as Vermont maples after winter.

  This beleaguered Toyota

  doesn’t like the climb—its four cylinders

  wheezing, coaxing combustion

  to reach another summit.

  The service will be in the same chapel

  where my colleague was married, back

  when she was a friend. I never knew

  her father. So why the struggle

  to attend? To be politic, to feel less

  awkward when we run into each other

  at a meeting back in Boston? I suppose

  that’s enough motivation. Or,

  maybe I simply relish

               something new

  for my repertoire of complaints.

  A flat tire, broken axle—

               a chance to show

  how far I’ll go to suffer.

  Meditation Waiting for the Orange Line

  If I were a savant,

  I could calculate the number

  of lavender tiles that cover

  the walls in this station.

  I could detect the aria

  in the brake squall

  arriving from Forest Hills.

  I would grasp the quantum dimensions

  that transcend the urge to copulate,

  and that lush-lipped girl’s photograph

  in the frame beyond the tracks

  could never entice me

  to purchase toothpaste

  that can’t possibly whiten

 
enamel this stained by coffee

  and neglect. If I were a savant,

  I could remain mute,

  without consequence

  or criticism: He hardly ever

  talks to anyone. I might know

  the mollusk phylum’s almost infinite

  array, from pre-history to present.

  No one would know.

  Gifted as a sideshow act

  in an intellectual circus,

  I could recite Sumerian limericks

  and every move from the past

  twenty years’ chess championships.

  If I were a savant, I’d tattoo syllables

  down the backs of waterfalls

  and watch them coalesce to sonnets,

  in the mist and foam of pools

  at the base of the cliffs

  we’re all tottering toward.

  But I’m not a savant.

  I’m an overwrought grunger

  passing through mid-life

  with a messenger’s bag of images

  muddled as crayon drawings.

  I am St. Francis to mosquitos.

  I guard a small vault

  dubiously filled with trivia:

  the two dozen counties in the states

  of Vermont and New Hampshire,

  the lyrics of most songs

  Pearl Jam’s recorded.

  To be a savant might be

  wondrous. To scan and recall

  every word in the dictionary—

  vocabulary unfettered by the urge

  to reorder and coax meaning

  to the surface. To the savant,

  meaning kicks off its shoes

  and finds a careworn bed in a room suffused

  with incomprehensibility’s pleasures . . .

  the city’s walls resting in the distance,

  untroubled by a single ambition. If

  I could join the savants’ tribe,

  would I? It’s easy to proclaim one might

  choose to undiscover the practical,

  to let incandescence dissolve into dark’s mystery.

  Perhaps what’s wanted is a variation

  on Kurzweil’s singularity: To integrate

  intellect and insight with savant capacity

  could be the next stop on evolution’s tour.

  Here’s the Orange Line, at last . . .

  screeching, rolling, rectangular

  pumpkin, ready to ferry us

  to Downtown Crossing.

  If I were a savant, I might

  not know to get on. I might stand

  here all afternoon, like an arrow

  without a bow. Harmless

  potential. Traveler on an island

  of flesh, unsure how to reach

  any destination beyond

  this maze of interior revelations.

  If I were a savant, wouldn’t I

               be happy

               just to be here?

  Blowing the Third Eye

  A friend would never threaten to paddle

  up the Amazon in a canoe commanded

  by an American-turned-shaman. What

  could be less American? Wait, did you say

  hallucinogens are involved? And,

  a vomit bucket? It sounds suspiciously like

  the Age of Aquarius as reimagined by Dick Cheney.

  Or, a variation on the sublimely surreal—like the time

  Allen Ginsberg cleared an audience at an all-girl’s school

  in Kansas with a soliloquy on ass-fucking.

  Language can only transcend so far. It takes

  a good hit of ayahuasca to blow the lid

  from the third eye, to melt the wall where

  the snakes gyrate like electrified ribbons

  through undetected dimensions. Split and

  spill the terrors that hunger for one’s life . . .

  those vibratory hells that demand homage,

  that refuse to cauterize lonely nights with vodka

  bottles. When television nurses hunger

  for amenable society, who could argue

  that the ship has foundered on a shoal

  of snapping serpents? In the jungle’s night,

  any shaman’s a beacon. Even the Pentecostal pastor,

  with all his uncaged tigers of damnation, might seem

  a friend. Physical ruin feels right (or at least familiar).

  Whatever potion one can find to swallow, to salvage

  the pretension of a soul . . . that’s medicine worth

  a paddle up the Amazon, worth a wade in magical

  self-delusion’s improbable realms. Say hello

  to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson . . .

               they’re the only angels

  who might prove all that’s unseen

  transcends the drying skin

  on this latticework that carries us

               through these days.

  Under the Influence

  The best days often include

  a browse through a bookstore.

  When my libido was more

  vigorous, I liked to sneak a paperback

  kama sutra to the automotive section.

  I appreciate the symmetry now—

  the proper calibration of carburetor

  and clitoris both essential

  to effective performance and power.

  Though at the time, I imagined,

  if caught, I could claim to have found

  (quite unexpectedly) this sexual concordance

  tucked between Edmunds Used Car Guide and

  the Encyclopedia of Corvettes. These days,

  I gravitate to the literary review section.

  It’s interesting to see poems written by people

  I know—and there’s always the potential to find

  that gloriously intact shell, tumbling in the surf,

  inhabited by some living thing wanting someone

  to appreciate its nearly unrecognizable luster.

  Tonight I sit beside a poster—On Becoming

  an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician.

  So much wisdom undiscovered, crusted and nestled

  like jewels in the strata of bound pages. Though

  we’re such lazy miners, requiring Provigil’s

  stimulation and the simulated realities of television

  to provoke the intellect. I might hurry back down

  Newbury Street to catch Saturday Night Live.

  What a metaphoric mash. This week’s show’s a repeat—

  leftover, half-clever satire in three minute skits, wedged

  between commercials. I’ve got a bed half-buried

  in books and unread New Yorkers. It makes

  me apprehensive to sleep with so much knowledge

  wanting to snuggle with my witless, empty notebook

  of a mind. So, I’ll probably doze on the couch

  and wake to infomercials in the netherworld

  that insomniacs are cursed to wander—

  having dreamt a shaman with a blouse half-

  unbuttoned, finding the windows

  to my consciousness open—believing

  it’s Whitman’s fingers brushing my hair,

  trusting I’ve written this indisputably compelling

  paean for an original century.

  William Doreski

  Gathering Sea Lavender

  Gathering sea lavender

  in salt marshes south of Brunswick

  we ease ourselves into contours

  so gentle they don’t show on maps.

  Only the washboard effect

  of successive waves of lavender

  reveals a dainty presence.

  Sea lavender sells for five

  dollars a spray in Boston,
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  but we’re harvesting just enough

  to warm us one dreary winter,

  a candelabra as nostalgic

  as my mother’s genealogy.

  Last night when the wind banged the doors

  in our rented cottage and the tide

  swept our neighbor’s dory from the beach,

  we felt each other quicken in sleep

  as we both dreamt of gathering

  sea lavender in brilliant light.

  I also dreamt, quite separately,

  that a former lover came home

  to sort through my possessions

  and take away what pleased her,

  especially sentimental

  items like the shard of slate

  from the Deerfield Massacre stone,

  the purple ribbon from Robert

  Lowell’s grave, the small glass cat

  that was my first gift from my wife.

  No wonder when morning came

  I proposed we scout the marshes

  for sea lavender, despite the rain,

  our bodies still uneasy

  upon us, the briny damp

  revealing as X-rays or radar,

  the losses of our previous lives

  reflected by the stony fog

  and empowered by the radiance

  ignited by our love of the sea.

  Hurricanes Named After Us

  The season’s first two hurricanes

  have named themselves after us.

  As they plow across the Atlantic

  toward Florida, we drift over

  books we’ve admired all our lives.

  You’re still retreating from Moscow

  in the bosom of War and Peace

  while I drift along the equator

  in the doldrums of Moby-Dick.

  Your storm will cross to the Gulf

  before mine. Your violence spent

  on the cringing Everglades, you’ll ease

  long before reaching Galveston,

  while passing south of the Keys I’ll trip

  unimpeded down to Veracruz

  and shatter on Mexico’s highlands.

  The summer heat drips from the trees

  in long greasy strings of drool.

  Your air-conditioned townhouse

  insulates you from the silence

  that centers in my tiny house

  as though a giant foot has crushed

  the finest of my earthly functions.

  Soon the fall semester will fill

  our datebooks. Scholarly poise

  will sculpt you upright and prim,

  but I’ll slump like Igor to class

  and growl and frighten young women

  and make the stoned young fellows laugh.

  Neither of us look like hurricanes,

  but the government knows better,

  and named its storms as precisely

  as decorum allows. Enjoy

  your book. Palm Beach and Miami

  curse you, but don’t worry. Soon enough