Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013 Read online

  the sun will shine in your wake,

  while safely offshore the hurricane

  named for me will parallel you,

  but diverging as subtly

  as I do almost every day.

  Truro: the Bay Side

  Watching blunt men surf-cast sand worms,

  you want to learn to catch the groundfish

  we sauté and eat with gusto.

  But flounder, halibut, and cod

  avoid shallow bays. Rockfish, croakers,

  bluegills, shad, bluefish. If you hook

  a big one—a forty-pound bluefish—

  it could drag you into the water

  where you’d squeal in Technicolor

  until I dragged you out again.

  These long July days seem delicate

  and blue-white as Delft pottery.

  The sky revolves on a pivot

  about a hundred miles overhead.

  The surf-casters mutter to themselves

  but rarely speak to each other

  and never to us or the other sun

  people scattered on the seamless beach.

  Maybe at dusk when fish are biting

  I’ll rent a casting rod and teach you

  to fling bait far enough to tease

  a cruising striper to strike. Maybe

  you’ll catch one. But then you’ll cry

  for the pain you’ve inflicted. You’ll free

  the creature back to its netherworld,

  and for the next few hours regret

  that you ever invaded its space.

  The Posthumous Look of a Diner

  The posthumous look of a diner

  on a hot Vermont afternoon

  forces me to stop for lunch.

  The parking lot saddens, one car

  angled in the shade, the gravel

  stippled and rutted and weedy

  where a wooden picnic table

  crumbles with decay. The metal

  sheathing has dented. Concrete steps

  trip me into gloom. The waitress

  sags with adolescent splendor,

  hunching to avert herself

  from my potentially male gaze.

  I order with downcast eyes

  so she doesn’t have to blush.

  Three ceiling fans rotate slowly,

  and an air conditioner rattles

  in its window perch, a chilly sigh

  exuding like the breath of a tomb.

  The other customers, a couple

  in their eighties, leave a tip

  shining on the table and depart.

  Stevie Wonder on the radio

  sings something from the Seventies.

  The waitress proffers coffee. I nod

  as politely as I dare, vacant stools

  rebuking me for being here,

  booths haunted by food-smells

  many years old. The ski crowd

  will pack this place winter weekends,

  but the summer glare exposes

  the delicate grease-film embalming

  the fixtures, the ground-in filth

  of the tile floor dutifully mopped

  every evening, and the fatal

  heart attacks ghosting from a grill

  tended with care by a cook so lean

  the waitress, if she weren’t so shy,

  could strum his ribs like a harp.

  Milkweed Days

  Across the Fremont land the wisps

  of milkweed flutter like strands

  of exploded cobweb. I palm

  a half-pod and crumple it

  to feel the papery compression,

  then feed the fragments to the breeze.

  When I was six I pestered

  Joanne Szluc with sticky tangles

  of milkweed filaments. Armed

  with the milk squeezed from the leaves,

  I pawed the mess into her hair.

  The cottony fibers were white

  as Grandma’s earnest and faintly

  senile gaze, so Joanne cried

  that I’d made a hag of her.

  We stared at each other a moment,

  thrilled that she’d used the word “hag.”

  The tattered milkweed stalks relaxed

  as we ran off laughing; then later,

  to punish, she pushed me face-down

  into garden mulch, and I let her.

  Huso Liszt

  Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin, Dirbi Monastery, Kareli, Georgia

  The history of Georgia is that of repeated invasions from the south, up between the Black and Caspian Seas. Few peoples in the world have an ancestry more dominated by rape. Contemplate the Forlorn Virgin of Dirbi, and its corrosion by violence. Remember that the monastery was a nunnery. Don’t forget that Stalin was born in Gori, just thirty miles away. The faux culture of a State based on the abstractions of Marxist ideology did not so much supplant a culture, as take root in a poverty of violence where the peaceful transmission of cultural wealth from family and society to child had been rendered impossible

  –Keith Smith

  i. Paleo-Violence in Plaster

  We saw it first in Pernambuco

  from the stoop of our rustic farmhouse

  roofed with thigh-molded tiles.

  Enormous toads emerge from the orchard

  to the scent of orange blossoms, jasmine, chicken shit

  as the sun pissed its blood and sank. A boy

  appeared out of a darkening tunnel

  up from the river through the trees.

  He was the youngest son

  of the caretakers we had unwittingly

  dislodged by buying the farm the week

  before from their landlord.

  We were in danger, he said. You’ll need a gun, he said,

  and pointed to a cold flurry of bullet holes,

  a heavy-flake snow perpetually falling

  in the plaster around the windows.

  We saw it again, and again, even next door

  in the boarded-up house where Jose de Deu’s

  brother was murdered. We’d pried

  the door open, and in barred shafts

  of biblical light, a host of tree

  frogs leached to the walls

  and disappeared though the roof

  as if they were the severed tongues

  of the survivors

  lunging for the cover of a time-

  darkened mouth. And there in the plaster walls

  fell the same heavy snow.

  The silence that each violence had scarred

  into the wills of the living there

  was so palpable. This is poverty!

  not an absence things,

  but a drought,

  a truth drought in floods of silence.

  When the real drought came dust rose

  like insurmountable drifts of snow.

  ii. As She Was First Painted

  Midway through her last eutherian trimester,

  the flush of certainty drained from her faith.

  No fire could unchill her from her doubt

  which rose with every parent else against herself.

  It had been at best an unamazing dream.

  She could brave the market as well as anyone,

  and once she’d passed a spot of bronze

  to hear a teller weave the Greek and Roman stories,

  and had shyly scoffed at all the shapes

  the so-called gods would take

  to relieve an earthly passion.

  But now she came to question how trusting she,

  and how unmiraculous he

  had been—so unlike a raging swan, or shower

  of golden light. To be sure, the angel

  had been bright,

  but only with an earthlike radiance,

  as if the shadows in her room had all

  conspired to be nowhere near his eyes and hands;

  and she had seen a R
oman’s slave

  with just as clean and shiny hair.

  Worse, she had never once refused

  to linger for the tales of shipwrecks

  the soldiers like to tell, and their funny,

  awkward rescues from despair;

  and her people

  had seen her talking to them there.

  She had imagined her time laid up with the holy baggage

  would be more graceful than this. She’d accepted

  the vomiting; she hardly noticed

  the bugs of lamb fat stuck to her chin

  as she scraped the pot for more stew,

  but even the colostrum that seeped through her

  swollen nipples repulsed her now, and worse,

  if the baby kicked at all, his kicks were as weak

  as the spastic reflexes of any half-living thing.

  iii. Dirbi Now

  The snow, the snow, for eight

  centuries, the snow,

  by Monguls, Turks, Persians,

  Khwarzem, Timur,

  Dagestani, Turkestani,

  Germans and Russians, over

  and over, each war the same:

  the men arrive, the women die,

  or go.

  Only the Dirbi Virgin remains

  confined within the Dirbi walls,

  a wedge of fresco

  in deepening drifts of snow.

  The flurries of spear, bullet, cannon

  scars and holes

  now render her forlornness

  as beleaguerment by cold.

  And the fossilizing swelling

  above her lap, which once gave

  hope to others in confinement,

  conceals the reluctant slouch of

  transformation, slouching

  still, as with newer gods from

  somewhere else, toward the same

  old Bethlehem to be born.

  The Death of a Whale

  it isn’t the

  harpoon kills

  the whale, it’s

  the line

  from which they can’t 

  be rid.

  their nostrils are a field

  of nerves

  vaginally sensitive

  to feel the shed

  of water, the snap

  of air with every

  rise, to time

  each blow and breath

  to fall between

  caprices of

  the breaking waves.

  or do they begin their blow

  underwater, and feel

  its pressure at

  the surface change?

  whatever. in

  their panic, and

  in their pain,

  and under the

  inexplicable

  horizontal

  force of the ship,

  there are breaths

  they can’t arrange.

  From Alaska: At a Conference on the Poetry of Place

  On the closing of the last light bulb factory in the United States of A.

  Let us have a conference and connect!

  And admit to the robbery and murder our consumption funds.

  If our tastes and dependencies here

  arm tyrannies there

  just as the love of pepper once

  launched a quarter-million ships to slit

  their way,

  throat by throat, up the coasts of the orient,

  what is the poetry of here, of place, and only here?

  From my porch in rainforest, Alaska,

  rainwater complicates over the clogged and rotted eave gutter

  and pounds on the mossy concrete below.

  There’s a simple pi pi pi pi of rainfall on the steps,

  a bassline patters out on popcorn kelp in the tidal zone,

  off salt-fluted hemlock leaning out to sea.

  Only a mind could organize so much water,

  and dum dum titty dum, suddenly

  it’s Mozart. I’m in the 18th century.

  And I’m drifting east, high over unnamed Deer Mountain, Blue Lake,

  over the ridge to Harriet Hunt, unnamed Carroll Inlet,

  Portage Cove, and the random fires of summer fishing camps,

  Behm Canal, and the dark continent.

  Lights cluster, mussel-like, to the shores

  of the the black Atlantic: Boston, Philadelphia, New York.

  The silence and utter darkness of ocean, then

  the first lights of Europe,

  scattered smoky fires of the agricultural poor,

  now, Paris, Avignon, Vienna. From high windows

  into the great parlors of the western world, we see Lords

  in pink and robins-egg-blue powdered wigs

  lean forward at the waist

  before ladies gowned like giant jellyfish

  and dance, gloriously lit

  by oil extracted from harpooned,

  drowned, and boiled humpbacked whales.

  I look down at my clothes, my Patagonia fleece from Sri Lanka,

  my Indonesian pants. Today, I ate

  an orange from Chile, apples from New Zealand, Belgian cheese.

  My American clam shovel leans against my wall.

  Up and down Tongass Narrows, reflections

  of crimelights, yellow incandescent windows of houses,

  winks of video and tv

  streak out through the rain and waver with the water.

  It’s the eyes of tired Chinese parents drowning in the sea.

  Pieter Breughel the Elder’s The Parable of the Blind

  Listen! The blind are leading the blind.

  Hear the wary linkage of six men, their breath

  and fearful muttering, how their syllables

  shorten and tonally ascend

  with each stumble and jolt. Hear how their tentative

  shuffle hisses music contrapuntal to the toads

  that screech to populate the village ditch

  where sewage makes wet kissing sounds

  against the rustling reeds.

  Their staves click between pebbles and grass

  like thumbnails picking dirty teeth.

  Their alms bowls jangle and thock against

  their beaded rosaries and belts.

  But where are those capricious landmarks

  of the human voice, of the villagers who see? Somewhere,

  a woman shouts insults into

  the vast cavern of her drunk son’s ear. There must

  be birds, too, twittering indifferently, high in the trees.

  Now hear the slip of gravel, the grunt, and then,

  the prodigious splash.

  Now, hear the things you wouldn’t have heard:

  The scrape of broomstraw as monks in the steepled church

  sweep pheasant bones from between the pews,

  and angels repeating whispers, mouth to ear,

  over the great arc of paradise, to laugh

  at each new garbled truth

  emerging on the other side.

  Hear aldermen belching, softly, ale gas,

  counting money in their troubled sleep.

  Be, for a moment, blind.

  You lead. A hand rides your shoulder;

  its grip tightens and slackens

  as you pitch over ground swells. Leaning

  forward, you choose your way carefully, always

  balancing against stumbling over roots and divots,

  your hand on guard for low-hanging branches.

  Suddenly, you feel the first horror of air where ground

  should be, and twisting your body mid-step,

  as if you might scramble back across the trespassed air,

  you fall backward into the water.

  This is the parable of the blind:

  No precipice exists from which men can fall forever,

  except within the human heart, where fear dissolves

  the underp
inning earth. What would it take,

  in darkness and in panic, to shout out to the others

  as you fall, “Stop! Fall back. The ditch is here. Hold still!”

  It’s too late. The men tumble

  cursing & thrashing on top of you. But let’s say you, unlike

  your fellows, don’t keep falling after landing

  in the ditch, but find your feet, the bottom, the surface

  of the water, air. Can you now shout, “Fools!

  Stand up! The ditch is only three feet deep! Stand up!”

  Or do you stand up, wipe your mouth, and wade away,

  and leave the rest to drown?

  Clifford Hill

  How natural you are

  why are you wearing

  that tangle of honeysuckle

  around your neck

  that torn blouse

  of rose bush thorns

  tight across your breasts

  that brittle skirt

  of oak bark breaking

  against your thighs

  everyone already knows

  how natural you are

  from the way you move

  with baby sparrows

  nesting in your hair

  Ice storm in Boston Public Gardens

  Trees have turned metal

  Emblems

  Of my own limbs

  Bearing a weight

  Of old love

  Now wood and ice

  Still there’s promise

  Of spring thaw

  Bark cracks

  Crystal breaks

  A sudden laugh

  Through leaf

  Branch trunk

  The whole root of you

  Domestic resolutions

  It’s Saturday in the new year: I rise

  at eight in domestic air to spread

  lemon curd on toast and brew mint

  tea in a clay pot; I carry a chaste tray

  to the late bed you occupy in our

  new resolve, egg and butter

  beneath your creamy underwear

  I’ll wash at nine. All week long

  my list of resolutions grew: musk oil

  for a man’s rub of leather in a woman’s

  boots and beeswax for shine of oak

  in your secret room: rise, old friend,

  dance the winter sun: with a broom

  of love I’ll sweep our closet clean.

  Jasmine branch

  the gold lights of Manhattan rise

  and soon the jasmine branch plunges

  once again in the childhood well

  we crawled into for just five dollars

  on a dare and there first smelled