The Seeker Ascends

by Merle Nudelman

while others chant

  Doctor, she know,

  she water me strong.

  Another petal

  spins to the surface

  screeching a cobalt gasp.

  Enfeeblement Conspires

  for Night/Day ... Day/Night by Beryl Goering

  Indigo invades the air,

  shards the beams’ radar blips —

  feral sprints atop jagged cliffs

  spiking flushed welts rising

  willfully from startled flesh.

  Heart (blandly pale) blinks treacle,

  stumbles copper,

  glimpses patches of glowing green

  beat-propelled to worry-me-blue

  rhythms sharp, unyielding.

  Inky indigo, ebony close behind

  thump-clump

  till there’s only perspective,

  this fevered microcosm beneath the edge,

  azure bisecting white sea.

  It know you know it there.

  Bubbling inside the downward slide

  the crystal voice is drowning

  as uneven pulse-peaks yellow,

  orange, navy away

  from opalescent balm

  throbbing oracular.

  Within the Behemoth a Dulcet Turning

  for Blues: It doesn’t matter which way is up by Wendy Weaver

  Skin mottled, traitorous throat constricts,

  drags down body’s thin dregs spiralling

  like a child’s empty shoe spinning on ice.

  Ensnared flesh and thought whirl

  within the same circuits —

  sometimes light’s slim white line,

  later the frenzied-orange band quivering

  round the final ring: sapphire despair.

  Together they orbit their puny field

  (a space of their own blind choosing)

  bordered by roads never reached,

  suspended within charcoal wisps.

  Beneath lies the dark.

  Time sputters past –

  spits and stutters.

  You/life she shrivels to body. You/body she

  shrivels from life.

  Arcs intersect and tumble the sphere

  towards luminance lying beyond,

  towards patches of fearless yellow.

  Propelled by will’s peculiar geometry

  orientations roll and right.

  The Enigma of Shells

  for Snail 2 by Mary Lou Payzant

  Pressed into polished folds

  beneath concentric coral orbs

  she plummets down the rabbit hole

  to bronzed flashes of lucent white,

  the nub stark at the vortex.

  Babbling to her own inner Hatter

  she sips Himalayan blackberry tea,

  divines the tilt and squeak of the centrifuge.

  Antennae project, lovely throat glistens

  as she glides majestic through a marbled world —

  sentient, expansive with the beauty of breathing,

  the wonder of mollusks and redwood.

  Charmed beasts share their secrets,

  listen to those coiled within her moon.

  Earthbound flesh delight in this life.

  Heard, spared she snails soft aqua roads

  flushed with the radiance of small things.

  What Lingers

  Terrors

  Beyond thin-roofed trees

  we bustle

  sizzle with edgy deals

  thwart dubious time-holes

  in mushrooming Dutch dams

  maneuver sludge

  to keep out

  the crash and flow

  bloating behind the walls.

  Old Business

  The refrain shrills,

  pierces the pressed hush,

  stammers into her ear that song

  she’d shushed (feigned, it seems) —

  the black/white lyrics

  boxed behind her tongue

  tuning acid to base.

  She sees him

  (all tinkly notes and melody)

  hissing dismissive arias

  at her gawking.

  The chords fight forward,

  tenor particle-pain,

  metronome her eyelids

  to a black boot march

  as he raises his arm.

  Tea Party Twist

  in response to Tea Time by Wenda Watt

  Afternoon tea beneath a ruffled parasol —

  rosette cups, lacy linen,

  meringues atop a lavender tray

  and she all satin and princess-pink,

  French braids and bows.

  Along the eyelet bed skirt

  beside the sky-blue castle spires

  a line of primped Barbies lounge,

  gossip about Disney’s happily-ever-after:

  the dollop of cream

  on a bewitching, russet brew.

  Study that drink deeply —

  beneath the polished surface,

  behind the plastic tiara, glass gems,

  clown’s prevaricating grin —

  that once-upon-a-time potion

  distilled in a faraway enchanted kingdom

  where rapt beauties wish upon mauve stars.

  Bubble bubble, toil/trouble ––

  Words hiss down the neck

  to collarbone’s pale shelf,

  drop demonically.

  Vapors gloss peachy skin,

  leech onto bloodlines.

  Smile in place the flaxen girl curtsies,

  wands the array of delicacies.

  Tea anyone?

  Waiting to Search Holocaust Records of my Parents’ Enslavement

  in response to in the distance by Wendy Weaver

  A glass wall frames nature —

  denuded trees climbing the hillside,

  the clawed clinging to earth.

  Pared to fiber their stories speak

  from gnarled limbs, snapped branches,

  scars tattooed in bark.

  Naked in their grayness.

  I sit at the window, ponder

  the portents, shadow-reminders,

  the depth and direction

  of these thick roots.

  Sadness roils; the ashes

  clamp my throat.

  In the distance a narrow

  road beckons —

  Survivors, they vanquished

  starvation, the brutal indignities

  of relentlessness,

  found scraps of potato peel,

  black bread crust,

  the hymn their mothers sang.

  They grabbed life’s palette,

  clothed their exposed flesh

  with hues of hope’s compassion.

  Coronary Red

  The body’s heart moves blood,

  lives within a cage thumping.

  Red/black slave camps stalk wife and husband,

  poach their will while

  brutality bleeds behind their lids,

  haunts visceral cantorial melodies.

  Within balanced chambers the harmony:

  current double-pumped

  into and beyond right

  to bounty, back and out.

  Heart wears an arterial crown.

  Their crowns have nascent thorns

  grown from tortured sorrows, unvoiced screams,

  the weight of dust-bones borne on their backs.

  Beat, beating, beat, beating, beat, beating contracts,

  propels blood, squeezes precious chambers small.

&nbs
p; Relaxed cavities gorge,

  valves alert and thorns

  clump, dig root-deep in fleshy fallacy.

  Steadfast they deny further fascist triumphs:

  elect to dance instead of keening,

  generations over annihilation.

  Blood-river stagnant, pump

  failed, body pleads.

  Her heart attacks, stabs through bars —

  her delicate ribbed cage. It blades.

  Too much, she says. Let me go.

  His body trembles, mourns her silver song.

  He shuffles forward following blood’s pulse.

  Crimson blackness morphs and moves,

  taunts his tender strength, the yearning ––

  Halts.

  Milky palms gather the sparks.

  The spherical motion of the May rake

  for Falling Leaves by Beryl Goering

  breaks their clutch, its tines churning

  ghostly leaves blanched winter-dumb,

  others thinly yellow as hymnal pages,

  umber edges grasping the few

  still stained red with falling memory.

  Spent pine needles dull as a dowager’s hair

  submit to twigs, their sturdy treeness.

  Exiles in phantom darkness meek leaves, quills, and cones

  rouse pell-mell from frosty encounters,

  thaw’s confusing embrace,

  fumble asunder for space

  in skewed plans.

  The land stutters;

  winds tamp them reverent.

  An ancient bliss ignites

  the honeyed glint in their bitter veins,

  shakes them wild with colour’s cornucopia

  fanning away all cowering.

  Mechanics of Metamorphosis

  He dies and we’re at the

  edge of the world quivering —

  lost in the future’s lies.

  Swords drawn

  we march into minds

  circling, sparring.

  Why snaps past most clearly,

  points to the grave we’ve tended,

  plot that left us whittled

  fine as balsa,

  conjoined at the throat

  by free will’s love.

  Destiny pounds

  demonic on the door.

  We hide

  even as she slides beneath

  like earth off a shovel.

  Within her gravelly wrath

  we embrace the why of it

  while how reads from

  time’s scroll, records

  hands gentling boulders

  from bent spines.

  Poisoned, you tend me;

  broken, I coddle you.

  Thorns buried in our skin

  shake loose then fall.

  As how advances to now

  palate and throat butter,

  allow pristine words,

  clear-cut tales of once.

  Together we walk alleys,

  the boulevards of place,

  unearth amber’s heat,

  an apothecary’s remedy:

  sibyllic sorcery.

  The Start of Yellow

  Daylight creaks me awake,

  turns my prickly pillow

  as I open to your face

  soft in sleep’s wise hands,

  dreaming angles smooth.

  Birdsong unlocks the tulips

  as your leaf-green eyes

  love me into morning.

  The Circular Linear

  Life Dream

  When soft film wafts over everything,

  when blood’s breath deepens

  and mind hushes to heartbeats,

  perhaps then

  a glimmer.

  You blink twice.

  All the world’s a stage.

  The gauze dissolves —

  no trace only

  the start of a question

  shivering in thought’s cellar.

  Again the world melts

  easing you into the signs

  and all the men and women merely players,

  textures of observing

  this reckless rendition:

  printed script and curtain.

  Visceral velvet or lucid transparency?

  You stutter through your lines yet

  lounge in the loge.

  They have their exits and their entrances,

  smell lilacs where none grow.

  Your brow strangely atingle,

  weighty air thickens.

  Signals from the other round stage,

  that parallel play:

  equally unlikely and compelling

  and one man in his time plays many parts.

  Verisimilitude

  in dialogue with Untitled by Gail Read

  Palms bare of incense or myrrh,

  I come to this holy place —

  island sheathed in Precambrian stone,

  sheltered by a pious congregation —

  parchment birch, ghostly oak.

  Beneath arched boughs I proffer

  words that sour the palate,

  blunt the clarity of leaves,

  your promise on my throat.

  Anger’s torch illuminates

  the cobwebbed rooms:

  a disappointed fairy tale,

  its childish lexicon —

  should, fair, mine.

  Mine no more.

  What echoes beyond this puny I —

  at once fragile breath yet

  towering monolith too?

  Thunder menaces

  but the rain dances,

  it dances

  and cardinals chant our story

  to the trees’ greening.

  Listen, listen.

  Stepping Away from Then

  Forgiveness is not

  a ringed onion,

  a pungent dispensary

  for sap that slips and does not

  grasp the pearl.

  It is of pearl.

  Pale pearl,

  a teardrop of sand

  within its core — the tinny, tiny

  hint of maybe not.

  A forgiveness of sweet

  cedar, its certain grain.

  You sense the lines move

  from this iteration

  to another allowing

  torso’s slight dip,

  obsidian jaw to gentle.

  Fragrant pearl comforts doubt

  and bitterness blows by.

  At last, forgiveness.

  The Seeker Ascends

  in response to Fear of Falling #4 by Mary Lou Payzant

  Freed of pretense the woman scales boulders

  bowed above delusion’s waters:

  aqua vortex twisting fact, its spoken solace.

  She persists, pushes higher

  until she enters the vastness —

  a crimson cavern.

  Crouched, hesitant,

  seeking a presence,

  she climbs closer.

  The woman approaches the girl that she was —

  dark-fringed child squinting tentatively

  into the camera’s twitching eye,

  palms protective on brother’s shoulders

  as she kneels behind him.

  Keep him safe.

  Who shields her from Dante’s Minotaur,

  his boozy breath knifing?

  Who sees her thrash like fine hair in the wind?

  All blind to her cringing.

  She hides the fetid secret,

 
the stains his hands

  leave on skin’s light.

  Misty years slick the rocks,

  muffle deceit.

  The woman wraps the girl in embrace,

  hears her speak, listens to the savagery

  again and again until with bloodied lips

  the child expels the beast

  prowling lifetimes inside her throat

  and reclaims her prepotent note.

  Elevation

  Rays shine truer above

  these craggy, leaden peaks,

  their snowy rivers pleating

  the formidable crest.

  Shoulder to shoulder they fill

  miles with their antiquity —

  roughly torn from earth’s flesh

  before human was even thought,

  shrugging off ice-worlds,

  wind’s clenched teeth.

  They face the sky and wait.

  Down the highway along the horizon

  hunkered hills (black, lava-pocked)

  huddle and consider

  the startling copper range

  smooth beyond road’s bend.

  To the north, gatherings: oblong boulders,

  the giant’s hand — skewed

  tan pyramids balancing

  in wonder.

  They face the sky and wait.

  Land/scapes

  for Proclaim by Carolyn Jongeward

  Step onto the oracle’s orange lip,

  the mandala’s thin rim,

  tread marmalade-slow tasting

  the spicy mosaic:

  its curry, mandarin,

  paprika heart cooled

  cream and proper gray.

  The symmetry of a cluster.

  Plucked, scattered daisies

  reassemble whole

  within the congruity of fire and air.

  Each petal is storied,

  each budding dream made material

  then harvested,

  informing the formless interior.

  Ephemeral land/scapes

  bound by magnetic bonds

  oscillate —

  attracted yet distinct

  separated by compassionate paths

  beiged and silvered.

  You enter at the edge,

  brush the lines rushing round the compass,

  their illusory haste.

  Precise segments shrink, slot.