Sixfold Poetry Winter 2014
Page 3
Burnt sienna and mahogany,
orange and scarlet,
a blaze of potential
rolling in my palm.
And this year,
my eldest daughter,
with a new woman-smile
gave me a brown paper bag
and said not to look, but
just smell it.
I inhaled,
and the colors poured back in me.
Sharron Singleton
Sonnet for Small Rip-Rap
Here is a wooden clothespin that grips
a striped beach towel, rusty nail in the hinge
no one has seen since nineteen thirty six.
Yes, and safety pins, straight pins, bobby-pins
used to plaster curls to my head when I
was twelve, obscure and forgotten as old
bones of the lesser saints. They lie
in dusty drawers, the plain things that uphold
us—buckles, zippers, paperclips, all
the small earnest rip-rap that insist we
button and snap and allow us the small
pleasure of undoing. Praise especially
that which attaches, is unseen, spare—
the needle that mends and binds up the tear.
Why I Don’t Write Poems About My Father
Old, mottled,
algaed
and scarred
where hooks
have ripped,
the fish
has gone
deep, has sunk
through brown-gold
pillars of water,
as if through
a temple ruin,
down beyond
the reach of light,
to lie hidden
among weeds,
tattered fins
and fronds
tremulous
with the lake’s
slow breathing—
the only sign
of its presence,
a shiver of circle,
unnoticed except
by the watchers,
the heron
and fisherman.
Well hooked
by his quarry,
the fisherman
wants both
to catch and not
catch, to scrape
away the armor
of scales,
to open, gut
the creature—
and still to glide
upon the wide
eye of the lake,
oars dipping, just
rippling the surface,
the shadow
of the boat
sliding across
the shadow
that is the fish.
Seed
I lay down
life, crave
earth. Time’s
bell clangs
death, chimes
birth, folds me
in its grip.
Harrowed
in the grave
I twist, split-
ting the shell,
I leap from
the furrow,
an old god,
green
and knowing.
Hottest Summer on Record
there’s no
resisting
the heat the air
sags with moisture
boundaries blur
between sea and sky
washed in bluegray
congruity
air becomes
ocean and we wade
into it lungs
open and close
like gills back
bones prickle
with forgotten
fins each cell
a pouch of liquid
edges dissolve
speech thought
becomes vapor
spangled with sweat
your body slips
into mine wet
boneless and salty
we stroke together
away from shore
The Sleep After
While the pleasure of it
rips through me
like lightning on water,
while I think this is
what I could die for,
have died for—
it is the sleep after
in the arms
of the fugitive moon,
in the hands of that saint,
the rose, in the mouth
of the god
that I long for.
Bryce Emley
College Beer
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
—Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”
It’s my first time in a real dive: dimly lit, Willie lilt, cue-ball-scuffed floor, basket of condoms by the door. I ask what they’ve got and stop her when she gets to Schlitz.
Before I clack the can open I conjure my father sneaking The Beer that made Milwaukee Famous into an Oral Roberts dorm,
swigging it mid-June Oklahoma storm from the driver seat
of his first Austin-Healey,
dwelling in that space of time he lived the stories he tells.
Bitter, tinny, it tastes like college beer.
Hemorrhage paralyzed him at 43. He’s 64 now. He doesn’t drink.
Every year is a stroke toward a closing surface,
a swimming out of the wreck,
the thing itself bluing into myth beneath.
The next round I take an AmberBock, and it tastes like it did in the Applebee’s on University all those times.
Two Pompeiis
In every living city the haunted ruin
—Robert Pinsky
i.
I’d like to think they didn’t see it coming—
denarii left on counters like quarters on a dresser,
bodies bound in awful contortion,
arms clung around Fortuna medallions—
but the tremors in the earth a week before
that shook their bones in god-like warning
while they pressed and jarred wine
grown and named on what would bury them,
their doors inscribed with Salve, lucru
ruin that tragedy, build us a new city still
haunted by a decadence for us to marvel at
as tourists and let ash and time conceal.
ii.
I’d like to think we didn’t see it coming—
our two bodies like bills wadded on a dresser,
too bound in painless contortion for us to grasp
that we had clung to what wouldn’t save us—
but how could we not have felt the tremors
in our bones branching through marrow
as we pressed tongues and fingers,
buried ourselves beneath ourselves,
our end always inscribing itself
in our skin, ruined from our start
by the decadence of flesh, the baggage
we carried as tourists in each other’s countries.
Non-Small Cell
What should we gain by a definition . . .?
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
It could be large,
maybe medium, basically
whatever just isn’t small.
One-fifth who have it last
another five years—
after that, some other statistic.
Nine times more common than small,
more women than men,
smokers and nonsmokers,
occasion for the one cigarette
lying dormant
in a drawer.
Clinical pamphlet,
Harvard doctor,
quick Google search—
some t
erms we can only define
by fissures branching our chests,
creating the loss by our knowing them.
Harry Bauld
On a Napkin
Imagine the table-bards
of yore, filling the scraps
with blotty elegies and kennings
depending so much on the unfolding
wheelbarrow-thoughts beside
the chewed white chicken bones. I pine
for the lost scop world of prescription
pads, envelope backs, menus, telephone pole
fliers and stub pencils borrowed
from fat salesmen on trains,
the crushed index cards
with jam stains retrieved from deli trash.
But now I’m back in front
of a moony screen, touching my eyes
and fingers to what can never
also be used to clean
that dollop of cream cheese
off your beautiful, hungry lip.
Swift River
Two brook trout flash in the current,
their iridescent shimmer a surrender
to the veiled hymn of gravity
and light. How small the self is.
Their bright wrinkling knows
they and the stream’s contralto
were born to the same tune,
as if their flicker and gleam
fires not just a stippled kinship
but the synapse between, invisible
gate of their own depths. Trout linger
in the rill but don’t know why or how long—
a while, with animal confidence, to turn orange
and find out why they stay. That is marriage.
The water has no words; I only imagine I hear
the pink and blue rings brookies wear
ping an ancient set of vows, history
of the recessional promise they whisper
to each other through the tips
of themselves: to face up
into the flood current that feeds
us minute particulars, the future’s
freestones ringing beneath us like bells.
Refusal
In the trivia contest blaring in the next room
at An Beal Bocht the question
seems to be Which states touch
other states? and after a 5th black pint I’m in a state
that touches several other states I will never
be able to name and the first rock&roll song was—————————?
and a vicious dispute breaks out over the number
of overtimes possible in some type of game
as outside the traffic waltzes by
like a tipsy girl in the night
and the college students smoke and wish
they could get served by the biceppy bartender with the Cork accent
while a Mexican cook makes more Irish curry
and then runs out (thanks be to God) of Irish pizza
and you drink under the glare of a big painting of Behan
and Beckett and Joyce and Flann O’Brien
and Patrick Kavanaugh, who in the painting
looks like someone (perhaps one of the Beatles, maybe Ringo)
playing Patrick Kavanaugh, and you are trying to remain
aware you are writing in a very small notebook
this five-pint poem and suddenly dreaming (One minute!
warns the quizmaster) in your remaining minute
of that Irish girl with waterfall hair
when you were sixteen, the two of you
trembling together in your trembling station wagon
in her driveway outside the barn
where her quarter horses trembled in their withers
in the suburbs and every synapse you had
fired with the electricity of her skin
and now—right through the stout and dried curry dustings
sparking under your nose—you can smell
that girl’s hair and you look in yet another unnamed state
toward the two sad white frosted cakes squatting like stones
on the shelf between the bar and kitchen
and you think, in spite of everything, no.
Jaundice
Two hours old, my son fingers
his monk’s cap like a conjurer
fanning four aces. Through the perfect feather
of a mouth, the quill of his cry
still echoes in the other cave
he came from that illuminated our margins
before the printing press was even
dreamt with its poisonous text,
its heavy leading. In a dawn light
flimsy as tissue I write
standing up with one finger
in his mouth while he pedals
and grabs for invisible boughs
under a flight of strong tubes burning
with their own full name—Biliruben—
to void the blood of what is
golden and deadly, this new pen
leeching its own dark cargo.
George Mathon
Do You See Me Waving?
Forty-two.
You announce it, as if it were the answer
for everything.
You’re playing a game
with the fiddler crabs,
wiggling your toes, counting the seconds
until they reemerge.
It’s dangerous,
I wouldn’t come out for anything.
But they need to eat, you answer, sifting
the mud. And they mate every two weeks.
The males wave their big fiddler
claws
to attract females who follow them
into their holes.
Purblind love,
I say.
Only if you’re invisible,
only if you’re still as a killer
will they come out.
But it’s impossible to tell the difference
between love and danger
of a silent predator.
They’re quick enough,
you answer, to make up for that.
They have to risk it.
You call it trust.
An adolescent ibis works its long curved beak
into one of the holes without success.
I call this hope.
But the adult birds know
how pointless it is and don’t even try.
It’s what lovers do,
tunnel into safety,
hold on until the ibises stop digging.
Because love is
dangerous as a predator.
We keep counting but it waits us out.
The Simplest Gifts
We love by accepting, I say:
the simplest gifts, the dumbest promises.
You nod in agreement
but remind me,
the male osprey knows
that if she doesn’t approve,
his mate will discard the branch
he offers.
Sometimes the things I want
to give to you, the words I want to say,
scare me like that.
Above us a large nest<
br />
sits on a platform atop a power pole.
A male osprey flies out of it,
low
through the mangrove limbs beside us,
his wings
like knives in the leaves.
I offer you a shell I’ve picked
from the beach. Washed of its color,
its original shape nearly indiscernible,
you tumble it in your fingers.
In full flight
the osprey grasps and breaks a twig from a tree.
Crack!
Inured to her will, the sound emboldens him.
He turns back to his nest. Though small
the branch is accepted.
It’s just an ordinary
shell. After a quick inspection
you toss it
into the water. But it’s all I want from you,
something small and plain as that twig.
The Cello
If love were easy
I would play
as beautifully with any bow, an equation
could be solved with any number.
It’s why I hate
the soft hollow of her knee,
her arms’ mathematical arcing
as they pull
these pellucid notes from my heart.
The way she bows me
until the sound
I can’t help but make when she presses
her fingers just there, and there,
resonates.
A quantum vibrato that fills and rattles
the empty space between my molecules.
Love is desperate,
I protest, but relinquish it
on the pitch she commands
because I am made
for her straddled plucking and the horsetail
she flails incautiously across my taut ribs.
Each note she breaks open
—breaks