American Poetry

by Bradford Morrow

  promise the ethical stand of employing critique

  or such assumption as to give voice and image

  in light of solace or satisfaction? There is the body

  which one and the person for whom.

  ___________________________________

  There’s a line

  of security glass against handgun, crowbar and

  baseball bat—is there no bond, none, to what follows?

  When from my counted days I think of

  times still owed to me by tyrant love,

  and my temples await a snowfall

  beyond the tribulation of my years

  I see love’s counterfeit joys are a poison

  reason sips from a crystal glass raised

  to those for whom a craving dare appear

  in the guise of my honeyed imaginary.

  What potion of forgetting pleases

  reason that by neglect of its duty

  so toils against itself for satisfaction?

  But my affliction seeks solace, measure

  of the desire to be remedied, and

  the desire to overcome it, love’s remedy

  Cuando imagino de mis breves días

  los muchos que el tirano amor me debe

  y en mi cabello anticipar la nieve,

  más que en los años las tristezas mías,

  veo que son sus falsas alegrías

  veneno que en cristal la razón bebe,

  por quien el apetito se le atreve,

  vestido de mis dulces fantasías.

  ¿Qué hierbas del olvido ha dado el gusto

  a la razón, que sin hacer su oficio

  quiere contra razón satisfacelle?

  Mas consolarse quiere mi disgusto,

  que es el deseo del remedio indicio,

  y el remedio de amor, querer vencelle.

  [Lope de Vega: Soneto II]

  (graffiti)

  between exuberance and snow

  the uncharted world a patrimony

  and prayers repeat the of our

  thinking where the eye directs a

  to change the world it contemplates

  timbre of my own voice: child

  of the imaginary between us, still-

  born: for the exegetes of jesus

  to suffer nightless is meaning (so

  let the __-__ go buried at our feet)

  Field of material contentions and conflicts

  in dreams of radical equality | market

  by the name of liberal assets unleashing

  in patterns uncontrolled so lawless

  and brutal a concentration of wealth

  and surplus such magnitude of deprivation

  ever thriving to be more dissatisfied or

  satisfied in a culture at odds internal devoid

  of all patterns in civic life neither tolerant

  democracy nor the promise of a unified

  collective wager will survive its sway

  as the final arbiter of the social good.

  Prepared all told to safeguard the borders

  of external threats to our security

  Lingua franca in which this is written

  embody the moral bind | include us all

  The Forest

  Andrew Mossin

  We come into it, leave it, as if it had neither beginning nor ending.

  —Traherne

  “The images have to be contradicted.” Our mind cannot bear it. When the house is brought down and the pathways submerged. When the materials lodged there are purged of design. A paradox of initial feeling. Failing this? The garbled epitaph that rises from misbegotten directives of earlier speech.

  “Language is not a consciousness of ourselves, but rather an inherence in the world.”

  The body floats across: dull, nerveless, a child of whatever comes toward it.

  _______

  There was some truth in the assertion of fault. Rift that gave way to an activity of precipitous neglect. The leather strap lifted and applied to a boy’s bare back. A sirocco wind jostling lanterns. The preeminent and disguised faces at the door. Each in sufferance of part of the tale.

  _______

  I meant to carry something over, to inherit the uneasy balance of memory. Which could not define what was remembered or comprehend the signals as anything other than scrapings on the wall. Borderland opprobrium. To which no just response could be given. Marred dualities. The egotistical infrastructure that labeled what we did “labor” and called for its erasure even as the semblance of a name was put forth. The indulgences of remembrance that was neither public nor personal but apocryphal. Drawn forward in the phantom voice of a sender. A movement caught up in the anathema of disowned birth.

  Feral nights dream. The signature of patrimony. Cool lairs where we took cover. Opportunistic orphan of its unnaming.

  _______

  A bird sought out in the wilderness. Blue latch of its throat. “I dreamt I died inside your arms. Your hair absinthe mauve about the lips. I held your hand as I went beneath the wave. A colorless fluid inflecting your breath. What terminus did the words impart. ‘Seven times the bounty of your dismayed grace.’ Foreknowledge of the aforementioned One-Who-Is. One-Who-Is-Not.”

  The original precision has been lost. Wayward allotment of its relation. “All the intendedness of what we call each other.” Beautiful deceptions. Garbled interpretations.

  The glamour of unearned transcendence that has marred so many previous efforts. “Anthropomorphism in tatters.” Out of earshot the drum is broken. The calendar lifted into the sky. Heartswork on the threshing floor. Your shy whistled-for self. This unmended script that harbors the intellect of another.

  “The sentence is moving in every direction.”

  _______

  I confused your name with a platform of uniform address. Spoke tablet mater at the water’s edge. Age of the forefinger brought to rest along the arm’s vortex. Bead of sweat traced down your breast.

  Atonement was buried in a cycle of flame. At the root of an olive tree, a fable of unreadable passages. When have I allowed myself to risk the necessity of their unfolding? Far from where I was I saw you emerge: visitant or communal stranger. The idiom of loss held in abeyance.

  _______

  “Awkward under such american skies to read this re-positioning of self and subject matter, its auto-fictional inquiry, markings in the margins of a book replete with omission. That in your hands the drama remains wholly subjective. As yet an indefinite part of contentless past. Mirroring continentless future. That what was forecast from the beginning, grape flesh and sea wave, wayward in their progression, was never more resolute than now. Distillate fragments of disowned knowledge. Until the integrity of address was lost. What did you give to arrive at its indeterminate shore? As if to conjure the presences of those who once came toward you (shadeless nights of no moon) were the same thing as to attend beneath shadows of depleted record. Your lateness that enters into the grove, muted, apart from what injured you, and makes from the remnants a mystery. Ceremonial affliction of the last-to-arrive. Morning’s suspended radiance across the eastern line. Mauve and green interchangeable in the dispersion of grass and salt. Drift and accession of another’s spirit. The body in pieces or the body cut free.”

  _______

  the voice is recognizable

  as fragments

  of a greater language,

  a live and changing

  face

  Wherein we read again of the public love necessary to continue the journey. Its violence and unboundedness that strike at the center of what any of us might do. The question of who has been speaking turned on itself, as circumstance and measure redefine the grove of foxglove and hollyhock. The personal ethos in which the materials depict, not an idea of self, but the gamut of relations that compose experience. “A cosmology,” as you suggest. Labile instruct of the numinous mark. His “unfigured manhood,” stripped of locale or reference, only his willingness to proceed. I
nvocations of the arcane self. A ritual of pre-possessive encounter, forcing contact along the perimeter where “you” and “I” are helpless to do otherwise. Armed with what took us there: images of the first conduct, the residual span. To invoke the memory of its loss is to re-encounter surfaces of mouth, aureole, lip, tongue, palm. To suffer again an incompletion that is likewise the offerance of a name.

  _______

  Insuperable logic of the cast-off. I could not have written you otherwise. Nor viewed the momentum with which we would meet again and again in this book. A perpetual re-search that is folded by an inquiry. An injury offering accord. Sea-salt on the tongue. Betokenings of primary care. “That we are only

  as we find out we are”

  _______

  Glyphs along the wall. You who hide among the ferns and are lost there.

  . . . . incense of the tree . . . .

  . . . . the thorn covered and hidden . . . .

  _______

  Not to have known the son who emerged. Tamarisk in the garden without water. The crown knocked from the wall. A childlike grief squandered over a lifetime.

  _______

  “I saw you there, desolate, not the vision of yourself but the orphan mask inside a cutout. Everything about you altered. I dreamt of the great address, house of dusk in the countryside. I dreamt of your permanence and your forsaking care. Your body lodged between the ceremonial and emblematic registers. I could do nothing for you. Your hands papery along the edges of old linen. I could do nothing. Everywhere I saw the mesmerizing signs of grief. I knelt with the women in a far corner of the room. At mid-evening I crossed myself among your elders and watched the water drawn across your brow. I ritualized the suffering and saw myself transposed by the logic of summary retrieval. A crescent leaf held beneath my tongue. The waxen effigy carried past us on a bier of straw and wire. Your inward gaze as I succumbed again to the manifestations of form. Your scarf and blouse removed so that all could see. The eagerness with which you dipped your palms into rose and jasmine. The conjured spectacle of ‘public’ when you lifted your mouth to the cool plate of leaves and took from each corner the wrapped rings of silver.”

  _______

  There was commerce in our desolation. A change overcome by what had instructed it. The lens through which you appeared, in old age, sympathetic yet far from paternal. An exchange of content in which the privative gave way to “a longing for completion.” Abstract and unreal: city of my birth that you understood long ago as central to the appearance of design. The divided archaic presence of it.

  Images without reflection.

  _______

  Singly the assertion of a letter. “Just there She must enter our hearts.”

  My mouth idle in its chamber. Sinister scrapes along the uppermost cavern. Burnt salt of affective emotion: your horn and silver band.

  “dwarf morning-glory twined around the grass blade”

  _______

  I catch myself beneath it with a version of you: eyes cast to the ground in search of articles of clothing. I hear you say “O garden of my twenty-seven years.” Your hands pressed over your eyes.

  _______

  Nightfall between episodes. Knowing the event, could we have prevented the outcome. Knowing the outcome how may we retell the event. You wrote to me in admonishment, “Nothing so particular is refined by a language of momentous inconclusion. The role we play is secondary to what must come from elsewhere, from the very centrality of our natures.” Absorbed in the trance of it, traces outside the common speech of everyday, I saw how you had become instrument: a messenger enclosed in the cloth of summer.

  Two Poems

  Elizabeth Willis

  A FISHER KING

  Falling in the alley

  or shadow of debt

  beauty yields

  beyond all earning

  A glitter train

  against the sun

  inventing a bobby

  fisher to live through it

  empires of loneliness

  on board

  Dear comet

  dear rook

  who couldn’t see

  the stardom on your body

  Hand against

  the flyaway clock

  a lasting silver lid

  or gulf you fancied youngly

  for a day

  Like Turner with his legs

  upon the orly grass

  thinking treed hills

  in tweedy blue

  his mothered shadow

  a lavender turbine

  an ancient wisteria

  lugging up groundwater

  What you take

  onto the surface

  above the brow

  is fierce emergence

  O hero of the leafy mind

  you’re out of reach

  in parabolic lamplight

  its burning eye

  whatever you wanted

  MY FELLOW AMERICANS

  who came to see

  a baby in a star

  a virgin in a chair

  a boy who walks a book

  crossing like a gold comet

  afloat in painted milk

  Preferring an arch to a peak,

  a pear to understanding

  I think I live

  to clink among the clams

  forgetting the edge of my twin

  Everything eventually falls into

  the opposite of water

  A ticking landscape pulls down

  heaven into atmosphere

  It’s in our paper plot, our life of flowers

  to sun, to sink, to water the planets

  pinching tickets, bending the bow

  Earthlings of modest parentage

  of unsure origin, of orange hair

  adrift across Wyoming

  in sandals, into bloom

  The building will fall

  like a little tree

  of creaturely Magritte

  I haven’t forgotten

  my boots of Spanish lead or

  the khaki nothing

  between painted things

  Regarding impermanence

  we’re almost there

  Dear Mike & Debbie

  in the heat of ’82

  Don’t accept

  impermanent cement

  an eyelash wish

  Regard impermanence

  dear Mike & Debbie

  Regard the flying boy

  Two Poems

  David Shapiro

  UTTER AVENUE

  He deduced from all aesthetics

  in small boldface with shining serifs:

  “He got nothing”

  Translated from the Norwegian:

  “Pleasure is so difficult,

  like tennis, like music,

  sorrow is so sly, so easy.”

  He wept all over the dream.

  Received the dream-letter:

  “Forgive me for (you) using you

  It jolts me to think of uh it—”

  Theology had apologized.

  At the old grammar school, at the beginning,

  father exploded. A critic wrote

  “I’m not much on textures,

  dreams, verbal links;

  and not very big on satire, either.”

  Thank you for liking the last line the subject on fire

  or fire in the photograph.

  THE EGYPTIAN RECENSION

  I confuse all peace

  And fortune here.

  I composed it as

  It is on mountain air.

  I want. Want what?

  Want a cat?

  And provide poor private

  Ash with light.

  Air and sugar. Snow

  In the mouldy mouth.

  “Launched a little boat,

  Will see how it goes.”

  To part you from Bea.

  At the Fountain

  Camille Guthrie

  —after The Unicorn Tapestries

 
; I.

  When I first saw you

  Pearled primed beading phantom

  bearded gilt iridescent

  Creature kneels to drink

  Susceptible falling early spring

  in the city, framed in stone

  you force my proclivities,

  I set my heart on that springhead.

  I pass you a frond of my very

  wish my genius for coming apart at the seams—

  changes of mood, statements of grief,

  and divergence of character,

  Wideranging, much diffused, in late

  meadowy sprays of ardor out of breath

  if you talk to me, I change color.

  Give oneself to

  Clarity

  look me full in the

  Face blue-green

  Iridesce

  this way

  your sound-and-light show

  Overlooking my exaggerations, the causes

  which led him to becoming erect and

  consequent changes of structure:

  increased size, absence of a tail, defenseless condition

  outside the library arboresque, scrubby with reader’s fatigue—

  Our various small points of resemblance

  are luminous, the term used in a wide sense.

  Overcurious, I occupy my plans with the most

  important of all relations, the “lineaments of desire”

  that’s Blake,

  You took no notice.

  Action of hand gestures

  Action of bird landing

  Action of light on a hat.

  II.

  Silvered sloped livid

  Stippled beast, touches water

  No protection

  from the number of individuals in the counterfeit city,

  its gewgaws and things to do, or any marplot

  whose ruinous intent ranges up the avenues to the park,

  fearlessness.

  The girl descends

  into the subway having a fit so pregnable

  those who wait are open-mouthed

  wincing from the tyranny of the beautiful

  and irreplaceable—touch me not.

  She leapt

  yellow gold red blue squares.

  Action of wristlet waved in hydrangea air

  points down carelessly Elizabeth Street “it’s too late.”

  Row of water bottles argues extravagance.

  Seemingly random behavior

  Whoso list to hunt

  Shatterproof paper landscape

  Road test rapture

  How do you like me now?

  The amplification of small errors