-John Allman

                                                  5 AM

 

SYNTAX       Reeds, mud grip, shell that forms only upon shell, this marsh rising and falling to sea-pulse, moon-drag: news of itself the only front-page effort worth its time.  I'm bored with self, the drop-out ego abashed at how little it confounds the tide's insistence.  I'm fed up with a name lifting itself into the breeze of opinion, the sky's azure only air that curves to authoring roundness. Nothing steps out of nature.  Nothing returns from the vast water that does not crave its tidal beginning.  Look across Calibogue Sound, at the three-masted dredge adding ocean floor to Daufuskie Island: spewing sand and broken bi-valves, crackled carapaces, torn whip coral, stag-horn weed, the sea's waste like the mind's creaturely ideas sinking to the bottom, pulverized into voiceless god-ground poverty. A turning over.  Shuck and thrust.  Hurled column and collapse.  A foothold reappearing further from tidy lawns and a porch filled with tourists in peaked caps, their glinting binoculars tilted to a sight-line low as this row of belly-wet pelicans close to white-caps, profile pterodactyl, their glide precise as a hand moving over text, without hesitation, instincted to its course.  Sucking sound.  Fume-moan. Stinking blackness.  Shuddering belts, sudden fling:  the given-up now the only given.                                       -John Allman                             The Beloit Poetry Journal   A DISTANT SUNDER Index What God hath joined together, let no man put— I used to solder. The reasons why are now obscure. Maybe just to bring old junk back to life: a clock, a ceiling fan, my father’s Philco; to see or hear gizmos, gone silent or dark, whirr, light up, or sound an alarm. There was a rude art to it, and an odor: The shock of a barely audible pfusssst; a sudden melt; quick hardening. Just a lad, fooling around in Dad’s cellar; making intimate connections; bringing strands of copper —cleansed of dirt & grease— together (or back together) with a silvery ring. Do you, wire A, take this wire, C, to be your lawful wedded weld? As I built each bridge over troubled metal, pulses quickened; couples thrummed: I do! But Judas snuck into my make-believe chapel and hid in the last pew; while the parson argued a slam-dunk case against betrayal. Still, I heard God’s demiurge say: Do what fasteners may, love & solder will be kissed away by a distant sunder.                                            -David Alpaugh                                                   Runes Sweet Nothing You may take four words with you cried the Angel of Death. Why four? (Already I was giving them grief.) She shrugged her wings: Seasons, Winds… Corners of the Earth… Horsepeople of the Apocalypse... Not even Euclid fully understands why Divinity favors that number. God is nothing if not inscrutable. Now there’s a word I’d gladly go into that good night with, I said. God? We gave it to Milton ages ago. Hey, he worked hard for it. No, the word I want is nothing. I can hear myself chanting it over and over—through all eternity. She smiled. Speaking of chanting, I visited a fellow named Ginsberg recently. He chose “howl,” “cock,” “Moloch,” and “OMMMMMMM.” What do the GREAT poets usually pick? Their immortal names! Colley Cibber… Robert Service… Kathryn Kookewicz… Alfie Tennyson caused an awful stir when he insisted on adding Lord which so irked Saint John of the Cross he proclaimed him blasphemous. No, I don’t want my name. I was never that crazy about it. You don’t have to take all four. The Zennists always complain that we offer three too many. Then I’ll just suck on “nothing.” Roll it up and down the roof of my mouth forever as if the stone Death punished Sisyphus with were no bigger than an Altoid. But, soft— while you’re at it, I’ll also take “forever.” She had turned on her laptop and was typing NOTHING like a DMV clerk checking a personal license plate request. Alas, it had been assigned to Thomas Hobbes in 1679 after he took his “great leap in the dark.” And John Donne had dibs on “forever” forever (along with “ecstasy,” “bone,” and “desire”). The Dead had scavenged the lexicon, a few nouns and verbs at a time. They’d eaten the red meat. Even the adjectives had been picked clean. Nothing was left but the parsley: adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions... I chose: “up,” “down,” “if,” and “meanwhile.” Just in case I awoke in a dark wood.                                                           -David Alpaugh                                                           Convolvulus Pivotal Question Why must they turn and look back? Ruin everything at the last moment. Lot’s wife... Eurydice’s lover... Their answers only partly satisfy: “Had to make certain she still followed.” “Couldn’t believe the city I loved was in flames.” Why, steps away from sure ground, This urge to look over our shoulders? To risk untold joy just up ahead— For a furtive glance behind.                                         -David Alpaugh                                            Hummingbird     LITTLE ELEGY Index Even the stars wear out. Their great engines fail. The unapproachable roar and heat subside as wind blows across the hole in the sky with a noise like a boy playing on an empty bottle. It is an owl, or a train. You hear it underground. Where the worms live that can be cut in half and start over again and again. Their heart must be in two places at once, like mine.                             -Keith Althaus                              Grand Street FEBRUARY The murder of Malcolm X took place long ago but now hes everywhere, coming up from underground the first thing you see, books with his face on the cover on a cloth spread out on the sidewalk next to T-shirts on which a splotch of colored ink mixes with nothingness to form his eyes, the edge of the familiar jaw and brow. He was in transition then, the crowds that themselves were thinking, rethinking, knew it was important, even brave, to come, the nadir of the winter, dark hole of the week, Sunday afternoon, the street all dirt and wind, corrupted snow. That is also when Horowitz always played, Sunday afternoon, at 4 PM... He was dead by then, on stage, among cables and wires from microphones and tape recorders, freed from his age in its swollen strings, untuned, like a bead curtain you push aside to enter a room denied to others.              - Keith Althaus             The Yale Review SOME NIGHTS, between the car and door in the dark I look up to find the great river of the Milky Way, and stand for minutes growing cold in the autumn air, unable to move, take my eyes away, only to look back, wishing the house would vanish, and I was alone, far from lights and roads, with its dark, its cold, its change from everything known, which makes even those reaching claw-like backyard trees seem welcoming, and I think this must be how innocents are drawn into madness, a whispering begins, that could be anything, the wind, but then turns definite, becomes a voice that has but one intended listener. In a field years ago I watched another river, dark, without a name or end, flow overhead, hundreds of thousands of birds, the complete opposite, the negative of that silent, lifeless stream of stars. The cornfield is gone, so are the birds, though their descendants may still follow that same flyway, perhaps some stars are also dead, and only their light survives like a memory a million years old. Tired and cold, under icy reminders of how insignificant, how brief we are, I mouth their message in words I see disintegrate: I am alone; I am almost nothing. Yet these rivers meet in me.                                -Keith Althaus                        American Poetry Review