 |
"to share those wings
and those eyes--
What a sublime end
of one's body, what
an enskyment; what
a life after death."
-Robinson Jeffers
Enskyment
now
welcomes up to
three poems by
each invited poet, thanks
to an increased
archival capacity.
|
|
hawk@enskyment.org.
You that sang to me once sing to me now
let me hear your long lifted note
su |
~an anthology of print and online poetry~
-Dan
Masterson, editor
|
MARILYN HACKER ● MARK HALPERIN ●JAMES HARMS ● MICHAEL S. HARPER ● Van Hartmann ● Brooks Haxton ●
TODD HEARON ●Michael Heffernan ● William Heyen ● Brenda Hillman ●
Edward Hirsch ● DANIEL HOFFMAN ● Cynthia HoguE ● John Hoppenthaler ● Andrew Hudgins ●
T. R. Hummer ● Collete Inez ● Mary Jean Irion ● MAJOR JACKSON ● Reamy Jansen ●
Mark Jarman ● Peter Johnson ● ANNA JOURNEY ● DONALD JUNKINS ● SUSAN A. KATZ ● JUDY KENDALL ●
X. J. Kennedy ● JANE KENYON ● GALWAY KINNELL ● Peter Klappert ● Ron Koertge ● Maxine Kumin ●
rODNEY LAY ● David Lazar ● Sydney Lea ● HAILEY LEITHAUSER ● Julia Levine ●
Philip Levine ● LYN LIFSHIN ● John Logan ● Richard Long ●SUZANNE LUMMis ●
Greg McBride ● Gerald McCarthy ● JILL McDONOUGH ● ELIZABETH McFARLAND ● Rebecca McLanahan ●
Al Maginnes ● Dan Masterson ● PETE MaCKEY ● GAIL MAZUR ● W. S. Merwin ● Nadine Sabra Meyer ●
judith Moffett ● Carol Muske-Dukes
GLOSE
Blood's risks, its hollows, its flames
Exchanged for the pull of that song
Bone-colored road, bone-colored sky
Through the white days of the storm
Claire Malroux "Storm"
Translated by Marilyn Hacker
Once out of the grip of desire,
or, if you prefer, its embrace,
free to do nothing more than admire
the sculptural planes of a face
(are you gay, straight or bi, are you queer ?)
you still tell your old chaplet of names
which were numinous once, you replace
them with adjectives : witty, severe,
trilingual ; abstracting blood's claims,
blood's risks, its hollows, its flames.
No craving, no yearning, no doubt,
no repulsion that follows release,
no presence you can't do without,
no absence an hour can't erase :
the conviction no reason could rout
of being essentially wrong
is dispelled. What feels oddly like peace
now fills space you had blathered about
where the nights were too short or too long,
exchanged for the pull of that song.
But peace requires more than one creature
released from the habit of craving
on a planet that's mortgaged its future
to the lot who are plotting and raving.
There are rifts which no surgeon can suture
overhead, in the street, undersea.
The bleak plain from which you are waving,
mapped by no wise, benevolent teacher
is not a delight to the eye :
bone-colored road , bone-colored sky.
You know that the weather has changed,
yet do not know what to expect ,
with relevant figures expunged
and predictions at best incorrect.
Who knows on what line you'll be ranged
and who, in what cause, you will harm ?
What cabal or junta or sect
has doctored the headlines, arranged
for perpetual cries of alarm
through the white days of the storm ?
-Marilyn Hacker
Bloom
(Pushcart Prize Anthology XXX)
HAZAL: min al-hobbi ma khatal
for Deema Shehabi
You, old friend, leave, but who releases me from the love that kills?
Can you tell the love that sets you free from the love that kills?
No mail again this morning. The retired diplomat
stifles in the day's complacency from the love that kills.
What once was home is across what once was a border
which exiles gaze at longingly from the love that kills.
The all-night dancer, the mother of four, the tired young doctor
all contracted HIV from the love that kills.
There is pleasure, too, in writing easy, dishonest verses.
Nothing protects your poetry from the love that kills.
The coloratura keens a triumphant swan-song
as if she sipped an elixir of glee from the love that kills.
We learn the maxim: "So fine the thread,
so sharp the necessity" from the love that kills.
The calligrapher went blind from his precision
and yet he claims he learned to see from the love that kills.
Spare me, she prays, from dreams of the town I grew up in,
from involuntary memory, from the love that kills.
Homesick soldier, do you sweat in the glare of this check-point
to guard the homesick refugee from the love that kills ?
-Marilyn Hacker
Massachusetts Review
FOR DESPINA
Why is it I don't like closing the curtains?
Even pinning pans of blue voile together
cuts me off too much from the winter morning's
comings and goings
and the tall, reassuring neighbors' windows
some with window boxes, some with their shades down
some cracked open from last night, so cold air could
refresh a sleeper.
Pick the stitch up, there in the place I dropped it.
Weave the ravelled sides of the day together
if December sun in a bedroom window
calls for a garment.
There are alphabets I could still decipher,
learn to read a stanza, or write my name in.
There are conjugations of verbs instructing
speech, song and silence.
Fear or hope or both of them made of me a
child who thought I'd probably be abandoned
if I misbehaved, if I lied about my
parents - or didn't.
How are you a Jew ? asked the young Greek woman
First, because I haven't the choice to not be.
Those who thought they chose found the same unchosen
barbed wire and ashes.
How am I a Jew? Through my mother's birthright,
turned into a death-warrant once; excuse to
seize the farms and villages of a people
"exiled by exiles."
You, the dead, my interlocutors, whether
friends or strangers - child on a no-man's land, her
satchel and school uniform clear in gunsights,
riddled with bullets --
while I clutch the moment, with a safe childhood
as my history, no grandparents' village,
no street where her father made shoes, his mother
measured out barley.
Strange that all I know of them is - religion?
Not if they had land, sent their sons to cheder;
Not which ones spoke Yiddish, Hungarian, or
Polish, or German.
Not which child, renamed, fed the pigs and dug up
frozen mud for potatoes; not whose notebook
browned inside a cupboard, while trains moaned through the
Galician winter.
Must a murdered child, after generations,
be avenged by gunning down other children
far away from winter and pigs, potatoes
and nameless railroads?
If a Jew may not deconstruct the question
(two Jews, didn't we say, and three opinions?)
if they call the peacemakers anti-Semites,
who are my cousins?
Lost lands which I never would call my country.
How are you American ? she might ask me.
Language, economic determination.
Once, it was lucky.
-Marilyn Hacker
Prairie Schooner
As always, I drift off. They’re playing Bach. As the new spaces in his music keep opening, I find myself recalling Jan, dead less than ten months. Years ago, when he danced, he’d find, in falling, ways to land no one expected, as Bach does, to our delight. I remember how friendship outlasted his skirts, sex-roles, our many differences—and we were writing twice a week, until the cancer ate away his breath. And then the music’s back, Bach’s roller-coaster. I’m tapping my foot, the man to my right not sure where to place me. Opening after opening. I think of my mother: rather than ask me why I was here again, a place she thought of as dangerous, she’d have tried her worry out on a dozen friends. She died not knowing I planned to come back again. The man to my left doesn’t care for the violinist in the trio. He shakes his head. They’re playing Strauss, now, pure schmaltz. What’s the Russian for that? What’s the English? All I can’t hear gives me trouble now, as the dead do, falling through the music.
Mark Halperin Sentence 6, 2007
A NEW TOWN
How easy getting lost is,
not so much in a fog as
among constant distractions,
beacons, appeals. The eye numbs,
stunned by a fence, each paling
topped with a turret, the sting
of car fumes and sea salt—views,
horizons. If you could choose
to, you’d choose to misread signs,
landmarks, take the road that climbs
still higher, but by day three
you automatically
turn right at the right corner,
not looking up to check for
the street, slip in the unsigned
entrance to your courtyard, find
you’ve climbed the stairs, fished out
your key and stand there about
to twist it in the lock, not
having thought where your route
led, attention waning, on
auto-pilot, as often
fading in as out, ahead
as behind yourself. You dread
what is coming, even as
now, turning the knob, you pause.
Mark Halperin New Letters, Vol. 73, No. 4/2007
After surviving, what arrives?
Some phrases are eighth notes ,
some trills , frost on the lawn , a flint
of moonlight in the grass.
Others sweeten breath
like blue noise in the deeper shade.
Like the jeweled beret she found
in a Little Rock thrift store,
the beer in her voice: I saw
streetlight through the tips
of her fingernails, the way
she stood slack-armed at
the window fronting High
Street: neon and gas lamp,
the elementary sadness
of downtown lights.
Let’s get lost , she said—
we don’t need to start
remembering until tomorrow.
All ascent takes the shape
of smoke leaving the body,
the body losing its shape.
To burn a word is a sin
unless it’s still in someone’s
throat. In the backseat
of Aleda’s convertible
the music seemed wrapped
in a flapping flag , torn
and muffled , though the sound
of a blown-apart embouchure
and a junkie’s croon
were reassembled in the wind
by her voice singing along.
--James Harms
Crazyhorse
We Started Home , My Son and I
after Jaan Kaplinski
We started home , my son and I.
Evening beginning. The small stains
of streetlight spreading across the sidewalk ,
thinning to darkness every few yards.
My son paused at the edge of each
then leapt , one hand in mine ,
to the next. Ahead , his mother
touched the meat twice before
turning it , rinsed the lettuce , called out
for his sister to wash her hands.
He said each spot of light
was a great land , each span
of darkness the sea. And we
followed his map home
out past the edge of town where night
filled the long blocks between
streetlights with oceans.
We rowed when we could , swam
the last few miles. Until the moon
reared up like an old man
startled from his nap. And once
again the roads of the world rose
beneath us. Before long , my son
and I were home. I watched him climb
the brick stairs to the front door ,
whose key I no longer owned.
His mother waved as he fell
into the house , the bright rooms
splashed with light. The ottoman
covered with horsehair; a damask
draped over the sofa: I couldn’t see
these or any other emblems of my
previous life. I felt the waters rise
around my feet , heard in the distance
the loose rigging in the wind , a buoy bell.
So far from the sea , I rolled up
my trousers , wading in
for the walk back .
-James Harms
West Branch
Cary Grant
You know, I have about the same interest in jewelry
that I have in politics, horseracing, modern poetry,
or women who need weird excitement: none.
--John Robie, To Catch a Thief
The last time I saw Cary Grant, he was tearing apart bread
at the marina , a cloud of gulls around him. He let me
try on his glasses , those heavy black specs he wore
toward the end , and I bought a pair just like them ,
though I didn’t look like Cary Grant, so I went back to not trying.
The night before he died, Cary called from Iowa to talk ,
just to talk. He said about David Niven: “He never
wore blue out of doors though every pair of pajamas
was a different shade of sky.” When his voice dropped
I thought a flock of sparrows had landed all at once
somewhere on the line between Davenport and Los Angeles .
“Sometimes ,” he said , “David held my hand while we talked
over coffee , while we smoked on his patio; he had a lovely pink house
on Amalfi Drive . Sometimes we just sat there watching the gardener
prune the bougainvillea , listening to traffic on Sunset Boulevard.
It was as if only half of what he was saying could be put into words.”
Cary was quiet a while before he said , “Goodnight , my dear.”
I sat without hanging up and listened to the dial tone , waiting
for the sparrows to lift , to go find another voice. What did Dudley say
to the Bishop at the end , a little wistfully as he watched the window
for a last look at Julia ? “I want to be far , far away from here.”
Away from what , I’ve always wondered , though that’s the half
that can’t be said: a dial tone , a hush , a blue hum in a sky
filled with gulls. I didn’t ask for his glasses that morning
at the marina , he just handed them over. “Wait till you see
what I see ,” he said. And he held my hand while I looked .
--James Harms
The Gettysburg Review
(Chicago, 1994)
He has many;
women in small
towns make them
special
and his touch
on the balls
of the digits
give rise
to a younger man:
too happy to fall apart
in the open,
or in his office,
where he has his tramp;
he travels light,
by car when possible,
but he has his tramp,
and so close
to Chicago
where he had to walk
around Hyde Park
as a boy,
he now drives.
The program,
with Don Byron
on clarinet,
foreshadows movies;
q & a features
the best he knows;
well, Gunther
Said Sassy
had the best pipes
in this century;
this isn't Gunther's
idiom, on this campus
or any other
but Mr. Bassman
goes on to say
he toured
5 1/2 years with St.
"Divine," then moves
to another question,
emanations off the beat
in "Mr. P.C."
Trane's tune for
Paul Laurence Dunbar Chambers:
both men avoided
pimps, gangsters, dressage,
getting to practice,
and being beat up
while protecting
their instruments:
he would die for it
getting to Miles
so modalities
would register
in half-measures.
Byron, who hates
the middle-class,
greets fusion
as styles/alloys;
he was told
he could never
master the classics,
his narrow lips
too thick
for modulations;
grads and undergrads
twittered:
Davis, who was late
to work,
had to get home
to Madison
to tune up;
the rest went to dinner
off Michigan Avenue;
we got paid;
for an extra day
I went out of the neighborhood,
got towed
from an all-night
foodlot,
retrieved my rental
in the snow;
Richard knew better
than to stay:
"Billie's Bounce,"
"Off minor,"
"Scrapple from the Apple,"
the best place to be:
Scarface, with "Fatha"
Hines playing only
the black keys
paid top dollar
if he liked you;
this seminar'
with vertical theory/
horizontal living proof
is aerobicly over: thanks to Richard.
@Michael S. Harper
copyright reserved
Yaddo News Letter
USE TROUBLE
for Jacob Armstead Lawrence
1917-2000, in memoriam
You told this to the children
when they confessed their works
were incomplete your dignity grace
a mapped space for trouble
your migration series at 23
synaptic code for having nothing
as you built off the backs of the poor
your symmetries where paint was talk
"gumbo yaya" Hayden (your collaborator)
coined it about his native paradise valley
a nourishment of the Detroit ghetto
while you were content with Harlem
a sixty-block walk to MoMA
for filial instruction
of the Italian Renaissance:
now in Seattle they lay you down
those parts Indian of your heritage
in Chief Seattle's words:
"This we know---
All things are connected like the blood"
migraines at gunpoint
bullet-ridden love song as migrants
to the highest plane
a vast battlefield of tones
over vegetation of the visible
where there is no insurance
yet in retrospective fantasy
to remake the spirit in your name
Michael S. Harper
@copyright reserved
The American Scholar
Year of the FirePig in Chinese New Year
Seven years back I lost a friend who died at home but ate no pig
(he was no muslim and no "firehorse" and he loved to cook)
Today we have leg of lamb in the oven in his honor to heal his bruises
(his son and namesake has his own "blues" over these seven years also)
A girl sat at his table holidays 'big-legged women with manners was his downfall'
(he extracted a promise from his physician-wife to provide exit-pills at his end)
I saw his daughters from that marriage 'go blank' at busstops near Brown's campus
(others who loved him his mother first murdered by a 'salesman' in her own home)
The Chinese in Chinatown in my favorite city eat FirePig in their own family restaurants
(I knew a Mei-Mei and Mei-Ling and Yin-Yin as a boy in Fillmore supple as ginger)
Later to breathe all night at Permanente Kaiser through E. Coli 'neonatology' cell
('the enemies of promise' everywhere fomenting eugenics in W. S. where all get eaten)
The second wife withheld the pills to ease my friend's last breaths
(a Hippocratic oath or a Jamaican rubirosa cigar an island getaway fully furnished)
This is all in code for I was born in the year of the Tiger lost my neighborhood 'duplex'
(never recovered from the deceit of the beloved and watched men fail warned or not)
The Pig is one thing but the FirePig once every sixty years is "Beauty Shell" covenant
(a lifetime of dread the spit open [NOT THIS PIG] upside down, eyes open)
Sing Sing and Treasure Island full of lifers 'dead in the hole'-then let out to kill
(mandarin writings "Message from the Nile" sphinx all at high table FirePig)
Michael S. Harper, 2007
@copyright reserved
Oregon Literary Review
We rode
single file, climbing sheets of rock
on slender equine limbs, thin air
stealing our breath, plumes of smoke
exhaling from the creatures' nostrils;
saddles creaked and lurched,
hooves struck a muffled beat against the stone,
lulling us as the lake sank
to a silver pebble a thousand feet below.
You were the better rider,
freer to feel your horse's muscles
between your thighs, freer
to inhale the cold smell of the mountain;
I see it on your face in the photograph.
You looked up first when the ridge broke open
to expose a sunlit grove of swaying aspens,
bark crudely carved, black hieroglyphs
on white papyrus, or hollow painted poles
in which Aborigines bury their dead,
except these rustled and shimmered
and angered me to find graffiti
in this wild abandoned place.
Our guide explained that shepherds
working their flocks left messages
for each other and themselves.
"Where do they go," you asked me.
"Most have probably died."
"No, the messages, in the winter
when the mountains fill with snow
and no one can read them.
Do they still whisper?"
"I don't know," I answered.
"Someday the snow will cover me," you said.
"and you will have to brush it off to read my name."
-VAN HARTMANN
Red Wheelbarrow
SEQUINS
Today I took the dog to search for you
along the path we walked last winter,
in that brief lull between the storms,
and recalled the lines you loved
from Doty's poem, "no such thing,
the queen said, as too many sequins."
We both agreed it should have been your theme song.
As the dog and I approached the sign
that always made you stop and do the bump,
because, you said, that's what it said to do,
a gust of autumn wind engulfed a grove
of nearby elms and gave them such a shake
they rained a shower of sequins,
amber, crimson, emerald, gold,
upon our heads. The dog went wild
with chasing bits of fractured light.
I almost heard you laugh. Outrageous, you,
who once picked up your wine and placed it
briefly on the table next to you
because the pill you had to take
said "do not mix with alcohol."
Undaunted, you who told the hospice nurse
you had to walk because you knew
that if you stopped you'd die,
and so, like tireless Hobson in Milton's poem,
you walked and walked and walked
until the nurse gave up all hope
of ever laying you discreetly to your rest.
Then you stopped. Rude impossibility.
You whose laugh could crack apart
the morning sky became a silence
full of sequins, missing everywhere.
-The Texas
Review
SAFE HOUSE
John Scarborough haunts this house.
He seeps through the broad pine floorboards,
wraps about the beams of winter light,
hangs in the air like incense after mass.
He came with our dial tone
late one afternoon while we were out
or inattentive or making love,
brought by a honeyed voice
sunny as dogwood, serious as clay,
persistent as kudzu, trolling by phone
from some cubicle down south,
sliding its filament of tidewater
accent through the static,
dangling a hook of sweet supplication,
fishing for one lucky bite from the lost
elusive wayward deadbeat John.
Like an abandoned sweetheart
she entreated him to call
about his delinquent account.
We erased the tape,
but the lady returned;
message followed message,
clogging the machine, invoking
John Scarborough, John Scarborough.
Month after month she persisted,
always while we were out
or inattentive or making love.
Thus he took up residence in our house.
It became our joke. We the abettors.
John the outlaw. John on the lam.
John of the underground railroad,
she the pursuer of fugitive slaves.
John the communist redistributing
Master Card's wealth. John the invisible.
John the invincible. John the transcendent.
John's libidinous disembodied virtual
self surfing the shopping channels
while we were out or inattentive
or making love, until one evening
we joined him, knocking down
shots of Captain Morgan in Anguilla,
sailing a sloop in Barbados,
tanned and untamed in Tahiti,
carving curves in the snow at Chamonix,
betting the house at Monte Carlo,
charging it all to John's account,
stepping out, inattentive, making love,
becoming ageless, beyond loss,
beyond grief, cut free like astronauts,
lifelines severed, the paltry earth
falling away, receding, shrinking,
slipping into silence.
The calls have stopped, but John lingers.
We never betrayed him, never
put his pursuer off her false scent.
Instead we give him this safe house
in exchange for the secrets
he whispers in the deep night about
what is possible and what is not.
All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;
and we all do fade as a leaf ... Isaiah 64:6
After my mother's father died,
she gave me his morocco Bible.
I took it from her hand, and saw
the gold was worn away, the binding
scuffed and ragged, split below the spine,
and inside, smudges where her father's
right hand gripped the bottom corner
page by page, an old man waiting, not quite
reading the words he had known by heart
for sixty years: our parents in the garden,
naked, free from shame; the bitterness of labor;
blood in the ground, still calling for God's
curse -- his thumbprints fading after the flood,
to darken again where God bids Moses smite
the rock, and then again in Psalms, in Matthew
every page. And where Paul speaks of things
God hath prepared, things promised them who wait,
things not yet entered into the loving heart,
below the margin of the verse, the paper
is translucent with the oil and dark
still with the dirt of his right hand.
-Brooks Haxton
The Atlantic
swung like a
pendulum, back and forth
across the
kitchen table in the light of five
o'clock
where seven loaves were steaming.
It was the
past, could have been many pasts.
I recognized
it gradually as mine.
Besides, the
dead that sat around the table were mine
and rose to
make me welcome.
It was not
as it is written
in almanac
or album: wasp-
thin, they
were not wasted
The madness,
the bad blood had gone.
Here were
the gracious accents.
Here the old
talk, of crops, children.
Here were
the hands of snow.
I sat down,
we all sat down together.
One offered
grace, I saw the fingers fall
over the
loaves that never can be broken
though they
be shattered, pulled apart as loves.
Todd Hearon
Ploughshares
though they
have the hollow look
of beings bred on ether.
There's an air
of cool
removal from your life, the hawk's
indifference to the hare's terror.
You see it
in their palms, raised casually
against the fresco's surface, as to glass
of submarine
or spacecraft, and you see
it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass
alone to
unknown agony. The song
they sing is merely time.
Todd Hearon
Poetry
WHAT IS MAN
THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM
Man is a
weapon of mass destruction –
Eliminate
man you dont eliminate
the Problem.
As dog to its own filth, so man returns
a swarm, a
fungus, feeding on destruction
as when a
child I fed upon my dreams
adrift in a
pool rainbowed with chemicals
a child
already dead, intent on death.
Think of the
thousands I marshaled to destruction
five hundred
years, having fed upon the earth
–
(there is no
better rhyme with death than earth)
I tore the
heart from Montezumas bride.
I saw Bikini
as a nippled blast.
Moon rises
at moth rise. I dream a jungle
from my
fruitless cot. I dream my father
spidering
the walls of the house in anger.
I think back
to my mother. I think
| |
