BROCK BOWMAN   Brock was- with his then-girlfriend-  a frequent attendee of the UPG from '96-'98. He only came a handful of times after, as has not written as much. Here's hoping the bug strikes again!

Footfalls on....    Girl Waiting    The Winthrop Hill Dance 

Footfalls on the other side of the door

Your eyes are moody;
behind them crumbling December
rattles, the sun has left
for a warmer place.

The river you helped
name has slowed to dirt;
it’s shadows bow deeply
blue to a sun like midnight.

On our backs, barely blue,
we fold ourselves smaller.

Copyright © by Brock Bowman

Girl Waiting 

Lightly in a falling,
ironed flowers spread across
a cloth pattern. In a field.
In a blue blaze behind you.

This wintering afternoon street
sniffles as a crowd passes, youthful
thighs yellow-looking on
the bearded black snow.

As these thought grow into
you like roots,
the dividing world stops a moment
to listen.

Copyright © by Brock Bowman 

The Winthrop Hill Dance   

The summer loved us then,
wind and woodthrush clicking
in the knee high grasses;

but now it is October scattering
in the reeds, and needles of broken
pine pinch the wet ground. 

In red faced memories, the lighted
edges of the dance hall fold
into the curves of an older wood,

a rush of papered stairs empties
into a bumbling river of boys
leaning on their crooked bow ties,

and wine colored songs toss
themselves like shipwrecked water
over the curling shapes of curious dances; 

but the place where her shoulder falls
and her stare rises to continue,
the slick haired boys are careful not to look.

But now it is October.

Copyright © by Brock Bowman   

LIZZY COOPERMAN   Lizzy was a semi-regular to the UPG from late 1998 through 2001- although we'd like to have seen more of her and her work. She is also an actress who has written and performed a one-woman play HOMEMADE recently. Her poems are all first-person but she usually has interesting scenarios that are very well-written. She was often a daring young voice at the UPG.

Rushing     Sonata

Rushing

We used to think our uncle passed
In a contest to see how long he could hold his breath.

The only way we thought to die—
Being underwater too long at the public pool

The little dime flashing at our noses as we dove
Against the rippled pressure, our feet propelling us

To the end, where diving feels more like crawling,
The last kicks to keep you at the floor to grab it, silver

Rushing back up, ripping the skin, shocked to inhale,
Your arm catching chills just to hold up the coin.

The mother in the background nods from under her sun hat,
Smiles, turns the page of her magazine, over on her towel.

The sky loses pitch.  The cold will catch up soon…
But not rushing up?

My sister practiced holding her breath in the bathroom mirror,
Cinching her lips, adjusting her features to match the almost red

Pressing to make it past that intermediate phase,
To come through, the final firework blue.

It became a contest of tolerance between us,
Two pained faces gripping the counter to stand it.

I was afraid of what might happen to our heads
Or the color of heaven if we saw it so young,

So I exhaled first, encouraging her burst.
She squeezed my wrists, making me support her fit.

Her look proved she was more serious than soap operas.
Leaving the mirror for my face, warning right into my eyes.

Sometimes I had to push her cheeks in, deflating her.
She screamed, got pink, sometimes cried, not letting her die.

I was left with the mirror after my sister’s storm.
The last rattle of hangers on the door she slammed

The moisture of her hands still left at the counter’s edge,
My circulation lifting back to level.

Copyright Ó by Lizzy Cooperman

Sonata

Staccato

              If there is a God,
              he keeps handing me
              this toothless piano
              that makes no sound
              unless I crawl in
              and move around.  

Legato

              If there is no God,
              then society presents
              this toothless piano
              that expels no chords
              unless I press
              against its boards.

Pianissimo

              If there is no society,
              then my family installed
              this toothless piano
              that begs for divorce
              unless my sonata
              keeps timing its voice.

Crescendo

              If there is no Rest toothless piano,
              I am left with God, society,
              and my family, making an orchestra
              to avoid my keyless gums of noise.

Repeat

Copyright Ó by Lizzy Cooperman

GREG DEGERSTROM  Greg was a UPGer since Day 1- and we could't get rid of him! Greg was the UPG's wildcard- both in verse and temperament. A walk inside the Degerstromian world is an experience- to say the least!

A Measure....   At Brass Tacks, Inc.  Being Someone  The Present  To Helena, Montana

A Measure, Door to Door

From youth's thirst
For a big greenevergreen yard
Just off a breath of lawn,
We come to a tangle of brush over
Where few things are so
Hard to take,
As cold wet springs
Rusted, or such a rake
Back to a house stuffed with room
So late. Then wanting the door
To some far inside night
Life, striding, forcing
The screen door
Balanced on a Universal  (spring
Hinge)     that brings hurry back
At the rate of our hugeness
of being
beyond our means
In a new home.

Copyright Ó by Greg Degerstrom

At Brass Tacks, Inc.

My wife and I and homework now
in clean diapers, we shake out
our cobwebs, spin them around
like color clothes in waltzes
over carpets. These wind down
with sealed faces of clocks like clones.
Monday daybreaks into pieces- of us
as drones in a working factory.
The huge morning hum just is,
into dispensed cups
as caffeine spits
for us to think.  So it happens
particles
in an industrial vacuum,
Of our minds continue-flashing existence
turning to ash. When no overtime
results, eyes are sparking open enough
for workers to find a serious
tank of thought. Our minds favored
for steel traps must open doors
leading to fumbled empty boxes, parts filled
with bits of rusted suggestions.

"Improve? Well how would you do it?,"
is glare off a plastic new hard hat.

My wife replies, "There must be something
to do around the clock. Something
We can get good at, then don't have
to go back. But people don't talk much."

Copyright Ó by Greg Degerstrom

Being Someone

As an athlete he starts: his lawn mower's mowing....
Cramming it toward his marks in the world
he stops (and hits golf balls, dimples of universe).
He wants to get to the big final running
into time. He rides a drunken bus ahead through
old joints of city stops, all the while waiting on
slow breaths of big houses
getting a handle on their lawns
as they would their pedicures, and carry
each like the morning paper so their neatness
and kind are everywhere. Rain through windows
is sheets falling off stars rising above it.
His best work was rush hours in sandbags
along a levee once, never staying away so long
that waving spilled over. The rolling stars
must have gotten over enough of these jobs.

Copyright Ó by Greg Degerstrom 

The Present

The branches seemed to weave floor space above
rooves as we walked. She knew all about that,
premonitions too, including crashes
into mountains so blue lost on trips.
She and her family know the abstract in
Picasso names and can make up
four sides around mind games.
But I could see a triceratops' display
or Egyptians' ruins- and be with them
cooling off calloused feet under
translucent mayfly wings,
felt this was worth something.

She wasn't in touch for months
but then sent a "carbon-dated" present,
a skeleton key, in case
I wanted into her planned treehouse
in the future or any old New Years.

Copyright Ó by Greg Degerstrom

To Helena, Montana

Again I open all the Great outdoors, past
all architectures so rounded cubed
angled colored and present, sent from the ground,
past corner toughs whose wild sides
are steps into sound tapping softness
for clear streams, past the shed gray
beyond a building block's leaden adjacent
lake, my past jobs stunted sunfish
swimming their circles, somehow still- fraying
against each other, wearing in the tall shadows
from sky places. The pine clearing
is a further dream sifting through
straining tree tops into their sleep at evening.
Indian paint brush leans on a frame of mind

Copyright Ó by Greg Degerstrom

ART DURKEE  Art graced the UPG from late 1997 on & has published a number of chapbooks. Most of Art's poetry is free verse and often focuses on nature and Eastern approaches to living. He is the UPG's resident polymath and/or Renaissance man. 

Art's bio: Arthur Durkee is a poet, musician, photographer, and artist. Currently living  in the Twin Cities area, he has lived in India and Indonesia, and calls Michigan and Wisconsin home. His photography, writing, and musical compositions have won several local, regional, and national awards. Websites: (personal) http://3.avatarreview.com:8081/dragoncave/  & (professional) http://3.avatarreview.com:8081/BDP/

A Book Of Woods    ...And Light   La Madonna    Not There, Not Yet    Red Pines   The Books Of Binding   The Water Temple    Tsuru No Sugomori

A Book of Woods

Cold of the cedar heart. Storks in the road. Pausing.
Up the valleys of red air, sunset finches blur into being.
Sun barks through pine needle carpet. The green birds.
Red shoulders to the wind. The eldest wind up quiet, watchful.
Nothingness. Your back to the cliff. Grey grows land, become stone.

Remarkable ironies. Hands becoming memory.
Birdcries of children in serious play. Try on this life for fit.
Porcelain sky turning grey. Murmurings in the scrub pine.
Does any geometry encircle the fallen birch? Where the red bird is.
A path, a winding, a trick of falling. Thunder clearing the fallen.

What is the right hand saying to what’s left?
Anything moving is chaff, what’s left to scare.
Apples of the irrigated chest. Naming is not the source.
Sweat of the night christens this marriage bed: two spirits.
Wrens in the headboard. Your breast full of chattering birds.

Agony of acorns ripe with vivid green lies.
Following the bell into silence. Two strokes midway.
Taking night’s throat into stillness. The dry lands.
Falls of sulfur, the beating of wasp wings. Speech of dust.
In this memory of river, underground, the religion of lamps.

A convergence inside something infinite.
Conflagration. Ekstasis. Remorse and removal.
Olive trees pretend to dance. Only wind.
Hardpan underfoot: dolomite and shrubs.
I’m walking on the gods’ home mountain: sun falls bronzed.

Moon veiled in bright ice-cloud, pine-tree sentinel.
The howling. Red-eyed, mewling, clawed and torn.
Every eye a tree-spirit, a passing light. Into cedars.
Loon: black dot on grey seas. Dark island.
Into the every world a circling, a wheeling. These times.

Stars bleed in from grey: watchers without hope.
Outside after aurora, sky cloud-blinded, veils.
Aspen snow boughs white on white. Footprints.
Trail starlit, moonlit, firelit. Eyes opening to Orion.
Clouds knocking snow loose, sugar on the wheelbarrow.

Copyright Ó by Arthur Durkee

. . . and Light

i.

the shaman crouches
on a boulder at lake’s edge,
crouches taking on the raptor shape:

his eyes and ears wordlessly swell:
aware of the tilt of every marshgrass blade,
the flick of toad and waterstrider,
counting tamarack needles on the far shore,
golden eagle turning far above,
long line of the wake of a loon flying low,
winging at the edge of air,
rush of a dark blue dragonfly thrumming past,
the pause as it catches, eats a fresh mosquito.
he hears the tic of small fish
breaking the lake surface, a fitful breeze
in the high cedars, insects humming over loam.
his lungs fill with damp lake-scents,
humus, peat, the abiding pond-muck.
his toes flex on lichen-encrusted stone (he feels 
muscles moving in his thighs, fingers alight
where they hang between knees), time and water
crumbling granitic matrix into sand. 
wavelet rings with brightening.

these times of raptor eyes
have overshadowed him: now released.
this heightened afternoon, brightness comes
without hurting, clean and timeless. he has waited.
promises kept in a wing’s turn at vision’s edge.

and the sunlight on his skin, a welter of grace.
counting the leaves. following the raptor soaring.
the deepening stillness, as time
pulls elastically towards Now.

ii.

the shaman stands
on a boulder at lake’s edge,
stands in a cathedral of light:

the lake is hushed, a silvered stillness,
black, deep, stars reflected in its mirror,
Jupiter dancing to the east in stalks of floating grass.
mist rises, veiling the opposite shore,
gathering into a spiral vortex at lake-center,
the island where loons call
white-shrouded, half-washed away,
a world floating between fog and stars.

this is night’s high mantle, blue hours long before dawn,
but a daybird twitters in the distance, confused:
the sky is split with blue-white radiance,
Northern Lights spreading across the skybowl,
glows veils spikes and crossroads
pulsing as waves wash through them
at the speed of solar wind.
brightness falls from the air.

washing of mind and heart:
covers the sky, sheets of luminescence 
enveloping as he stands on a boulder
at the apex of spirit’s dance.

the temple of the night,
waxing with shimmer light, with point light,
burning moon just down.
the shaman said,
“show me the Face of God.”

iii.

the shaman builds
a frame for the lodge
where rocks will hiss: from their own heat,
sweat and prayers will stain the dirt.

birch saplings curve over
to meet their twins:
this tying together is already
the ceremony: cleansing.

clear the land just so: giving thanks
for every greening that allows this lodge.

the shaman builds a sweatlodge, 
defining space: this will be inside,
this will be outside. they are the same size.

saplings curve together
to make a dome, bound to each other,
children clinging to their mother’s hands.
their feet are planted in the dirt,
small rocks caging their ankles.

working in the circle, he smells
sea-salt and brine, blood and dung.
the air inside comes from everywhere.
geometry of meeting in the womb.

inside, shadows loom, waiting for the revealing.
cries of bears, wolves, birds, and dragons
will ring from the pitted earth.

as he pours cool water,
the shaman remembers his own
and is glad and grateful.
most recent: nearly going over
the waterfall, a sacrifice to the river
on its own altar. he pours water and sings.
steam rises, draping them,
a mantle laid on the shoulders.
“make me a better little hollow bone
for your spirit to blow through,”
he cries. and pours water.

Copyright Ó by Arthur Durkee

La Madonna

In a minute, I’ll make a sandwich.

Until then, it’s enough
to sit here by the window
nothing tugging at my skirts.
Soon there will be work to do,
children at my breast, demanding,
a husband little more than a child,
hungry. He imagines that my days
are not work, and my nights are his.
Now the light is changing
towards the cooler half of afternoon,
and the house still—just for a moment.
Such a deep green on the leaves.
I must prepare dinner,
for he and they will soon be home,
filling the rooms and halls with clamor.
Look at the light on the sill.
It used to be adoration.

In a minute.

Copyright Ó by Arthur Durkee 

not there, not yet

                                           the gull still
becoming the cloud that chases the boy,
or the boy puts himself into the water
like moose or dark elk tasting lichen.
no, not yet: if you never arrive,
you never have to choose between trails,
one going up past the waterfall’s steam,
another idling in the heat, stirred 
by the strokes of gnats’ wings—
the story doesn’t have to end; the telling 
braids words into watercress, the cry of the rabbit, 
caught in the lynx’ jaws, rings out 
over the reeds, echoes never receding.

Copyright Ó by Arthur Durkee 

red pines

i.

The red pines droop
low over old snowbanks
while drip water melts

into their shoulders
and over the feet of crows.
I have to wonder

if, after all, there isn’t
some place for me
under their boughs,

sleeping.

ii.

Three planets coax the moon
through a purpling sky,
until everyone’s down but the Daughters

and the train lights on the hill.
In the stand of red pines
near the park’s eastern road,

wind flicks needles against
the feathers of sleeping crows,
who fidget, dreaming of maize

in blue evening August.

iii.

Last night, the park filled
with fresh snow, not even
children’s tracks, yet

lit high in relief by the street
lights acid yellow and harsh
on the eyes.

The park huddles silently
where crows burn,
black coal chips

under the red pines.

Copyright Ó by Arthur Durkee

The Books of Binding

The Book of Spells 

the drumbeat. all things enclosed in the circle.
their cycling rhythms, the dark voices of stone altars.
from this rough place, another is made, is touched.
seahorses stride across the plowed fields.
breezes stir the leaves. the weakening sun.

The Book of Air

whisssst. sssstinfickertick. sssssshhhooom.
mouths of the dark birds shatter.
roaring in the sky, three knocks above the hill.
death of a god, birth of another.
now the sea and air are their own gods, restless.

Atlas of the Dead

come see: how quietly they move through the stones.
parchment fingers rustling their leaf tambourines.
the dew is on the grass. their feet, in all their wanderings, do not touch.
they float above the earth, or dissolve near to it, into it.
their compass rose is of the greater earth: these leaves fall through them.

The Book of the Sea

the sea speaks fiercely, cursive waves and shouting spray.
surge. pull. the tides rock under the sky, chariot rhythm.
foaming at mouth and mane, the green mares race ashore.
prairie grasses break in waves over the river’s edge, churning.
leaves fall into the eye of the ocean. whales sing of hot, dark love.

The Last Wave

God is a huge encircling round, like the ocean, permeating everything.
like the ocean.
the eye of the ocean is the heart of time. the Dreaming.
dreaming true of a rose, a shell, four moons, a crescent scythe.
sickle moon pricks these trees, the earth into humming.

A Book of Elements 

Earth says: I turn. I adhere to myself, lichened unto time.
Air says: I fill. There is no burning without me, and no living.
Fire says: I consume. Living is dancing, the immolation of love.
Water says: I flow. I slowly wear it down, seeking the lowest ground.
Spirit says: I spin. Every grain a web, a lantern, a long  weaving.

Copyright Ó by Arthur Durkee

The Water Temple
            for Ando Tadao

Go down between the lotuses
to the red dawn of the West.

Drowned under the moon-pond,
yet still breathing: lungs complain
at the extra work.

Someone filled this garden
with cedars, tall, red, blank-faced:
witnesses or guardians of the sunset.

She sits humming, the aether filled
with lotuses floating in her hair.

Each time a monk descends,
shaven head bobbing on the pond,
a blank cork:
drowning the self, finding the self. 

Mirroring your original face
in the flowering lotus:
path down through
open water.

Copyright Ó by Arthur Durkee 

tsuru no sugomori

and a white crane rising
from the braided pebbles
of a stream, sandbars and rivulets
intertwining mare’s nests—
transfixed on the god of fishes
as it stalks the royal river,
shrapnel of god’s yellow eye
nailing the dusk to you—

*

and a white crane found loving
the flicks of late spring snow
hounding fluffed feathers, the stream
too cold to stand in long,
in a riffle tadpoles have
just now thought of dancing—
and a white crane’s careful step,
the graceless launch that merges
down the river’s twists,
till you can’t separate the distances,
wind blows the mind into snowdrift,
there’s only a golden eye where
the sun was a white feather
(adrift in a dust dance longlit at dawn)
landing on feldspar boulders
pinked by aspen through sunrise—

*

and a white crane lands 
downstream, repeats its silent
long-legged march upriver,
all hunger for the cold-slowed
salmon of wisdom, and repeats—

Copyright Ó by Arthur Durkee