Kate Benedict is a New York poet (a Bronxer) who has published since 1980, & lives with her husband on New York City’s ritzy Upper West Side; they surround themselves with totemic objects and thrift-store treasures. She has worked in book publishing and finance, hating every minute. Visit her website, from which these poems are reprinted: http://home.att.net/~leahyshaw/katebenedict.html. Also her online zine is at http://www.umbrellajournal.com/.
Atlantic City Idyll Beneath Bronx Singular EL: The Litters Glimpses of the Body.... In The Key.... Into His Hand Itchy Scar
Atlantic City IdyllCome bet with me and be my luck
and bring me gimlets tart with lime.
We’ll chase the wily holy buck
and toss the dice and sneer at time.
And we will dazzle in our clothes
and neon dazzle us as well.
We’ll strike a sleek and moneyed pose,
we’ll yell a blithe, ecstatic yell
until at last we’ve squandered all,
shot the wad and maxed the cards,
until we’ve quaffed till dawns appall
and hoarse are velvet-throated bards.
Come stroll with me and be my muse
of feckless hope and vain desire.
On the boardwalk the huckster woos
and Armless Annie tongues her lyre.
Where it sank exactly no expert knows,
the British frigate with a Hessian name.
Most likely, it foundered in the narrows
off the Bronx in a nor’easter. It came
with a freight of gold to pay the redcoats.
The coins are still unclaimed, or so some dream.
They glint in murk beneath our pleasure boats,
the scattered coins with unremitting beam.
But there are those who do not trawl so low,
who put all latent treasure out of mind.
My family never spoke of a lost ship
when we took those waters at a nimble clip
on summer Saturdays. Were we sun blind,
to notice nothing luminous below?
In the confinement of my solitary childhood
I did a little wandering.
So many things to see and ponder—
bars next to bake shops,
whining expressways,
shrines to the Virgin Mother
set up on people’s lawns.
Some days I’d straggle very far,
past weedy lots and car lots,
through the labyrinth of the projects
to the spot where avenues ended
or else where they began.
There was a beach down there,
I swear it,
a tiny inlet strewn with bottle tops
and sludgy rubbers,
mussels too,
and once a horseshoe crab.
There’s where I did my best thinking
as oily water slapped into my sneakers
and jets descended,
low and lower,
to LaGuardia across the way.
Here is not where I belong
is what I’d say out loud to no one.
My real neighborhood is elsewhere.
I’m from there.
I’m going there, someday.
Rouge, the tabby who matched my mother's hair,
had kittens in the crook beneath the stair.
Mink Max had hers on the porch, on a perch of dried
cloth. My mother didn't let her come inside.
I was four when Rouge brought forth her litter.
I named each kitten: Puffy, Winky, Glitter.
I was eight when Max grew swollen-large.
She'd purr and preen and queenly strut, garage
to snowy gutter, stoop to alley to back-
yard. And Rouge? Daddy put her kittens in a sack
and drowned them in the toilet. The sack throbbed,
the sack mewed. I held my ears and sobbed
though he said to let them die was just humane.
Max glared at me one day beyond the windowpane.
She seemed untamed, she snarled and hissed and rolled
her arching back. Her kittens: dead of the cold.
I had to see. I let one chill my palm.
I weighed the awful event with icy calm
and coldly cursed my mother for allowing the kittens' fate.
Thus it was I learned terror and hate.
Glimpses of the Body at a City Window
Mine is not a building with a river view.
No park outside my window changes hue
with the successive seasons. If I crane,
I see chaotic traffic, and a fire lane.
Shades shield me from the urban mess.
If now and then I raise them, it’s to guess
the weather, not to linger at the sill.
Still, one day I lingered against my will.
Across the street, I saw a man, a very
old man, naked in his room. A terry
towe—gray, perhaps once white—glided past
his hips. He bent, and his momentous ass
hovered above the avenue. Vast, pink—
he bore his great weight gently to the brink
of that too public sill. His wife helped him dress.
He put up with each capable caress.
Were they not mindful of the spectacle
they made, he in his enormous shackle
of slack skin, she in her intimate act
of wifely duty? Their street-show lacked
self-consciousness or shame. Uninhibited
as infants, pure, free, they exhibited
his frail exquisite body and were proud.
It wouldn’t have surprised me, had they bowed.
Nor did it surprise me when the scene would play
again on other days, or that I’d stay
by the window, riveted to the floor,
or that in time their figures came no more.
In Central Park, you lost our keys,
you dropped them in a drift of snow.
The plows
had not yet cleared the road.
Our boots dipped deep with every step,
hip-
high sometimes, kneecap high
and in the snow you lost our keys.
A haze
suffused the tops of trees,
a shush of sleds was on the air.
A pair
of cardinals did not cheep.
Quiet city, muffled, furred.
No one heard
the house keys fall. No one
heard them clink or ring.
How long
it’s been since last it snowed,
how long since we were that transfixed,
so lax
that we let go of keys,
lost them in capacious snow.
Awe
is a deep, distracting thing.
We even took a mazy turn,
down
a path that seemed so strange,
it was made over by the snow.
How
long until it snows again
and snow mist caps the winter trees
and we lose
ourselves, or keys?
...cupped in sleep, you’d tuck a nickel. Such
gentle stealth: not wrist or finger stirred.
His O-mouth gaped, his snoring chuffed and whirred.
That numb deposit: all you knew of touch.
Double shifts of duty on the subways
conducting a shrill orchestra of doors.
After, rotgut with Clancy’s dull-eyed boors.
Back home he’d drop right off: you’d foray
into father’s room, bearing your bright coin.
You loved imagining that wealthy waking—
but did he like the joke? It wasn’t spoken.
Today that quiet man lies dead. I join
you, husband, in a rite of our own making:
tucking in his hand this subway token.
A faded scar of mine turns garnet red.
I’ve dusted powder on and slathered rich
ointment. Nothing assuages the sharp itch.
Untidy wheals have broken out and bled.
Hadn’t I forgotten that childhood gash,
forgotten it like a freckle upon the back?
Forgotten too: the masked faces, the black
coma, the body part removed like trash.
The scar was numb. It gave no sensation—
though I recall, dimly, how it prickled
when newly etched. For a while it tickled,
then all feeling ebbed. Complete cessation?
Unheal me, resurrect me, the wound wails.
Have at me, prize me open with your nails.
Adrian Boas was born and grew up in Australia but has lived for the past 35 years in Jerusalem. He was born in 1952. He started writing poetry only recently. He is an archaeologist and university lecturer in the field of medieval archaeology (a field he has published 2 books, & is completing a 3rd in).
Down shopping mall or narrow covered suk
In sun-warmed streets the happy people pass,
A Friday morning's shopping to be done.
And laughing faces, children at their play,
Young girls and lovers walking hand in hand,
And somewhere near a baby's laughter heard.
Then, for a moment pure silence reigns.
But only for a moment, then a rush
Of heat and noise and dust filling the air.
An immense din, too great to be described
And putrid smell that is best not recalled.
The frightful ringing matrix behind all
Is broken by the sound of falling glass.
But sound and smell are only part of this
And sight is now far the most awful sense.
Shattered limbs, burned faces, wild eyes
And empty husks of bodies on the street.
The anguished cries of injured and distraught
Are buried now beneath the sirens' wails.
As fear and comprehension take a grip.
And those who still live settle in their pain,
Begin to grasp their new reality.
But some are dead, some will not walk again,
Some will never more see their loved ones.
Some who before were children now are old,
Some wish that death had taken them instead.
Some candles and a wreath, a curious crowd,
Perhaps and angry voice or two that shout:
"How could this happen? Who will take revenge?"
But come again, say in another week
To pleasant covered suk or shopping mall,
Or sun-warmed streets where happy people pass,
A Friday morning's shopping to be done.
George Dickerson is a poet ("The New Yorker," "Mademoiselle," "Pivot," "Rattapallax," "Medicinal Purposes"), fiction writer ("The Best American Short Stories of 1963" and "1966") and actor ("Blue Velvet," "After Dark, My Sweet," etc.). His "Selected Poems 1959-1999" was published by Rattapallax Press, 2000. He is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
A Mist Of White Horses Badinage For "Pepper" Dentistry In War Relativity The Coming On Of Night The Integument Of Dust
A Mist of White Horses
Tell me you have not forgotten the rain,
Close by the Mediterranean Sea,
Promise a mist of white horses again!
In the marshy sedge of the delta’s plain
Where the white horses of Camargue run free,
Tell me you have not forgotten the rain!
Why we should meet I could never explain,
Except for a squall’s serendipity;
Promise a mist of white horses again!
Huddled together like two sheaves of grain,
Strangers sheltered under a wind-whipped tree;
Tell me you have not forgotten the rain!
Well, this led to that and that led to pain,
But what severed us was not surgery;
Promise a mist of white horses again!
I’ve stumbled into an arid domain
And counted the days to infinity;
Tell me you have not forgotten the rain;
Promise a mist of white horses again!
Badinage for "Pepper"
(for Thomas M. Catterson, in memoriam)
So you've finally gone to seek your severed leg
And end your body's antic quarrel with time.
Terrific! What's left behind? Here. At the still point.
Where the mirthless clowns of midnight
Snicker: "Hoo ha! Hoo ha! Sweet Pepper's dead,
With Eastern metrics dancing in his head."
This is not so fine, my friend...this hapless end.
You know how absence aches....
You knew before you quit
Your walker's intricate pirouette
The recklessness of wish and want...
The cost...the haunt... ("Jig! Jig!" the jongleur said.
From his busted bed.) But to stop short
The syllables of your heart's fierce muttering
So soon is beyond my knack to grieve.
Hey! Let's take a jaunty, jocular leave
And screw the wizard of finality.
We'll have another cigarette. You bet!
And watch the lovely ladies' last late pass,
Then listen for God's gruff guffaw
As you humpety-bump your raggedy ass
Up the steps of heaven. "Hoo haw!"
Dentistry in War
Leaning in, his drill a weapon in his hand,
Hachem sortied into the molar’s core.
I could read the braille of sweat
On his oily face, acned like downtown
Souks pocked with bullet scars.
“Your mouth’s corrupt,” Hachem said.
I thought of Martyr’s Square
And the bomb-blasted stumps
Of the center’s rotten teeth.
“Root out the cause,” Hachem said.
His hairy finger probed
Like the snout of a foraging pig
Or the blunt nose of a Kalashnikov.
“The nerve must die,” he grinned,
Imagining himself the perfect
Executioner, imagining himself
On barricades, firing away,
Committing murder in the name
Of hygiene, without anesthetic,
Smirking while the city screamed.
“I hate the killing,” Hachem said,
“It’s such a waste of dental work,”
Digging deeper still, as if to excavate
The ruined Roman stones beneath
The crumbled, bankers’ vaults,
The war-wrought jaws of East Beirut,
As if in my poor slobbering mouth,
He could wipe out recent history,
Eradicate the offending caries
Of civilization gone awry.
I thought of flesh falling away,
Of teeth like gravestones
Marking the cemetery of the skull--
All laughter gone--incised
With Hachem’s demonic skill.
He was a man of sensibility:
Leaving in my sinus a pool
Of formaldehyde to combat
The germs that might yet try to live--
Embalming sentinel of his domain.
I protested the coming hurt;
He cursed and shouted, “Screw your pain!
What matters is my artistry.”
Oral butcher of West Beirut,
How many of the mounting dead
Smile the rictus of your dexterity?
Outside, I can hear a siren
Speeding towards someone waiting--
Someone who may not know
He is waiting.
On my kitchen table I reach
For a crust of bread
And crumbs I have not yet eaten.
Between the reach
And the waiting
Is the cave of a parabola
Where I can hear
Einstein laughing.
Light scatters from the trees
Flutters momentarily,
And seems to die on air.
Night picks up his walking stick.
Jackhammers machine-gunning the streets
Have stopped their persistent yammer.
Only a fragment of an echo
Brought by the restless wind
Chatters the Venetian blind.
In my room a girl trembles
To an emotion as far away
And indecipherable
As the shudder of subways
Through the belly of a building.
It is too late for summer,
But she makes fireflies
In the darkness
With her cigarette,
Insisting on her presence.
In the first night, in the Garden,
Did terror strike our hearts
With the quickness of the tiger?
Or was there a sign
To ease the uncertainty--
A surprise of stars
Assuring the upturned eyes?
Over the city now,
The stars open bloodshot eyes
In a heavy, sullen neon glow.
The girl snuffs out her light,
Makes a stirring like leaves,
Like grass disturbed by frightened birds,
Then empties out my room
With the closing of the door.
The heart crumples black
As a burned letter
From the half-forgotten past.
The Integument of Dust
I’ve been cautioned by the cognoscenti
Much of the dust in my unkempt rooms--
The dust that soups my kitchen air,
Stirred by a ladle of sunlight--
The motes that silt the rivers
That grain my oakwood table--
These are flakes of my own dead skin
Hanging around to haunt me--
Sometimes cohabiting
With the sloughed-off flesh of others:
The man who reads the meter,
The plumber who plugged up the leak,
And all the transient lovers
Who’ve left hints of themselves behind
With these miniature calling cards,
Just to remind me what I’ve squandered.
This is unsettling news, to learn
I’m dying piecemeal day by day,
That when I scratch or if I shrug,
Particles of me fritter away,
And to discover I’m never alone,
Even in my most private acts--
For which I can hardly atone.
(“Ashes. Ashes. All fall down!”)
If I draw the blinds, I cannot escape
Hannibal’s elephants marching on Rome--
Their dunglike feet pluming the air--
Or the ghosts of the Ganges dead
From ghat-burnt pyres that smudge the clouds.
Coterminous with the cosmic dust,
I am commingled with all that’s passed--
Nudged in a sneeze of memory--
Composed from our common quick pool of quarks
At the yawn and stretch of awakening time.
When the great storms rose on the Kansas plain,
My grandmother taped all the windows tight--
The cracks of doors and all the chinks
Where the laden wind could insinuate--
Sealed fast the cedar chest under her bed.
Covered with blankets, we hid in the closet
While the banshee wailed through her widowing house
And the buzz of bees filled our dust-bit heads.
Before he died, my grandfather ripped
The tape from the chest, felt deep to the center
For the yellowing linen of her wedding dress,
Unfolded it with arthritic care
To find another’s dust sheltering there.
(And the centipede crawled on their mohair couch.)
I have been to distant desert places
Where toppled columns crumble and flake--
Our civilizations blow away in the wind
And dust devils dishevel the mind;
I’ve knelt and wept for all our sins;
And I’ve come back home to trace
The calligraphy of your spectral face
Writ in the grit of my windowpane.
Clayton Eshleman is a poet, translator & editor of Sulfur magazine. He has had many books published by Black Sparrow Press since 1968. Upcoming books include Companion Spider [essays] & a revised translation of Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land [both by Wesleyan University Press]. Check out his websites: http://www.webdelsol.com/Sulfur/ & http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/eshleman/
Crematorial sensation in a department store, thousands of suits and dresses without bodies, as if it is always Book 11 of The Odyssey, we are surrounded by speechless souls
Souls trying on souls, the hippo-assed white, the mantis-waisted black, caramel shoulders of a teenager, a pink ankle-length soul for Xmas day
Caryl found some fabulous pants, gold green alligator quills, loose in the crotch, baggy in knee, she put them back, fearful no tailor she could find could fashion them perfectly
(In eternity, Henry Miller is a tailor--
lustfully he entered the Cave of the Nymphs,
soon became more concerned with the gates of ivory and horn,
souls arriving, souls departing, all needing
a cutting here, an addition there--
a drowned soul slithered in, needing resurrectional attention,
old Blake hobbled through, Henry dusted him off,
perked up his lapel)
We sashay over to the Santa Center, the old sot in red crumples each wish, sending a beam of hope into the child heart, I can feel the soot already in the childrens' mouths as wishes like elves congregate on their lips, they sit for a moment on the stony gingerbread knee, this realm of sweet deception
Dorothea Tanning's female cloth-like forms blow through, crumpling knots of outwinding femininity
Department
depart meant
Beckmann's Departure
clothes awaiting casting off
Redesign yourself, step into this angelic armor
Cuddly music, emptiness made cosy
"'Exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats'
vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,
gouging the wages down,
dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
in blood, in wasting flesh."
Old man in a pea coat searching for something among womens' suits
Recalls my father searching for my mother after she had died, he'd steal his car keys the Rest Home people had hidden, then drive and drive, 200 miles away one afternoon a housewife found him parked in her driveway--when she asked him what he was doing there he told her he was looking for Gladys
--emptiness keeps coming in,
the unfillable sleeves and slacks of life
The terrible animal imprint in perfume departure, the civet cat and the musk deer, crushed like grapes, displayed in tiny gold vases
I help Caryl shop, holding her coat and scarf, pick out clothes, color schemes, purples, lavenders, auburns and deep browns, things for her new silhouette.
Copyright Ó by Clayton Eshleman
Marissa Fox is a recent graduate of Barnard College, where she studied Art History. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she spends her days working on a floating chamber music hall, and her nights contemplating Frank O'Hara. This is her first online publication.
A Short Confession Border Town Blues Jamaica Transfer The Excuse The Graduates
Kaikki is hello in Finnish.
I found this in your English-Finnish dictionary
when you were downstairs using the bathroom.
I was going to surprise you with my language skills,
but I put down the book quickly (like a thief!)
when you returned, so I never got the chance
to figure out the correct pronunciation.
I have been meaning to say it to you:
kaikki when I ring your doorbell,
kaikki when we meet by accident in town.
In my mind kaikki also means goodbye
and I say that, too, though slower,
lingering on the ka-i-kki until it means hello again.
Listen, I know you have trouble understanding me
(save for the instance when we locked eyes,
when we held hands furtively in a crowded pub),
I just want to tell you that I am working
on other words - pussata, suudella, suukko –
that I will mention one by one when language
means less, and the spelling looks right.
Copyright Ó by Marissa Fox
The heat down south is killing us:
we, the disarranged,
the leftover, the jughandled,
even our stories are stale –
We feel a prick on our tongue
that doesn’t disappear for weeks
I fell for you in a border town,
near a tent city
from my vaudeville days
in a bar that was all corners
When the shots went off,
I followed you half-way across the country
in a long tuxedo coat
and one application of mascara
My eyes were bluer then,
before the cataracts;
there was nothing innocent
about the way I looked you
up and down
Copyright Ó by Marissa Fox
The train lights collapse
Across the platform is Olga
Her dress immaculate
Her thoughts strewn
Like old leaves
She presses her spare keys
Into a stranger’s hands
As if by habit
There are traps
In the architecture of unfamiliar faces
Jiri calls with the excuse:
we can no longer meet
at the flea market at lunchtime.
It will be too hot –
Haven’t you seen the way the sun
descends on the plaza?
Hitting the rims of old spectacles,
reddening the necks of those digging
through the remains of forfeited fiction,
the stubborn reminders of chance.
We cannot meet here midday,
he says over the phone,
only later, when the shadows
spread across this tired square,
when the market shuts down
and Marolles becomes a burial ground:
Meet me where the vans
gather the unsold goods
in the wave of exhaust fumes,
where pieces of cloth, chains,
a shard of glass lie –
there you will find me,
scavenging.
The Graduates Present Their Theses
Concretized, Krauss-esque
In both ways, in multiples
An appendix or an index: a sign
Hold on, hold fast
Less didactic, more romantic
There is a seamlessness to your discussion
There is a seamlessness to your dress
Bad graphics, how Benjaminian
Adorn[o]ed, their best blouses
The blondes always discuss Turner
A pause, applause, 3 missed calls
Some misread article in Artforum
A re-appropriation of “the icon”
Their lecterns were invaded,
Or worse –
Poorly articulated.
Copyright Ó by Marissa Fox
Dylan Garcia-Wahl Dylan came to the UPG a number of times. He has written novels, as well chapbooks of poetry. In addition he has hosted reading series, cable access shows, and is an avid jazz enthusiast. He is married, with two children from a previous marriage. One of his long-term goals is to live in Europe. I have known Dylan since 1993 and we have collaborated on a number of arts projects. His website: http://dgarciawahl.com/
As In Benediction Baptism Filmatic Gates Of Rodin Manikarnika Ghat Quiver For.... Somnolent Verse Song To Whom Is Forbidden Voices Welled
You, Madonn’ of my desires,
each dream is coiled to your caress
as is the solstice of my needs.
My love, when the world covets flesh
mine very words shall covet love.
For answers come before questions.
And now only thy flesh is the
lasting want of antiquity
come immaculate. Soft, I scream
my past and my sins into you.
Palm to my chest, these delicate
flushings of wish are beyond me.
The dark refracts as a single
wonder passes from you to me.
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Baptism
'Tis only by humble cherish
that I make my way to your fount
The writhing of my essence in the hands that I clasp
make into this hollow of mine, a performance of grace.
The words of my confession, the trial of my days
lent to your forgiveness.
For you,
I shed myself of my flesh,
of my calling, of my sins
before your waters darkened by candlelight
to seek redemption
to ignite a purity
to deepen my bow
and fall to the within you.
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Filmatic
for Jerry Tomlinson
“Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm happy to state, I finally won out over it.”
-Elwood P. Dowd, “Harvey”
Life (?)…
an archipelago of breaths
Reels –
movement
(or years)
purposed and propelled by memory
The theatric boast of life the eyes parade
a silent camera, ever behind, focusing.
In patchwork scenes childhood, middle years, old age,
death – then birth -
edited
played out
critiqued
Nothing known at the fade in
will be felt in the fade out
Leaving nothing to predictability,
except pardon,
the film is christened - ages
in sensitivity and texture
The stir of the heart
scripts the direction of purity,
cleaving to what we cast off,
never playing tomorrow as the strains
of another day
What of the actor?
His lines are his to forget
-his audience to recall
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Whereas Ghirberti had bronzed paradise
The unfathomable can be found more explicit
By the doorwell as much mirror as it is plaster,
A question posed: By what sins is there a rising in Hell?
As declension must have a counter balance
Avarice is brought in holy quantities
The expulsion of shades that have drowned in spirit are still
The Biblical myths pray in their falling
And incomplete as is all sin
In vignettes of lamentation
Never has the human form been more naked
Never have beliefs passed by so rapidly
Even if discord is not visible to you
Face your sorrow and it is sculpted in portal.
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Manikarnika Ghat
The Ganges moans unlike any ocean can
But, come tumult, the voices are similar
Death is this sound of dying
Dead, all is the reap of prayer
A shade made of life
owing veneration
to what waves can bring to memory
In the renunciation of the river
wisdom is given repose and
passions are washed away to become sediment
The water, itself, is but a mask of the senses cleansed
A diseased breeze feeds
the sinless fires
in turn sooting the air with ancestry
making way for the eternal river
-which is Heaven
Chanting at the steps
Doms of outcast wearied
Bodies burned of their stories
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Is his life the tune of his human hands
as they play out rhythms at his shoulders
in a refrain that comes to nothing more
than drumming of nervous architecture
to the straight on stare of strangers and friends
which mixes the past with what now comes myth
in a man that is buried from within
by the loss decreed sanctimonious?
The very tremble of his hands excused
in order to show his capacity
to feel beyond the blur of his present.
For continuum weighs sympathy. There
is not sin in the baring of these days
that calm this man to strains of humanfold.
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Somnolent Verse
‘neath bare your feet the grasses sing
as springtime yields the world its heart
In timely tongue my language will pattern
a supple course of desire
There’s a prayer I’ve chanted made up of your motions
in a day that needs you closer to tomorrow
So, until I can approach you
having you see me as naked
without seeing me as weak
I will not call again upon your rest
Sleep
Sleep
for a moment in the hold of God
Oh, sad intangible one,
to die impossible by your side
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Song
Singing something
to walk through the walls marketing the world
Singing to imbue a horizon
Singing a prayer of spirit
It is within our flesh that God comes to ponder
showing the makings of illusion
For it is not the ribs enclosed in flesh
that give definition to man
It is by the singing we are defined
Judgment comes by how the songs of midnight
meet the songs of daybreak
Sculpting an innocence
is easier in the blindness of the womb
than in the world
with its mint of the unfamiliar
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
To Whom Is Forbidden
There was the night I dreamt you drowned
Baptized to me an anguish found
No breath to rise, lips part no more
As horror wished to be adored
I pardoned our unwedded bed
I practiced saying your name dead
At Midnight’s lunch the grave was served
When I rose to unleash my nerves
And tipped the shelter of my fears
In the house that believed you here
The corners where your shadow weeps
Displays the dust thought buried deep
What comes of you is chord and note
With weight to sink but wave to float
My eyes to lift and tremble when
I woke to find my broken pen
Its ink in flood across your throat
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Voices Welled
Emparadis’d in your reaching spirit, delicate
there is a sky that does not pass above you,
a second that is not made a moment without you,
and a beauty etched to carols of the heart.
For there is something naked in your voice.
Innocent not - sometimes a weakness
when the heartened flesh trembles pale
brightened by a moon of continuum Spring
who’s breath does birth the belief of ecstasy
kept to union in nestled bodies
weeping for immortality.
For in each whisper, a catharsis.
An echo for to surround
with the sigh of your quiver.
All senses toward you.
And always
you
moving alone within invited crowds.
Always you
stopping breaths
forever
and dressing desire.
Always you
haunting the hours of man
with an image of beauty
that justifies their loneliness.
And always you,
only you,
hearing my voice
falling silent
in hesitation
of your soliloquy
in fear of its touching
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
William Glass William lives in Gainesville, FL, and works for the state. He graduated from UF, gaining above all a rabid addiction to football. This is the first time his poetry has been published.
Satellite:
A Collect of Astronomy in First Person
Sin Speaks Behovely Sonnet, In
Advance.... The
Instrument Responds... Satellite:
A Collect of Astronomy in
First Person ...consider
first, that Great or
Bright infers not Excellence: the Earth Though,
in comparison of Heav'n, so small, Nor
glistering, may of solid good contain More
plenty than the Sun, that barren shines, Whose
virtue on itself works no effect, But
in the fruitful earth. Paradise
Lost 8.90-96 Copernicus ~May
24, 1543
(for Bishop Tom Wright) I
study the sun, constrained into a glass of
wine, within whose fluttering demesne a
shift of wing is seen to pass, transfigure,
and remain most
truly wing. That is light's effect on
things—reveals them most by making them into
itself. The luminesced reflect: so
things become what
we see things by. And
if my face is
brighter than most, it is because no shade remains
to leave a trace of
knowing whose engines made the
wing in the wineglass and its flight reveal
the shadow that reveals the light. Galileo
Before the Inquisitors —Rome,
1633
Save
your histrionics! Have you seen How
Venus spins in the light of the sun? You
insist I undo what I’ve done: to
please a jester, shall I jilt a queen— deny
her in the rack of the world, and
swear she never visits me? She
turns her body, whelms my sight in a whirl, Shows
me what Anchises could never see! Jupiter’s
queens never quit his face; can I hope
to turn from the vast horizon of light, smash
my telescope and hope the sight of
her will die in me? She, who can never die? It’s
more than a lie you bid me tell— why
must I quit heaven to stay out of hell? Sir
Isaac, at the Lamb and Flag ~1693 Nicolas,
fetch a friend another ale, a
glass to shed the cold--but not the dark viscous
soup of a beer, I fancy the pale, the
froth refracting light in upward arc, the
only thing that ever made me doubt gravity--Nicolas,
please do hurry back-- For
them I endeavored to father out the
revolutions of force in the vacuum of fact, to
chart the attractions of bodies barely in reach of
one another's influence--but I learned awe
from the reaching--Oh, so hot in the breach is
the grieving, my friend, of love that is not returned-- Damn
Leibniz or England, I don't know which!-- Nicolas,
why are you leaving!?--You son of a A
Letter from Yuri ~April
12, 1961 Valentina, Never
have I been 'til
now, so clearly aware of the need for space to
open, occasionally, between a
man and what centers his motion.
There is no choice in
gravity--we were anchored to the ground. I
labored with the power that cut the string, but
now that I've seen it dangling, what
do I wrap my ends around? Russia's
a ghost that doesn't know it's dead --like
you, the earth is blue, not red!--no motherland's cord
can tie a man who has gone to bed with
the world in his window, small as a hand.
No country is worth the tethering to:
It's good that I circle, not the world, but you. One
Small Step, or Armstrong to
Aldrin, In a Bit of a Hurry ~July
21, 1969
7:56 pm (Houston Time) close
me up tight or I might bleed into the nothing which
bends and beckons me as if toward home if
home were nothing and maybe we came from there and
rockets testify to an uncertainty of
return whose only fruit is the act no certainty or
its lack can justify how with all our might we dare tempt
the titans whose rage alone can
salve the wound we surround with air in our breathing I
should never have been chosen for this though
our times choose us and I will not be found timid
in the mirror of my time still I confess near-failure
of nerve that I should be first to transgress the
pale bride of the universe and know my wound will
endure hollowed out in her where nothing always is .
. . . "I
have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these
properties
of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses.
For whatever
is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis;
and
hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on
occult qualities,
or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.
In this philosophy
particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and
afterwards
rendered general by induction." --Newton
(1726). Principia Mathematica
Copyright Ó by William Glass
I become as though I never wasa fault within them, which cannot reform
except by mending the frayed seam, cause
of the wound unstitched, into a whole. This harm
was not my choice, nor did I choose to tear
all that was torn by me. Here I am nothing
I was not made to be. And no repair
can heal the break in everything
I am, since I am the break itself.
Of this they are ignorant, but not you:
you were the harbinger of something else,
something I was unsure of, in that I
who was rent by all, found in rending you,
myself--fresh-hemmed, with cords that can't untie.
Copyright Ó by William Glass
Sonnet, in Advance, to an Ex-girlfriend*two months from now, possibly
It was your body that I loved most
of all bodies, and that most I love
to recall. For in each of your features a gist
was printed of the rest. What I would leave
in turning each page of you would attain
in the next. Your eyes could feel like fingers,
unfasten in me what I feared to be seen.
Your furious waist could roar with anger
(I would that it still roared on me). I would
watch your breasts flaring, like a hunter's nose,
at the scent of what lay hid in my wood:
your body was nothing like you supposed!
For you were all bodies, each body the crest
of the next--of the body that I loved most.
Copyright Ó by William Glass
And
who knows how I play, how I hold you
to
be mysterious as music is,
brief
as a summer afternoon, and blue
as
Miles Davis was never, how I
am
held by you, whose curled melodies sway
in
me with new words. If
I bend and lie
in
that posture, tendering for a curve
this
back upright and hollow, who will say
what
heaven or hell would have been—or if
any
orthodoxy could sustain that beat
of
yours, could any bible give of verse
the
way you give of your ambitious sweet
improvisation,
& breathe into me the riff
of what you hold & only we rehearse?
Copyright Ó by William Glass
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