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Carnelian
As changes go, beyond replacing a bookmark, I hope Carnelian 's move to its new domain has been nigh on invisible (please accept apologies for any inconvenience); indeed, the aim of the magazine will remain visually as it was before: to present a poetry quarterly whose graphics reside in the text of the poems, right next to the imagination, the emotion, and the artistry... A couple of new wrinkles debut: Poetry All Stars, which will feature favorite poems, and On These Premises, a page for reviews, poetry-related commentary, opinion, etc. [Note the link above]. In this issue, you'll find an in-depth examination of poetry by the Chinese-American author Ha Jin, former winner of the National Book Award. Two more reasons, I hope, to keep an eye on these premises ... The Editor On the cover: The Kiss [detail] by Fernand Khnopff pastel on paper circa 1887
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Volume 2 Issue 2
April 2002
TABLE
OF CONTENTS:
Absolutes Ruth Daigon Corte Madera, CA Hold It Taylor Graham Somerset, CA telling the truth until nothing else matters John Sweet Endicott, NY Image Series, August Night Tim Bellows Reno, NV After Apples, Listening Tom Sheehan Saugus, MA Autumn Song: 41° N Steve Delchamps Chicago, IL Wormholes Kathie Isaac-Luke San Jose, CA Remembered Wings David Anthony Stoke Poges, UK Similes Taylor Graham Somerset, CA Engine Hour Paul Kloppenborg Melbourne, AU After the Party Jack Granath Kansas City, MO Cushioning the Blow David Anthony Stoke Poges, UK Poetry All Stars Calenture Alastair Reid Catch What You Can Jean Garrigue
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Submissions which
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POEMS:
Let there be days soft and deceptive
the taste of water absolute
the inner sun absolute
and our awakening absolute
Let our life fly over fields
filled with radiance we almost touch
air we almost embrace
and moments of near fullness
We are one with the legendary shadows
smiling with apricot lips and vanilla
voices
singing the sea's high sound
in a rush of joy before dark
When the last feather of light floats down
on the ripening hours
the breath grows visible
dividing and dividing stillness
We recall fine tunings of sun
the moon's ancestral silver
fugitive years and moments
nudging enchantment when we wore
the loose limbs of childhood
and watched endless springs and summers
steeped in the absolute music
of long-traveling light
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Hold It by Taylor Graham Let’s not go there, you said. So we didn’t. One foot at the slippery threshold we pulled back, dancers in a video rewind, almost that dizzy. The words slipped back in my mouth, I nearly choked on the indiscrete question asked in reverse—a fish- hook in the throat. The two of us slickly back- stepped polished corridors along with all the other travelers in hasty retreat, so eager to retake their pasts. Each of us coughing up morning coffee along with masticated small- talk and the casual regret, all the time getting closer to something I don’t want to take back, some- thing I think’s worth saving.
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telling the truth until nothing else matters by John Sweet cold and the threat of snow and your beating heart wrapped gently in a white flag this need to describe every moment the fear of drowning or the fear of abandonment or the blood coughed into the bathroom sink on a tuesday morning and what if i tell you that this is a love poem? what if the baby cries until the mother kills it? these are words that should only be written at least a hundred miles from home are words that should only be found scratched hastily onto crumpled sheets of paper then thrown into hotel wastebaskets imagine what it means when they become something more
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Image Series, August Night by Tim Bellows
One dark tree stands in the damp lawn. Steel fence
knifes along the center line, the level grasses.
I’m south of the fence, down in the bed.
The final son, I
look out father’s high windows. Night
grows from the particle, the moment
where sleep, rain and dream
sweep down in expert landings. The agile blackness
snaps open. Sleep
hits the formal room back in my eye.
Come and meet the matching instant where rain
hits the leaves and atmospheres hanging over my
lawn
and I’m some sleep-eyed animal. The neighborhood
nudges me, pulls the covers down and I’m just feather,
cuticle, floating skin. The lawn
sprouts up as forest after instantaneous centuries
pass.
If dream can wake us up and prowl
through branches and hanging moss. If the old trunks
can send leaves up to wrap silence and reach
clear through the city’s hum in the sky. If that
sound
can in turn stroke the purring,
the thin bird call inside every green thing
buried in the weight of night,
the cabinet of silence.
And if all music be released from the sidewalk
boards,
the day sky—then sound can walk us head on
into the waterwheel of sleep where you and I
meet to question nothing and see
how easy it is under this day of clear-water light
and hard sun
to creep and shimmy up slow out of the morning’s
drops like wide eyes.
Where we continue to touch
the million hearts of the past night and nights
to come;
touch the green-dark singing of dream, rain and tree.
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After Apples, Listening
by Tom Sheehan
They have all gone now, the fire engine-red
Macintosh, under batter with cinnamon,
gone
to day school on yellow buses with brown-
baggers, or bruised to a freckled taupe
and
plowed under for ransom and ritual. Some
have had the life crushed out of them
for
Thanksgiving cup. Standing on the stiff
lawn
downwind of winter, I drop the first cold
moon
of November into a fractured wheel of apple
limbs and hear the bark beg away. A pine
ridge,
thicker than a catcher's mitt, grabs half
the wind
riding off Monadnock and squeezes out
wrench-
ing cries that hang, like wounded pendants,
on
necks of far, thin stars. Deep in the
Earth, in a
thermal tube of its own making, an earthworm
grows toward a rainbow trout sleeping
under ice
and waiting to be heard, or the last of
an apple's
black-as-tar pips still on this side of
the grass.
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Autumn Song:
41° N
by Steve Delchamps
The leaves must die,
and so must I;
all things that descend
from a common start
arrive at a common end:
in death, whose comprehending art
enfolds all our bright diversity.
Each living thing—
on foot, on wing,
at swim—bears the mark
that proclaims us one,
who journey from dark to dark
trailing our shadows in the sun
and finding at last the evening.
O Latitude!
deciduous wood!
loved all-dying place
of my brief life's calling!
In mine is revealed your face,
as in the leaves of autumn falling,
blown sparks of surprising plenitude.
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Wormholes
by Kathie Isaac-Luke
Somewhere, in a parallel universe,
you are sitting in a well-worn chair
your books and maps fanned out
before you. There, in our nightly
ritual, I sit beside you, perhaps
adding recollections to my narrative.
In the silence of the comfort no words
are wanted to tell me you are regretting
not having seen Antarctica in the spring,
the glaciers not yet receding, a great
auk of penguins thick upon the shore.
And in that world I am wondering
how my own life would have unfolded
if when you asked me, I had told you "no".
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Remembered Wings
by David Anthony
Year after year their timing was the same. As early summer took the place of spring my swallows came, and briskly gathering would breed, then raise their young and so proclaim hope's renaissance. Each darted sharp as flame between the earth and sky, remembering old haunts, despite long miles of wandering. This year I waited but they never came.
Autumn's a time for leaving. Cherished things are embers, as remembered flames burn low, and vanish with the chill the first frost brings; A time to grieve, though now it is not so: never to greet those brave arriving wings spares so much pain of parting when they go.
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Similes by Taylor Graham He never exactly mentioned love, but on that Sunday morning he was fixing eggs for two. But that was once, and now is later than a professor dares profess about any given semester or its students. All that semester he’d murmur Elizabethan likenesses, conceits from Donne, while he kept on grading papers and speaking of the poem’s essential ambiguity. Decades later, suppose you meet by chance. Do you dare ask him, once for all, whatever does a love poem mean?
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Engine Hour by Paul Kloppenborg Blood[A+] pistons bones [206] joules steam skin bolts [20 sq feet] the gas of my sex throttling ventricles moulded heat, starts muscles [650] now glazed as one, dynamo ribs, 50 billion cells subcutaneous diodes gnashing adrenaline's mounting joints of lacrymal glands sweat our litres, yet spindle kisses tapping, putty and fitlock, grooves now wet grip shafts fracture, skulls as notches, sternum to my teeth [32], toes [10] tempered drive beating [60 beats] booster rods of 80K, cranks tissues, my tissue, our enzymes, chamber serrations shock serum, now chronic, all waste, stall,
inert
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After the Party
by Jack Granath
I hardly knew her, didn’t care,
Beautiful, moody, Japanese,
One foot on the bottom stair,
Fingering her keys.
I shambled up without a thought,
Said nothing, found her eyes, and brought
A red grape to her grape-red lips.
Warm breath against my fingertips,
Neck bending back, her eyelids low,
Proud of her beauty, proud to be young,
Preparing an illicit show
Of teeth and tongue.
Her taking seemed to take her days, And then we went our separate ways.
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Cushioning
the Blow
by David Anthony
We thought it best to leave the cat with
Ted
along with Grandma, when we went away.
No sooner were we home from holiday
than, bluntly, he announced the cat was
dead.
"Listen!" I said, "Bad news is better told
obliquely—such as, 'Bess went climbing on
the roof, and fell. Her legs and back were gone.
They tried to save her but she was too old.' "
Ted—who's direct but not a thoughtless man—
felt chastened (so he said) and mortified.
"Don't worry, Cousin Edward", I replied.
"We all drop clangers. By the way, how's Gran?"
"Not great", he said. "In fact, to tell
the truth,
last night she went out climbing on the
roof ..."
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Calenture by Alastair Reid He never lives to tell, but other men bring back the tale of how, after days of gazing at the sea unfolding itself incessantly and greenly— hillsides of water crested with clouds of foam— he, heavy with a fading dream of home, clambers aloft one morning and, looking down, cries out at seeing a different green— farms, woods, grasslands, an extending plain, hazy meadows, a long tree-fledged horizon, his ship riding deep in rippled grain, swallows flashing in the halycon sun, the road well-known to him, the house, the garden, figures at the gate—and, foundering in his passion, he suddenly climbs down and begins to run. Dazed by his joy, the others watch him drown. Such calenture, they say, is not unknown in lovers long at sea yet such a like fever did she make in me this green-leaved summer morning, that I, seeing her confirm a wish made lovingly, felt gate, trees, grass, birds, garden glimmer over, a ripple cross her face, the sky quiver, the cropped lawn away in waves, the house founder the light break into flecks, the path shimmer till, finding her eyes clear and true at the center, I walked toward her on the flowering water.
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Catch What You Can by Jean Garrigue The thing to do is try for that sweet skin One gets by staying deep inside a thing. The image that I have is that of fruit— The stone within the plum or some such pith As keeps the slender sphere both firm and sound. Stay with me, mountain flowers I saw And battering moth against a wind-dark rock, Stay with me till you build me all around The honey and the clove I thought to taste If lingering long enough I lived and got Your intangible wild essence in my heart. And whether that's by sight or thought Or staying deep inside an aerial shed Till imagination makes the heart-leaf vine Out of damned bald rock, I cannot guess. The game is worth the candle if there's flame.
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Carnelian V2 Iss2 April, 2002