Welcome to Archive / Links On These Premises
Carnelian
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not. Indeed. We imagine we know, and occasionally, we manage to make it sound as if we do. What the poem simmers down to is theoretically definable and practically limitless. So until someone invents a litmus paper that turns phthalo blue or cadmium red at the merest breath of poetry— opinions rule. And I have those by the dozen ... Check out the guest review on Ruth Daigon's new book in On These Premises, peruse a pair of her poems, and percolate along with other fine works by Jack Granath, Paul Goldman, John Sweet and more! On the cover: The Duel After The Masquerade (detail) by Jean-Léon Gérôme oil on fabric (1857-1859)
Grace our mailing list, or request a link exchange: carnelian@sidewalkpress.net
Volume 3 Issue 2 April
2003
TABLE
OF CONTENTS:
Naming This Morning Taylor Graham Somerset, CA The Cruelest Month Wendy Taylor Carlisle Texarkana, TX All We Need Jack Granath Kansas City, MO In My Body Of Skin Ruth Daigon Corte Madera, CA a map for the blind, the bones of ghosts John Sweet Endicott, NY Russet Liquid Janet I. Buck Medford, OR Riptide Paul Goldman Overland Park, KS Northern Catskill Mountain Trail Jack Donahue Bayside, NY Mother Of Alphabets Ruth Daigon Corte Madera, CA Last Rush Janet I. Buck Medford, OR Winterwarm Beki Reese Newport Beach, CA Perfume Among The Groceries Geertjan Wielenga Vienna, Austria Poetry All Stars Keen to Leaky Flowers Richard Hugo A Pilot from the Carrier Randall Jarrell
**************************************************************************
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Send 1-3 original poems, any form or style, no longer than 100 lines (per). Author retains all rights. Cut/paste poems into the body of an e-mail (not as attachments or links to URLs). Simultaneous subs okay; previously published okay if you hold copyright; poems accepted/rejected (generally) as is. Include name/city/country; no screen names please (use pseudonyms if you prefer to remain anonymous). No homework assignments or therapy exercises, thank you. Please query concerning poems longer than 100 lines, or articles for On These Premises.
Submissions which
do not conform to these guidelines will be discarded unanswered.
Send to: carnelian@sidewalkpress.net
*****************************************
back to table of contents ***************
POEMS:
Naming This Morning by Taylor Graham A gaggle of geese becomes a skein rising above the usual noisy murder of crows. It must be spring in this gratitude of grass, where a loyalty of dogs (your term) is chasing a famine of rabbits (mine), and won't come home to either call or whistle. That's loyalty for you. Whoever invented (I wonder) these odd aggregations? A superlative of cats (you'd say, knowing I own one, who's surely her own superlative of one). And how about a clasp (I ask) of lovers? As if two of any- thing could ever fit together in a single word.
***************************************** back to table of contents ***************
The Cruelest Month by Wendy Taylor Carlisle This spring’s parrot tulips blow, Red and white under the River Birches, yellow daffodils genuflect and scrape for the black pansies in the garden, the earth ruptures, splits, drives from jet to olive green, rain gluts the thawing soil, retreats and falls again. April prays for sighs at the start, begs sadness for remembered kisses, nags us for disconsolate spring verses. The poet urges me, "Regret your losses." But I come in from weeding glad for ruin, grinning at my dirty hands.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
All We Need by Jack Granath The full night tilting steeply, starts to spill, A long walk, thoughts of Fassbinder, the work That lured him rushing through his sloppy life, Four films a year and countless cigarettes, Wrecked cars and broken hearts and microphones Dipping, on occasion, into the frame. A life like that, so senseless and so breathless, Desire mixed up with speed and fragile skin, The stumbling evidence of something more Than movies at the far end of his gaze. And what that was, it really doesn't matter, It blew it spilled it will not be recovered, He left it on the bed beside a script He never finished. Intimations, though, Come tumbling out in your ferocious words: "Racing," "panting," "pushing," "doing." "All We needed was a dose of Fassbinder." All we need ... And look—it's everywhere.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
In My Body Of Skin by Ruth Daigon
When I was a nightingale I sang
When I was a serpent I swallowed
My voice spume blown from a wave
a sound too thin for earthworms
With memories older than Prometheus
I remember the time when time was birthed
the sky appeared
sudden light wind and water
where blind valves closed
on a single grain of sand
In my body of skin of moss of clover
I touch fingers to fingers
lips to lips
the exposed tip of the heart
Seed work sun work earth work
If pansies are for thoughts
I pick them early in the morning
so they last
Lake-summer days I climb the hill
drink the sky and pose like Millet's peasant
listening to an invisible lark
With a pocketful of seeds I sit
peeling an orange under a static sun
attentive to the sound of pine cones clicking open
The child sleeps in my shadow
and walks beside me
following from birth
moving as I move
We cling together like small animals
the well is dry the cup empty
and gravity is a long way down
***************************************** back to table of contents ***************
a map for the blind, the bones of ghosts by John Sweet not lost but moving blindly beneath the late october sunlight measuring the flat empty landscape between one known place and the next with everything that matters in my life right here beside me my son asleep and my wife silent and all of my lies forming a halo or a noose all of them offered without guilt without apology and wherever we go someone has just died or is about to wherever we go the windows have been painted over with frost and a television mutters to itself in an empty room does this sound familiar? are your doors locked against the possibilities of the evening news? what you need to do is consider all of the reasons a man might be killed find one to call your own maybe a second drive until you can no longer remember what it was you were trying to leave behind
***************************************** back to table of contents ***************
Russet Liquid by Janet I. Buck It's 8:00, a.m., too early for the bottle god, but a gallon of bourbon sits on the counter's clean tile. Its russet liquid, well, it's been our orange juice. The sight of it just threatens trust. I'm two days late with your birthday gift. Ribbons sag and Hallmark cards don't speak what's on my worried mind. Did I push you to this cliff? Father just ignores your glass, wanders off to watch the news. I recall the wet excuses dripping sap from falling trees— "I need a little for my bowels. It's not a drink; it's just a drop." If I hadn't used a corkscrew plan to sort through my depressing mail, I'd probably blow off the scent, consider slurs the way of winds as age creeps up behind the back. But I see shrunken leather livers in my head; organs in formaldehyde. "Father, take a firmer stand" my eyes are pleading forcefully. Doctors ought to use their forceps deftly scraping out the wound. In all my amber innocence confused with prayer and plugging through recovery, I stare at crystal lined with ice and God, I hope it's apple juice.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
Riptide by Paul Goldman
A crippling calm haunted the surface,
years, like gleeful gnomes hidden
beneath the rough undercurrent,
smiled.
As memory panned gold
from grains of sand,
fiction battled truth;
if his life was only his benign creation, then the line
from imagination to visceral reality blurred,
and sense begot
nonsense.
Whom he had claimed to have been
no longer kept the sharks swimming
at a safe distance. Danger danced.
His steps, each cautious and keenly aware,
were too late—barbed edges of barrier reef
bit into the soles of his feet.
As pearls of blood-lost wisdom
sullied the crystal blue water,
hammerheads marched toward him,
convinced of easy prey.
The undertow hailed, a sweet siren
Song to release, surrender…
as the sharks circled closer
his lips, for a moment,
tasted the salty hereafter.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
Northern Catskill Mountain Trail by Jack Donahue Climbing the escarpment trail straight up, packed with city savvy, the doors to familiar safety seal themselves behind me. We assault the mountain with raingear, water, and food, seeking the unexplored view. Along the trail, I find the pale green veins of new life curl out of the soil. Through rocks, the meanest plants thrust their heads toward the sun and centuries of decay enrich the forest floor. Every hole is a snake hole. Every fallen branch has deep eyes and long teeth. Fearful noises fall off the edge of distant crests as birds color the leaves with song and hide their tails on sunlit limbs. The trail winds up soft beds of tufted grass, fragrant balsam and tiny insect villages shrouded in brand new clouds. The top of the next mountain is nearer to imagination's flight than to these tight limbs. Natural springs give us rest in the ice clean sustenance of dreamy states. One splash and city fat relaxes in quiet cool. Our senses renew themselves in the clean and clear. We move along with the unbroken rhythm of fresh growth. Even the fetid stench of fallen deer fails to spoil this pioneer walk in the woods. What happens in the deeper, darker woods? At night, the other world crawls out. We scramble for the safe placenta of a nylon tent. Creatures roam the forest, crawl out of their stinking holes, gnaw things from catalog and gift stores. Bobcats chase errant ponies through the thick and wild animal screams race through the trees like ghosts. Porcupines ignore our threats, turn their defiant backs, click teeth and raise quills against our authority. Darkness belongs to the twig-crackers and hole-makers. Being gnawed alive by impatient teeth keeps us alert. There is this other world at night, a forbidding life behind the dark eyes. Promises are made in submissive solitude; fearsome images invade the mind, twist the uneven bed we make on the soft, forest loam, home sweet home for the filthy and the poor.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
Mother Of Alphabets by Ruth Daigon You call me from the under skin of sleep beyond the dream of dust and drought of spring floods and rings of fire. You store in the heart's hollow a perfect memory. Your soft-skinned inner arms begin the story of my life. You teach me how to enter the day how to be quiet, marooned in a tongue of shade where there's no sound as startling as silence. Musing on the black keys, I know what I know: how the seasons insist and encourage, how dark eyes of water glitter through grass in the spring how the heart tugs at the end of September how December's crust leads me back to frozen footsteps and idling light. Snake dancing before the blaze I'm blanketed by winds protected by cave shadows but if I step out of the circle the earth worm will find me Better a damaged day of almost spring expanding without limits than a safe haven austere and silent. Better the cactus and its thorny geometric than the night-blooming orchid. There is no such thing as no such thing and I am oracle and secret like a lone feather on the breath of a wind.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
Last Rush by Janet I. Buck Lashes drooped like dipping seagulls for the catch—your pupils would grab the last of the withering light. I was torn between wish and seeing first hand a shrunken oasis of flesh doing its natural thing. Your arms were gold tamale husks. Cold and brittle. No muscles moved but mine— tending to trivial stretches of dream, feeding a stomach glutted by time, finished at last. Sense of hunger echoed in my churning gut. Your legs lay pancake flat. I tried to stay your cup of tea, piling blankets, stacking pillows. I was ice cubes of my grief. It was my turn to be motherly. To place an ironed handkerchief under the sniveling tunnel of breath about to close because the hour was banging its brassy chimes. Father tapped the morphine drip, disappeared to eat a meal his arching fingers couldn't touch. "Open the drapes, read me a poem— on second thought, just sit." I bargained with God, rolled your favorite string of pearls between my thumbs. You settled like piano dust— when pages spool, when songs are done. I watched the kiss of life go dry. There wasn't a moment I did not want to be your straw.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
Winterwarm by Beki Reese The hills are blanketed with snow, The wild geese have all flown south. Whisper your warmth across my mouth. The woods breathe deep, and hold their breath, The creeks and streams have ceased to flow; The wild geese have all flown south. I know a single winter truth The hibernating creatures know— Whisper your warmth across my mouth. The trees stand tall and meet their death While rabbits huddle close below; The wild geese have all flown south. You are the husband of my youth, The only comfort that I seek now— Whisper your warmth across my mouth. The lake is frozen hard as truth, The fish swim deep and sleep below. The wild geese have all flown south, Whisper your warmth across my mouth.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
Perfume Among the Groceries by Geertjan Wielenga Believing the worst to be over, at last seeing through my despair, just then—I was buying tomatoes— the wind brought the scent of your hair. Right next to me, drenched in your fragrance —two small hungry kids at her feet— a super-stressed mother picked apples, while I smelled afresh my defeat.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
Keen to Leaky Flowers by Richard Hugo To know expanse I read thin books on spruce and buffalo, and sailed where ice and bears are serious. I rose when the sun broke wild and blinding on the field, walked to the bay made famous by old Indians and now the sun. Why track down unity when the diffuse is so exacting—crocodiles give clouds a candy meaning in the manic frame. The world should always pour on us like this: chaos showering, each thing alone, dependent as a dream. I bent with every local contour then. A buttercup erupted. Aspen leaves in summer on the stillest day and hedge tips in the wind moved savagely and strange. Geology had grace. To turn is to go. To see a weed from other angles, learn its name, preserves it more, its battle with the grass. Transpierce a perfect diamond with the shadow of a fly. I am keen to leaky flowers, how they con devotion from a bee.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
A Pilot from the Carrier by Randall Jarrell Strapped at the center of the blazing wheel, His flesh ice-white against the shattered mask, He tears at the easy clasp, his sobbing breaths Misting the fresh blood lightening to flame, Darkening to smoke; trapped there in pain And fire and breathlessness, he struggles free Into the sunlight of the upper sky— And falls, a quiet bundle in the sky, The miles to warmth, to air, to waking: To the great flowering of his life, the hemisphere That holds his dangling years. In its long slow sway The world steadies and is almost still... He is alone; and hangs in knowledge Slight, separate, estranged: a lonely eye Reading a child's first scrawl, the carrier's wake— The raveling milk-like genius of the smoke That shades, on the little deck, the little blaze Toy-like as the glitter of the wing-guns, Shining as the fragile sun-marked plane that grows to him, rubbed silver tipped with flame.
***************************************** Back to table of contents ***************
Carnelian V3 Iss2 April, 2003