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Carnelian
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river,
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face,
and it touched me. — from 'Poetry' by Pablo Neruda (translated by Alastair Reid)
"I don't like to talk about poetry. I like to talk about food, wine, traveling, birds."
— Pablo Neruda, 'Absence and Presence' by Louis Poirot and Alastair Reid
So let us spring into a season of birds & wine, and the moving feast of poetry.... The Editor
On the cover: Enchantment (detail) by Maxfield Parrish oil on panel 1913
Grace our mailing list, or request a link exchange: carnelian@sidewalkpress.net
Volume 4 Issue 2 April
2004
TABLE
OF CONTENTS:
Doorways Of The Flesh John Grey Providence, RI Skin Deep Paul Goldman Overland Park, KS To A Dervish Nancy Henry Gray, ME she says... Iris Appelquist Kansas City, MO Lest The Last Light Flee Also Tom Sheehan Saugus, MA At Deception Pass Lucas Howell Tacoma, WA Icicle Latorial Faison Fort Hood, TX Madness Is The Melody A. Michael McRandall China Twp, MI One Midnight Mary Rae Weston, FL Muscle Touch Nick Zegarac Windsor, Ontario, Canada Classmates John Birkbeck Iowa City, IA Do Not Go Humble Maggie Morley Kensington, CA Poetry All-Stars Evening Train Denise Levertov A Choice Of Weapons Stanley Kunitz
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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 anonymity). 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
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POEMS:
Doorways Of The Flesh by John Grey Somewhere blood like a river flows to its appointed delta, to soak amid sheets, to ripple in a lake, souring my reflection a cruel crimson. Somewhere a wound must have its way, discarding this sense of me prematurely, opening cracks in my armor for snakes to slither through, for demons to dance up their red ladders. A hand rushes to this blind exit. A heart already senses the crush of unwanted company. The voice, the laughter you remember is taken away with the bedclothes, tossed on the fire or dissolves into curious plankton, fodder for feasting fish. It's another version of me, you say, a grimmer, more expedient soul. It's the usual invasion, is what I do not tell you and I have the scar to prove it.
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Skin Deep by Paul Goldman
I sleep in the same skin
as you, at once translucent,
a moment opaque, an instant pearlescent,
too oft impenetrable.
Skin deep, we are no different—
what is it then that
separates us?
the sky, the ocean
Saturn misaligned with Mars,
molecular predispositon?
Is it physics alone
that created these
barriers we refused to cross?
Or something intangible
that has masqueraded
as sinew and substance—
through differences perceived,
substantiated by raw data each of us
has so carefully collected, collated
on three by five index cards,
A separation of the senses,
fooled by what we think—
not by what we see,
Skin deep.
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To a Dervish by Nancy Henry You were a slight, platinum fish once before science slapped the sea from your lungs. Remember how small our lives, how devouring our pain. Pause a moment in your mad whirling, let me contemplate the way your face holds the bright exteriors in balance where doubt is twisted into healing, where the western sky is a wall of churning dust, where butterfly and willow are waking to their dream.
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she says… by Iris Appelquist well. its like this; have you ever waited around for someone who told you they were coming...and then they didn't come? and then they say they're coming so you wait and they don't. and then they say they'll be around soon so you wait, full of faith, but they don't show ...pretty soon, you're waiting, even though you know they're never coming. its enough to mix up all your metaphors and leave you in an acrid disarray of hunger and yellow and peace and pennies, turning your similes into smiles and you're a cracked pot, burning the soup black. chaos has no regard for fragile dispositions, neither the subtlety with which you would lay it all out, down. so willing. so maybe we get just what we deserve. maybe it's just the desert stretching infinitely into the horizon, breaking the dawn lit sky in a manner that could only be described as full of beauty. maybe the answer you crave is grammatically erred, or phonetically spelled. so, it's like this; the night bleeds imperfectly, staining your senses with the gore of poetry. you can only acquiesce. can only wait around. only stir.
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Lest the Last Light Flee Also by Tom Sheehan Lest the last light flee also, and all shadows resort to themselves in the vast but starless night, we fed pine knots to the campfire, miniature sparklers leaping red parabolas and blue tangibles. Though those small fires eyed up in the pockets of our faces, and each could tell the posture and the bent of his comrades, more by eye level and fire acceptance than by any of a thousand words, we felt that ghostly closeness the old cave-drawn hunters knew, the brace of union, solidarity's slow motion moving under skin, a brothering darkness holding camp like a briefcase about a document. We fed stories to the faulting fire, reams of stories, great breads of stories a slice at a time, thick, slabby, crusty mouthfuls of what had brought us here, our whole lives loafed up. When a sound happened outside of us, the owl's calling attention, a croaker's voice setting up tent in the night hawking his dominion of the pond, a loon's soliloquy sliding over hills, the sad songs saxophones loose; we accepted it as punctuation, proper pause, the best of caesura. We understood the leaf, knew the tree hanging fire above our heads, the span of it touching different days. Even darkness can't hide a tree. But daylight, we knew, and white water's rapid turmoil can hide the silver and red of trout, can hide the mouth bitter for worms, the string and foil of manufactured flies and bare metal strikers. Daylight hides the reddest fox, the darkest owl, and campfire dreamers. As we talk, red lights in our eyes, dawn bulging behind timid leaves like a poorly kept secret, we understand there are only so many visits allowed. This visit will be the last for one or more, the odds having their say, the threats as fluid as the stream we dare bend our ankles in. As we trespass, camped inland above the water's constant flowing, we are reminded by earth's quiet of what the pause of being means, we are merely lights here, stars set off in a widening sky.
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At Deception Pass by Lucas Howell if you ever found the alternative to living no longer utterly impossible, this is where you would jump. here, where the weight of the moon is painfully obvious: where Captain Vancouver swore the sea had lied to him. this is where you want to be— floating in that cold turmoil, feeling the weight of everything but yourself.
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Icicle by Latorial Faison I see the icicle that falls and breaks into too many pieces and immediately I mentally begin the count of too many wrongs to right and by the time my mind reaches quantity the wrongs have dissolved into something that runs away from me like water escaping another freeze.
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Madness Is The Melody by A. Michael McRandall There're rabbits in the basement wearing overcoats and boots interrogating postmen dressed in gray Armani suits while colors play with razor blades suspended from the ground the answers scream at questions who have never made a sound and yellow is the reason you stay locked behind the door yet you still hear the rabbits tapping lightly on the floor Then eighteen blue-eyed maidens riding bareback on the lawn sing hauntingly of rapture as they race to beat the dawn while wingless birds fly blindly through a storm of battered souls a ghostly seamstress hurries in attempts to mend the holes and tiny ballerinas dance to Brahms amended score yet still there go the rabbits tapping lightly on the floor When yesterday's tomorrow in your sorry bleeding head and mother rants on autumn playing poker with the dead while voices cling to windows in a room that has no walls madness is the melody that plays when silence falls and pallid dread is keeping you behind a bolted door but you'll not stop the rabbits tapping lightly on the floor
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One Midnight by Mary Rae I left my house because you were not there and every light was burning to bring back your face, so calm, your dark and gleaming hair, but when I turned to see you, all was black. I left to seek you in the midnight sky that knew your beauties, counting star by star. I could not breathe for feeling you close by, but turned to see the sky grown cold and far. The fields brushed evening's wet against my feet and distant mountains held still pools of light. I heard you call. The air grew thick and sweet. I wandered after you into the night. But only birds called back from bending trees that blended into dawn's first golden red. The grass was soft. I rested on my knees beside a stream, and knew that I was dead. And in my loneliness I cupped my hand to drink of earth's cool water one last time. But as I bent to drink the air was fanned with spice which made the water's taste sublime. I looked into the water's stirring face and saw a light that changed what I had been, leaving you forever in my place, and giving me, with love, my life again.
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Muscle Touch by Nick Zegarac To feel the simmering heat of beaded sweat, each hardened thimble, the festering prick of slivers lain tight into my skin, is to taste flesh for the very first time, that rippling mass of thriving panic, writhing to penetrate, taunt sinew one smooth contour traced into the next, until frenzy lays waste and sharp little curves relax bouncing all my daydreams to earth, living deep inside of me.
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Classmates by John Birkbeck We computerised chainletters to the survivors from the democracy of old age divining hazy images from our irromantic past and clear peer into the hypothetix of a future tense Floridaward or whatever other Sunbelt Utopia tottering in aimless shuffles toward a new canasta game— nutz enough to live past one hundred or the eternity of another year
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Do Not Go Humble by Maggie Morley The shade of Dylan Thomas enthuses to his New Best Friends, the lads at the National Poetry Slam. Do not go humble into those smug cliques Of highbrow headcolds flaunting classic lore. Rail! Rail against old Romans, older Greeks! Avoid those ageless belles with frail physiques, Those sniffy wimps declaiming "Nevermore!" Do not go humble into those smug cliques Where fleering Stuffed Shirts flourish: Lord, it piques! Toplofty pedantry's a bloody bore. Rail! Rail against old Romans, older Greeks! Make haste to squash the egghead when he seeks To value rhymed and reasoned songs of yore. Do not go humble into those smug cliques. Salute the air with spittle-laden streaks of A-words, F-words, fecal metaphor… Rail! Rail against old Romans, older Greeks! Shout down the staves and strophes! Crack your cheeks! Drown out the scholar and the troubadour. Do not, I say, go humble to those cliques. Rail! Rail against old Romans, older Greeks!
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Evening Train by Denise Levertov An old man sleeping in the evening train, face upturned, mouth discreetly closed, hands clasped, with fingers interlaced. Those large hands lie on the fur lining of his wife's coat he's holding for her, and the fur looks like a limp dog, docile and affectionate. The man himself is a peasant in city clothes, moderately prosperous— rich by the standards of his youth; one can read that in his hands, his sleeping features. How tired he is, how tired. I called him old, but then I remember my own age, and acknowledge he's likely no older than I. But in the dimension that moves with us but itself keeps still like the bubble in a carpenter's level, I'm fourteen, watching the faces I saw each day on the train going in to London, and never spoke to; or guessing from a row of shoes what sort of faces I'd see if I raised my eyes. Everyone has an unchanging age (or sometimes two) carried within them, beyond expression. This man perhaps is ten, putting in a few hours most days in a crowded schoolroom, and a lot more at work in the fields; a boy who's always making plans to go fishing his first free day. The train moves through the dark quite swiftly (the Italian dark, as it happens) with its load of people, each with a conscious destination, each with a known age and that other, the hidden one— except for those still young, or not young but slower to focus, who haven't reached yet that state of being which will become not a point of arrest but a core around which the mind develops, reflections circle, events accrue— a center. A girl with braids sits in this corner seat, invisible, pleased with her solitude. And across from her an invisible boy, dreaming. She knows she cannot imagine his dreams. Quite swiftly we move through our lives; swiftly, steadily the train rocks and bounces onward through sleeping fields, our unknown stillness holding level as water sealed in glass.
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A Choice Of Weapons by Stanley Kunitz Reviewing me without undue elation A critic who has earned his reputation By being always Johnny-on-the-spot Where each contemporary starts to rot Conceded me integrity and style And stamina to walk a measured mile, But wondered why a gang of personal devils Need clank their jigging bones as public evils: "The times are suited for the gay empiric, The witty ironist, the casual lyric; Apparently it's gristle-fare, not fat At certain tables: must we weep at that? Though poets seem to rail at bourgeois ills It is their lack of audience that kills. Their metaphysics but reflects a folly: 'Read me or I'll be damned and melancholy.' This poet suffers: that's his right, of course, But we don't have to watch him beat his horse." Sir, if appreciation be my lack, You may appreciate me, front and back— I won't deny that vaguely vulgar need: But do not pity those whose motives bleed Even while strolling in a formal garden. Observe that tears are bullets when they harden; The triggered poem's no water-pistol toy, But shoots its cause, and is a source of joy.
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Carnelian V4 Iss2 April, 2004