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Carnelian
What follows is quoted from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (a most delightful book, and one I enthusiastically recommend to any and all lovers of life and language); so much of the poetry in this issue echoes and illuminates her thoughts on the nature of our existence that I just couldn't resist opening the magazine with this particular passage ...
That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it; fired into it; a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode ... The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age." This is what we know. The rest is gravy.
©1974 by Annie Dillard Harper & Row NY, NY And now then, the gravy...
On the cover: Carmela Bertagna (detail) by John Singer Sargent oil on canvas 1879
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Volume 3 Issue 4 October 2003 TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Holly On Low Aliya Whiteley Lincoln, U K
Apology Jack Granath Kansas City, MO
Like The Sweet Apple Turning
Red On The Branch Top Rustin Larson Fairfield, IA
Give Them Time Geertjan Wielenga Vienna, Austria
Idyll Of The Banquet For Estranged Lovers Peter Magliocco Las Vegas, NV
The Diseased Get Eaten First Jas Abramowitz Lawrence, KS
Lights Off, Nude Alison Eastley Tasmania, Australia
Midsummer Nights In The Park Taylor Graham Somerset, CA
Pissed To The Nose John Birkbeck Iowa City, IA
Hymn To An Automatic Washer Richard Moore Belmont, MA
An Invasion Of Nouns Rae Weaver Norfolk, VA
Desdemona Michael R. Burch Nashville, TN
Poetry All Stars:
Weathering Alastair Reid
[You who never arrived] Rainer Maria Rilke
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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 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
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POEMS:
Holly On Low by Aliya Whiteley Sunset casts everyone as hero— The glow of Buddy Holly states, long and low, Floating out from the turning vinyl, Every day seems a little longer. The two minute spectre fades to a taste Cold— the sunset red turns To a grey, letting the lights Of the passing planes wink in firefly fragility. Every day seems a little longer. Buddy's voice sings over on low. Heroes on repeat aren't free to go.
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Apology by Jack Granath
When I look back on this poor scrap of life,
This bloody rag
In an old brown bag
With spiders hatching in its folds—
And there it lies among the marigolds—
I feel the wind move down my throat
And bang a shutter there,
I listen to my heart's dark rote,
Its echo awful and— everywhere.
When I look back and blanch and maybe lie,
Bend and catch the reflection in my eye,
You'll understand me then:
A small child hiding from another,
Hiding from a father
Or from an older brother
Or even from a childish dare
With dandelions in her dark brown hair,
But hiding— that
The important fact—
Until I spring out, bold in my bare feet,
To lord it over the empty street.
And when I cast ahead for second tries,
Those spectral things,
Mere shimmerings
Through pipe smoke in a blighted bar,
Dreams in the bottom of a mason jar,
I shape each hour of soft, wet clay
Into a smart disguise
And make a mask for yesterday
With blisters in the place of eyes.
But still it bleeds into reality,
Coagulates, turns black, and— behold me!
The stout professor there
With bald spot, pipe, and comfy sweater,
A wife grown duly bitter
At home with our loud litter,
And against the spring's first oriole,
Girls in short skirts raging through my soul.
Or something just
As bad. The gist
Is that these promissory days ahead—
They smile, but stiffly, like the dead.
So you find me crouched down in the present,
And I mean present
As in this instant,
This glare, this bit of callused skin,
This high note on my neighbor's violin.
You find me in my poetry,
Stuck here between that's done and hey let's see.
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Like The Sweet Apple Turning Red On The Branch Top by Rustin Larson Initials and hearts, years: '98, '01, '14: knife slashes and awl diggings, so many the boulder seemed solidified with stings. Anaktoria brought lunch. "Do you have any chicken sandwiches in there?" Green bottles clinked alive in the basket. "A penny for..." she trailed off, throttling a coneflower and yanking it by its roots from rocky soil. Offering, settling down near me on the rock, yellow shooting light through white oak and poplar, she drew out her pen knife, slashed and looted the nearby vegetation, thoughts wheeling, "Sappho will love me now." She added purple crown vetch, feeling her opinion in flowers. Initials and hearts. Sad. I didn't say anything. A boulder carved with a century's graffiti. True and sad.
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Give Them Time by Geertjan Wielenga You never hear of dull-winged butterflies, of daisies that are snapped off at the stalk, of blurry rainbows, or of brooding skies, when lovers romp back home from some long walk. And when they show you snapshots of some isle, around whose sandy shores they slowly sailed, or croon about their cruise along the Nile, they'll not complain of how the engine failed. But give them just an extra year or two, with nappies, mumps, and needing to invite pediatricians, and a plumbing crew — they'll tell you when the baby cries all night.
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Idyll Of The Banquet For Estranged Lovers by Peter Magliocco She believes I came to her for sex, though life has neutered me enough to be content having it on the brain, across a multitude of southern states to hunger at the bounty of her fallen scarf lying in aesthetic disarray at her bare feet— a parti-colored cotton relic svelte fingers knotted around the Leonardoesque contour of her throat, a fragile being beyond the reach of lusting man? "Shit howdy," I blurted, lying & denying the way people in love do in the movies, though our screen was bare as grandma's cupboard. Her Texas home was a triumph of suburban-uncool. She cooked good Tex Mex food & spoke of world news filtering unobstrusively from her T.V. altar the cozy living room was illumined by, reserving the brunt of her comments for a husband missing in domestic action, a man she hated— as if he were an impostor, not really her husband. If love was food we would have starved like Kafka's hunger artists, glutted by memories of unreachable sex in the shadow of false gods, inhuman now as ourselves grasping for loincloths secreting that dry ambrosia to poison clay pedestals.
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The Diseased Get Eaten First by Jas Abramowitz Crystal Methane in the vein, plunger stops the hunger. Shot up again today. Bruise on my arm; eyes glued open, thoughts glide by, grazing the surface. Sleep beckons only as a pattern. Lay down, let darkness fall. Consume me Night! Take away the impurity of day! I shall look no one in the face today, for I cannot face the fact that today I lied to myself, and weakness prevailed like a sick zebra escaping a pack of lions.
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Lights Off, Nude by Alison Eastley Liquid crystallizes into igneous rocks until erosion carries fragments, small monuments depositing waves of salty sleep. It's just another burial pushed underneath Earth's crusted surface. This eternal turning away from external could be a result of pressure or temperature expressing temperamental cycles of change, metamorphosis melting magmas erupting when I ask, 'what position is best for sleep?' and you reply, on my side, lights off, nude'. It makes me want to talk about the flush of skin when opposites attract, when there is a need for deeper geology.
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Midsummer Nights In The Park by Taylor Graham In Elizabethan tights, you find the poetic to-and-fro has slipped from memory. Shakespeare slumps into a sort of jazzy scat from Sumpter St, where the sun's been cooking cats on the pavement. So mid-summer hot, a Dowland lamentation Flow My Tears that's being fingered by the 3rd Musician on the lute gets ghetto-blasted from the barbecue- pits where the Sons of the Pioneers do a barber-shop foursome dying for Cool Water. So hot, all music melts into a fusion of sound sizzling just like life grilled bloody rare. So hot the young blood fries the brain. In a jade-shimmer thrift-shop gown, your heroine sits fading under sycamore-shade. She fans her cheeks and sighs. Even if she loved you, she couldn t remember her first line.
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Pissed To The Nose by John Birkbeck Losers all me among them holding down the bar at Ginty's fresh out of love and into anger at what-ifs and might-have-beens out of vomit out of ciggies teetering on the fault line of Normal working at getting shit-canned from the job but fuck it I was looking for a job before I found this one life goes smooth steadier here bellied up to the bar beer in the belly fire in the brain.
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Hymn to an Automatic Washer by Richard Moore
O wise God of our fathers,
we love You, yet...one question bothers:
has no one ever quashed
reports that Jesus seldom washed?
And who can think a greasy
and soiled St. Francis of Assisi
could cleanly love The Lord?
Shall we imagine he ignored
those lice between his toes
when he blessed each creature that grows—
each creature, born or hatched?
Shall we suppose he never scratched—
though vexed with itching poxes?
Who can resolve such paradoxes?
You can, God of our daughters!—
swirler of heated soapy waters,
immaculate machine,
where DUZ does everything so clean.
Cleanse us, if we have sinned,
spin-dry us, lest we flap in wind,
exposed to harmful germs.
As every snowy shirt affirms
with underdrawers in chorus,
a new white Idol stands before us,
rolling its sudsy eye.
America, thy sons reply,
Down with the old gods! Beat
them into scrap, they're obsolete.
Warranted washer, prim
in thy enamel and chrome trim,
we celebrate thy birth.
Whirl on! Protect us from the earth!
Lead forth this Land's creations
and sterilize the unwashed nations;
O thou, our helm and shield,
launder those lilies of the field!
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An Invasion of Nouns by Rae Weaver Nouns shrivel into labels, and shovel themselves past palisades, worming into bellies. They snake a blight of waxen roots, and invade rich tillage. Indignations swell fiercely with the intrusion, until we become the demise of hot-eyed sons in hostile lands. Then strewn about, we're ruptured scions, broken to the truth of laddered lives. We all learn division with precision, hear, from youth, similitude and separateness. Tossed in offhand observation, canting burrs salt us. Changed from verdant meadowland into the filth of inner city squalor, we lie fallow, casualties of marauding nouns.
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Desdemona by Michael R. Burch Though you possessed the moon and stars, you are bound to fate and wed to chance. Your lips deny they crave a kiss; your feet deny they ache to dance. Your heart imagines wild romance. Though you cupped fire in your hands and molded incandescent forms, you are barren now, and—spent of flame— the ashes that remain are borne toward the sun upon a storm. You, who demanded more, have less, your heart within its cells of sighs held fast by chains of misery, confined till death for peddling lies— imprisonment your sense denies. You, who collected hearts like leaves and pressed each once within your book, forgot. None—winsome, bright or rare... not one was worth a second look. My heart, as others, you forsook. But I, though I loved you from afar through silent dawns, and gathered rue from gardens where your footsteps left cold paths among the asters, knew— each moonless night the nettles grew and strangled hope, where love dies too.
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Weathering by Alastair Reid I am old enough now for a tree once planted, knee high, to have grown to be twenty times me, and to have seen babies marry, and heroes grow deaf— but that's enough meaning-of-life. It's living through time we ought to be connoisseurs of. From wearing a face all this time, I am made aware of the maps faces are, of the inside wear and tear. I take to faces that have come far. In my father's carved face, the bright eye he sometimes would look out of, seeing a long way through all the tree-rings of his history. I am awed by how things weather: an oak mantel in the house in Spain, fingered to a sheen, the marks of hands leaned into the lintel, the tokens in the drawer I sometimes touch— a crystal lived-in on a trip, the watch my father's wrist wore to a thin gold sandwich. It is an equilibrium which breasts the cresting seasons but still stays calm and keeps warm. It deserves a good name. Weathering. Patina, gloss, and whorl. The trunk of the almond tree, gnarled but still fruitful. Weathering is what I would like to do well.
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[You who never arrived] by Rainer Maria Rilke
—translated by Stephen Mitchell
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods—
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets I have chanced upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
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Carnelian V3 Iss4 October, 2003