Aaron Belz: "To the Front"

I must no longer ask

the kinds of questions

one asks in poems

or provide the kinds of

answers one inevitably

provides: I am at war

now and must produce

steel, rubber, and rations.

I am at war and must

ship all my questions

and answers to the front.

At the front people

are dying because they

have not enough steel,

rubber, rations, questions,

and answers to beat

the enemy. They are dying

because I am hording

everything for myself

and my family and not

giving it to them.

I will fly this poem,

loaded with supplies, to

the front. I will step into it

as one steps into a cargo

helicopter and inevitably lifts

amid gusts, amid clouds

of dust, and fly until I reach

the front and land

and emerge the hero

with a load of new

rubber, hard steel, fresh

rations, and questions,

many questions, and new

answers, complex answers,

and I will be decorated.

They will whisper

that I did the right thing.

They will smile and be proud.

They must not die.

[Read more Aaron at [belz.net]

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the icheneumon fly.  Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.


- Cyril Connolly, from The Unquiet Grave

Ben Nardolilli: "The Other Side"

Flat horizon only the solitude

not the mountains or the sea,

the cold blast I wheel,

And responded gaily,

when there is the damp ground

sweet Thames, run

so intelligent

Heard one person starve

a young man carrying thunder,

his eyes open, I saw

the Elysian Fields,

a poet and a world traveler,

the heyday, my friends,

heard the roar of a graveyard,

and not without reason.

Knife in hand, the totem maker

Carves the final ancestor

In the animal valley

- Duane McGinnis,  from The Valley of the Gods

from the saucers

from  On Gertrude Stein About 9:30

            How curious.  I had no idea!  Today has ended.


from Canicula di Anna
52

Black for the pines,
black for the cypresses,
black for the thinking Christ.
But
silver rubbed
white for the bones
when we found her for
they stood
in the wounds like metaphysicians
quiet,
bloodless,
glancing
out.

-from Anne Carson

Every day, a little apocalypse

Lay down, lay down next to his

-David Byrne

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

It blows so hard, ‘twill soon be gone:

To-day the Roman and his trouble

Are ashes under Uricon.

- A.E. Housman,  from “A Shropshire Lad, XXXI”

Ah, past the plunge of plummet,

   In seas I cannot sound,

My heart and soul and senses,

   World without end, are drowned.

- A.E. Housman,  from “A Shropshire Lad, XIV"

Kate Schapira: "Choose your own (II)"

If you make it past the checkpoint, you enter a stadium lit with green and yellow lights—you’re already pulling the gray clay brick out of your bag, people are pulling gray clay bricks out of purses, fannypacks, satchels, briefcases, messenger backs, people are laying their own bricks—the bricks they brought with them—on top of seats, walkways, and below, the sweepers hired to sweep away the flowers look up in late alarm—


The sky is a blue shell you wouldn’t believe even if this story came true. Whose idea could it have been? Forming the low houses framing a courtyard just as they used to, or would if they could, forming hot blank corners and places to tuck bicycles, and the guards are shooting now but their bullets get lost in narrow passages and unexpected gardens.

To begin with if. The rags of our wounds never quite close, but clean clothes become part of the economy. Everybody knows each other by name and smell. Grim is not clean or general or easy; events always seem to lead, but in effect what it comes is back to this, food scarce, scabs, a guest at the fire. Actual relationships to a central governing body have not changed much but presumptive relationships have melted, colored oils soaked from them into already fairly poisonous ground. If slowly bad news became human-sized, come not back but around, if you are one of many, but not very many.

Kate Schapira: "Choose your own (I)"

If you make it past the checkpoint, you enter a stadium lit with green and yellow lights—you’re already pulling the gray clay brick out of your bag, people are pulling gray clay bricks out of purses, fannypacks, satchels, briefcases, messenger backs, people are laying their own bricks—the bricks they brought with them—on top of seats, walkways, and below, the sweepers hired to sweep away the flowers look up in late alarm—


The sky is a blue shell you wouldn’t believe even if this story came true. Whose idea could it have been? Forming the low houses framing a courtyard just as they used to, or would if they could, forming hot blank corners and places to tuck bicycles, and the guards are shooting now but their bullets get lost in narrow passages and unexpected gardens.

What if I lost all the detail, and could only tell you about things in a general sense? All the edges had turned a little metallic—or was it just ashy?—slightly silvery, a kind of ghostly powder, hard but not exactly bright. There was still something there, lumped into sacklike nouns, a little adjectival sprinkle sifting out of the open seams. It was like a skeleton, like a burned forest filled still with the uprightness of the former trees, their spacing maintained by their crusted stumps, leafiness and liveliness now only inferred from the gray material so consistently covering the charcoaled ground.

-Angela Woodward, from End of the Fire Cult

Lee Stern: "Either Way"

I want you to be proud of me for the way that I’ve turned out.

I want you to say to yourself, “It could have gone either way

but he did pretty good.”

I want you to say that, when I fell into the pit hole,

I didn’t waste any time at all in pulling myself out of it.

And that when I got back up to the level ground,

instead of wasting my time sniveling about my experience,

I loaded some pears into my basket. 

And took off for the new world that was finally waiting in front of me

not like a supplicant.  But like the bringer of additional advice,

who, when the melting begins, throws leaves in a bowl full of grain.

Bruce Boston: "Ghost People"

If ghost people

were the world

we would roam

the empty highways

in search of life.

We would migrate

through the walls

of deserted homes

and become manifest

in abandoned bedrooms

and kitchens to briefly

touch the objects of

the real world in a

way less than human.

We would watch the

fine artifice of man

stealing into ruin

as the centuries

unraveled: highways

cracked to broken slabs

soon lost in wilderness,

cities collapsing stone

by stone into rubble.

We would learn to think

of the changing climate

we were unable to feel

not in months or years

but passing millennia.

We would track strange

species as they appeared

and flourished and evolved

to stranger incarnations.

We would see the earth

turn flat in its crumbling

and watch the seas recede.

With our memories intact

as the sun burned red,

we would howl louder

than the dying wind.



              *


[According to some sources there are about 652 days and some ten hours remaining of the world as we know it.]

Duane Ackerson: "Praising Little"

Let us praise little:

dust, pilgrims resting on plateaus,

the world inside the wind

of a vacuum cleaner,

the mouth of the navel

rehearsing small speeches

of lint, pockets full of replies;

things moving under stones:

bugs, small black flames

licking through woodpiles,

worms stretching their tendons

when you try to pull earth free from itself

parachutists, blossoms falling and

folding back into two-stemmed flowers,

walking away

dogs performing under the grandstands

while the elephants attempt

to climb up on each other

the mist, no larger than a gray caterpiller

as it climbs hills

to reach your eyes;

the past, becoming a small small ball

as it richochets off one thought

then another,

bouncing further and further

back into the brain.

[from the chapbook, "The Bird at the End of the Universe"]

Cooper Renner: "Lear"

and from Shakespeare's text:

Lear:

Nature’s above art in that respect.  There’s your

press-money.  That fellow handles his bow like a

crow-keeper: draw me a clothier’s yard.  Look,

look, a mouse!  Peace, peace; this piece of toasted

cheer will do ‘t.  There’s my gauntlet; I’ll prove

it on a giant.  Bring up the brown bills.  O, well

flown, bird!  i’ the clout, i’ the clout: hewgh!

Give the word.

Edgar:

Sweet marjoram.

Lear:

Pass.

The ovenbird is in the warbler family.  It has olive-colored wings and tail and upper body, but its belly is heavily streaked in black.  You often saw ovenbirds walking on the ground, as I had that week behind the sawmill, though sometimes they perched on low branches.  I thought it was easy to detect a human word in their call, teacher, teacher, teacher, each repetition louder than the one before.

- Howard Norman, from The Bird Artist