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The Life
by Rhina P. Espaillat
Q: So in the end, was it the dummy’s
personality
or the ventriloquist’s that people
liked?
A: Well, of course it had to be the ventriloquist!
The dummy’s not real, silly!
—Melanie Rehak interviewing Tim Robbins,
The New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2000,
p. 8.
That’s what this is: each page an out-of-town
gig for a house always about the same
but different; folks who never let you down,
although the take is low, but use your name
to summon someone else—that other who
sometimes waves from the stage, amiable, trite
with good humor. But it’s really you
they come for, come to watch you sneer and bite,
artifact, creature on the maker’s knee
miming the motion of his harmless lips.
Look how they follow each exchange, to see
how one of you is chafing at the blips
to say—for once, for them—say
out of sync
what they’re sure only one of you can think.
Copyright © 2000 by Rhina P. Espaillat
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This Morning
by Leo Yankevich
—for
Dylan Thomas
This morning I woke to the sound of bells
and to the dark sermons of black-frocked rooks.
The air was fraught with the breaths of angels
and the sky stood strangely above the roofs.
This morning I woke with the taste of stale
liquor lingering on my twisted tongue
and entered the deep grey of my heaven-hell
with a cirrhotic liver and mucous lung.
This morning I woke to the coughs of cars,
to the clangour of crammed trams turning
corners, kissing the whey-faced hush of a nun.
This morning I woke opening strange doors.
In the skull’s temple: white candles were burning,
and the coins on my eyelids saw the same sun.
Copyright © 2000 by Leo Yankevich
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Paean
by Leo Yankevich
A blue elf’s smile on the surface of milk
in a bowl is pleasant delirium,
much nicer to look at than blood on silk,
than a spider bellowing kingdom come.
If I could understand the words of wood,
crucified with nails, I’d say that it hurts
to be wood, but wouldn’t be understood
except, perhaps, by lizards wearing skirts.
The world’s so definitive, there’s no room
for gnomes and angels, for nymphs without clits.
Yet, a few men have existed for whom
trees walked in perfect accord with their wits.
This poem in part is written in their praise
and for the bright Light that never decays.
Copyright © 2000 by Leo Yankevich
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Susan
by Leo Yankevich
Say a prayer for Susan, the sad leper of my tongue.
She taught me the ways of love, how to down hard whisky,
how to watch the rooks above the rowans, ever young
and ready to spread her legs in amorous pity.
Say a prayer for that girl with limbs limp now in the eaves
among the mud of past autumns, among the sins of
whore-masters and cheap fates found in fortune cookies,
among the sweet breaths and buttocks of much-needed love.
Say a prayer for old whoredom and for the happiness
she gave a few lonely men in the dark for a while.
Say a prayer, say a prayer, for her and good-heartedness.
She flies above the rowans with a flock of rooks now,
flies above my whisky as I long for her living flesh
and have one for her soul as mistaken as her smile.
Copyright © 2000 by Leo Yankevich
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Poem in October
by Leo Yankevich
On this breezy October morn I walk
in the swift shadows of cloud-cursing rooks,
watching the world wake on the horizon.
In the brush I hear the tangerine talk
of blackbirds, and, in a crumbling wall’s nooks,
the tumult of thrushes halving a bun.
And I see the first cart of dawn turning
the corner, see its owner’s toothless grin
amid a pile of leaves lit by the sun.
And I smell the scent of something burning,
of something smouldering deep within,
fouler than all the hills of Polish dung.
Thirty-five years have transformed my life’s leaves
into an outcast’s smoke upon the breeze.
Copyright © 2000 by Leo Yankevich
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After a Rain
by Mary Rotella
Flood drives you out and now you’re caught, exposed,
futile. You writhe against unyielding grounds
with senses useless so far out of bounds,
stripped of soil and slime, your wormy flesh unclothed.
Out of the soup and into the skillet,
fish bait, bird food, boy’s temptation just
to stomp your stupid blindness in disgust,
some nameless dread arousing lust to kill.
Fear not, for I am neither wanton tough,
nor fisherman, nor hungry bird of prey,
though some have called me each along the way.
I stoop and pluck and, not quite gently enough,
hurl you back into the muck from which you came,
longing for the hand who’ll do for me the same.
Copyright © 1999 by Mary Rotella
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Auto-Erotica
by Andrew Tully
Driving the autobahn bare-assed,
diamonds are this man’s best end.
Rubber wraps itself around the bend.
Ignore grave road signs, get gassed.
A day without speed is a day unsure
of the turnoff, the place I show my fur.
Towns in between, traffic lights recur;
as in dreams one can never really secure.
When she gives me a heart attack,
double lines hover above my bed.
Is this prosaic, or just prozac?
In the collision my tongue wags
at a woman disguised in red––
I can’t live without my dual air bags.
Copyright © 2000 by Andrew Tully
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The Bagpiper Waits
by Andrew Tully
A man stands on a street corner and blows checkered bagpipes.
Pinched commuters pour out of the subway, dried earth clumps
coughed up by that dragon below. Too busy to pay attention,
they allow him only muteness, indifference, or ignorance.
Women who pass give strange looks, and men shake loose heads.
Empty, his bag sits rumpled, open, and unmoved on the sidewalk.
Blankly, he stares ahead, blaring the same melody for ten minutes,
then starts a new one, a funerary march played by elephants on fire.
Teenagers in baggy pants and pierced eyelids appear, laugh, and point
at the strange noise, but he blows on against the din of their rap
music.
Their hand-held boom box offers no competition to his live instrument,
that wide, metal echo produced by human breath instead of batteries.
Necktied men stop in their tracks, but, unable to recognize the sound,
walk off,
while his howl pierces the sun that falls behind gray granite buildings.
Copyright © 2000 by Andrew Tully
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The Last Round
by Peter H. Desmond
What is this love affair of ours? A bout?
Why did you come out swinging just this morning?
For three days I have watched you sulk and pout.
You spring out of your corner without warning,
jab, then deal a verbal roundhouse right
before you walk to your mother’s nursing home.
Brockton is where Marciano learned to fight;
Your hometown must have been a combat zone.
Seethe the day, or two or three, then boil,
say you despise the very breath I breathe.
I watch your pent-up bitterness uncoil,
think I will not mind it when you leave.
Absorbing blows, I wait until the bell.
Love was heaven; living with you is hell.
Copyright © 2000 by Peter H. Desmond
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The World of Swinging Singles
by Peter H. Desmond
(after
William Wordsworth)
The world of swinging singles is passé:
boozing and cruising, wasting years in bars,
leeches gathered at sordid meat bazaars.
Our glory and our dream: another Lay!
Satyrs then, Professionals today,
We drink Perrier and drive imported cars.
To further our careers, our rising stars,
we network at a business-card soirée.
I’d rather see your Red Cross card. My test
was negative. We would feel less forlorn
if, intimate, immoral, we undressed
and sought success arrayed as we were born.
Ah! pretty flower tattooed upon your breast!
Oh, Maenad––do you blow my wreathed horn?
Copyright © 2000 by Peter H. Desmond
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On What I Counted Most
by Paul Breslin
On what I counted most my world’s possession,
If once there was or since been any choice,
A day of terror died without your voice,
And worlds were lost––I humbly make confession.
I walked in brooding forests of oppression,
Deceived to think I heard your silent voice,
Whispering this pledgéd reason to rejoice,
“I love you, Distant One,” in sweet succession.
The trees are scratching at November skies;
The emptiness they clutch pours black and bleak;
And, in their brittle, to-be-pitied tries,
I sense my hopeless fault, as though they speak:
“If arms are Love’s sole binding ties,
Your heart eludes the ultimate you seek.”
Copyright © 2000 by Paul Breslin
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When Last I Saw You
by Paul Breslin
When last I saw you, darling, all the land
Was cold, shivering for its blown red cloak.
We kissed––and, strangely, under Fate’s strong stroke,
I saw you smile. I didn’t understand.
“Is mine so heavy––hers, so light a strand?
Is parting’s flesh-ripped violence a joke?
From, thirst that makes my throat and courage choke,
Is she so free?” I didn’t understand.
My ultimately Wise One. Cliffs could rumble
Into ruin; everything that’s solid, break.
Above the mountains, roaring as they crumble,
I’d hear your laughter over a lava lake
With silver certainty. Your love is humble:
Love’s stronger love that loves the mutual ache.
Copyright © 2000 by Paul Breslin
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8 Sonnets from "Modern Times"
by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
XVII
It is the unrolled plenitude of pain
which goes along with reading blasted novels
that gives you pause, yet and over again:
not a jot like our hearing liquid Mozart.
It is the daunting drag and tow,
causation heavy in the very grammar,
that proffers an impending blow.
(For density and hope, read damage.)
It is the grimacing whatnextitude
that ploughs and pants it all along
through young love, maiming, beatitude
and blasted hopes. A strung-out song
whose tune’s the dry wreck of common lives:
whores, bandits, Brahmins, kids and wives.
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XVIII
Yet the novel tends never to deal with such things
as our sorting out socks from the line into pairs
(reluctant bachelor sock!); or trying to wrinkle
residual dry gnocchi from the wire mesh
of a colander; cutting toenails; nicking
oneself in a shave and staunching the blood
with toilet paper scraps; a cupboard door
that sticks every time; or loss of the shopping-list.
It forgets those hazy morning moments when
one thinks in French or Italian by mistake;
the broken fingernail; a squeamish tummy
after rich dissert last night; your mislaid keys
(unless they enforce the plot); and the lost noun
you only recalled half-a-day later in town.
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XIX
The swarthy, companionable map of sky
flaunts all its rhinestones at another spring,
the evening is drunk with jasmine: me with wine.
Every day is a small new offering,
winding history further back, like the Japanese
model train that went bung on Boxing Day,
whirr, then . . . plunk! Such disappointment
was part of education's natural way.
How can we ginger up mortality?
What presents do we place along the track
to make up for golden moments we have lost?
Take every flicker there and grasp it back,
discern it with van Gogh’s intensity
or the comic fine-tuning button of Marcel Proust.
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XX
Even doing it abstractly, I feel: ––
Small rough solids which are grating against
a curved patina rather like brushed steel
here and there randomly indented,
dimpled with mathematical cavities:
shadowy with plum-bruise purple
and approximate silvery tans, what has
now become a grainy, rude arena
over which thistledown of luminous
gases will keep on blowing lightly
from the north by sardonic north-east,
softly coloured like the pre-dawn dreams
of our favourite dogs and horses
when the prospect of bad weather has increased.
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XXI
It’s not the thing I thought it ought to be
Nor is it what it mustn’t be at all;
It doesn’t satisfy me, certainly,
But got so close it’s very hard to call.
It’s not a fault, nor could I declare it "in",
Dithering somewhere just about the line.
What I have written does look pretty thin
When I’d intended to sound rich and fine,
To turn our phrases burnished like old gold,
Reveal the vibrations of a heart,
At least prove a green walnut not a lime . . .
Call this a sonnet? Looks more like a crime
Half-bungled, or a fried egg eaten cold:
The cool change brought me not a sniff of art.
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XXII
R.A.A.F., 1952
Surely the gravel impressed me first,
Hours on the zephyr-swept bull ring
With remarkable inter-class relations
Nattering away in Nissen huts.
We rose like the sun in our navy-blue boilersuits,
Folded our blankets according to the rules,
Shaved, shat, coffeed, crunched out cold
Onto parade: an example of litotes.
The important thing for Australia was
It had to be boring all the time,
Keeping us firmly away from stimuli.
It was on those flat volcanic plains
I learned to read Dante and Doctor Chekhov,
And swore with augmented fluency.
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XXIII
Today we broke up auntie’s rustic chair.
Seventy-odd years it stood foursquare,
Sturdy in hard, arthritic tea-tree,
Legs, back and arms natively arabesqued.
One gesture at repair, and it was gone,
That sturdy fabric fallling away at once
To lengths of timber for a fire, at best;
But we still have her mother’s cabin-trunk.
Summer nights are nostalgic as hell, like this:
You gaze north over the black ridge, there
As ever are the delicate Pleiades,
Kitchenhand Orion, Canopus and the Dog . . .
Time keeps pouring through us like red wine.
Today we destroyed Violante’s tea-tree chair.
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XXIV
Back in the drowsy, non-addictive city,
Nightmare cars purring down gigantic streets,
Old men with hose or foxie, tennis balls
Endlessly bouncing off convenient walls.
Just up the way, judging from the ringlet spirals
Of silver beet and all those feral fronds
Of parsley, it would seem that our contadino
(Compulsively neat) has fallen really ill.
It’s alarming: clutches coldly at my heart.
His microcosmic urban farm has flourished
Neat as pie for all these little years,
Each crop weeded and well-nourished,
Rotating in the best virgilian way
Onion, tomato and red pepper seasons.
Copyright © 1999 by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
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Two Temperaments
by Joyce Wilson
—for
J. B.
One rises from the bottom and explodes
in revelations sparkling on the surface;
the other sinks in basins of the cosmos
to steep and ruminate the ancient codes.
How good it is to choose contemporaries
and spend the hour articulating phrases
under the aegis of centuries of sages
refined in labyrinthine-halled libraries.
If time should prove these conversations wasted,
O let each be served with sugar or with lemon
in cups or ladles, cisterns of the czars!
Let no one deprecate these trends we tasted
as we compare the Greek verse with the Roman
or reconstruct those years between the wars.
Copyright © 1999 by Joyce Wilson.
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