The Poetry Porch presents

the sonnet scroll xii

RAGS
By Kristin LaTour

When she was a girl, her mother tied rags
torn, wet and white, into her dull, bronze hair.
There were rugs knotted and braided, dragged
to where the kitchen floor led to the stairs.
The garage held buckets of pink shop rags
her father wiped across his grease stained hands.
The house was filled with old scraps, and time lagged.
They moved apart, like dry blown desert sand.

See these somber photos of girls in curls?
Imagine Gram, the stove, how she would cook
cabbage rolls, ham hocks, frosting in swirls;
hear echoes of Grandpa’s silent hard work.
Ages and years later, feel ragged and frayed
and knotted, regarding those faded days.

Copyright © 2012 by Kristin LaTour

HOUSE TIDES
By B. E. Stock

At times a lull upon the mighty sea
Or busy breakers when the sun goes down,
At times a brooding greenish misery
Or foamy lace of an abandoned gown.
At times it looms and blocks the midday sun
And threatens to engulf its residents,
But when the fight with cold or mice is won
It soon goes flat, collapses and relents.

Like fishermen we talk of getting out
Knowing this crazed apartment is as much
A part of us as water for a sail,
And tides are what our hands revolve about—
Yet longing for a peace our hearts can touch,
Shelter beyond our ken, that will not fail.

LIFE
By B. E. Stock

“I have been half in love with easeful death. . .
to cease upon the midnight with no pain.” —John Keats

We may not mind, but sacred flesh rebels.
It takes us down a thousand fearful ways
Makes pain the minotaur of every maze
And questions all our heavens and our hells.
We in our weariness may hear the bells
That mark our passage, seek the pleasant haze
Of incense—when it clears, the terror stays,
The worm invades, the reek of rot repels!

What ease there is comes after or before
The agony, the visions and the quiver,
Not thanks to any languor of the brain
But to the death that opens onto more,
Thanks to the Maker of the flesh, the Giver,
Who turns our very suffering to gain.

VITO CARDINALE
By B. E. Stock

Amid the glass and steel this church remains
Its steps disintegrating, windows smashed
The porch a prey to violets, the stains
Of rust upon the walls where seasons clashed.
And yet a statue lovingly maintained
Still stretches out its arms to those who pass—
That Savior seeking, though he be disdained,
All whom the wolves of hate and greed harass.

A little man upon his shoulder stands—
“Good Thief” in Latin reads the brazen scroll
Upon the cross he cradles in his hands.
The pedestal’s inscribed, “God rest the soul
Of Vito Cardinale,” known to be
A major criminal, last century.

PASQUINADE
By Marcy Jarvis

Pasquino, you just stand there like a stone,
impassive, as the people come to read
the lampoons they deface you with; no need
to open up—your mouth is not your own,
although you are the talking head of Rome!
For those who have no voice, let tongues be freed
against oppressive government and greed;
for those who must speak out—confess, atone
for those who have no choice—you stand, indeed,
though only half a man. You’re just a bust,
politically, a pawn, no more, no less.
Your nose may be a Roman’s but your creed—
along with any armor—has been lost,
and what you think is anybody’s guess.

(Pasquino is the talking statue of Rome to which people still affix satirical poems
and lampoons which have become known as “pasquinades.”)

ABYSS
By X. J. Kennedy

—after Baudelaire, “Le Gouffre”

Wherever Pascal went, went his abyss,
   Like a good dog. All’s chasm now: desire,
   Dream, action, word. How many times my hair
Rears upright as the winds of terror pass.
Up, down, around me—fathomlessness, loss,
   Silence, seductive space. On night’s chalk board
   The professorial finger of the Lord
Traces unending nightmares, and I toss,
Leery of sleep as of some open pit
   Oozing with spooks that leads down who knows where.
My windows gape wide on the infinite;
My tortured spirit, racked with dizzy spells,
   Envies the void. It’s blithely unaware,
While here I’m trapped in Things, in Numerals!

SOLO
By Lois Elaine Heckman

You made me love my body for the way
it warmed up in solfeggio, then soared
into a melody that turned the wait
delight. Your fingers vibrated the chords
to start the dance’s syncopation, pitch
crescendoing until the music reached
its climax and, diminishing the pace,
concluded, turning turmoil to release.
You taught my body how to feel, and let
it sing responses. Then you stole away
the resonance, abandoning the beat,
and made me wish I’d never learned the lays.
Alone, I hate my body’s euphony,
and it reciprocates, betraying me.

CLINGING
By Lois Elaine Heckman

Her left hand curls above the breast, the right
arm circling a sash around her waist,
while wasted flesh cocoons into a life
become “persistent vegetative state.”
She still can sleep and breathe and cry, but eyes
are focused into nowhere, for there is
nowhere to see. Her lips appear to smile
(illusion we embrace), in a device
enacted by the body when its brain
performs an automatic anarchy
of false reactions, letting us maintain
our hopes for future-time recovery,
as we refuse to stop believing in
a lifting lip which won’t deny the end.

ENCROACHING DARKNESS
By Lois Elaine Heckman

So little time remains to tell your thoughts,
so little time before this time will end
and fly into forgetfulness, to blot
out memories which will no longer find
a home. You’ll lapse into a world unknown
to your existing insights or ideas.
Speak now: I need to hear! Before sense goes
and recognition fades and disappears,
describe the truths concealed in what you feel,
and the significance that they project
on each raw sentiment that you reveal.
Depict what observation can’t detect.
The sunset flares and beckons you to say
the words, before dark swallows them away.

HIGH TIMES
By Victor Howes

Atop those dizzy heights we barely spoke.
We drew each gasping breath in pain, felt ill,
And stumbled, fainted, fell asleep, and woke
To place one further brick on the huge pile
We had amassed, passing each stone from hand
To hand, hoping to reach the highest stars,
To scale the heavens, godlike, and to stand
On the top of all the world. A dream was ours—
Folly—as when our old familiar words
Broke into nonsense from our failing lips.
We uttered in foreign syllables, absurd.
Could this be madness or apocalypse?
Our tower trembled as it fell to rubble.
We fled. Our outcries gibbered into Babel.

WINDCHILL FACTOR
By Victor Howes

Pineneedle cold. The last three crows wing home
Across an ashen sky. The wise oaks bare
Their branches and endure, and here I come,
Minus ten windchill, and my toes gone numb,
To where we stood last summer, where you stood
And said, “No further.” Last July was hot.
We watched a careful partridge and her brood
Steal from the brush and cross an open lot.

They vanished with a scurry in the leaves,
And you are gone. A solitary actor
Scatters mixed grains and suet. He believes
The birds will come to him, but as day grows
Older and colder, suddenly he goes.
He hadn’t reckoned on the windchill factor.

Grinnell Glacier Drawings
By Barbara Lydecker Crane

These drawings aren’t from life. I wasn’t there;
the others kept on hiking to the glacier
while I perched on my canvas fold-up chair,
sketchbook spread before the lake. Erasures
of errant starts scratched into the page
like tiny echoes of the creeping scrape
that hollowed out the lake, this ancient stage
of constant play. Striations, shadows, shapes
kept shifting in the light. I let it fall,
my book, and closed my eyes.
Then, two times,
I startled at a distant, feral call,
a minor-key lament that dipped and climbed,
recording into bedrock memory
these views that I imagined I could see.

OUT OF ORBIT
By Lee Evans

I’m glad you went to heaven when we died;
I’m also glad I didn’t go there, too.
Instead I ranged in deserts far and wide,
While all your kindred spirits clung to you.
My death was permanent; I rose no more
To resurrect the life where we once loved
And intermingled where our spheres were joined
Just barely. In that narrow strait we moved,
And called the place our home. But when the merge
Reached only through our atmospheres and failed
To sound beneath the surface, there occurred
The rift between our worlds: Apart they sailed;
And only once did I look back to see
You with the ones you loved, but not with me.

FATHER OF THE MAN
By Lee Evans

A child becomes the world that he creates,
And sports with it as though it were his toy.
It grows with him, delightful in his joys
And mournful in his sorrows, till one day
The course of things begins to turn, and stays
His present with the shadows of his past.
He seeks a refuge from the wintry blast
Of old age that consumes him, as his May
Declines through August into cold December;
And so he shuts himself off from the flood
That bore him thus far—seeks but to remember
What never can again bloom from the bud,
Save for the child born of his death: for Love
Inflames the world once more from dying embers.

LUNCH HOUR
By Lee Evans

The tent caterpillar and I fall asleep
On a weathered wooden bench in the sun.
The pink and white rhododendrons
Are not to him what they are to me.

Tomorrow morning, when I pack my lunch,
Out of the box will spring these azaleas,
Cattails, croaking frogs, photosynthesis
Weaving its green leaves before me.

When the worm becomes a butterfly,
Out of the dark cocoon will spring
All the whispering leaves he has nibbled,
All the half-dreams of our shared siesta.

FIRST THING IN THE MORNING
By Lee Evans

To sit down at a bed and breakfast,
And endure an hour chit-chatting
With half a dozen strangers—
(Practice makes perfect, I guess)

That sure is hard to do for a man
Who spends too much of his time alone,
Rehearsing his thoughts to himself.
(It’s hard to get up in the morning.)

The coffee should have inspired him—
Instead, he felt drained, nostalgic
For those private booths in diners
(Practice makes perfect, I guess),

Where the waitress brought your order,
Then left; and the cashier said
“Hello” then “goodbye”—that’s all.
It’s hard to get up in the morning.

FIRE ALARM TRIPPED AT 6:00 A.M.
ON THE DAY OF DEPARTURE FROM THE POETRY CONFERENCE
By Joyce Wilson

The siren would have made Poseidon reel!
Like Gods they rose in groggy dishabille:
First Hermes staggered through without a robe,
Enfeebled by the lamp’s florescent strobe,

While Aphrodite, wrapped in pink peignoir,
Left the heavy exit door ajar,
And Hestia joked that she’d sneak unawares
To meet the mighty Ares on the stairs,

As Demeter, in crisis with a frown,
Tried to fix her hair, half up, half down,
While Hera, wearing ugly cotton pants,
Cursed her husband Zeus in sibilants.

As if expecting he might be betrothed,
Apollo rushed outside completely clothed.

Warning
By Aidan Rooney

The mesclun patch I planted early spring
in the chickenshit-manured rockery
that still yields bowls of tangy greens has gone
to seed again, making a mockery
of the Burpee packet’s hardiness zones
in colour-coded bands that cut across
the United States, golden, umber tones
in the deep South cooling, heading North,
to greens, and on into the very blue
the sky is this mid-December morning
when nothing should any longer blossom
the way these mustards and radicchios do,
making a bolt for foreverness, warning
of more to come, ridiculous, awesome.

Salut
By Aidan Rooney

—after Stéphane Mallarmé

Nothing, this foam, but verse, first draft,
that works itself out in the flute;
just as, far off, some seals afloat,
form mostly a belly-up raft.

We set sail, O my diverse, daft
friends, I already on the boot,
you on the swank prow of the boat
that cuts through winter’s lightning draught;

a sweet drunkenness urges me,
despite the surges of the sea,
to raise this toast, this salut –

Solitude, reef, starburst –
to whatever measures up to
the blank canvas of our artwork.

Empire
By Aidan Rooney

Revere House, Boston, 1864

After the complimentary banquet
in honour of Admiral Лесовский
where city councilors hovered over
oyster and ortolan hors d’oeuvres
then sat to turtle soup, canvasback duck,
miscellaneous grosses pièces and aspic-
crouted sole à la Victoria, cailles
volantes sur socle, snipe, wigeon, teal,
&c., &c., &c.,
on into the bonbons and chantilla
baskets, Lady Fingers, and a Charlotte Russe,
toast upon toast to sorting out the fuss
down south and, ad nauseam, the hymn
to universal political equilibrium.

4th of July
By Aidan Rooney

Do you mean, citizens, to mock me?
—Frederick Douglass, July 5. 1852

A redskin in a shock of silver hair
at the wheel of a dark blue Escalade
with front and back vanity license plates
for veteran / ex-prisoner of war,
notices one not long back from the war,
headed to fireworks on the esplanade,
a bit banged up, a do-rag where the plates
do well to keep him pumping in his chair.
The elder parks, unfolds his folding chair
alongside his inheritor, and waits
for the long overture to escalate
its fussy pastoral to scores of war,
to lean in and shout above the riproars
of cannon on the river: this day is yours.

The Poetry Porch presents

the sonnet scroll xii

RAGS By Kristin LaTour

HOUSE TIDES By B. E. Stock

LIFE By B. E. Stock

VITO CARDINALE By B. E. Stock

PASQUINADE By Marcy Jarvis

ABYSS By X. J. Kennedy

SOLO By Lois Elaine Heckman

CLINGING By Lois Elaine Heckman

ENCROACHING DARKNESS By Lois Elaine Heckman

HIGH TIMES By Victor Howes

WINDCHILL FACTOR By Victor Howes

Grinnell Glacier Drawings By Barbara Lydecker Crane

OUT OF ORBIT By Lee Evans

FATHER OF THE MAN By Lee Evans

LUNCH HOUR By Lee Evans

FIRST THING IN THE MORNING By Lee Evans

FIRE ALARM TRIPPED AT 6:00 A.M. ON THE DAY OF DEPARTURE FROM THE POETRY CONFERENCE By Joyce Wilson

Warning By Aidan Rooney

Salut By Aidan Rooney

Empire By Aidan Rooney

4th of July By Aidan Rooney