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The Poetry URL of the Moment

John Keats
One of the greatest lyric poets in the English language.
Find out more here.

W o r d P l a y f o r Y o u r
C o n s i d e r a t i o n

P oetry:
W hat is it?

			THIEVES


		     In any big city my father made
                           a point of knowing how to find skid row
                           and drive us slowly through,
                           My mother would rattle the map and complain
                           and reach to lock car doors, while my brother
                           pressed against his window, and I slid down
                           further in my seat, embarrassed by the solemn
                           exaggeration in my father's voice. Burnt-out
                           neon signs. Bums the color of pavement.
                           Poor sons-of-bitches, he'd always say.
                           Luck will rob you a thousand ways.
                           It was thirty years before I'd see
                           the picture of him, age five, in government-
                           issue overalls, posed with his brothers
                           by the crank Ford, under a dust-eclipsed sun.
                           Cropless seasons were all those kids had seen,
                           till that spring a thunderhead opened over
                           them,
                           coaxing forty acres of decent corn.
                           They measured the stalks that climbed the air
                           for weeks, till the morning an eerier
                           sun-darkening
                           clouded up from the south:
                           grasshoppers searching out any green spot.
                           In a matter of hours the corn devoured Ñ
                           then fenceposts, window-curtains,
                           paint straight off the house; hoppers plugging
                           the old Ford's radiator, clogging calves' mouths
                           and nostrils till the animals collapsed.
                           Nothing left, and still
                           they whirred down in waves, piling up
                           in shady corners a foot and deeper.
                           After a day you could step out in the yard
                           without getting smacked and tobacco-stained
                           by the hail of them, but the place you knew
                           was gone. Cousins and neighbors gone soon
                           after.
                           Grandpa packing up to find town-work.
                           Where? For how long?

                           Once, on vacation in New Orleans, even Mom
                           was too hot to keep the windows rolled up
                           on our detour. We felt as gritty as folks
                           on the street anyhow, and this section of town
                           wasn't the colorless smear he usually took us
                           to:
                           vendors juggled oranges, and tourist carriages
                           clipped through, the horses sporting straw hats
                           that swayed through the jazz curling out
                           of open doors, intricate as the lacy
                           iron railings wound with flowers above us.
                           And to our amazement Dad was pulling over,
                           beckoning to an old guy with a cardboard sign:
                           TOURS. FIVE DOLLARS. A whiff
                           of licorice as he crawled in back with us
                           and talked Dad toward the cemetery
                           where ornate graves were stacked
                           above ground to keep the sea
                           from rising up and separating families.
                           Here it wasn't dust, but water
                           that had threatened Ñ even the dead.
                           Brad and I scuffed in and out of shadows,
                           following lizards that flashed and vanished,
                           as Dad read the tiers of names Ñ who could've
                           wandered all the way to this sunken
                           swamp to die, I wondered, but Dad
                           was saying nothing. Trouble was, the old
                           fellow warned, sometimes thieves broke
                           into these graves, looking for whatever
                           they could take off the bodies, so even if
                           a name showed up here, the soul might be adrift.

                           Debra Nystrom
                           Quarterly West
                           Number 50, Spring/Summer 2000

		"No Title"no title
                	     Now I live inside the
                          window. Now I think the
                          sky
                          doesn't have enough sky
                          today and that all
                          the trees have cancer and
                          are whispering
                          their little coughs to the
                          earth though I don't
                          hear them because I'm
                          trying to talk
                          with three boxes destined
                          for Pittsburgh.
                          The woman from UPS said
                          they'd be here
                          sometime between eight and
                          five which is like
                          predicting that one day
                          you'll feel the need
                          to purchase either a
                          matching rake
                          and pitchfork or
                          hollow-point bullets
                          and nightscope. I'm not
                          good at waiting
                          which means I'm not good
                          at being alive.
                          I'm not strong enough to
                          believe there must
                          eventually be a kiss on my
                          spine at midnight
                          that lasts 47 years and
                          leads to piles
                          of scrapbooks in which
                          I've recorded
                          the dailiness of my bliss.
                          I'm not wise enough
                          to hear anything the ocean
                          has said to me
                          after worshiping it for
                          days except go away.
                          Gladly I would were it not
                          for these boxes
                          and the books in the boxes
                          and the letters
                          between the pages of the
                          books
                          written by my father to my
                          mother when neither
                          was dead and therefore
                          suffering
                          from irretrievable
                          penmanship.
                          In Pittsburgh my sister
                          wants to open
                          the boxes and let the
                          words
                          on the letters molt in her
                          hands and turn
                          into the voices of our
                          parents
                          calling us in from a sky
                          turning dark
                          as a stone's appetite.
                          It's not enough
                          to send the letters she
                          wants
                          the books, to hold
                          Pushkin's and Darwin's
                          embrace of what my father
                          said from a train
                          on the other side of the
                          country to my mother
                          in a blue kitchen as she
                          threw
                          a towel over her shoulder
                          and let sunlight
                          graze across the paper.
                          She wants to stand
                          on her porch overlooking a
                          bridge
                          where strangers practice
                          their hobby
                          of diving into what they
                          believe is the river's
                          silence and touch where he
                          signed
                                            Love,
                          always love,
                          because their breaths are
                          mixed in the slight
                          eternity of ink. If the
                          carrier
                          ever arrives in her dirt
                          uniform and bearing the
                          little
                          computer that will eat my
                          signature
                          and feed it to a larger
                          computer that hopes one
                          day to own
                          all our names, I'll tell
                          her I've thought
                          from eight to five about
                          why
                          everything I've concluded
                          thus far
                          concerning loss is merely
                          a prelude
                          to a greater confusion.
                          This won't seem
                          nearly as strange as my
                          insistence
                          she let me kiss each box
                          good-bye.

                          --------------------------

                          Bob Hicok
                          Plus Shipping

Garden Court At the National Gallery nearly everyone carries a white plastic bag from the gift shop, and this coincidence smacks of a miracle, a detail she deems worth dropping onto a page the way a scavenger, while combing a beach, might throw a pair of old, worn shoes into a duffel bag, the way museum-goers pick postcards at forty cents a pop, the choicest apples from the tree, then own them by holding them in tiny packets of blank white space. Though a few people look like someone she knows or might have known once, almost all get caught in her web of longing, of people she would like to know, now. She thinks, trust a public space, a room called Garden Court to highlight the beauty of being merely human, of being here. She doesn't sense how she herself magistrates this trick, transforming the lot into objects of instant desire, these museum-goers, these strangers traipsing in and out on a Tuesday early-afternoon. The faces appear curious for the most part, and often confused. Where will Garden Court lead, they ask? Why have a room filled only with plants and chairs in an art museum? A group of teenage boys, high-top sneakers and baggy shorts, trudge around the water fountain, thick with fern, at the court's center. Their banter reveals the room's echo, and they begin clucking, loudly, deliberately, like ducks. Even they are beautiful, she notes, t-shirts and pranks, pubescent boys in an art museum being as boyish as they might be in a field. She sits, pen poised, ready to describe the middle-aged guard who, next door, takes to the floor for a quick ten push-ups before plunging into boredom's deep end. A guard of her own, she selects Garden Court for her work, a room in the museum where there are no paintings, walls blank as a blank page, and she, at the edge, sentinel to what goes in and out. Elizabeth Poliner New Zoo Poetry Review

 	        Day

                           It was a day Ñ a bit
                           of camouflage cloth
                           through which the sun could shine.
                           I decided to hang the laundry

                           on a line. It was another day
                           in my civilian life. Monday, the day

                           of lost keys. Tuesday the breathing sweetness
                           of macaroni & cheese. When I

                           heard my son's sheets slapping
                           at the breeze, I turned around.

                           The sound
                           of soldiers
                           marching through the trees.

                           Wednesday

                           is the sparrow's day; she
                           nests in the place where the shingles
                           have broken away from the eaves,
                           in a home she's made for herself

                           out of Kleenex
                           and twigs.

                           The bus
                           is yellow.
                           It goes and comes
                           bearing the small
                           laundry of my son.

                           Thursday, a star
                           falls out of the sky as I
                           wheel the child's bike
                           to the garage Ñ the garage, which is a darkness
                           like the father

                           of my son, glittering
                           with wrenches, the smell of rags and oil. He keeps

                           a hat he wore in the jungle
                           hanging from a nail on the door. Friday

                           the clouds
                           part above the highway, leaving
                           a ragged hole
                           in my clean sky. The laundry

                           on the line, how like our lives! As if

                           something of ourselves
                           could be left behind, hanging

                           in the sun, taking
                           our places, bearing
                           our vague shapes
                           long after we've stepped away, wearing

                           other lives on other days. Shadows, pants, on
                           Saturdays

                           the library's stone lions run
                           freely through the streets.
                           We have to lock the doors.
                           We have to stay inside. But

                           by Sunday morning they've come back, and see

                           how emptily they stand,
                           very still and very quiet,

                           side by side, side by side.

                           Laura Kasischke

Quartet


                           We were nervous, surprised,
                           not looking at each other,
                           everyone trying to talk at once.
                           When we'd last seen each other
                           it was summertime and we
                           were all perfectly beautiful.
                           Now after forty years,
                           another season.

                           Someone suggested we sing
                           "On a Chinese Honeymoon" Ñ
                           Steve half blind, with
                           a head tremor, leading;
                           Pat with his triple bypass bass,
                           me striving to wheeze up
                           tenor through my asthma,
                           and Bill, his head tucked down
                           like a small, stricken raptor,
                           pressing the button on his throat,
                           trying to croak some baritone
                           out of his voice box Ñ

                           together we made the keening
                           wails of a banshee,
                           or ancient Greek crones,
                           or maybe something like
                           the sound four hungry mules
                           might make, abandoned in winter
                           as snow begins to fall.


  The Questions Poems Ask

                           Watching a couple of crows
                           playing around in the woods, swooping
                           in low after each other, I wonder
                           if they ever slam into the trees.

                           There's an answer here, unlike
                           most questions in poems,
                           which are left up in the air.
                           Was it a vision or a waking dream?

                           You decide, says the poet.
                           You do some of this work,
                           but think carefully.
                           Some people want to believe

                           poetry is anything
                           they happen to feel. That way
                           they're never wrong. Others yearn
                           for the difficult:

                           insoluble problems, secret codes
                           not meant to be broken.
                           Nobody, they've discovered,
                           ever means what he says.

                           But rarely does a crow
                           hit a tree, though other, clumsier birds
                           bang into them all the time, and we say
                           these birds have not adapted well

                           to the forest environment.
                           Frequently stunned, they become
                           easy prey for the wily fox,
                           who's learned how to listen

                           for that snapping of branches
                           and collapsing of wings,
                           who knows where to go
                           and what to do when he gets there.

                           Lawrence Raab
                    The Probable World

                  Cruiser

                           We would quicken in the vinyl
                           (velour if we were lucky) of our third mothers,
                           with their huge eight-chambered hearts & cleavage

                           deep to the very block, with their buxom dashboards
                           perfumed with specious pine, their dials & meters,
                           dual bands,
                           & songs for names Ñ Delta, Regal, Skylark,

                           not Vera or Constance or Jane Ñ with their ample
                           headroom
                           & sturdy bodies forged from ribs, bituminous & ferric,
                           torn from our state's west side. Think dead

                           of July of pumping gas by day, Crusoe of the concrete
                           isles,
                           tending my private garden of stains
                           that bloomed in rainbow colors after sun- or
                           thundershowers,

                           dreaming all the asphalt hours of Friday
                           night with Janet Moscowitz or Ellyn Chanin, Cindy
                           Patterson
                           or Lisa Koss (I have to strap myself to the pencil's
                           mast

                           even now to print those names), with Carol Elliot & her
                                  flawless mouth
                           no longer full of correction & lisps. Think serving time
                           in Exxon
                           exile, customers who sparsely tipped, knowing
                           yourself

                           the lord & master, nonetheless, of cowering dipsticks,
                           bold suppressor of steamy uprisings, cleanser of the
                           sins of
                                  robin redbreasts,
                           crows, the Great Emancipator of genie-like fumes. &
                           think of

                           waiting, of cooling your molten heels
                           beneath a sky in tiger-orange shreds promoting
                           change
                           of brakes & oil, twirling thumbs like universal joints &
                           tying hands

                           in complex knots for which no merit badge was sewn.
                           Then
                                  think of
                           sweating it out a little longer Ñ the final hour a frozen
                           gearbox, a
                                  rusted lug nut refusing to turn Ñ
                           the air hose hissing, like the Fiend Himself,
                           incessantly

                           in your simple ear, urging you to cut out early, to take
                           that first
                           transgressive bite of freedom, a pox on its hidden
                           worm. But
                                  imagine hanging in there
                           an impossible moment more....

                           counting the drawer-closing minutes out,
                           like the pennies, nickels, & dimes they were, for
                           Karen Franchi come stars, come cricket dark, full
                           moon

                           of her shining arm's inoculation mark, for the two of us
                           at last
                           to turn down some unpaved road & park
                           in her parents' Olds, with its padded elbow-rests &
                           seats

                           bouncing us on their cushioned knees, its power
                           locks & steering, arctic a/c, its glowing,
                           120-mile-per-hour
                                  promise
                           of 100-percent-pure American speed. She would shut
                           the engine

                           but not the FM off, scroll the windows down, setting
                           the polar
                                  spirits
                           free. They would scatter in a field of garter-rocks &
                           weed,
                           & before knowing it we'd be intertwined like twins,
                           alloys,

                           weft & warp, content & form, forming an ampersand of
                           twisted
                                  clay
                           in every conceivable conjunction, fusing new
                           contractions by
                                  closing the gap
                           between the sacred words of our once-divided flesh.
                           We would

                           cross & double-cross our ankles, arms, & lead us
                           deeper
                           and deeper into temptation, without ever reaching its
                           other,
                                  darker side Ñ
                           fulfillment. We would suck our bloods without
                           breaking

                           the skin, leave pink carnations, roses, violets
                           on each other's throats, flowers on our childhoods'
                           graves.
                           I'd be groping sightless, trying to learn how to read

                           a bra clip's Braille, while Karen Franchi apprenticed
                           in the midwife's craft, nervous to deliver the
                           undersized
                                  quintuplets
                           of my short-sleeve's buttons, her fingers quaking
                           throughout those
                                  difficult

                           reverse births. Time would spin all three wheels
                           in a vital stasis, a here & now that gleamed like
                           polished chrome.
                           A glorious present would come alive, inhaling the
                           future, exhaling
                                  the past,

                           while keeping them invisible to us as summer breath.
                           We would
                                  only know
                           the unescorted this of katydids, cantoring from
                           balconies of trees,
                           of Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music," Rod
                           Stewart's
                                  "Tonight's the Night,"

                           crossing whole oceans of air on rolling waves
                           to bow before the shrine we'd build
                           on the shining hill of every knuckle, at the confluence
                           of our
                                  many-rivered palms,

                           bow, I said, before our temple of hair & bone, joint &
                           nail,
                           fingerprints locking groove to groove. Which were
                           you Ñ her or
                                  me?
                           both or neither? Ñ as little brothers & sisters dozed

                           in adolescence, while fathers & mothers slept in the
                           same
                                  monarchical bed,
                           yet still in separate rooms? Whom were you holding,
                           or withholding yourself from, while we would turn
                           together, back
                                  & forth, side

                           to side, like a radio knob, trying to tune in through the
                           static
                           to the single music we'd christen "our song"? Elders,
                           literalists all,
                           called it "necking"; to us, it was "making out" Ñ

                           a phrase that better captured the unlikely
                           success of the thing, our great dumb luck
                           in that scorching month we started kicking

                           our legs nearly out of their sockets, trying to kick
                           them out of
                                  jeans
                           that clung like skins, placentas, as we clung to one
                           another
                           like stitching & seam, space & ink, consequence &
                           cause.

                           We were not haunted, you understand, by former lives,
                           & had no
                                  adult sense
                           of ourselves as the houses (small closets even)
                           of ghosts. We were unaware of being rent in two

                           by tomorrow & yesterday Ñ those siblings constantly
                           warring
                           over the fragile doll that is one life. It was 1976,
                           we were seventeen, our days were not a series yet

                           of might-as-wells & might-have-beens. We were not
                           anxious
                           over quandaries, wouldn't pick at them like splinters
                           or scabs. &
                                  we didn't care,
                           didn't think to care, whether we would find our
                           proper
                                  distance Ñ

                           a berth wide enough, but not too wide, to keep us
                           intimate,
                                  longing
                           for each other's next embrace. Because there was
                           nothing
                           creeping up in our blind spots; no bottlenecks or
                           wreckage lay in
                                  wait

                           ahead, & there could be nothing
                           false between us, nothing more than harmless alarms:
                           a stray dog scratching at the driver's side for scraps,
                           dead
                                  branches

                           crashing down through living, our four ears perking up
                           at first like
                                  rabbits',
                           then easing safely back into their warrens. Where, I
                           wonder,
                           were you Ñ in what mezzanine seated? Ñ when we'd
                           resume
                                  our dance

                           within the atomic dance, our play within the cosmic
                           play, me
                           the log-lugging grunt to her Prospero, patrician
                           magician now
                           to her kindling hunter? What were you doing or
                           thinking while
                                  we'd pull off our

                           daring spectacles, fearlessly walking the high wire
                           between vexing contraries, swallowing the fires
                           sparked by our
                                  two rough flints,
                           rubbings of our spindly limbs? Were you even paying
                           attention
                                  enough

                           to warn us before the double-barrel of that cruiser's
                           headlamps
                                  swung over
                           our quick-ducked heads? Perhaps you could have
                           cried out
                                  "Fuzz!"
                           or "Bacon!" Ñ or simply whispered "Police"? But maybe

                           you had yet to feel the strain of trying to stay
                           quiet, of keeping your lips buttoned after
                           everything's been
                                  loosed.
                           Perhaps you didn't know, that far back, what it was
                           like

                           for time, a stubborn zipper, to refuse to budge again,
                           no matter how hard you yanked it with a wish
                           that furtive, gravel-crunching cruiser would pass on
                           by

                           without paying you one pebble of mind. But surely you
                           know by
                                  now
                           that much of this never happened,
                           at least the way I say. You know whatever it is

                           we call love, or closeness, or just plain desire,
                           appears
                           most luminescent, most clear, when the actual facts Ñ
                           those
                                  nagging skeeters,
                           swirling gnats Ñ are swept away with a swish of the
                           hand. &

                           you are perfectly aware
                           that before that great black-and-white can swim off
                           into gray,
                           before I can tell how Karen Franchi & I

                           (or was it Carol Elliot, after all?) climbed out
                           onto the hood of her parents' pale-green Olds,
                           or LTD, or Grand Marquis, once the law did

                           disappear, before I can describe the way we splayed
                           ourselves
                           across that massive expanse of steel, with its rifle
                           sight of an
                                  ornament
                           aimed at the enemy distance, or how we rested our
                           naked backs

                           against a private beach of melted then supercooled
                           sand,
                           I'll have to come clean & admit there never was a
                           cruiser,
                           & that I was certainly no cruiser myself. I will have to
                           state for the
                                  record

                           that I was one who traveled strictly in a circle
                           of one, & spent my weekend nights with my family of
                           four
                           speakers & Pioneer components, a harem of albums
                           sprawled
                                  around me

                           on the floor Ñ only my cravings & boredom moving
                           back &
                                  forth, side
                           to side, like LEDs. I'll have to fess up
                           that all along the ampersands were me, seated
                           cross-legged, in
                                  bashful

                           profile, unable to face beauty head-on, to hear its
                           harsh appraisal,
                                  its gavel
                           thwack, or listen to my heart shake loose & drop,
                           with a rattle & thunk, like a can in the station's Coke
                           machine.

                           If that's "confessional," then you're a priest Ñ
                           forgive. Forgive because you can, because we're all
                           alone in this
                           together, every crime is ours, & not to forgive is the
                           worst

                           we can commit. Perhaps that's overrighteous, so
                           forgive, & I'll repay, as best I can, with all five
                           kingdoms
                           of the world: animal, vegetable, mineral, the kingdom
                           of heaven,

                           & the soundless void. I'll take you back to a golden
                           age
                           before our words were dead, when "right on" &
                           "radical"
                           leaped off our tongues with trapeze ease, when
                           "fuck"s

                           were capable Ñ imagine! Ñ of "flying." I'll return us
                           to a time when you yourself had no idea
                           that so much remains

                           split off from us, anonymous, that most things are
                           known
                           by their aliases only, & that we might be nothing
                           more than our gropings toward & of each other in
                           respective
                                  darks. Once,

                           you had no honest clue
                           that all the good intentions & acts of kindness in
                           creation
                           don't stand a chance of halting the march of
                           degradation &
                                  despair,

                           & vice versa. You couldn't fathom then
                           what letting memory lead you to its waters meant:
                           that it would
                                  make you
                           drink, would force your face down into & past your
                           face, that it
                                  would hold

                           your head beneath the surface until your lungs burst
                           into gasps of song. Think back: the nation had turned
                           two
                                  hundred;
                           the fifty-first state shone white & full within what
                           seemed like

                           our easy grasp. I told Karen Franchi if she looked
                           closely
                           she could see the flag, waving in the solar wind. She
                           said I lied,
                           & laughed. Knowing everything Ñ that nothing Ñ

                           I walked her through the zodiacal zoo, explained black
                           holes,
                           their infinite, light-swallowing throats, told her there
                           was no God,
                           no You, that human prayers were like those giant
                           flares

                           flung out from then looping back to the sun. (I'd been
                           reading
                                  Asimov
                           & Sartre.) She laughed again, & suddenly so did I, for
                           no reason
                           I could voice. Sometimes I still hear that laughter of
                           mine,

                           & it seems the only one I still possess
                           not shot through with the cynical or cracked. Will you
                           guffaw at
                                  my expense
                           if I tell you I still carry Karen Franchi's arm Ñ

                           whether it was ever there or not Ñ around my
                           shoulder,
                           & that some nights when I lie in bed, after snapping on
                           the dark, after distance (but not longing, never
                           longing) closes
                                  down, I think of her

                           & of her parents' car, whatever make it was,
                           with its haloed tires, quadruple-barrel carburetor,
                           windshield
                                  scarfed with tint,
                           with its glove box the size of the cradle, trunk as
                           deep as the
                                  grave,

                           & I forget to worry if there is truly any greater good
                           than a single voice, anything more to life
                           than life itself. I simply believe in our communion, our
                           laying on of
                                  hands

                           that would have made the purest of evangelists wince
                           with envy & delight. I believe
                           in the complete & unambiguous way I once believed in
                           the
                                  accostive stink

                           of leaded fuel, in the tainting powers of grease,
                           the purifying of Go-Jo soap. & truthfully, I feel less
                           afraid.
                           I am comforted, in fact, by how full we once were

                           of each other, how empty of ourselves,
                           & how we pressed our lips together, as if each kiss
                           were our first in, & our last for, many, many years.

                           Gregory Fraser


                           My Father Singing in the
                           Basilica of San Marco

                           I'll never be as handsome as my father,
                           singing Vivaldi, when he's seventy-five,
                           beneath gold domes or strolling by the water.

                           The choir will go to Harry's Bar together
                           after the concert. The young tenors grieve:
                           they'll never be as handsome as my father.

                           There's one they call my "double." I bet he'd
                           rather
                           have my dad's full head of hair and never leave
                           gold domes, humped bridges, and the rising
                           water.

                           "Why don't you join us? We could use another
                           voice for the Gloria." But I believe
                           I'd never hit the high notes like my father.

                           Gold domes glow like furnaces, the weather
                           heating up outside when singers move
                           through the Piazza, thirsty for Scotch and
                           water.

                           Where's the blown-glass mirror to show each
                           other
                           what we both fear, what we sing to disprove?
                           I'll never be as handsome as my father
                           until our funeral launches cross the water.

                           John Drury

Incident at Third and Woodlawn

EsKiMo B L U E d aY

Snow cuts loose from the frozen
Until it joins with the African sea
In moving it changes its cold and its name
The reason I come and go is the same
        Animal game for me
        You call it rain
        But the human name
Doesn't mean shit to a tree
If you don't mind heat in your river and
Fork tongue talking from me
Swim like an eel fantastic snake
Take my love when it's free
        Electric feel with me
        You call it loud
        But the human crowd
Doesn't mean shit to a tree
Change the strings and notes slide
Change the bridge and string shift down
Shift the notes and bride sings
        Fire eating people
        Rising toys of the sun
        Energy dies without body warm
        Icicles ruin your gun
Water my roots the natural thing
Natural spring to the sea
Sulphur springs make my body float
Like a ship made of logs from a tree
        Redwoods talk to me
        Say it plainly
        The human name
Doesn't mean shit to a tree
Snow called water going violent
Damn the end of the stream
Too much cold in one place breaks
That's why you might know what I mean
        Consider how small you are
        Compared to your scream
        The human dream
Doesn't mean shit to a tree

T h o u g h t f or t he P a ge :

 Five

                           Inexplicable foreign substance of life,
                           blue sky with milk solids squeezed into a corner,
                           an unusual configuration of adolescents
                           trading hand shots... yesterday
                           a fleet of old women arrived on the block,
                           returned to the school they graduated from 60 years
                           ago,
                           rushing along blown by ancient breeze,
                           45 voyageurs returned from the impossible journey
                           carrying tales of joy and hardship
                           endured... it got cold last week then warm again:
                           in Denver snow: in DC drought
                           curls sycamore leaves, plucks feathers from the oaks:
                           here they've turned the fountains off, businessmen
                           hardly notice, they buy shirts on Broadway
                           eating Italian ices... someone fires a gun and
                           the crowd scatters, soon returns like a flock
                           resettling... very soon there's harmony,
                           a sense we will go on moving along together...
                           always some crisis to be avoided,
                           sidled past... women talking on the phone... three
                           artists
                           meeting for coffee, competing with each other, saying
                           a few amazing things, not even trying to come clean,
                           a light dancing in one woman's eyes, memory
                           joined suddenly with some
                           episode in the present, something distinct
                           like the scent of basil, a touch she remembers,
                           recalling a weekend on the Cape...
                           other friends dissemble and delay,
                           one loses track of another's interests,
                           confuses an important point, the friendship
                           dwindles, fades... there are men scolding
                           children early today, a woman leans
                           against a tree eating an orange, celebrants
                           step into churches to pray... a passerby rushes
                           into a hotel to ask a favor,
                           goes on thinking of a bet he might place,
                           recalls a maple with one red branch like knitting
                           unraveled over a paddock, remembers bells rung all
                           night
                           at the French Society, car races,
                           a word he might use: he thinks of his wife
                           bobbing her head crying as she
                           tried to explain, pictures her tipped
                           on the examining table grimacing as the doctor
                           probed...
                           sometimes he thinks there's
                           nothing he can do... it's late morning,
                           buses arrive from the Hamptons bringing
                           the slack and sated few
                           to their commitments in town; there's an argument
                           taking place at the top of the stairs:
                           a union organizer frets over some papers
                           he left in a bar; you can see the World Trade Center
                           through
                           haze... a lawyer eats a steak sandwich...
                           tomorrow there will be a special section
                           on Middle Eastern poets: the tide's in:
                           a child memorizes his third prayer: carts rumble
                           on Fulton street: the curator dusts
                           the Marconi equipment: many take to pathways
                           running
                           for health... You could have told me,
                           the girl says, beginning to smile,
                           and there's a rush, a sense of momentum gathered and
                           thrust forward, a change of speed, of something
                           about to happen... you look up
                           and see the sky, streaked white:
                           it's still early,
                           as if a new era has just begun... it's possible
                           to live unresolved, inconclusively
                           and without appeal... you take a walk in the park,
                           take a few minutes off and watch the squirrels
                           dodge and run... there's not much you can do,
                           nothing helps much... you may be seeing things...
                           the same vicious couple feeds pigeons,
                           the artist places sheets of paper on the grass,
                           everything speaks for itself

                           Charlie Smith
                     TriQuarterly

When the red sun sets
     on the railroad town,
     And the bars begin to laugh
     with a happy sound,
     I'll still be here
     right by your side,
     There'll not be anyone
     in my heart but you.

     And the dreams that you're having,
     they won't let you down,
     If you just follow on
     'cause you know
     where you're bound,
     The well will be flowing
     and the words will come fast,
     When the one who is coming
     arrives here at last

     On the grassy hills
     of the railroad town,
     Where we cut through the fences
     and over the crown,
     Where wind was blowing
     right through your hair,
     I dreamt that my Momma
     and Daddy were there

     And the dreams that you're having,
     they won't let you down,
     If you just follow on
     'cause you know
     where you're bound,
     The well will be flowing
     and the words will come fast,
     When the one who is coming
     arrives here at last

     When the red sun sets
     on the railroad town,
     And bars begin to laugh
     with the happy sound,
     I'll still be here
     right by your side,
     There'll not be another
     in my heart but you

In the canyons of the Great Divide
    Familiar places we can run and hide are
    filled with strangers walkin in our
    houses- alone. In the GreaT
    Divide - Nothin to decide
    Noone else to care for or love
    (You won't fit in too well)
    On the horses of the carousel she rides
    along with you and me.
    She rides like she knows wherever she
    goes
    We'll be there.
    On the carousel- life is going well...
    anyone can tell we're in love
    On the carousel you're gonna like the
    way you feel...
    You and I, we got lost down there - in
    the twisted canyons of the Great Divide.
    We walked the floor Now, we don't go
    there anymore...
    In the GreaT Divide-
    Nothing to decide. Noone else to care
    for or love.
    In the Great Divide I don't fit in too well.