Poetry P – The Recusant

Poetry P

Alan Price

Enid

This sole image in my hands.

Octagonal glass frame

with a clipped down photograph.

Subdued sepia except for the felicity

of a yellow button or broach,

hand-painted on the collar

of her studio dress.

Grandmother’s well enough.

Diseases unborn, yet waiting.

Pensive for evidence

of hope and humour.

Her eyes, nose and ears,

first premonitions of myself.

Occupation mother and wife:

the code of the century.

Died of TB.

Her boilermaker husband left

for another port.

Three infant daughters and son

fast donated to an orphanage.

No film or recording.

How did she kiss, laugh or sing?

Scottish. Reticent. Stoic.

Loved choirs and musical hall jokes.

My mother unable to unknot

the mystery of who she was.

Jessie

My aunt giggled on seeing a buzzing fly,

a kettle boil or a plate fall off a table.

Anything could pull the trigger

for Jessie to be sent into nervous laughter.

She only slowed down on listening

to my mother tell her fortune.

Her eyes would stop darting wild,

blur down on tea leaves in a china cup.

I imagined she was fidgety at night,

laughed when her husband undressed

and told her to shut up.

Pressing his beer lips against hers

in semi-darkness

she must have pushed him away,

wiped her mouth,

with the back of her hand,

wanting the performance to end.

I once saw Father

make a pass at my aunt.

A proposal followed by groping.

Her weighing up and refusing.

What Jessie desired was acceptance,

a condition she never laughed at.

Dorothy

A beret suited Dorothy.

It made her head look brightly lit

and stacked full of big mischief

to dignify a small, frail woman,

tender and trusting, who shivered,

late spring, from abandonment.

Her man, for twenty two years,

buggered off down south

with a factory girl.

And a son was conscripted

by the army to Suez.

The only canal she knew

was the one from Liverpool to Leeds.

Mother and Dorothy were pally

at the pictures, doing the shops,

swearing about a late bus,

laughing at the rain, having tea

and forgetting, inside the house,

to remove headscarf and beret.

In hospital she was dear Dot,

a whispering skeleton,

overlaid by skin,

shaking visitors’ hands.

No more shared lipsticks and secrets.

No being flighty together in the street.

Good companions unable

to understand the end.

Mother tried lighting a fire with a newspaper.

A headline, about the government’s betrayal,

turned brown. Mother let it burn as she grieved.

Edith

The dog waddled in,

after its waddling owner,

sniffing chocolate buttons on a cushion.

She kept the dog bloated for complicity

and comfort: an ally to resist

a skinny husband who beat her

with a brush.

She and her dog competed in smelling

so I couldn’t tell them both apart.

My nose was constantly bewildered.

Auntie smiled and touched my cheek:

her face and her smell becoming as one.

She fed us potted crab-paste bread rolls,

salad, cake and black and white TV.

Even though the bread was stale

and the tea too strong we came together

on summer nights only marred

by a coal fire blazing.

Edith would mail us bulky letters.

Mother and I struggled to decipher

words that looped and rode the rapids

of an inky page and, when rescued,

be mistranslated by our laughter.

Only when she bussed it down to our place

did we dare to question what she meant.

Auntie never blushed or brought the dog

Miss X

On Sundays visitors would come

but this was a shocking first timer.

“Remember me.” she said to Mother,

“I’m Angela’s friend. We met and chatted

at the hairdresser’s. You said pop round.

So here I am.”

Mother poured tea, buttered bread and thought,

“Who is this slut? Wearing heavy makeup;

crossing her legs like that;

shuffling her bottom on the sofa

and smiling at everything.”

“Spinster.”muttered father

behind his News of the World.

He asked me to leave the room.

“Let the boy stay. He’s no trouble.”

protested the strange woman.

Her dress a floral exposure

‘indecent’ for that summer day.

All coiffure hair and showy necklace.

Earrings that glinted astray.

She spoke nonsense, sighed and left.

My beautiful disrupter.

My lonely intruder.

Whose house did she visit next?

Steve Pottinger

Enough

And so, it comes.

That winter morning when you wake

and find that you have had

enough.

You will give it up, you tell yourself,

retreat to the hills, the coast,

a cottage, a boat, a hut

some place out on the edge of it all.

Anywhere but here.

Anything but this.

You make plans to see out your days

walking beaches

scattering resting gulls

climbing mountains

to stare at far horizons.

You tell yourself

you will tend vegetables

grow old by the heat of a fire

lose yourself in books

and the view from a window.

Let the rich and the furious

have the world for themselves.

Much good may it do them.

There’s no shame, you tell yourself,

in howling your grief

into the roaring wind

at the stars, the moon,

anything that listens,

in finding solace in the bottle

or the bottom of a pint.

There’s no shame in walking

away from the fight,

throwing the towel in.

Let the rich and the furious

have the world for themselves.

Much good may it do them.

You tell yourself all of this and more.

You even believe it.

And then, one day, it comes.

That morning which has always

been written into your bones

woven into your future

that morning when you wake

and find that you have had

Basta!

Enough!

and you roll up your sleeves

and set to once more.

Steve Pottinger © 13th December 2019

Douglas Penick

Blanqui Unknowing Loss

Violence exhausted,

All action past;

Imprisoned deep below the granite dome

Whose high summit is ever unfathomable

In shadow:

A monster to established ways,

Judged, convicted, imprisoned

A Minotaur, he muses:

perhaps

there may be a way to contact, you,

the other prisoners.

While no physical medium allows.

Perhaps

there are parallels and passages

deep

within the mind where thought flows

to merge boundariless.

shhhhhhhhhhh

Reflecting:

Log ago, long after expulsion from the Deiity’s garden, His Eden,

Humanity, ever on the move,

Now amid sparkling waves

Finally discovered a New World!

Europeans, we discovered unexpected living

Lands and shimmering seas of an alien star

And it did not occur to us, didn’t

That we had found Yahweh’s Eden once gain

Our place of origin,

Our point of departure

From which so long ago, we were expelled

Reflecting:

We Europeans, ever on the hunt,

Were not inclined to think that we,

Were not extending

The limits of our fallen world,

But

Might have found

A space undivided,

The innocence of all beginnings

Shhhhhhhhh!

So, amid the silent walls, do I begin to wonder if there is a way to find in our imagining a garden or a palace or a book or music or device in which we, imprisoned everywhere, can meet and share the fact, the mere fact of our task, our awareness.

I begin to find that certain movements of the body cause specific images to arise in mind. If I lie on my back and slow my breathing by consciously relaxing my diaphragm, I am still in Paris. I am crossing a street near a news-stand at the Boulevard St, Michel. It is eleven in the morning, bright, warm. Lying on the floor, as I relax my neck, I see a restaurant near Montmartre. It is a famous place, I think, a place where artists once gathered. Now only tourists go there. Nothing quite comes together.

Shhhhhhhhh!

It did not once occur to us,

Then or now, that

These white beaches, these deep and humid jungles,

These macaws shrieking,

This deep river opening on the shore,

That this, your great discovery.

Is both New and Ancient World.

Reflecting:

It is our Eden where

Now

A gracious and merciful God may offer us redemption

From our history of sin, violence, corruption.

The prisoner gives a bitter smile.

Yes, indeed, Columbus, on his 2nd voyage, considered that, yes, when his ship touched the shores of what was later named Venezuela, he might have rediscovered Eden. But that time he had other missions. But he could not put it out of his mind. He returned on a 3^rd voyage to explore this possibility even though it stretched the lines of history.

Ssssssssssh

What is awake and what is asleep come to have a very different significance for me now than once they did.

I feel sometimes as if I am perched on the summit of a mountain at the summit of the night and my thoughts and all the images and sensations that pour through my frame radiates through all the universes taking shapes and finishing out as lives of moments I will never see and which I will no longer have to maintain. A kaleidoscope of edges, borders, boundaries, junctures, breakages.

Ssssssssssh.!

Columbus did not stay.

The exigencies of establishing a slave state in Hispaniola,

The need to temper his brothers’ ill-considered brutality,

Shifted the course of his energies into dark and familiar channels.

New white Americans would follow him.

Thus again we lost a verdant and ample Paradise;

Colonization by genocide and slavery

Became your outer our inner engagement

with the unknown.

Reflecting:

Loss, destruction and unknowing now conjoined.

Ssssssssh!

A beam of light of slower frequency than the blue violet range passes through space. Though it cannot be seen by the naked eye and no one has bothered to create an instrument to observe it, it leaves certain traces. Like the faintest of breezes rustling in the high branches of the palms, it strokes the webs and networks that bind matter as visible or auditory or perceptible or graspable or knowable or just beyond knowable. It causes webs of awareness to vibrate subtly. It creates an inaudible music that can sometimes, but not always, move denser and weightier forms. A hissing, a faint laugh, rippling from afar, sometimes causes the rulers of the world to look down in unaccountable shame.

***

BIO:

Douglas Penick’s work appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berefrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader, and Consequences among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays , The Age of Waiting which engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, will be published in 2020 by Arrowsmith Press.

Alan Price

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) directed by Terence Davies

“We shall not gather by the river but in the beautiful pub.

We’ll have a sing-song to praise, then quickly batter down,

our bringing up. Our religion’s Catholic yet we prefer beer

and candles to wine with that brute our father in the cellar.”

Two daughters fighting against the blows of a broom.

A son conscripted to the army; returning to light a fag,

swear, marry and escape. Lives desiring to avoid tyranny.

If you knew Susie. Buttons and Bows. Taking a chance on love.

Voices joined with neighbours over an ale-drenched piano.

This was their opera, romance, ballad and M.G.M. musical.

Ceremony. Rituals. Cry of the camera. Cutting of ambition.

I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks

your heart. A family in time and space. A street’s existence

under the stars. I heard my brother’s life crooning loud

and raw; caught myself, a shipping clerk (like the director)

in a Liverpool long ago vacated: all its celebrations eclipsed

by time.

Los Olvidados (1954) directed by Luis Bunuel

Bunuel, you were born to disregard Freud – never interpret

our dreams only render them brutal, incomprehensible.

Pedro’s slow motion filmed mother (how daintily she held

up the sides of her nightdress.) The son asks why no love

and kisses. She says her hands are tired from washing

and reveals a lump of meat. Jaibo, Pedro’s rival, comes up

from under the bed, grabbing at meat timed to the sound

of a thunderclap. Soon a legless dwarf would be thrown

from his cart “One less. One less just like that and they will

continue to drop. They should kill them before they were born”

says a blind man, trying to molest a girl. Luis, you mellowed

later in France for a bourgeois Piccoli. And before this came

an eye and an Andalusian razor. But this dead boy in a sack

on a city waste dump. I sat chilled in my seat, unable to cry

Redemption gone missing: pushed outside of the frame.

Pick Up On South Street (1953) directed by Samuel Fuller

A necktie selling woman licked her pencil, informed the cops.

Fifty dollars – last instalment on a Long Island burial plot.

“I have to go on making a living so I could die.” Plonked on

her bed the shoes of a communist: gunning for a microfilm.

The lady’s head blown off. Sweet Mademoiselle loudly sings

her record. For Sam life is terrible for ‘dopey’ looking agents.

On a waterfront hangs out a three-time loser: pickpocket

throwing a bottle of beer to a sweating detective dishing out

crumpled bucks and hating routine. How on a Summer day

a thief unclipped the commie’s girlfriend’s bag in a subway

train; groping behind tissues, makeup, ID for money: scarce

seeing the cops, arrested by abuse, the system, a dame’s

bruised face and transformations of love sticky on arrival.

I never met a Red. Nearest I got was the SWP, gassy lager

and an overdose of American imperialisms.

The Gospel According To Matthew (1964) directed by Pier Paolo

Pasolini

What cinephile succour could I offer nuns and children

enduring a film approved by the Pope? Timid souls fidget.

One shields a little girl’s eyes. Had the Vatican blown it?

Good Friday’s blistering gospel from a Marxist unbeliever.

“You will be hated by all, because you bear my name.”

Jesus rebukes, attacks, hectors and spits out his message;

knifing the Pharisees, bursting open the moneylenders,

stealing nets from fishermen. “Abandon family and friends”

demanding that their darkness can only ever receive his light.

Armed with ecstasy and palms they dash towards Christ.

Hand-held camera running as if a panther by their side;

then prowling caged behind the backs of soldiers, witness

for a rough-hewn Passion. Pasolini casting his own mother

as the aged and rejected Mary. Her lost Messiah, born to fight

immaculate, returns to disobey: resurrected with a sword.

Boy (1969) directed by Nagisa Oshima

“It’s the end of Japan. We can’t go any further.”

says the stepmother. “Grandmother won’t want

to see you” says the father. “We went to Hokkaido”

says the son to the police. A journey of scam accidents

right up to the snowy North. Boy learns how to fall;

extorting money from drivers; faking bruises on arms,

taught how long and when best to cry. A ten year old

with a brother, only three, and a Mother pregnant with

maybe another boy (snowed in) to hear the screech of

brakes. A snowman, red Wellington boot and a dead

girl. “Men from outer space will come to save the world”

Boy assures his veteran father. As a child I too believed

in cosmic forces. But a new wristwatch, that told you

the date, and to be always on the move wasn’t for me.

It all belonged to Nagisa and his boy.

White Heat (1949) directed by Raoul Walsh and acted by James Cagney

A gang member scalded by steam from the mail train

then bandaged up and left to die waiting for the doc.

Now if ever I burn myself badly at my kitchen stove

indifference returns in the form of Arthur Cody Jarret

snarling from his pain and lust in mother’s open arms

till his girlfriend enters, spits out her gum and demands

a fur coat, shivering treacherously in their hide-out.

Those ‘tops’ of Jarret’s world kept peaking in madness;

a routine killing whilst gnawing away on a chicken leg,

‘epilepsy’ as a manic protest in a prison dining hall

and firing your gun at the chemical storage tank

exploding with a blast to ape your psychotic torment

and meltdown the riveted audience for an atomic age.

“All I ever had was Ma.” She was the gang’s engineer.

Her son – the ruthless driver despising the rest of them:

plagued by headaches from hell and incurably in love

with Mom, especially when she was shot by Cody’s gal.

All the punk gangsters, that came after Cagney, merely lit

the fuse he’d already planted in our brains.

Alan Price’s poetry has appeared in many publications including The Interpreter’s House, Second Aeon, Envoi and The Morning Star. His debut collection of poetry Outfoxing Hyenas was published by Indigo Dreams in 2012. It was followed in 2016 by Angels at the Edge nineteen prose poems inspired by Walter Benjamin’s comments on an Angel picture by Paul Klee. This pamphlet was published by TheTuba Press. Alan’s chapbook of poems based on the composer Mahler called Mahler’s Hut came out in 2017 from Original Plus Books. And his latest full-length poetry collection Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady appeared in May 2018 from The High Window Press. A book of his short stories and flash fictions called The Illiterate Ghost will be was published in October 2019 by the Eibonvale Press. He is presently writing a novel and working on a collection of film poems with the working title, The Cinephile Poems

Mair De-Gare Pitt

Crimson Lady

She is adorned with a necklace of tears

a smoky blouse of sighs,

with little tappy shoes that shine red

in the shadows.

Dainty blood-beads bracelet-dot her wrist

and hide in her scarlet skirt.

Sometimes she talks youth-speak

and paints its password on her mouth.

Tipsy lip-stick.

His key grinds

then wrenching, turns.

Her stomach churns.

The door swings;

china quivers.

She shivers.

Blodeuwedd

She watches the squirrel, sharp-clawing bark,

the lizard lounging, lazy on stones,

the minnow wearing the water like silk.

Fritillaries bob in the turquoise

haze; the broom

is patched with purple.

In the sweet meadow, petals quiver,

shimmer in the warm breeze breath

and the mirage-making heat.

Dusk fills the field with shade.

Sky-lit hills scoop up the black.

All is becoming in the changing light.

Cool in its own shade

the oak beckons with long shadows.

Blodeuwedd dreams of day and wakes to dark.

A tussock couches, rabbit-like; rabbits crouch, still as tussocks

then sprint as air made animate

as living ghosts.

She conspires with the Moon

in silver fear.

Small creatures tremble and freeze.

Over sleeping flowers she glides

listening for rustling grasses,

scenting heartbeats in the darkness.

In the tarnished night she kills.

She swoops, wing-breath whispering

cold on the meadow-sweet.

She visits like a veil flitting through fingers.

She visits like a stream in flood.

She visits like a half-wish, like a scattered rose.

She is terrible in the darkness.

She is Kali, red tongue lolling.

She is Fury, twitching to snip.

As the long day rises

she is Eve, consuming night-knowledge.

At last, birth-star Mary, Mother of us.

Now she is Wendy.

She is fragrant Florence.

Beneath the cool starch, is she razors?

Dark falls again and she burns.

Now she is Wendigo, owl-beaked.

Why is she starving? Has she been fasting?

Dawn breaks on the hillside,

showers gleam like shot silk.

She raises her hand to her heavy hair.

Italian Retrospective

Like an old man, sky-full of memories,

Palazzo Blu invites us in

to wander through its layers of time.

TVs play flashes of mistakes on loops:

leather boots in flickering black and white,

the screen grainy with history like rheumy eyes.

Inlaid cabinets with secret drawers

hide whispers in dove-tailed spaces.

Regrets bow their heads in corners.

Galleries ring with grace-notes,

their triptychs in scarlet and gold-leaf

remembering love and loss and resurrection.

Like an old man, grateful for our time,

Palazzo Blu, head nodding, lets us go.

Fred Pollack

Thesis

Hegel says that Diogenes,

vainly seeking an honest man,

is unknowingly seeking a man

of an earlier type, bypassed by History.

Diogenes, however, has

just found his honest man.

Clings to his shoulder, laughingly tells him

what Hegel said. “Who says I’m dishonest?”

the guy yells. Casts off

and punches out Diogenes, calls him

a perv who never held

a job or a sword, Hegel a typical egghead,

and dies in a shootout, a hero of the Right.

Results May Vary

I was privileged to live

in immense luxury (it never seemed

that great to me) on the eve

of the Sixth Extinction-Level Event.

The Arctic ice-free in summer, Antarctica

thawing, most of the coral

and 60% of vertebrates

dead since 1970 – but such phrases

sound like scolding,

and no one wants to be scolded. Yet

through subtle conduits, the anguish of frogs

and bears, the background noise

of energy in the atmosphere

seep into culture, and even I,

soigné as I am, have grown rude.

Observing my precipitous decay

with a risus sardonicus that is neither classical

nor Decadent nor brave nor

in any way generous, only

glad that I’ll die before you, and in

some comfort. Like drowned bayous,

uncontainable

deserts and wildfires, methane belching from tundra,

my hate overflows its banks;

my “narcissism of small differences”

(countless as the signs

at neofascist rallies

I watch on TV

with rage greater than theirs because informed)

flaps in the wind. And leaving places

I’ll never visit

and/or won’t be invited to

again, I do once-unimaginably

vile things … “Made you look!”

Orange lilies, pink alstroemeria,

one white rose and a ring

should do. Walking, I nervously

rearrange with my free hand

my straw hat, which alternates

with an upscale kerry and a bowler

Then, ducking into door- and alleyways,

I change my look: thin eyebrows, small straight nose –

or the originals? Compress (there’s a valve) gut and butt.

Lengthen legs and stride, then think

better of it. (Springs and struts.)

I wish there were a module for morale –

some slow-released hormone – and for the day:

Monet clouds, a brass band in the park, a park,

and a few last horse-drawn carts amidst

the Fords would be preferable

to this grey.

Will you say yes? Oh, do – before

I sense I’ve drifted back

into some Futurist future or Constructivist fancy,

and flights of biplanes mutate into drones,

and some medley of electronics,

first centralized and broadcast, then autonomous,

takes over regulating me.

Oh the Wellsian crowd is a Deco mirror

I wish we were gazing into

side by side, nude and organic;

but the gloom of the day and the world’s prospects

have furnished only these flowers, as real as you.

The operative word is “I” or “buy”;

they amount to the same thing.

With the decline of malls, malls are occupied

by artists, the lowest kind of squatter;

and these are the lowest kind of artist,

the audience – pretentious dreamers.

They drift through garbage, Everything Must Go

signs, needles, greasy wrappers.

They nap on the torn couches,

dream of Fifth Avenue, the secondhand smoke,

the contact high of money,

and gaze into the few working displays.

Dignity, a glazed bowl.

The give and take of discourse, a top.

The unarticulable early hope,

luggage(?). One place offers

(strange firms creep into dying malls)

a “Love Machine.” The living dead,

readers, viewers, cognoscenti flock

to that window. They expect something

like an ancient fax or 3D printer,

concave, convex, and soulful; but what’s there

is a man. He stares vulnerably out,

spreads his arms as if to embrace

the abandoned throng and the sullen vista

behind them. What the world

needs now, what the world

by definition needs is prosperity,

the carnal index of transcendent love;

moved by that vision, he begins to sing.

In her own much-loved work, the editor

moves from emotion A to emotion B.

It’s apparently heroic for her to have

the first emotion, and the second,

and to move. I can’t grasp those emotions.

Not much happens, but there’s a lot of nature.

Someone or perhaps no one is there,

a betraying, reassuring presence.

For years before I learned the word “reflux,”

I was troubled by heartburn.

Once walked at 3 AM to a 7/11

for Rolaids and the sort of high-carb crap

responsible for the condition. Once saw a diagram

of acid-producing cells in the stomach;

they looked like alien weapons or flowers.

When I chewed Tums or Rolaids or, in a pinch,

chugged milk, I visualized

the meeting between acid and chalky alkaline;

the brief cooling or neutrality

was blessed, though knowing that

the result is technically a “soap”

caused qualms. This internal oil-war

changed some of my esophageal cells

to stomach cells. That’s bad, said the doc

who stuck a tube down my throat,

then told me to take Prilosec daily.

Which stopped the problem for decades,

though recently I’ve heard it causes Alzheimer’s.

When she encounters my work, the beloved editor

reacts first with a smile,

like any intellectual confronting terror.

Frank Praeger

Indolent Interlude

The piling up, the flood of sound, and a fixed star,

indolent interlude in the presence of a Siberian tiger.

I have not lathered my face

for this stilly no nonsense hypothetical;

I refuse to acknowledge threat, dream,

knive plagued playground,

cracked cement,

unthreaded needles,

bent nails,

copper tubing,

explorations of an unremaindered past,

or dark wherein crocuses close.

Ah, pearl gray encroachment on a lavender siding.

Ah, that dark wherein I, too, have rested.

A crow and a greater dark,

a bracelet charm in a rain spout,

voices and moving figures,

finger pointing and clarification.

Escape in a subway entrance, emerging to a new life,

another reprieve.

Horseless and no oasis,

A coconut mango mix and cherry blossoms off to the side.

An only answer, patience,

without awareness of the calamitous events,

the bizarre nights,

the waste-weary, vapid intrusion of day,

the uncooked meals,

excuses for two.

I am closing down,

a little dry rot,

a less than sibilant whisper taken for mind,

a perplexing darkness for sleep.

John Porter

My eyes

Happy

to still be here,

on waking I am greeted by

the silver logo of the company

as my eyes boot up.

I have, I admit, papered over the

branding on the cereals,

kerbing the invites

to merge my journey

with that of a dry toasted

toe nail of corn.

There is a click lid resistance

and any blinking trickled into

an image feed, with a following

of ten million masturbaters,

but that is ok they paid for my eyes

free at point of use

pointing to choices

glance right to order, left to

gift wrap.

The thoughtverts did start to

grate so, just for a while

I wanted to unplug, and tensed the link

between chip and vein.

A stern message flashed up,

and doors locked,

no sirens allowed for the self fired pain,

if you tamper with stock

kindly supplied by the company.

Sleepers

The tent flaps clatter in the warm wind

coming in from the red horizon and inside

I tend to the sleeping. Not many of us are still awake in the

rolling cites moving on as the waters come. The sleepers are laid

out in rows, numbered, labelled, I change the drips

twice a day, let the nappies go until the stench gets me.

I have not yet yawned, but do not resent the

sleepers, let them drift on till the day their snores

turn to gasps, the young ones can repay me in the pot,

the old I’ll cast off into the waves

to move, tumble and dance down, and away.

Dissolving

Even as the ice melted

and waves crashed in taking cites with them,

as the land was bitten away like secret

nibbles on a biscuit until there’s just a rugged middle

and an archipelago of outlying crumbs,

even then, when spires poked out like splinters

in the flood and roads led down from crowded hilltops

to nowhere but deep fish playgrounds

and every minute another server slipped under

the web fizzing away to steam,

they still sat around rescued mahogany,

wincing at the wet leather of the chairs,

banging the table, even as useless banknotes splattered

the rocks, with spit flying as strongly as the currents

they sang out their faith that this would all be solved

by the market.

Dry heat

At the start of the week there is already reverence

as those disposed to fawn at its constant warmth

regard the Aga. The luck that the house is equipped

with such a metallic alter is pored over, dry heat

discussed and temperature gradations

of the particular ovens charted, as if they were marble pillared chambers

of the world’s greatest bathhouse.

Later should members of the group doubt

the heavy hob lid hallelujah, opting instead for fan assisted exacting ease

it is sacrilege, a blasphemy against

the order of stone floored kitchens, withering looks pity aspirations that

do not see the good news in thick wire coiled handles.

Even when the bacon deposited behind the shining metal door

is returned charred to dust, the conductor blames herself

for not being in synch with the mighty instrument.

By the final day the most devout stand hand on the Aga

risking burns, unable to part, so consumed with love

and gratitude, merging with the metal, sliding

into dry heat.

Baby walking

So I just stood up, pressed off, put the stained mug

in my bag and left. I think is was 9.15am and since then

I’ve been baby walking.

At first it was wriggly screamers, I’d pace round

the streets for hours tiny head bawling

rocking against me until rhythms

forced nuzzles and snores. It started with one but

soon there were some on each shoulder and a few on the arms.

Like limpets on a rock striding further up hills by the moon

through rainy city neon they calmly look out,

fireflies on a ship through the gloom.

The parents were pleased to rest, a welcome slip into stupor

whilst I strode on just my eyes looking out

from a blanket of babies purring as they slept,

safe as I carried them home.

Rhetoric for the Ordinary

An invariant handful of dirt

and pleasure almost beyond bearing.

Smiles that do not distinguish,

a daily bowl of spinach positing a dreamful venture,

a painful posture,

the visible neither adding nor subtracting.

The view of the distant bluish Huron Mountains

that has always consoled.

Days vacuous as the water’s edge.

A stillness from a stranger’s mouth.

Was someone laughing or was someone crying?

Seventy and forever old.

No way to reconcile a churning in the gut

with a putative inner calmness.

For All Those Whom Gustav Klimt Painted: Adele Bloch-Bauer I,

Emilie Floge, Mada Primavesi, Fritza Riedler, Unnamed Models,

Et Al.

Too much –

too much gold, luster,

too much design, ornateness,

too much myself,

extended, touched,

inundated by each cluster

of gold, of purple,

of heightened color.

Crumpled vermillion lovelier…,

nor pair of scuttling claws, nor razor.

Nowhere

ground cover,

dull, dying vegetation,

amorphous

ground color,

plaintive – glossed over.

Each of you

has been held,

each

pictured

at least once,

each

held dearer – dresses

dyed heightened color,

dyed purple,

dyed gold,

dyed vermillion,

dyed lovelier… –

held

at least once,

each

caught,

fixed,

a calculated figuration –

neither significant nor trivial.

Each face,

if complacent…

if willful…

displayed,

seen –

a flowery pistil arrangement –

whether ductile…

whether brittle…

final –

as any fortuitous,

winding sheet scene.

However Desperate No Longer Quiet

Allegiances he’d lost others had lost before –

Idyllic squanderings of excess, troubadours of more.

So here he was last and lost,

compa¤ero to spite, yeas ricocheting,

dream dust irritating his eyes.

Last and lost he repeated, grittily.

Although even sandpiper cries could dishearten him

he set about counting ways he could be.

Lover of big cigars, admiring the declarative,

could he not prophecy the end,

but of two minds on pigtails,

inclement weather, little red riding hood,

wouldn’t he end up

press agent of paradox?

Unable to confirm his own words

he aped the mirror’s consternation –

so why the hellabaloo.

Exhibitionist to his own discretion

he mobilized.

Today would do.

No more cuttings on the floor,

a clean foray to wherever,

a quiet sorting of loose ends,

neat coils receding, hallways

filling. He backed into a crumbly wall,

shook himself off, backed again.

A slight fog came settling on the window sill.

Tired of high fives, staged impromptus,

he stabbed at power buttons, pushed contraptions,

belabored missing parts, burned-out motors,

separated more and more like from dislike.

He varied the day’s agenda, fascinated by each menu,

to change the odds. Recipient of entry forms

to numerous contests,

he took to calculating distances,

to swatting flies.

He vowed nothing furtive would do.

Destined, he thought.

Unsure as to exactly what

he said it to himself again, destined.

He liked that sound, how it rang true.

Crickets, Robins and Flies

Crickets to follow

after frogs,

already a robin’s call.

A fly on the inside of my bedroom window

was busily cleaning itself

enveloped by the warmth of sunlight when….

Oh, crescent streaks, pitiable washes of gray.

Tousled, interminably doctored,

truculent when not cheeky,

an indolent, speculated had,

dashed

turgidly

through homeless paths

to be left with an out-of-tune piano,

with a deft touch for the inacessible.

And a Fitful Wind

Matter?

Beached whales, dithyrambic bits,

discarded biopsies?

Who could have thought it?

Yet, days are still the same.

And nights?

Lengthened, shortened?

In memoriam quickened?

Questions, questions.

A pointless shrug

answers.

Matter?

does it

that sparks of fire and daylight haunt me

with their spectre of crimson-green

and how bullrushes shake

before a fitful wind.

Steve Komarnyckyj

Ihor Pavluk

The Old Water Flows

The old water flows, the ancient water,

A pagan wolf howls at the half moon

By some hermit with a beard of cloud,

The yellow maple woods parade,

The old waters flow, flow, flow,

Tiny deities hide in the skies,

Stars, the children of the frozen Dnipro,

Collide and kiss

In the constellations’ vagaries,

The old water flows…

A dog, grey

And awaiting

The miracle of death.

Is history an angel

With a sword, old water

Bereft of wave or whirlpool

Always moving, but completely still?

Стара Вода

Стара вода тече, стара вода…

І виє вовк-язичник на півмісяць.

Пустельника хмаринна борода.

Полки стоять кленовим жовтим лісом.

Стара вода тече, стара, стара…

Малі божки ховаються за небо.

А зорі – діти змерзлого Дніпра –

В сузір’я б’ються і летять до себе.

Стара вода тече, тече, тече…

Собака сивий.

Див чекає смерті.

Історія – мов ангел із мечем,

Стара вода…

Без хвиль

І круговерті?

Вовчі Ягоди

малинове село.

Ріка.

Старенька церква.

Букетики свічок.

І тьма.

І забуття.

Тут джинсове дівча

В бабусинім люстерку

Із ніжністю в очах.

Сова мовчить в млині,

А млин в мені кигиче.

Епоха у зубах, як м’ясо, застряє.

Кругом села ліси.

Кругом лісів обличчя.

Одне із них моє.

Втомлюсь любити світ.

Всім все одно ж не вгодиш…

Прикрив асфальтом вірш,

Бо він, як вовченя.

А я ще повернусь до себе, до природи,

Себе поранивши, розхриставши коня,

Мов скрипка, що до спазм знов хоче мати корінь

І деревом рости, і знати цвіт, і плід…

А так — лише пісні…

І осінь, осінь скоро…

Усе, як у людей, усе – як на Землі.

І треба мати честь.

І добре мати гроші.

І справжнім мужиком…

І вміти пити ріг.

Ці зорі, ці віки, метелики хороші…

Комусь я допоміг.

Когось я не зберіг.

Ці люди й голуби…

Вже вовчих ягід – море…

Вже села не такі.

Вовків чортма в лісах.

А джинсове дівча

Прозоріє, прозоріє…

Тече його коса.

Я ще косар, коса…

Wolf Berries

Village splashed with raspberry light,

Of sunset, the river too, a mottled strap,

The church with bouquets of candles

Brews its deep intrinsic dark,

All we forget…

The girl in jeans applies her make up

In her grandmother’s compact,

Giving her reflection a tender look.

In the mill the owls are silent,

Its workings squeal inside me,

The meat of the epoch stuck in my teeth.

Forests surround the village

And faces, one of them mine,

Surround the forest.

I am tired of loving the world,

You cannot please everyone…

All that you asphalt over your verse,

For it is like a wolf cub, glides

Into nothingness and I turn

To nature, a wound in my own skin…

Saddling my horse.

A violin spasms, yearning for its roots

To be a tree, to know blossom and fruit

Rather than only song.

The autumn comes quickly, through the soil,

Its human soul.

You need to have your honour,

You need to have your money,

You should be a real man,

Quaffing horns of drink,

What of these stars, these ages,

The beauty of butterflies?

I helped someone,

I failed to protect someone,

These people, these doves,

These wolf berries and,

Respiring over them,

A green ocean

Fathoms deep, the villages change,

There are so many wolves ranging the forest.

The girl in jeans becomes transparent,

Her hair,

The river,

I’m still the farmer, gathering wheat by the water.

Слово — Не Яблуко…

Слово — останній листок.

Мовою жестів спілкуюся з лісом осіннім.

Димом вітчизни я пройнятий весь — до кісток.

Кров’ю ліричною досі я голонасінний.

Як і розп’ять, не люблю я нутро торгашів

І релігійних фанатів зневажливі очі,

Чорних політиків на моїх вухах «лапші»…

Але люблю я дощ серед ночі.

Ще мені милі скуйовджені запахи хвиль,

Ангельська скрипка, що плаче невидимим сміхом,

Світлий і добрий зап’янений дядько Василь,

Що на Поліссі збирає горіхи.

Хочеться пісню таку написати — як світ —

Той, що до мене, і той, що уже після мене.

Потім — заснути: як в шкурах вовків, — у траві,

До воскресіння щоб танцювали гени..

The Word Is Not An Apple

But the last leaf of the fall.

I converse with the autumnal forest using the language of gestures,

The smoke of my fatherland seeps down to my bones…

I sow my lyrical blood as seed,

A naked voice…

Like the crucified I do not love the mesh

Of trade, religious fanatics with their blank eyes,

The inane hiss of politics…

I yearn for the nocturnal rain

And yet linger, tangled in waves of fragrance,

From an angelic violin that cries with an imperceptible smile,

Remembering bright, kind, and somewhat inebriated, Uncle Vasyl

Gathering nuts in Polissya.

I want to write a song that is like the world

Of all who came or who will come.

Then sleep in grass, as in a wolf skin,

While my genes dance, awaiting resurrection.

From Polissya

На сосну навіяв смуток вітровій.

Я тебе покинув, край поліський мій:

В солов’їнім гаї — росяні сліди,

Ту, що у розмаї за село водив.

Білий цвіт черешень і волошок синь…

Голубі озера, я ваш менший син.

Тут збирав ожини, рвав рожевий мак,

Щастя з неба зичив Зодіака знак.

А бабуся в казці так розповіла:

«Щастя — хоч від Бога, але — за діла,

Роки, як гусята, не вернеш назад…»

Кучерявим вербам я русявий брат.

Повернутись хочу з осінню в наш сад,

Як веде журавка в небо журавлят.

Осипати смуток в тінь її крила,

Від зірок зайнятись — і згоріть дотла.

* * *

The morose wind respires through the pine,

I have abandoned you, my Polissyan country,

Dewy footsteps in the nightingale grove

Left by her, whom I drove from the village to this greenery,

White cherry blossom and blue of cornflowers…

Dove soft lakes, I am your younger son,

Here I gathered berries, tore the poppies’ pink blooms,

Wished my fortune from heaven, a zodiac sign.

As grandma told me once in a story:

“Fortune, though it comes from God, is earned by work,

The years, like geese, never turn back…”

I am the auburn brother of willow coils,

Longing to return with autumn to our orchard,

As the crane leads her young heavenward.

Scattering sorrow in the shadow of her wing,

Catching fire from the stars utterly burn.

Літописець

Ріка — як час: не видно, що тече…

Шумлять ліси, продовжуючи пісню.

Ревнива доле, хочу ще і ще

Надіятись приснитися Поліссю.

Тут білий сад мене благословив.

То гриб, то синь…

Та що там говорити!..

Осінній клен моєї голови

Шумить над вбитим за дбайливість дідом.

Зашепчуть мавки чорта у мені,

Зашепчуть страх за право бути битим.

Живуть же зорі на морському дні…

Не все одно — згоріти чи втопитись?

Ріка — як час: не видно, що тече…

Куди — не знаю, але знаю звідки:

Із краю, де порубуна мечем,

Сміється вічність —

Наче Божа кістка.

* * *

Chronicler

The river, like time, flows imperceptibly…

Forests murmur, continuing the song.

Jealous of fate, I yearn endlessly,

Striving to appear to Polissya in dreams

Where the white orchard blessed me.

Among mushrooms’ blue light…

What is there to say?

The autumnal maple of my head murmurs

Above Grandfather slain for his carefulness.

Dryads whisper to the devil in me,

Whisper to fear for the right to be beaten.

Stars live in the depths of the sea…

Is it not all the same to burn or drown?

The river, like time, flows imperceptibly…

I do not know where to, but I know where from,

From the country felled with a sword,

Eternity laughing —

Like God’s bone.

Знову Вдома

Я знов там був душею і думками…

Свята бабуся молиться Землі.

Як очі — небо.

І сміється камінь.

І дід лежить під берегом, як хліб.

Вогонь помер.

В очах відбитий Місяць…

Наш Бог живе у церкві, як в тюрмі.

Мисливським рогом згадує Полісся

Усе, що у галактик на умі.

Дорога-промінь в соснах поламалась.

Русява шишка впала в тінь свою.

Мов тиша, бродить привид князя Мала.

Я бачу, а сміятися боюсь.

Сліпа хатина.

Скошений чорнобиль.

Тоненький вітер — сни очеретів.

А час іде.

Нічого час не робить.

Але ж, погляньте, — ліс осиротів.

Але ж почуйте: мохом, як морозом,

Заріс Перун.

І коні не іржуть.

А час пішов…

Жовтіють верболози.

Все людство спотикнулось об межу.

Вагітних мало.

Весни не солодкі.

Ніхто себе не вміє обмануть.

Діди весняно ходять на колодки

Мовчати в душу яко в таїну.

Через вогонь зростається залізо.

Через сльозу…

Ох, що через сльозу!..

Тут рейки вже.

А я все древнім лісом

Русалку залоскочену несу.

Дрімучий світ —

І раптом: добре й легко.

* * *

At Home Again

Again I was there with my spirits and thoughts…

Sacred grandmother praying to the earth.

Eyes blue as heaven

And the stone laughing.

Grandfather laid beneath the riverbank like bread.

The fire has died,

The moon is reflected in my eyes…

Our God lives in church as in a jail,

Polissya recollected in the hunting horn’s call

Everything in the galaxies’ minds.

The roads of sun rays splinter among pines.

The auburn pinecone falls into its shadow.

The apparition of Prince Mal roams like quietness.

I see him but am afraid to laugh.

The blind windows of a house.

Sheaves of wormwood.

The slender wind, the dream of reeds.

Time passes,

Time itself does nothing

But look on the forest now orphaned.

But hear how moss encrusts Perun

Like frost.

Silent are the horses.

And time passes…

The osiers turn yellow,

All of humanity strikes against the boundary.

Pregnancies decrease,

Spring is denuded of its sweetness.

Nobody can deceive themselves.

Grandfathers become as the young,

Silence secreted in their spirits.

Iron grows, fuses with fire,

Because of a tear…

A tear.

The railway now runs here

And I am the ancient forest,

Bearing the tickled Rusalka from the water.

A dreaming world —

Suddenly things are good and easy

It is simpler thus…

* * *

І просто так…

Колиска і крило.

Ми всі ще — час.

Ми близько і далеко.

Ми любим біль.

Нас довго не було.

* * *

A cradle and a wing.

We ourselves are time.

We are both near and far,

We love pain.

We have not long been here.

All excerpted from A Flight Over the Black Sea –Selected Poems of Ihor Pavlyuk (trans. S. Komarnyckji, Waterloo Press, 2014) bar ‘Old Water’ which is exclusively published in translation here for the first timeAlan Price

Communion

Bark of varnished brown tree arms.

Snaking. Hugging a concrete trunk.

An immensity of tree. Sheltering

a restaurant cashier.

Fidgety woman impatient

for the devout man to pin,

a little faster, his credit card.

Too vacant. Too exact. Too innocent

To have tracked

her own disappearance

in this self-service

eating wood.

The tree branches are invading a trellis.

Leaves appear to entwine, prosper.

Is the ceiling supported by the tree

or does it always press down?

Still the pin escapes him.

She looks up to the spreading foliage

as if asking acorns to drop.

Deliver up the urgent host.

Four anxious digits.

Ineluctably the sale passes. The tray moves on.

Forlorn, come others holding their meals.

Watched by the forest’s eye.

Always the pin is lost, found,

lost again, then found.

She kneels down in prayer.

Opens the till.

Mouths it for succour.

Targets.

Ahmed went on holiday after only realising forty six per cent of his ‘potential’

sales. He was warned to make quality and customer satisfaction a singular

obsession. Micro – managing young men told him to fight harder to achieve his

targets.

At his hotel Ahmed knelt on his prayer mat. Work harder for less was the

mantra that resounded through his brain. His oiled customers, sprawled inside the

hotel lobby, restaurant and swimming pool, gave him no peace. Ahmed kept seeing

everyone as an unrealised percentage. On his return flight he feverishly counted the

passengers, but failed to make his duty bound target. By the taxi-ramp people kept

running up to him. Yet Ahmed’s numbers were still not enough. Arriving home,

he discovered more work inside his garage. Yet he was pleased and delighted that

fifty four men, and women, had managed to comfortably fit inside.

Things now seemed to add up. Ahmed carefully attached a hosepipe to his car

exhaust. They watched every move of Ahmed’s; whispered to each other and made

notes. His anxious crowd, of morphed percentages, quietly drifted away only when

he’d expired from monoxide poisoning.

The coroner concluded that there was more to life than business schemes and

striving for profit. Yet if Ahmed had attended his own inquest he might have

disagreed; stood up, offered his hosepipe, as if it were a comforting hookah to the

coroner and probably said, I funded the ideals of the company and betrayed my

customers. Now the accounts are bereft. I am ashamed. Look about you and see.

Here are the spirits of the lost fifty five!

Three Views of Old Baltic Prisons

(1) Vilnius

Two cell boxes. 0.6 metres of silence, filth & space.

Fresh prisoners. Brought to a solitude made ecstatic.

Reciting, in bruised heads, sacred information of weapons

and numbers. Fantasising that all men struggling

to be compact angels, in war time, never divulge

plans to overcome themselves, nor the enemy.

Duty officer waiting, one floor above.

No obvious guts to be a devil.

Processing the papers for the newly fallen,

and the interrogator of the day.

After the war, six even smaller boxes were constructed.

Wings were torn off. The arrested could only stand.

When Stalin decided to die, all boxes were re-thought.

Now, more of a post angel, you were required to sit down.

Take the weight of your feet. Succumb to the great disclosure.

You couldn’t transcend your shrunken box. And they waited.

(2) Tallinn

Crutch, on a metal stand, in the corridor.

Broken cd case. Large tyre of a truck.

Bag of workman’s clothes stuffed inside a soaking red pullover.

Gas cylinder. False teeth. Toothpaste. Razors.

Magazine picture of Jordan pasted over a bunk.

Her left breast torn adrift. Dangling implant.

Six tiny stickers of Andy Warhol’s face, stuck to a white tilled wall.

Premek has continued to shoot bull brother

A message, in black fibre tip pen, on the operating table.

Was Premek a Czech named guard who repeatedly fired his gun

at the fallen body of a man called Bull who was once his comrade?

Or was Premek a Czech tourist inmate, who having paid

his 40 euro share, of the group charge, proceeded to shoot up heroin,

for the night, and spoke bullshit to his mates?

Through the prison window you can see the harbour.

Wind and sea hitting large hard rocks.

(3) Riga

Seven armies occupied Latvia for 90 years.

A voice of apathy. Respectful young man.

Paid buttons to narrate its history.

He is not a prison warden but a museum guide.

Perhaps that is worse.

So answer me this. How many fitted into one cell?

And tell me where was the warmest part?

If I’d known, in advance, the answers I would

have had to have been the bureaucratic fiend

who instructed the bricklayer to build

an economical trap for bodies.

Have asked the glazier to smash the barred window.

Coaxed the sun, absent of any papers, to freely enter

and heat the lucky man standing on another’s shoulders.

Sacrifice

The long grey overcoat barely managing his swaying.

Jobs I did were rubbish. And the rubbish money was never enough.

The frozen white hands trying to escape from cutting sleeves.

No books. No learning. What would I have done with an education?

The buttons, on his overcoat, buttoned up in their prison locks.

Why do I enter a library now? This place wasn’t for me.

The staff frightened. His cries not turning into a drunken song.

I pass on messages. Wife gone. Two daughters, never talk to each other.

The knowledge that his stumbling sucks on the poison within.

I read their newspapers; wash my face, spit in the café basin and go.

Car mirrors, jutting out into space, routinely punching his chest.

There was a time when I only saw one car in the street. What a silence!

The fiercely angled wind lining up his battered body.

Not like that at work. I cleaned. Made a noise with their machines.

The holding onto a wall for the penitence of its builders.

I can’t add things up, anymore. Where’s the sense?

The gravity he longs for like an impatient lover descending.

There was family and my mates. Sometimes I had a foreign holiday.

The need to stand (perfect & holy) as his body is ravaged.

They photographed me once aged five sitting on a desk.

The sun, breaking through chafing clouds, turning a blazing red.

I was the desk. The desk was me. The parting was too great.

The hand pointing at home as it starts to tilt and darken.

Frank C. Praeger

Slight Inclines

Segregated – no! sequestered.

Grapevine not budding yet,

otherwise, fine.

Breathing hard on slight inclines,

despondent climbing stairs,

swollen feet and ankles,

as I’ve said, otherwise, fine.

Happiest sitting down.

This path, these bushes, thorn entangled, deep in dusk

with nowhere to get to.

A transient pain measures wakefulness.

Is it that trees do not sleep?

And why should that follow?

Who will call busy but careful?

But true, I have not heard a nightingale

nor played with wolf pups,

or been a comfort for the aged,

too mournful of yesteryears distancing

and all the in betweens.

Troubled, humbled

by the confetti of the last parade.

Shouldering arms and an uncertain fate

conspire toward screw-ups

as miscue follows miscue,

even

as all the rehabs are bungled

all the seats taken.

——————————————————————————

Frank C. Praeger

107 E. South Ave

Houghton MI 49931

USA

email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

Never So Incisive

Crepe laden monuments,

misleading signs,

a debacle in bundled fibres,

fractured shorelines,

measures out of whack.

I am no more thankful than before;

darts, dartboards tender climatic moments;

binges, excesses, hopes precede

a modicum achieved.

Humidifiers off,

fire out,

I plummet.

and where I had once been

a man falls.

And what to make of having gone on,

having had someone else pronounced dead?

These fragments may well tell whatever I may wish.

My father dead, too,

left no footprints.

——————————————————————————

Frank C. Praeger

107 E. South Ave

Houghton MI 49931

email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

Getting It Right

Motorized vehicles,

spaces between intervals,

firing blanks celebrating

ascendency of jolt –

where has the color gone?

More motors, abandoned mine shafts,

a grainy, faded iridescence,

a not so obvious opal,

not even neglected tears or yesterday’s joys.

Swings still. A see-saw rests. Shadows form

as children scatter.

Sleeves catch on blackberry thorns.

Start over.

Shoulders back, swagger

tossing bread crumbs into storm sewers.

Let the early arriving birds

make patterns overhead,

chatter, in part, their disapproval.

No further question where the color has gone.

Say it is now that dawn comes over.

Shades partially drawn,

an old dog shifts

into a more comfortable position.

A lattice takes on color.

An outdoor faucet drips.

Here and there, standing pools of water.

——————————————————————————

Frank C. Praeger

107 E. South Ave

Houghton MI 49931

USA

email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

Slackening But Not Impatient

That which was once with me,

whose pace was mine, that fevered senses, now, when failing,

am I not the one

to be diminished,

shaken,

made numb.

Masquerader at a loss,

totaled, mascara botched, ill-disposed

towards any final hurrah, tried

for an unruly, unstoried watch –

wait!

Who lingers longer touched.

Who cared

who could have worn taffeta, sequins,

whose severance was a further slanted light,

talked about, then, dispensed with over lunch.

——————————————————————————-

Frank C. Praeger

107 E. South Ave

Houghton MI 49931

USA

email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

Acceptance

“I am not here to write, but to be mad.”

Attributed to Robert Walser

when while in an insane asylum he was asked about his writing.

Acceptance is all.

The dried leaves shake,

no sense to it even if they quiver

nor fruit or shade.

Dried up plants, drooping leaves.

Ask if you wish where the insects have gone.

Walking up even slight inclines my ankles ache,

my breathing hurried.

Yes, also, to the dried-up marshes,

but the wind is still constant –

I can not offer enough thanks.

Sunlight shines off the surface of Pilgrim river;

my wife and I, two small and quiet persons stare.

Some sighing and, later, with a bucket full of blackberries

more sunlight, more reflecting, more running water.

Would I could vanish there

as much

as on top of Lookout Mt.

Would I?

Here, there is no stone tower,

no water-fall or wooden bridge

from here to there.

A facetious gloss to the everday.

A laugh mistaken as lament –

maybe.

Yes, it is so, I am not Chinese.

My roots are countless,

indistinguishable

from anyone else’s.

Further now means less.

More has long since been past.

How to rank successes, failures?

If I were a painter,

would I be painting black on black?

Instead of listening to mice

rummaging in the interstices of my house.

————————————————————————–

Frank C. Praeger

107 E. South Ave

Houghton MI 49931

USA

email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

Time Slots

Intractable,

scheduling,

parsing existence,

parsimonious doling out of time slots.

A loquacious maintenance of distance –

closer I can not get.

Sandy feet,

cutoff levis,

dirt,

dust,

and spider webs

as inconsequential

as a broken yardstick

could be –

inconstant measures of remorse.

Observations faithfully done,

why not file an interim report?

A childless background, an empty swing,

as much dream as not,

no more foretold than forgot,

and, as before, a scribbling in scrapbooks

replete with place-names.

Not to be ignored, fingers cut,

stained with blood –

that same parsimony again doled out as time slots.

Doug Polk

The Game

far away the wizards watch,

hoping to cast their spells,

people living the day to day,

pawns on a chessboard,

moved from square to square,

waiting patiently for the next move.

Carrot Sticks

Titillated,

didactic,

quiet as the stones;

insipid, yet, stymied over, and, sun-tampered,

inwardly borne.

Trash tacked on, taut muscles torn, earthly symptoms

gone; familiar and all that seemed open redone.

Samara stung, catkin lashed

of which no one will have sung.

No more tomorrows, trifled, tidbited to dust,

affronted.

A cheat, a chump for crises.

Here! Sit! Be teed off:

carrot sticks, coxcomb, a hound and three half-slips –

a dotage in waiting, not to be counted on.

Devotions

awake in darkness,

breakfast can wait,

til devotions paid,

to the church,

cassock and surplice of white,

candles lit,

the altar made ready,

prayers said,

and heard,

the Mass,

performed,

home for breakfast,

and off to school,

full of faith,

and glazed donuts,

from the bakery downtown.

Frank Praeger

Antique or Junk

Stymied,

too many misgivings

about misplaced plate settings,

mouse droppings,

tarantulas as house varmints.

Days frittered away in back exercises, icings,

taxed by the simplest matter.

A ticket taker asks for more than I have,

refused admittance,

dressed down for indifference,

and, then, a waitress turns her back,

a trucker does not slow.

Antique or junk?

Who argues,

who guarantees?

My name on officious papers,

drawers full of disallowed requests,

insufficient data.

The personal tricked, picked to pieces.

Frederick Pollack

Billionaire

The sun is a great neurotic.

It regrets that, when its time comes,

it will be unable to go nova

and rise for months in someone else’s day.

It could not, however, abide

a white dwarf

companion sucking its substance, which novas require;

and is reconciled, barely, to becoming

a red giant, absorbing

at least some inner planets. Then what?

The option of being a black hole –

that spectacular collapse;

outliving everyone, though negatively –

attracts, yet is barred to it. So, a white dwarf

itself; in the fullness of time,

perhaps, a black one –

still envious (of neutron stars, etc.),

until the final chill.

The spots, the flares, the magnetic storms are signs

of the sun’s petulance,

like the amber borders of the leaves,

the khaki grass this summer, the sense

of a wordless demand for love, evaded, mocked.

The Liberal

They settle in. Testosterone

and an obvious need for decision

as to who gets top bunk, top spot

in rapes, main share of the food, etc.,

reciprocally cause each other. Plus

ideology: Aryan Christian types,

more common-or-garden

bigots, and other believers contend

for corporate spokesmanship. The few

real corporate figures who weren’t

sufficiently faceless to escape

my dragnet try to act

like regular, prayerful, duckhunting guys,

but learn that distance is the price of love.

(In another block, the women

find their own ways to hierarchalize.)

The room, initially clean enough,

soon smells the way these places do.

When I allow a meeting,

manifesting myself

on an indestructible screen high in the wall

as a rigid golden figure like an Oscar,

they get it together, proving

the ultimate necessity of reason.

They elect a charismatic or Opus Dei

Father to follow my directions through

the wall, to my universe. When his

anathemas, prayers, impotent

violence are exhausted he remarks

that I’m as much a prisoner as they;

that unless perfect love casts out fear

there is no end short of eternity.

I tell him to preach this to his flock.

Predictably he won’t accept the point;

sees only power and a loathsome pity

sculpted into a stylized golden man.

So through that monitor the inside

of the mind like a warden watches

the outside pace and hate;

and cannot look away, and broadcasts

Tolerance and Rights and Science,

the whole dispirited reflex rosary,

to no avail. I think my charges, clients,

(masters perhaps?) are worthless

because they doubt these things;

they know I think this of them

and therefore despise me and will never

listen to anything I say, and are therefore

worthless. The mind holds them

the way a captive is held

one doesn’t know what to do with

but can’t allow to roam unsupervised

(which is why anyone is kept in hell

or, really, any of the nearer places).

The Forest

It often happens that the parents

of schizophrenics, when they have been robbed

too often, or (as it happens) terrorized

in their own house for hours, beaten

(or at least weakly, almost absently

punched), and the words

the schizophrenic says about them, desperate, heated,

yet banal and capricious, have drawn tears

too often, change. Change locks, obtain

a restraining order, tell the schizophrenic

they cannot help him any more,

not to come by, they love him; then change

their phone number. And the schizophrenic

comes by, pounds on the door, is arrested

and spends perhaps three nights, before

he’s released, in a verminous

uncrowded place where many schizophrenics

once lived, then were released

to beautiful clean halfway houses

that were never built but existed

integrally in dreams. And the parents,

as previously noted, change:

their faces become still, their affect flat,

empirical when they describe

the treatment they received and the schizophrenic

received, or didn’t. The death of a child

often separates parents, but this

overarching, effectively nameless

stratum of things, which aspires

to the ubiquity and necessity

of death, creates a defensive bond. And one

or both of them will think

(as if to stay in touch) of the schizophrenic

out there somewhere, lousy, hurt

or dead (which is a way of being

hurt), and may still wonder what

he perceives. In Sarban’s novel,

at the trees’ edge a Chief Forester smiles

terribly as his guards attach

fur to the bound limbs, horns

to the head of a prisoner. Hunters

watch, but tonight will only carouse. And the Chief Forester

strikes off the bonds and cries,

“Thy lust is to be free? So shalt thou be!

Free of the Forest!”

Matt Panesh

St George (Dedicated with love to the BNP)

“For God, and Harry and St George!”
wrote Shakespeare the Bard,
and made him ours,
the ever ready reliable St George
who stuck with us through two world wars
St George,
Patron Saint of…
Syphillis.

And so we spread
like a disease
and conquered all of the seven seas
bringing Civilisation with cutting steel,
a hearty Huzzah!
and a damn good eye for other people’s Real Estate.

“For God and Harry and St George!”
Patron Saint of…
Beirut.
And there the Dragon he did slay
in a place that’s aptly called
St George’s Bay.

“For God and Harry and St George!”
Patron Saint of…
Leprosy.
And like a leper’s skin the Empire cracked,
bits fell off, the system nearly collapsed,
the puss inside began to weep,
and by the way,
St George is also the Patron Saint of Sheep.

“For God and Harry and St George!”
Patron Saint of…
The Teutonic Knights!
The f***ing Germans!
Well, I must admit, I was a bit surprised,
but we won’t dwell on the War, or
economic zeal,
instead we’ll move along to a different field,
cutting through the mystery,
let’s have a look at this man’s history.

St George was a Roman soldier, from Anatolia,
born in the late third century, all sources are, however,
hagiography (Which means NOT the verifiable truth).

In 303 he was ordered to take part in a persecution,
but confessed himself to be a Christian and criticised the Royal Decision.
An enraged Diocletion
ordered torture followed by execution,
so he was lacerated
on a wheel of swords,
then decapitated
outside Nicomedia’s Walls.

“For God and Harry and St George!”
The shout still outs
in the world of Sports
where every shaven head is clad
in the white and red-striped flag
and we still cheer at the sight of the crest,
and despite all evidence (just look at Wimbledon!)
hold that England is the Best!

“For God and Harry and St George!”
Patron Saint of…
Agricultural Workers, Archers, Armourers, Butchers,
Crusaders, Sheep, Shepherds, Field Workers & Farmers,
Ptuj, Lepers, the Order of the Garter,
Riders, Saddlemakers and of course the Soldiers,
Canada, Cappodocia, Catalonia, Ethiopia
Ferrara in Italy,
Genoa, Georgia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Malta,
Modica in Sicily,
Slovenia, Amersfoot in the Netherlands,
Corinthians, the Brazillian football team, and naturally England!
Equestrians, Palestinian Christians and the dreadful Syph
Palestine, Aragon, Beirut in the Lebanon and Venice,
Gozo, Moscow and Constantinople,
Skin Diseases, Lod, the plague and Portugal,
Cavalry, Chivalry and Haldern in Germany,
Horses, Horsemen, Husbandmen and Leprosy,
The Scouts, Greece, Herpes, Heide & the Teutonic Knights
“Ladies and Gentleman, I give you George –
He’s the Patron Saint
of everything in sight!”

Frank Praeger

The Welter of the Fragmentary

A leader mislead, a sycophant charged with not caring.
Cuttings that do not take.
Relaxed, a human face, a muskrat’s,
scared,
and what to make of enough?
Rejoice in the acute,
in the imagined magic of the ceaseless incremental.
Lilies bloom, indiscreet in their profusion,
their cultivated variation,
and the unwarranted continuation of now,
as much as the outpouring petal surging fate of flowers,
document
the welter of the fragmentary.
Who could be morose in the midst of more,
in the bracken dense undergrowth culminating
in soul, apostolic hymnals, a constant muttering of forever?
What if each walk does tend downward?

The extraneous distances that were never ours.

The habitats of dreams dissembled in the waking hours,
lettuce patches, dwarf trees, fields of twigs,
odd shaped rooms replete with brass gadgets.
Though constant in my walking out, inconstant
in my troubled speech;
cited for confusing incontinence with inbetween,
for talking in my sleep.
If I wasn’t then who have I been?
Who was it the last fifty years,
and before that who was that young man?

—————————————————————————————

Frank C. Praeger
107 E. South Ave
Houghton MI 49931
USA
email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

A Summer’s Rage

Summer not yet fully articulated, then, cicadas.
Where had they been,
what could have happened?
Crocuses, violets gone, lilies going, and I am wonder,
starred, felled, formulaic, stayed, lost
in innumerable pathways, summer’s seizure
prolonging an ageing sexual ardour.
Cicada and late summer with its wild blackberries,
incessant flowering of tansy, knapweed, goldenrod,
yellow and purple and sunlight across the furthering fields,
imagination and birds in flight,
does and their fawns.
What could they tell of?
Does the rain-soaked foliage quiver?
For every query a multiplicity in response.
The cicada calls and I have no rejoinder,
no sequestered polyphony that I can call my own,
no final umbrage or celestial calm
in any scattering of breath.
A sojourner rests,
each stillness withers.
Alongside stiffness, aches, recurring premonitions of oblivion,
a token or, maybe, more of what might yet be,
of the salutary edge to the unfinished,
or of a final flinging out of one last Queen Anne’s lace.

———————————————————————————–
Frank C. Praeger
107 E. South Ave
Houghton MI 49931
USA
email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

Gated Neighborhoods & ID Checks

We have had princes among us,
lords of haberdashery, truants from idiocy.
We have had double-petaled roses,
outpourings of grief.
We have fingered the untraceable –
needy speculators of the unforeseen.

We will not trumpet down any,

we will not parley,

talk down the least among us,

revoke death certificates,

argue for any foreseeable fantasy,

reinstate briefs.

——–

Students tumble out of a seaside chute.
Sidewalk dancers elbow wiggle room for their pelvic ventures.
Street corner sermons chastize the late evening air.
Gated neighborhoods, ID checks.
Dogs peeing on fire hydrants, wrought iron fences.
Crosstown a neighborhood patrol appears.

———

No one knows who will be summoned.

No one does not need.

No one is safe crossing a street.

—————————————————————————————–
Frank C. Praeger
107 E. South Ave
Houghton MI 49931
USA
email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

A Tad Too Far

The singer’s tortured self in sweet surrender,
it takes so long, I almost palpate my own illusion.
It’s as if we had been together, dreaming in an indeterminate
location of a still more indeterminate occasion,
now, all forgiven, puzzled by what may have been forgotten,
we swing on trapezes a tad too far.
Who could have been happier under such duress.
We might have pondered over the night’s coming,
the dark that brought us further on,
but, now, another singer sings of the imagination
and we both chuckle,
unable to sleep waiting out another starry-ridden night.

Kenneth Pobo

Myself Starring in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers

He didn’t cast me but I appeared

anyway. I play a secret sister

named Agnetha. Barely photographed,

I get none of Nykvist’s loving closeups.

I slide in the background, polish silverware,

dust clocks, hum. Ingmar can’t

understand why I keep interfering

with his shots. Get him out of here,

he says, but no one sees me—bulbous

Swedish dresses disguise me and

my beard looks like a veil. Credits

don’t list me, but the Academy notes

my performance. I’m nominated

in Best Invisible Actor Or Actress

in a Foreign Film. Ingmar returns to Faro,

Liv returns to America to choose

her next project, and I return

to the Acme, drop six grapefruits

in my basket, then speed home

to read fan mail that never comes.

Si Philbrook

In Memory of Me

Light the ovens,

Burn to ash

The race that would deny me,

Do this in memory of me

Defend the oil,

Boil alive the pagans

On the road from Al Jahra,

Do this in memory of me

Reign Supreme,

Prepare the beams from which to hang

Your strange fruit,

Do this in memory of me

Suffer the children,

Teach the beatings into them

Our little secret,

Do this in memory of me

Worship me

I don’t care how you live

Or what you give, just make it dollars,

Do this in memory of me.

a different beauty

i’ve seen naked

cynthia

fifty-two with a catheta fitted,

three years of alzheimers

stole the sparkle

that comes with “downs”,

cynthia –

i changed her pad

wiped away the shit

others chose not to smell

near the end of their shift,

cynthia

bed baths and hoists,

dignity

isn’t measured on a tick list of pad changes,

but in the eyes

and in the days

when

naked moments

passed between us –

giving her a drink

in a sippy cup,

her lips, old and cracked,

life is brittle

and hurts,

she just left me

no words

no fuss,

she wasn’t family

but important;

fragile.

cynthia

Gillian Prew

mobile canto

the first colour was meanderings in black & white

liftings from sorry blinks & scratches in the sand

it wore itself close folding the sky earthward

plucking the wind from the centre of rhyme

we were free then the blood unstuck

the air in our lungs just long enough

for a breath

remember red

Walk a deeper drift than confetti (love). Make

a pilgrimage (a path sore

and sailing) scooping

the soft spillage of forgotten blue. (Remember

red?) It was born with us before they wiped our

bodies clean. Learn it

again. Recover

our discovery with tongues (wrapping). Words

and spit (sweet) show

the horizontal hallucination

of the dream, the vertical

illusion of the view (yes? no?). There are answers. Pluck them. See

if they resemble truth. Rock them

into red.

(remember)

momentum

the frozen miscellaneous of January is

building a gun to the moon.

(meanwhile) in

another part of town (there is warmth on

the edge of a barroom stool). the air is

fresh with forgetting. thoughts

circle careless spillage

waiting

for history. the future is an idea

in the corner of a smile.

it might snow once in a while in

a place like this. the streets measure

life in worn tar, pacing it

with traffic lights, but nothing.

ever.

stops.

………………

Neal Pearce

Bridget

When I was at college, a girl called Bridget

told me I was going to kill myself one day,

which was kind of her.

Down the years her words have haunted me

through many depressions; but I’m still here.

I’m sure she intended no malice.

It was just the way she came out with it;

I don’t think it was anything about her:

not even her red hair,

like rusty cemetery gates.

Circle

Me as a wedding suited harbinger,

squinting at the moon;

you as a toothless skull,

wishing back the flesh of your squandered being.

My children as candles burning down in another room.

Time as the impassive witness.

Our clock as an hourglass,

filled with the sand of pulverised rocks from eternal beaches.

The old man in the jaws of death,

as a shrivelled apple looking back on his treetop youth.

The world as a mollusc at the bottom of the sea.

The end as the beginning.

Last Thursday it was,

as two men who never wore hats we met;

sat filling our bellies with

the flesh of dead fowl and hogs;

pushing logic where

it oughtn’t to go:

“Have you noticed

there are no flies in my flat?”

enquired Brian.

“The reason there are no flies is

that you’re not dead,” I declared

with a dark smile that he returned.

Then I finished my coffee,

and turning left, I left

down the unlit stairs

into the night of rotting oranges.

J.R. Pearson

Drop

a song forged from the bare

rhythm of the night

& you’ll hear petals fall from her voice.

Follow the sound of sweat

to the roar of her breath

in your mouth. She hums

your name with her pulse lost in the dark

& a magma bleed from a Milkyway

of holes in your chest.

Hours after Geronimo walks the skyline,

silent tongue-tips feather stones

in a held breath before an Apache tracker’s sunrise.

Eight legs of daybreak climb forearms

& drink a bead of sweat from wet hair

horned by your bad collar.

Cygnus opens its last luminous wing

across the sky’s black mouth

& she winks at the dead air

in an eavesdropper’s lust for padded vice grips.

You recite the underground alphabet

tattooed on the back of your eyelids

& think of the last honeydew

that sings in the summer sun.

Inches Away

A cutlass at his side,
an unrecorded dream,
more than could have been anticipated
from unexpected lives,
crappy, cranked up, fell, yet, partial to full,
that will not culminate
much as streets covered in debris
nor is there a sunset in the western sky
but an evening streaked with color,
silhouette of a til now forgotten grief.
Elaborations on the unremarkable,
unwarranted green,

unasked for laughter,

unmerited rain.

Apart, together,
dodging would be assailants
transported by a hummingbird’s ease,
by each one whispering each other’s name,
by a fractionally easier breathing.

——————————————————————————————————–
Frank C. Praeger
107 E. South Ave
Houghton MI 49931
USA
email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

Larger Issues

Well, it may have been cactus sighing,
another kind of mayhem.
It did not startle bluejays, squirrels,
nor a hummingbird at the periphery of my vision.

The larger issues: cruel months, collateral damage,
days without rain or sun,
edicts of pain.

And to the finality of broken chairs,
discarded sandwiches,
a largeness inescapably so.

————————————————————————————————
Frank C. Praeger
107 E. South Ave
Houghton MI 49931
USA
email: frankpraeger@hotmail.com

A Thousand Years End

A thousand years,
then, always, the iconography.
Would dwarfs be out of place
to balance the enormity of birds?
Alarm in the shadow of a beak

and sunlight

and icicles;

yes, tentacles
when we would have had feet.
And, then, again, why not radial?
Piqued being relegated to chance.
What, missing a day!
Glad
Tidings?
Spooked out?

Yesterday’s wash that never dried.
A tide that never came in.
How inopportune,
nor will I belabor any further.

So, only humans fail?
Born visionless a soprano sings.
A thousand years end.
No one to call to,
no one to respond to the surety
of your own sudden urge
as the wind, nightly, scatters rain

and lightning hurtles through the hills

and no end to the heirlooms buried in the earth.