Anatomy of a Clock Face

Heartbeat, hummingbird,

Sweeps around a ballroom

•

The traffic light, the grocery line,

The tock, the tock, of keeping on

•

Hours for the first guest to arrive,

Christmas Eve to come, beige paint to dry

•

Markings in a circle—blanks,

Numbers, a dot, an I, an X

•

Whisperings from the wall,

telling the invisible tale—

Knit, purl, shushing, lemony,

Violet, tiptoe, grief

–– Midge Goldberg

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‘Looking Down Commercial Street: June 1976’

(a photograph)

It’s only as it still is in your own city

neither demolished before you, nor before

your infant gaze, except all the shops

and all their people are changed into

black and white and utterly: you want me

to know and, for God’s sake, to name them;

you’d be content if I would just recite

the number plates of the cars, mutter them even.

Off it goes down to the docks’ vanishing point,

flashing its V of receding tenements.

It’s an ordinary second in the past, explains

the camera, but we won’t have it. We insist,

since all the cars are dead and their drivers

or mostly and certainly all of their pets, many

of the marriages or other contracts void,

that love is nonetheless embedded there

and can’t back-pedal. You just need to give us

the names of things as if there could ever be

just the things sitting there in the past. Give us

this melancholy coda once and forever:

nothing must shift our dumb conviction all

the past abides but in some other place,

and those we keep on losing are displaced

to where, convinced by dream, we always knew

time would secrete them in its folded streets.

–– W. N. Herbert

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Light visits every morning, watchful

and every morning makes strange –

sits on the rim of an empty chair

fingertips the high-shelved book-spines

sets yesterday’s teapot to a gleam:

restless, held-in, drawn back

to the long east-facing glass

where winter trees emerge

from night tides swaying their velvets,

and beyond the garden

a lone call lifts and dies unseen,

hopeful, broken:

if light were desire it would leave no trace

crossing bared spaces, the stairway

curving softly up, you do not know

yourself or your life here now,

skin prickling as rain whispers in the chimney

whose house was this?

–– Pippa Little

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Ever Enough

Haloed in vapor, the mirrored bedtime kiss

I’ve just drawn back from and exhaled upon

as though it were a kiss blown off my palm,

and quickly framed in a finger-painted heart

without too much real heart in it to hurt,

as it’s your lips I pretend I’ve kissed,

mirrored on many another night like this.

Young love clung to in later life

is little more than half enough excuse

to justify the balm of self-abuse

these friendly evenings out with you lead to –

years of them now spent watching you

after you’ve walked away from your polite

Love you and mine to you, less quick, less light.

When I proposed to you, the first and still

the last impulsive time I spoke those soft,

aggressive words, we both laughed off

your immediate No and the remorse

I feigned and felt, granting your divorce

from being loved so much against your will.

You wouldn’t stay over that night. We’ll

never make love anymore except like this,

the prefatory kiss not mine alone

nor its exchange of breath. We’re not apart.

The body once bared for me alone at night

for mine to use has mine its own to use.

I touch myself to be in touch with you

and for such self-induced desire to feel

I’ve more than half enough of an excuse

to have proposed and with the self-same love

renew the vow that failed yet marries us.

–– Jerl Surratt

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Kalyves

Somehow as I swim back to the beach

you never visited I expect to see you quite alone

outside the restaurant that can’t work out,

knowing its own worth and the time of day,

why it is so empty. You’re too far away to tell

if you’re reading or making a note or, in this heat,

just nodding off. The mesembryanthemums

overflow the bank and touch the sand,

but they’re not yet in flower, fingers reaching up

in succulent hordes. The sound of the surf

is not so insistent now, so you should be able to

distinguish its sistrum of sea glass and marble

from the rattle of those pebbles and flat stones

whose colours are better seen through water

than when they are dry. The seafowl float quietly

and the water is clear out to the meandering line

where it deepens from green to a shade of blue

you may have already defined, and so there’s

an end to it, except there appears to be no end,

neither to the horizon nor its afternoon. Except

the sun is too insistent on the back of my neck,

the sand, once I’ve staggered up the shingle,

its shifting step out of the sea, too hot.

So when I look again, of course it isn’t you.

–– W. N. Herbert

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Trespass

When he speaks of his lost life

in that crow-stepped house among Scots pine

he remembers most of all their kitchen

where with wild hope and a blunt knife

he breached the earthen pinks of pomegranates

pricked ruby after ruby from each seed-chamber heart,

fed her willing tongue from the point of a pin

taste, love, the first astringency and then

the bite, such risky sweetness for a dying

made immortal –

craving him

these days of fading light I begin to go too far,

slip down dim passages noiselessly and weightless

drawn to the kitchen lintel’s rim of fire

where haloed in gold-leaf fragrances of steam

I watch them turn to one another:

how young he seems, how carelessly alive!

I want to tell him now forgive my trespass

forgive all of it that sends me flying,

my sorrow and my joy, like fine rain, a simmer of lightning

far beyond the dark into privacies

I have no right or place to know:

more, how much it hurts having to return

human, bone-hollow and alone:

but my love is a dazzle of salt, a constellation

I fling high and far across my shoulder, cold stars

to light the crossing and recrossing of a fault line, scar line

whose mutable border is no-place, has no history

or future, whose only gift is witness

–– Pippa Little

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Falling in Forests

Here is the scar from the road upstate

where I fell over the dogs

that came with me jogging each hot summer’s night

the length of the dark to another farm’s light

and tripped me like hidden logs.

There is the stain from the baby bird

that dropped from under the eaves

and baked on the sidewalk until it was hard.

On the other side of the house, in the yard,

it might have fallen on leaves.

Where is the sound from the falling oak

that surged away from this place

and finding no ear, only echoing rock,

was neither recorded nor registered shock

as a wince on somebody’s face?

Why are there bruises from each hard word?

I never intended to please,

but I would recall them if only I could.

I can’t hear the shush of the merciful wood

for all the offended trees.

–– Meredith Bergmann

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The Lost Resemblances

North Blyth Northumberland

A dog outruns his distance

beyond the three remaining terraces and Social Club.

More’s vanished here than standing.

Grey-veined tide meets the river’s maw, the end of the world

frays and wearies in seafret’s smudged and silvered light,

the wind smells of minerals and sad blood

licked from the cold skin of a boy’s bare knees:

here are lost resemblances of days,

their steady workings blown to smithereens,

cleared like a crime scene:

the power station’s four brick spires, ferry’s stink and churn,

Russian hulks on Battleship Wharf,

red rows of roofs and yards and doorsteps

gone, all. Miles beyond shore the mine tunnels sing:

when the wind’s in a certain direction something lifts

sharp-winged, flits the surfaces of waves, caught

on the in-breath: the ship of my heart’s carried out to sea

and the dog keeps moving in ever-increasing circles

small as a tick across salt and pepper wastes, indistinguishable,

the last Jack or Skip down the generations,

too sick on adrenaline now to stop.

–– Pippa Little

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Winter King

I favoured the deepest part of our winter.

A good day was two hours of light

with the white sun rising to take its farewell.

Afterwards nothing but darkness, time,

and guilt to be apportioned. Thus it was

the flower of exsanguinated maidenhood

went to their graves in a garden so vast

it touched the Arctic Circle. It was cruel.

It was boring, as epics and eternities

are boring. But it worked. Believe me, it requires

the opposite of faith to die, almost, forever.

When I was done once more, I’d lie in state,

the wicked king of a forgotten country,

on that granite slab, my freezing sword to hand.

The waiting nearly killed me, but I’m here.

Remind me, though: what was the question?

–– Sean O’Brien

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Now, After

Now, after, there will always be before,

for those of us who were around before,

long enough to know what came before.

Of course, there will be those born after, or

who don’t recall before but only after––

and who’ll dismiss you as an awful bore,

going on and on and on about before––

which, after all, in their minds, isn’t after,

but how it is, was, and will always be.

And so, there are two versions of this always––

you’ll always know what you consider always,

but that means less and less, inevitably,

until––as will your after and before––

your always turns to never anymore.

–– Midge Goldberg

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Bowl

(Andrea Baumann)

The potter blackened

this porcelain bowl’s

wall outside,

illumined the inner

with liquid gold,

and fired it.

*

If you cast a glance

at the pool of light,

then scan within,

your eye snags

on a shape that lurks

in the glowing deep,

as though a trace

of the outer darkness

marred its radiance:

a shadowy twin

who floats head down

yet will not drown,

but moves as you move

to try to free

your sight from his sight . . .

*

How to delight

in celestial light

if you cannot leave

the dark outside?

–– Dunstan Ward

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Fava

Consider the life of the bean:

its kinship to flesh, a food

for the ghost to taste the earth

in its soft return: enough

to reveal a subtle being,

like cobweb lit with morning

dew. Slipped from the womb

of its sac it could be a human

seed moist with the pith

of a mind. Eaten and buried

in the gut, the otherworld sows

its soul in us: a burst

of breath that breaks the soil:

the stem of the blood will follow.

Dried, they become a bag

of eyes that see the bodies

of the moving air, the vapour

of the mouth take the power

of touch. The bean placed

on the tongue raises a head

from mould to flowering light.

–– Gregory Leadbetter

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Lost Shoes

The lost shoes are not lost. It’s me,

no longer knowing where to turn

in this slow dance, in this dark hall,

with a baffled black dog and her lead.

First went the trousers, then the teeth.

Did I mention the arse I have failed

to locate with both hands and a lamp?

These are ‘the gifts reserved for age,’

wrote Johnson, who knew everything

and then forgot it, falling sideways

out of history with a thud because

his friends were dead, though to the last

his gift of timing never failed:

‘iam moriturus,’ he announced. Encore!

Gunn’s sad captains meanwhile

meet extinction with superbia

as the enstarred embodiments

of hard disinterested f[l]ame: yet

even their admirers might object

that these dispassionate exemplars

have no dogs to walk, nor shoes to find

amid the ‘inspissated gloom’

their grave illumination does not reach;

nor any humour, not a sodding glimmer.

–– Sean O’Brien

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A Dream of Graves

Reports of his death were only slightly wrong.

For a time it seemed that he’d been whited out.

He’d seen a lost, white bird, incapable of song.

Art, like life, became no longer long,
Though nights were long as hell. He had no doubt:
Reports of his death were only slightly wrong.

Each of his men had signed up young and strong.
They halted as they glimpsed above their route

A lost, white bird, incapable of song.

It dove and fluttered, aching for its young.
Then Graves was on the ground. He looked about.
Reports of his death were only slightly wrong.

A shell was in his chest, death on his tongue.
He woke from Lethe with a painful shout.

He saw a lost, white bird, incapable of song.

Goodbye to England. He did not belong.

No longer could it be a safe redoubt.

Reports of his death were only slightly wrong.

He’d seen a lost, white bird, incapable of song.

–– David M. Katz

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Daedalus Downsizing

Over the city of the double axe

an old man works the feathers he has plucked

from songbirds into the framework of wax

he’s smelt from bodily humors, & duct-

taped together, his desperate design

shaped of his & his son’s fates interlocked.

The quills are stubborn, but his art is fine

as all his previous handiwork; the maze

he first sketched out over Minoan wine

has kept the Minotaur at heart – his days

now go to undoing what he has done.

The double-headed axe has dealt both ways.

The only way out is up, after one

word of caution to his ambitious son.

–– Mike Alexander

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Light Years

I

My father gave me space, my mother, time.

And then she took it back. The first assignment,

my first anxiety, was Earth. Her crime

was rushing me through canyon and escarpment,

volcanic chimney and basaltic causeway,

to hand the homework in before its date.

Geology cannot be finished, Thursday!

It starts too long ago. We’re very late.

The tiny skeletons of all those fears

have drifted to the bottom of my mind

where, under pressure, under seas of tears,

they lithify. I’ve learned to fall behind,

and like the mother we all share and fear,

I feign my calm around a molten core.

II

My mother gave me time, my father, space,

alignment, centering, and measurement.

When people tell me that I wear his face,

I hear his voice bounce back in argument

determining how far to keep his distance.

Interminable silences in cars,

dark woods unspooling past, and my insistence

on conversation, failing. The farthest stars

looked closer.

But I remember piggyback,

and how he let me center picture hooks

by eye, and match his ties to blue or black,

and level shelves for different weights of books.

He hid his mind. I never flushed him out,

but I hit the first clay bird I ever shot.

–– Meredith Bergmann

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A Door

Staring through my mother’s kitchen window

in the mutual midnight dark of inside and out,

the door behind me, half-open to the still-bright hall,

is reflected in the glass before me and, by this

trickery, projected into the night’s garden. Thus

we are granted access to any number of no places

at all: all the otherwise worlds and their words

we couldn’t even guess how to walk in past

that first impossible step. There is no other ever after

after all, just the space we gave it once, like

a floorplan for our nothingness. Still the door stands

man-high at midnight like a capital letter on the lawn:

Somewhere through it, he goes about his present,

my father still, but older and wearier, neck frozen

so that he can’t look back over his own shoulder.

It’s easier to imagine the back of his head.

Somewhere through it, Cavafy’s ‘poor old things’

and ours, the Greek, τα καϋμένα, meaning ‘burnt’,

as though such a pyre was the source of the light,

as though this means that somewhere is a centre.

The hall’s beyondness makes maze from mere

rooms’ memories, opens thresholds unlikelier than

this door hanging in the dark: lobby after hall;

hame after house, back, back. Soon this home too

will step through the doorway into itself

and everything in it as on a cloth cold-furnished

for the feast will be dragged from her table

and the linen worn as a cape. Everyone will rise

and follow in good order till only the door remains,

open-jawed, since, like all this small estate

from which my mother’s friends, aging, wasting,

are weded awa, it is night’s inhabitant.

–– W. N. Herbert

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Second Language

You haunt the corridors and offices

of empty premises with yellow calendars

and desk-drawers choked with dust:

beloved labyrinths, archives of pain

from disused objects – inkwells, blotters,

ledgers lying open under sightless clocks

with faces on the brink of revelation.

In these chambers where the future

came and went and left no comment

when the nineteenth century, the erstwhile

capital of everything, was sentenced

to internal exile, you’ve been listening

at the walls, a spy for history. Some nights

you half-believe you’ve heard what can’t be said.

Which might be agony. Or prayer, perhaps –

a rosary, recited by a relegated god

immured within a ruined paradigm,

or just the banter of some fonctionnaires

returning late from lunch, untroubled

by this waiting telegram from death.

Call it a lifetime’s work. Time’s up.

Snuff out the lamps and leave. If history’s

its own reward, you too must be

its language, secret and unspeakable,

forever dying in the act of being born.

–– Sean O’Brien

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The Speaking Art

There are still those who wonder

if a thing can be spoken to life.

Not every thing. Not that child

caught in a black and white photo

sunlit smile who I was told

had died, though I still grieve

that sight. Not my father,

into whose absence I still release

myself as if to speak, though our voices

will not meet. Not that leaf so lately

green now weathered to lay its skeleton

down. Not those falling strangers.

They ghost here, though having been

they cannot come again to be,

not by that verb nor any means.

For them there is but hallowing.

So what remains for the speaking art

that opens a mouth in the leaning air

with the touch of breath for the burr

of words to enter, to hear its gift return

alive? Dead man, you have your answer.

–– Gregory Leadbetter

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Orison

Help me to know this world

from the emptied skull

offered by the earth

where I dug for food,

naïve as a child,

and found those staring

eyes of dust

still damp with the ooze

of the vanished mind –

blown like an egg

for its secrets, only

to yield a dish

of yolk and albumen

raw and slick

as semen: this

was the bulb of thought

when spilt from the head,

as different from the answer

the ignorant questioner

sought as the innards

of an egg just laid

are from the bird

that splits the shell,

flies and sings.

So much for looking

for the soul in its matter.

Weak from the search

for what I have found,

I now understand there are truths

that can only be known

by an answer that makes

the question an error.

This land has been harrowed

like this human skull.

It was a garden where

that mind once walked

in a strange voice,

its touch at every greening

leaf, its tongue a flower

itself. At night, I hear

its rumour rustling

inside the fire

I sleep beside,

a shadow loose

in the starless dark.

Each dawn I wake

to its ashen ghost.

One day you might lift

my skull from the earth.

Help me to tell you

what I have learned.

–– Gregory Leadbetter

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Over the Ruins

The world is always weaving itself over the ruins

– Howard Nemerov

I’ve lived a long time in a world

which a poet said is always weaving

itself over the ruins.

Always. Always? Taste the tempo. Always.

Repeat the process over and over

and the mended texture might mean either hope

or the repeated failure of any hope

to repair a damaged world

whose persistent collapsing over

and onto itself necessitates re-weaving

(what is the difference between ‘again’ and ‘always’?)

to cover up the latest layer of ruin.

We were born into a different ruin,

one that looks from here as if it promised hope.

Not that it’s new for trepidation always

to govern how we negotiate a world

so wounded and disordered, how we weave

endless fresh patches to try to cover

the gaping hole that opens over and over

under the crust of the latest layer of ruins.

Opening, closing, bleeding, and re-weaving:

this home-made poultice of repurposed hope

may be what the world

has to offer, necessary but not always

sufficient. What can be counted on always

is that life’s patterns over and over

play themselves out in the world

whether we perceive the place as ruins

or as a garden burgeoning with hope

or both. Yes/no: the warp and woof, the weaving

of the quick and the dead and then de-weaving,

the undoing that always

alternates with doing. Should we live with the hope

that this pattern will or won’t go on forever?

All projects seem to subside into their own ruins –

the Ozymandias rhythm of a world

built, buried, partially unearthed. We always

weave repairs over the latest ruins

not without some hope.

–– Rachel Hadas

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