Urthkin 2 – Part 2
DIPPING FOR MINNOWS
John, years a garage mechanic in Hawley,
one day packed a green duffel
needed ina time of killing,
then forgotten
whern not with whiskey.
Abandoned his town
by beginning to walk away.
Opened his eyes at the harbor.
Again. Old. Poor.
And Ed.
Heavy arms tattooed.
The bad leg like fire.
The red Ford pick-up smeared
with deer blood and fishscales.
Buried his wife near the Bonesack,
long before the dark cough
stopped his heart.
His sand-blown eyes
were proof the Dakotas lived
for us to love and fear.
My father spoke of these men
when we dipped for minnows,
dark shapes darting
in their cold stone tanks.
Michael Moos
Waterford, Connecticut
PIECE OF THE DAY
Dusty wheels eat
the gray air east toward Stoneington.
Headstones taken for granted.
Vines almost bare.
Even the linemen will not climb.
Carved pumpkins sag on doorsteps.
An old woman fishing from a bridge
leans into sleep.
Too many layers of men
have lived on this land.
The cold cliff-faces
wind-burned smooth.
The stuffed grizzly in the Mobil station
fills me with fear
as real as exhaust.
At the yellow caution light
I do not yield.
The greenhousess are empty.
The road owns a piece of the day.
Michael Moos
Waterford, Connecticut
THE MONASTERY
A bell is rung.
Lean voices murmur the moon office.
Hair hidden under hard cloth.
Old Dominican sisters sing
in bodies that look like white birds.
Their language is kind, detailed.
Shoulders are taboo.
Gates are locked.
Blankeets are folded.
Windows are closed.
Dust does not live here.
All is in order.
I have not come to confess.
I am a tourist
in a silence with no roof.
I have come for a room,
two meals, the passage of a day.
At dawn I ask for a key.
Mist moves through gorges.
Mountains appear.
Oleander sun and cedar reach for me.
Michael Moos
Waterford, Connecticut
THE UNFINISHED ROOM
When I wake
street lights still burn.
Ice is born on the dead pine.
The yellowjacket hive grown slow.
All morning a slow rain
gives itself away
on the gray road that dips
and rises off the map.
I live outside
the unfinished room.
The worn floor
mountainous with luiquor boxes
filled with forgotten books,
a battle front
of photographs and mileage receipts.
A portrait of a soldier
stares at me from the far wall,
reminding me that here,
like the spider
I sweep from the corner,
my small history continues.
Michael Moos
Waterford, Connecticut
THE WAITRESS
Morning sky the gray of burned matches.
In Howard Johnson’s: thin voices,
like worn-out sandpaper,
of men who have worked long.
The hour when salesmen
drunk on travel,
enter the day,
maps torn and folded wrong.
The old waitress who has given up
on the tint of her hair,
claims the willows will bud tomorrow.
I believe her
because of the way she moves her hands.
I wonder if she sets these tables for her rent,
or serves coffee to strangers
to keep the memory still.
All I can give her are coins.
Michael Moos
Watertown, Connecticut
TRYING TO MAKE MYSELF CLEAR
This night could crack in two
I want direction, so bad
my arms
straddling each side
Oh why the hammer, nails?
They lock a box.
I thought I knew everything in a bed one night.
Don’t frighten me with your desert space.
Your wide eyes
contain pieces of women.
They dance down your back like fireflies.
Oh I’d choke on your desert air,
burn out in your fractured light.
with my dreams of tiny rooms
where each sentence is drawn on the wall
in thick paint
so I can read it
like a book or the weather.
I am still
separating continents
placing maps along my body
east and west
Don’t you see
I am alone here.
Soon I will walk into space, your desert
without a compass
ride a blue-eyed stallion
blind, along the Pacific
shoot words with a bow and arrow
watch them break
into a thousand letters
running down my body
like water….
Louise Nayer
San Francisco, Califronia
Collecting
I’ve misplaced the child
the great hummer
the heel-kicking wonder kid
who shook this house
with junk and noise.
A new-breasted girl
will walk with a sidelong glance
at cars and men,
her hands and smiles
will mimic a grown-up poise;
she practices a ruse
and fades from her mother’s side.
"Dress like the older mothers,
don’t say anything strange at the meeting."
I lost my popish rectitude
gradually
as gradually as the child fades.
I find her at bedtime, at the beach
where waves entice
with music and glitter,
I stumble on moments
of make-believe,
her apprenticeship
to deeper passions,
then lose her in a moment.
I’ve misplaced the child;
I tiptoe, I sidle, I sneak
in secret agent’s disguise
(learned frm her)
to capture moments,
document them for rainy days
when I’ll be used to the woman
but long for the child.
Rosalind Neroni
Santa Monica, California
DOWN BY THE SEASIDE
The sea-faring bards
Take their similes & metaphors & symbols
And dunk them like day-old dnouts
In coffee cup surfs
Then with a soppy poetics
(Bred from the puppydog rhythm
Of stand-still waves
That do little more
Than lick dormant sands
& water stoic rocks)
They fashion spells of love & melancholy
Slither into them
& feign hypnosis
Until they can’t stand the humidity
I guess
If rhythm–
Why not a rhythm that explores & discovers
Like that of two lovers
Caught in the heat of sex
Pounding together with piston-fed passion–
A rhythm that amid screams & groans
Sends two minds
Bullet-like
Through fire & ice
Marries them to the burn & freeze of climax
Then, rudely, drops them–spent
Ina heap of heavy breathing, sighs & memories
If waves–
Why not waves that speak with force & conviction
Like those that hammer & plunder
The steel & wood & flesh & blood
Of hapless, cork-like intrruders
Or those that repair the rifts
Left by diving transmitter-fed predators
Stalking, salivating, studyinig
Patiently waiting to devour the world
In shatter & crush & flame
If the sea at all, poets of wet things
Not when it obeediently paws at the shore
But when it crashes over its boundaries
& lashes at trees, houses, people
Sweping them through streets
Over fields
Like tiny toys
Sucked through anangry universe–
Or when it recedes
Leaving its bottom parched & sterile
Laying waste its tenants
Lile so much incinerated debris
No, not donut-dunking seas
With the puppydog rhythm of standstill waves
But seas that command with wrath & denial
Meanwhile–
Drunk on sunsets & birds & night air
The vassals of Neptune
Continue to renounce
Their aquatic souls
To placid seas
And more placaid snads
While the surf goes nowhere
Just like their poetry
Patrick O’Neill
Ironwood, Michigan
PRINCESS HOLLYWOOD AND THE VAGABOND
i walked behind you for a half a block
And I don’t know why I was attracted by
The blank agitated way
You rejected all the exquisite soft scarves
in the Boutique where I had followed you, but I
Walked over when I overheard you
Ask a salesgirl if she had an extra cigarette
And offered you one of mine. You didn’t like the brand
But took it anyway. And I lingered there
On that half-bloomed-rose-look
Of your parted lips
while we talked
About rock-music and imported cars and not
much else. I said I liked
What you liked.
I didn’t care.
I wanted to lie down beside all my ideas
about your long legs.
I prayed for the coffee outside at a hamburger stand and we
Decided to drive down to a beach that was nearby…
You never travelled. You didn’t read much. We ran out
Of things to talk about and kept walking on up to the jetty
Where I started to gather stones and shells. And I handed some
To you. You didn’t say anything, then you said they were "nice"
And firmly held them
in your little fist
with the chocolate colored
painted nails…
Watching some gulls wash themselves
In a clear pool of dark water
I leaned back, I leaned toward you a little bit
And you asked me to help brush the sand off your feet
So you could pull your boots back on. And I handled
Your legs like I was pulling some damned smooth thing
out of wind
down on your foot
for a shoe.
You got up.
You said something muffled I couldn’t hear.
You started to walk away without looking
Or saying anything to me. I got up
you kept walking
I sat back down. And I didn’t care.
It was only about an hour and a half. You had
Beautiful legs. I’d be gone the
Next day. I didn’t mind.
But you could’ve gone owver the other side,
You didn’t have to
step down with all your fashionable weight
On the pretty stones and shells
Pressing them
back into the earth.
Doren Robbins
Santa Monica, California
YOU FLOAT DOWN MY EYES
You walk up from the river
You float fown my eyes
Do what you like, white
strap-lines
on the clove shade of your shoulders,
Voice like an untouched bell—the moon comes up
On the burnt looking horizon,
you walk up
from the river
A river of yourself—you float
down my eyes—
I stare over the split stone cliff,
the donkey standing
on the shaded hill—it’s all
The same—you
float down my eyes—I look away you
float down my eyes—
Do what you like
On the hillside of oregano,
In the field of
short sunflowers—the slow look
on your face, the blue
dust on the figskin—
Do what you like…
Some needles spin down
From the pine trees,
Some pine cones hve started
to spin open—you walk up from the river—
you float down my eyes, split stone clif—
It’s all the same…
Hillside of oregano,
Clove shade on your shoulders—you don’t know
how good you are—twin
hills of moon
your eyes come near
in sleep—you don’t know…
You lay your head back
On the bedroll
Adn look up at me like
We have been together
For twenty years—
I take down
the faded towel
from your body,
I whip your throat slow
with my hair—
Soft pine shade
Split stone cliff
The river
Giving up what it owns
To the sea.
Doren Robbens
Santa Monica, California
LATE NEWS
The newsboy didn’t come back
From his route.
The lady on Drexel St. called.
He’d never missed her before.
The father went out looking,
An ominous reptilian
Fear for his boy
Crawling up his back
Under his sweat-soaked shirt.
What about a crazy.
Turning a corner,
Two wheels on the pavement:
The kid was only eleven.
What did he know
About a crazy?
They found him
Six feet beyond
A chain link fence
Blown down by a rain,
Where two Danes,
Standing above his shoulder
Suddenly became a pack,
Attacked
And mauled him
So you coul sitck a fist
In the cavity they made
In his chest.
The owner got home
Horrified to find
His two dogs’ work.
After the quarantine
He said
They’d be destroyed.
Laurel Speer
Tucson, Arizona
Leaving South Sixth East
When I go, it can’t be any state, you
at the back of a month reading horoscopes
to find my favorite linel. Someplace famous
or New England, not the blurred figure upstream
worried about fish. Water with salt, a glass bridge
and God, no crickets when I go.
Fi I taught geese as make-believe,
would you look up or walk the shore the way
a river draws me in? My efforts are torn grammar
that jars the lid of an oil drum. Corrected for reference:
opera at five a.m., brandy then spaghetti but why go?
Didn’t we find lemonade across town below zero?
Doesn’t the talk in your sleep start
my index under poersonality,
changes I can’t make?
Take your clothes and oyster stew.
I’ve heard enogh of Houston and diarrhea
on the bus. Your sister at nursing school
wouldn’t approve my bathroom or double solitaire
on an odd cigarete-burned sheet. You want me to go.
Early where the floor creaks, the woman with cats
in her basement of electric wire has a slow limp
to the piano I play. The end, I think,
doesn’t fit the same dream.
Stop me. It will be a pink wall
with two paintings mostly black. I’ll smoke
more, pull the curtains before dusk. I may plant
cactus, a windowbox of herbs. No peonies. No Wednesday.
No Perry Mason reruns. Maine, perhaps
and less wind if you come back.
Dennice Scanlon
Butte, Montana
Ever Nearer the Gutter
You know how it is,
with new dragons to be slain
every other day,
sometimes you’re drawn
as if on wheels
to walk to the nearest bar
where aflter one too many
the rotten taste of liquor
goes away
and there’s a brawl
going on inside your swimming head,
and soon the sharp edge
is filed off
that vast tumult of sadnesses
that has vised you in its grip.
Outisde
on dim lit streets
mouthy winds exhale,
make your eyes run wet
as you stumble along
sidewalks that sway like the sea…
then
that sewage of mind and heart
sinks down with you
as you hit asphalt hard as reality,
in the midst of a city
that stands sober and upright,
and you barf up
all the outrage of a lifetime,
you know how it is,
with new dragons to be slain
every other day.
Face down ever nearer the gutter
on cement where ants get smashed
and unburdened
beneath shoes big enough to be God,
your fisted heart
pounds forth a wild surf of blood
and you acknowledge
the sometime dismal failure of your will
to just hang on
peer over the edge
while swift moments
are butchered off the hours,
you know how it is,
with new dragons to be slain
every other day.
You brace yourself
and in desperate urgency
groping you porobe, try to find your way,
mayhbe even say a prayer,
in spite of
the accumulated puke of a mind,
you know how it is.
Nikki Selditz
Studio City, California