Echo of brutal laughter at the edge of the sea

                                                 by James Wright

Bari, Old and Young

       The old women of Bari near the sea sit in the small shadows of open doors. Their faces are beautifully darkened in the sunlight. Their hair is grey enough. They have seen the wars. They have known the young Germans blundering and falling out of the sky like poisoned moths. The young men in Bari today swagger and smirk as though no one had ever lived before, as though no one had ever died. Forever titivating their lank hair in the Adriatic breezes, voluptuously caressing their own armpits, they love to be told they are the lost youth, unemployed and betrayed by The System. Their motorcycles whinny insanely along the dark streets, and they are interested in women only to frighten them. They are too mindless to be skillful thieves. But the old women of Bari in their open doors know that young men will find something wlse to do, and I walk in this city as frighted as an old sea woman startled by moths.

       Once the old city of Bari rose and gathered its companions out of the sea. But the new city, a growth of our present desperate century squats a little inland, companionless. It is no place for solitude. Already the stony faces of new tall buildings are beginning to crumble.

       On my last day here, I will walk carefully through the barren places and find the past again, the old city where I can stand solitary beside the noble churches. And beyond the old city, even beyond the past, there is the sea itself, the ancient freshness of the natural world that God, stirring in His loneliness and unapproached in His light, breathed upon. The fragrance of the water moves heavily and slowly with mussel shells and the sighs of drowned men. There is nothing so heavy with earth as the sea's breath and the breath if fresh wilderness, the camomilla fields along the shore. I would like to stand among them and breathe their air, one more day of my life, before I have to turn around and make my way back to this present century, back through the ugliness of vicious young faces,w ho will leave no churches behind them in the fullness of their age, but only the blind scars of motorcycle tires, the wrinkles of panic on women's faces, and an echo of brutal laughter at the edge of the sea.

The American Poetry Review, May/June 2015.

The two seconds taken to assess the situation

                                                     

                                                     by Mark Doty

                                                  In Two Seconds

Tamir Rice, 2002-2014

                                   the boy's face

climbed back down the twelve-year tunnel

of its becoming, a charcoal sunflower

swallowing itself. Who has eyes to see,

or ears to hear? If you could see

what happens fastest, unmaking

the human irreplaceable, a star

falling into complete gravitational

darkness from all points of itself, all this:

the held loved body into which entered

milk and music, honeying the cells of him:

who sang to him, strokend the nap

of the scalp, kissed the flesh-knot

after the cord completed its work

of fueling into him the long history

of those those suffering

was made more bearable

by the as-yet-unknown of him,

playing alone in some unthinkable

future city, a Cleveland,

whatever that might me.

Two seconds. To elapse:

the arck of joy in the conception bed,

the labor of hands repeated until

the hands no longer required attention,

so that as the woman folded

her hopes for him sank into the fabric

of his shirts nad underpants. Down

they go, swirling down into the maw

of a greater dark. Treasure box,

comic books, pocket knife, bell from a lost cat's collar,

why even begin to enumerate them

when behind every tributary

poured into him comes rushing backward

all he hasn't been yet. Everything

that boy could have thought or made,

sung or theorized, built on the quavering

but continuous structure

that had preceded him sank into

an absence in the shape of a boy

playing with a plastic gun in a city park

in Ohio, in the middle of the afternoon.

When I say two seconds, I don't mean the time

it took him to die. I mean the lapse between

the instant the cruiser braked to a halt

on the grass, between that moment

and the one in which the officer fired his weapon.

The two seconds taken to assess the situation.

I believe it is part of the work

of poetry to try on at least

the moment and skin of another,

for this hour I respectfully decline.

I refuse it. May that officer

be visited every night of his life

by an enormity collapsing in front of him

into an incomprehensible bloom,

and the voice that howls out of it.

If this is no poem then . . .

But that voice – erased boy,

beloved of time, who did nothing

to no one, and became

nothing because of it – I know that voice

is one of the things we call poetry.

It isn't only to his killer he's speaking.

The American Poetry Review, May/June 2015.

Death collecting souls for recycling

                                           by Kim Addonizio

from The Sonnets

#12

I hate clocks & mirrors I hate all roses

& trees especially trees even evergreens

are felled & strung with lights & ornaments

I hate ornaments & wind-up crèches

playing “Silent Night” with plastic cows breathing

over a plastic baby I hate babies please don't have one

it will ruin yr beautiful tits forever

you'll have to push a stroller a 40-pound shopping cart

before you like a plow 18 years you'll toil

what a waste paint something green

get a show somewhere with white walls

& people drinking wine I love wine I love

taking it in my mouth then kissing

it into yours having enough / & time

#22

my glass shall not persuade me I am sober

after three French 75s in the bar mirror

our hair messed up & the bartender

carded us both then look I death my days

but not yet this afternoon it's elsewhere

collecting souls for recycling mine's metallic

scrape the rust off it's still shiny

yours is egg cartons wrapping paper

birthdays weddings congratulations Christmas

mine is Deepest Sympathy Sorry For Your Loss

hearing the champagne hiss in the bottle

& gin to kill the apple maggot

when threatened it walks sideways & mimics a spider

lay down beside you & felt so much older.

#73

it's that time of year ice in the trees

snow like dirty light piled beside the trash bags

city gardens behind chain link fences

mired in white except for an occasional rat

everyone lately has cancer

Philip Seymour Hoffman is dead of an overdose

everyone's sad & fascinated

black night is falling in a song

I prefer the one about the glow-worm

illuminate yon woods primeval

come to my bed my aeronautical glimmer

draw a treble clef a few notes will swoop down

nothings lasts anyway

& we leave nothing behind

From The American Poetry Review, May/June 2015.

Things which will not appear in this lullaby

                                  

                         Three poems by Traci Brimhall

Family Portrait as Lullaby

Your father is the slow dance and I am the ballad.

Or he's the nightclub and I am six tequila shots on the bar.

I am the salt and lemon, too.

I am the snake and the apple. I am the tongue that says

to your father – Take. Eat. Do this in remembrance of me.

Your father, the monologue in the music box

and I, the plastic ballerina in gold shoes.

Your father is the swaddle, the rock, the cradle.

His potbellied heart loses its socks and is learning to laugh.

You are Mars. Your father and I are its two moons orbiting.

You, stardust on the telescope's lens

and the ice in the comet's tail.

Your heart is a poppy – bright, forgetful

You are the first mayapple of spring, unripe and rising.

And this is the hallelujah I asked the first stardust to sing at the quickening.

This is the dirty Eden, stalked by envious angels,

This is the land of Isaac, and of knives.

Things Which Will Not Appear in This Lullaby

This cast iron cradle on an overburdened bough.

That stone doll with a quartz heart and agates for eyes.

A boy waving a red skirt at a girl pawing the street

         in patent leather shoes.

A pirate ship circled by a shark that feeds on moonlight.

Mermaids training with tridents.

Instead I'll sing about a kelp[ forest caressing a glass-bottomed boat

        or wild ponies bathing in a starlit river.

Your father, his sweater held open like a sling weighted with pears.

Your father, anointing my wrist with a paper corsage.

My love, the fourth-longest river in the world.

Someone else's love, between the road and the woods,

Not Job's first loss or his forty-eighth, but his wife swaddling

        the second set of sons she'd been given to replace the ones

        God had taken.

Neither never, nor Neverland, but always and here.

 

Lullaby with Almost All the Answers

The bridesmaids in yellow silk harvesting

pears is when. Love set you going is why.

One third of the spirit entering me is why.

Moonlight gentling the curtains is how.

The angel Gabriel is who. The husband is who.

The stranger next to me on the bus who let me

warm my hands on her thighs is who. We all

want to be broken for each other is why.

We all want to kiss our names from someone

else's mouth is why. The tongue is where.

Neck is where. Collarbone, nipple, and nave

are where. Why: winter approached and heat

was scarce or the fourth glass of wine or old-

fashioned loneliness. My blood on the white flesh

of the bitten apple is what. I wanted a child

to live long enough to call me mother is why.

From Poetry Northwest, Winter and Spring 2015.

All the cameras have gone to other wars

                                                       by Wisława Szymborska

The End and The Beginning

After every war

someone has to tidy up.

Things won't pick

themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove

the rubble to the roadsides

so the carts loaded with corpses

can get by.

Someone has to trudge

through sludge and ashes,

through the sofa springs,

the shards of glass,

the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post

to prop the wall,

someone has to glaze the window,

set the door in its frames.

No sound bits, no photo opportunities

and it takes years.

All the cameras have gone

to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,

the railroad stations, too.

Shirtsleeves will be rolled

to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,

still remembers how it was.

Someone else listens, nodding

his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby

who'll find all that

a little boring.

From time to time someone still must

dig up a rusted argument

from underneath a bush

and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew

what this was all about

must make way for those

who know little.

And less than that.

And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there

in the grass that covers up

the causes and effects

with a cornstalk in his teeth,

gawking at clouds.

From Wisława Szymborska, MAP: Collected and Last Poems, 2015.

Feast on your life

                                                                 by Derek Walcott 

The Time Will Come

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another; who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

For the lives of the sons of daughters

                            by John Fuller

Elsewhere

in the Golfe de Lava

The sea is as sharp as diamonds.

The sun has a flat in the Oc.

Its tread has burned up the horizon.

The clouds are pillars of rock.

The sky's the grey-orange of rosé

That signals the end of the day

When Christian, Raymond and José

Went down to the pebbles to play.

And now the sunset's a cauldron

Of grief for the passing of years,

For our lives as thoughtless children

For the thoughts that turn to tears.

For the light on the glittering waters,

For the looks that turn away,

For the lives of the sons of daughters

And for the abandoned bay.

No one will water the roses.

The hedge grows over the gate.

The sun turns over and dozes.

And one more day is too late.

The breeze from the bay grows chilly

And worries the petals to rags,

For night has darkened the lily

And closed up our dreams in her flags.

No step on the path by the curtain

Will lift up the eyes from their book

For now only one things is certain:

There will never be eyes to look

Now the moon delivers its lecture

On light to a single star

And no one is left to conjecture

Wherever it is that we are.

The shutters are closed in the villa

And latched with a swivelling key

That curls like a rusting cedilla

And softens the sound of the sea

The Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 2015.