Enskyment - Poets H

t this time of year, even the apple tree lets purpose fall. When I was eight, maybe nine, I picked up an autumn apple and was stung by a drunken bee sheathed in fragrant rot underneath. And that was the first time. Pulling spent tomato plants, my father stopped, loped across the lawn and led me inside. He pulled an ice cube from the freezer, put it in my palm, closed his hand over mine until pain sluiced through our fingers. Twenty years later he died. I was far away and it was winter. Uneventfully, red and brown leaves had fallen. Ice glazed the highway and clicked in the plastic cup of bourbon on the plane, which banked away from Pittsburgh to shudder through the clouds. The shorter stewardess was kind, and we dropped from the sky like sleet. I filtered through the wake all night, picked my way through relatives and deli platters, but when I touched his cold hand the next morning, just before they closed the lid and the censer swung wisps of perfumed smoke in our faces, something melted through. Outside, it threatened more snow. Rock salt crunched underfoot. The bees lay dormant, sleeping it off, dreaming under a slick gloss of ice, if they dream at all, of spring, sweet arrival-- the inevitable blossoms of apple trees. -JOHN HOPPENTHALER Tar River Poetry

Siple Dome

After three years of drilling, we reached
bedrock, two-thirds of a mile under
the hump-backed bulge of winter.
Each season, six fresh inches of ice

put us closer to Jesus on one side,
machinery to whatever else on the other.
Sometimes the scientists gave us trash
chips to splash in our gin & tonics–

you could hear bubbles of air & ash,
dust that’s fifty thousand years old crack
& pop. There’s so much pressure at bottom,
it squeezes a whole century into an inch-

thick wafer of time. Neanderthals roamed
Europe. Homo sapiens still hadn’t left
African plains when that sliver of core
was last exposed to the pale, thin light.

Now pieces break off the Antarctic cap
at rapid rates & float out to sea. Coastal
cities could be swamped in just a few
centuries. Sure I was drunk, but one

afternoon after work had stopped, wind
sliced through the rigging, & I’d swear
I heard singing. It was the last day
before the end of what passes for summer.

We’d soon leave for home. I spit a nickel
I’d kept warm in my mouth down the shaft
& wished. Like every hole that’s opened,
we fill, or hope something will come out of it.

-John Hoppenthaler
Tar River Poetry

Ghirardelli: San Francisco

                             “Studies show women crave chocolate

                                      more than any other food”

                                                                          –newspaper clipping



At the start of the 17th century, pious

Mexican women sipped hot chocolate in church

Bittersweet warmth filled their earthly bodies,

& their spirits levitated above the cloistered

drone of mass. In their eyes, the transported

glassiness of sexual gratification. Jealous

of such passion, the bishop forbade the practice.

His imminent death was bliss, poison slipped

into his own bowl of cocoa before matins.

Montezuma thought it an aphrodisiac & quaffed

dozens of goblets a day. Bronze & doomed,

in the throes of ecstasy he’d picture the certain

swoop & rise of condors behind the shut

wings of his eyelids. At Fisherman’s Wharf,

I buy a sampler box for Valentine’s Day,

anticipate your teeth marks on every piece.

The one shaped & grooved like a seashell

might cause you to grow unpredictable

as the Pacific. Inside the perfect, dark square,

the tropical swell of coconut or oh, please,

yes sugar drift of caramel. Will you place

a wafer laced with praline on my tongue?

Back from a New World, I’ll come like Columbus

to Fernando’s court & offer the innocent gift.

                                   -John Hoppenthaler

                                         Chelsea

			PLAYING DEAD	Index

Our father liked to play a game. He played that he was dead. He took his thick black glasses off and stretched out on the bed. He wouldn't twitch and didn't snore or move in any way. He didn't even seem to breathe! We asked, Are you okay? We tickled fingers up and down his huge, pink, stinky feet- He didn't move; he lay as still as last year's parakeet. We pushed our fingers up his nose, and wiggled them inside- Next, we peeled his eyelids back. Are you okay? we cried. I really thought he might be dead and not just playing possum, because his eyeballs didn't twitch when I slid my tongue across 'em. He's dead, we sobbed--but to be sure, I jabbed him in the jewels. He rose, like Jesus, from the dead, though I don't think Jesus drools. His right hand lashed both right and left. His left hand clutched his scrotum. And the words he yelled-I know damn well I'm way too young to quote 'em.

Andrew Hudgins

Poetry

			EPHEMERON	Index

Those are windflowers glowing in the outer darkness

Just beyond the gateposts. If I squint,

I see them clearly: white windflowers, flicker of stargas,

Bridal-veil nebula—an infinity bent

By the gravity of dawn and rain, but opening.

It astonishes me again: I am fifty and pregnant,

And beyond the bedroom window September is gathering

Its cosmological light. A child, the windflower says.

What’s that? Nothing. Or hardly anything

Five weeks beyond conceiving. And that monstrous

Morning star above the neighbor’s gable mutters,

Enough. What’s one more human? Heartless,

These elemental things, mist on the sidewalk, litter:

And so there are gods again, suddenly.

The windflower opens its oblivious scripture

As the sun advances degree by omniscient degree.

In the street a shadow of sparrows echoes the oil slick

Left by yesterday’s downtown express. Details gather ominously,

And that is the point, precisely, a god’s favorite trick—

The accrual, like money in the bank, of our undoing.

But an arm’s-length away, the anti-entropic

Womb of my sleeping wife is growing

A consciousness. Listen, zygote. The windflower’s true name:

Anemone. Its true vocation: to be blowing

Against a wooden gate at 6 a.m.

In the broken dawn-light of the fiftieth September

Of a man old enough to refuse to be ashamed

Of his own joy. And the windflower’s fate? No matter.

It is enough, now, to watch it being.

It is enough to be, myself—again almost a father,

Watching the newsboy wander the street—feeling,

Almost, the old gods’ abstract hearts contract.

I smell them gather above me like ravens, wheeling

Over the promise my body makes. Black-

Hearted godhood has left them hungry.

But it is they who assemble, in the amniotic sac,

Bits of star-grit, skeins of DNA, the holy chemistry

Of existence. What can I do but leave them to it, even

Knowing what I know? My spiritual autobiography

Is a shambles-in-progress, my unfinished Confessions

A creaking stylized fiction from a distant century—

It reads like a pirated version of a bad translation

Of a novel the young Balzac wrote, then threw away.

No god forgives such things. The gods have taste.

Smelling an uncouth sulfur in the aura of the coming day,

The Supreme Will wrinkles the Great Face.

The Gaze averts, and here’s our chance. A space

Opens – ambiguous territory, zygote. A vacancy. Our place.

-T. R. HUMMER

The Kenyon Review

			EVE'S SOLILOQUY	Index

When I was riddled with pizazz
and hot to trot,
gnats and mosquitoes didn't
bother me, after all it was heaven,
but now I'm past the middle
of that carrying on,
so long immunity.
Bugs bite
parts once sleek
as that trickster snake,
and still fair,
the blush of apples,
where curves quiver.
So says the mower
in our garden.
Adam gone soft
in the middle hasn't solved
the riddle of love
any more than I have,
pulls me by the hair,
wants his dessert
when I want mine
while time, bent and warped
in its space time event,
prepares to blow
the lights
of our tryst
with incalculable pi.

-Colette Inez
Ploughshares

THE CHAIRS

Our faces caught in the mirror
above the piano soften,
hands resting on each other's
shoulders after we clear the dishes.
With a flourish you call
my attention to the four chairs
upholstered in my absence,
deep burnt sienna, color
of the wine we decant.
"This reminds me of..." you say,
lifting your glass.
Chairs, accept our humble bodies
heavy with memory and longing.
Once we sat on stones
on an island in the north,
seeking the key
to Spinoza's infinitely
infinite universe.
Love, the hour grows short.
What was the comparison?

-Colette Inez
Louisville Review

			THE GREEN GATHERERS AT SOUNION	Index

Three old women draped in black
cross themselves and bow, K-rees-to,
just outside Poseidon's temple,
then part and hunch along like crows
bent on a solemn search for supper.
Each one parts her grasses, peering,
moving, parting, peering, pulling,
slowly filling her apron, spilling it
over and over onto the common pile.

Working different parts of the maze,
they do not talk or pay any mind
to the buzzing infestation of tourists.
Like the same old shepherds, same old sheep,
these are at work the same as their mothers:
grasses for salad with olives and feta,
grasses for boiling to go with the lamb,
grasses for selling. Grasses are threading
mothers like beads who thread thousands of years.

They will never leave by ship, have never
gone. They will never throw themselves
over and down the long cliffs to the
sea, breaking on points of stone;
nor read themselves into an epic poem.
They'll thank whatever gods may be
before they wilt; and dip and tilt,
leaving their wake in green, three old
black sails. So the white news prevails.

-Mary Jean Irion
Poetry

			SAID THE TRANSLATOR	Index

My brother wore his favorite shirt that winter night they took him away the shirt that "strongly suggests" that those in power are illegitimate. We knew they'd come with ritual offense in the small hours reserved for small acts. Friends slipped through the curfew with luxuries—vodka, fruit, and fresh meat for the latke pies prepared as for a high holy feast—incense of their sympathy, gifts to ease the waiting, sustain what was left of sanity. We could deny the inevitable while loosing time together; watching the watchers, drinking white spirits until they broke through as tears.

Ice flakes scraped with the plastic edge of my new green-card settle on the cuffs, memorials to the missing buttons. Windshield wipers smack at the edge of space cleared but not yet enough to see a way ahead, to see a way home; but it's a beginning, here in Freedom,

Go, they begged, before they take both of you. I no longer flinch when pipes bang. I bleed only radiator air, the rust smell mixing with last night's garlic. I no longer fear hammering on my door—now, I long for it—someone to speak my name, someone bringing meat-and-potato pie. -Rodney Lay Potomac Review

. . . half a century ago when things still seemed pretty modern and underlying motives were the same though not the dark, intricate working out of them. -John Ashbery, "Film Noir"

He blew the famous opening figure of “West End Blues”
and then... A long pause. A long long pin-drop pause.
This sounded like nothing the four of us had been hearing out here
at the Famous Sunnybrook Ballroom in East Jesus, PA,
which was in fact a moth-eaten tent to which in summer
the post-war big bands, then fading into the fifties --
the likes of the Elgars or Les Brown and His Band of Renown --
would arrive to coax the newly middle-aged and their elders
into nostalgia and dance. My cousin, our pretty steadies
and I were younger, cocksure, full of contraband beer,
but the moment I speak of knocked even us in the know-it-all chops.

I suddenly dreamed I could see through the tent’s canvas top
clear up to stars that stopped their fool blinking and planets that stood
stock-still over cows and great-eyed deer in the moonlight
and ducks ablaze on their ponds because everything in God’s world
understood this was nothing like anything they’d known before.
It’s still a fantasy, that sorry tent a lantern,
transparent as glass, through which I beheld the landscape around it
as though it showed in some Low Country more-than-masterpiece
while no one danced. The crassest fat-necked burgher in the crowd
sat rapt, as did his missus, the moment being that strong.
It lingered strong, beginning to end, through the blues that followed.

Then Velma Middleton got up to jive and bellow.
She broke the charm, her scintillant dress like a tent itself,
and people resumed the lindy and foxtrot as she and he
traded the always-good-for-laughs double meanings
of “Big Butter and Egg Man,” “That’s My Desire,”
and so on. And so we four, or rather we two boys,
resumed our drinking and boasting until the band took its break.
Full enough by now of the Bud and some of the rum
that the cousin had brought -- which would take him in too sadly short a time
away to another shore forever -- I stood and pledged:
I’ll get his autograph. It made no sense at all.

I staggered to and through the canvas’s backstage hole,
the mocking jibes of cousin and sweethearts dying behind me,
and beheld a row of semi- trucks: his equipage.
There were two doors as to a house in each, and a little set
of metal steps underneath. Without a hitch, I climbed
one stair of the bunch. It made no sense except it did.
I knew.... Something had burned into my reeling brain
when that opening solo started, and the man would have to be
just there where he was when I knocked on one of the several doors
inside the trailer, and the growl was Fate: it didn’t surprise me:
Come in, he said. How could he? How could he not? I came.

It was meant to be, and still I stammered with puzzlement, shame.
I’d had a vision, yes, and yet to have the vision
there before me.... Wonder! Great Armstrong at a desk
in an undershirt, suspenders flapping, his face near blinding,
sweatbeads charged by the gimcrack rack of fluorescent lights
so that he seemed to wear an aura -- it was all
one supple motion, the way he reached into a drawer,
drew out a jug of Johnny Walker, sucked it down
to the label, squared before him a sheet of paper, ready
for me, it seemed, flourished a fountain pen and wrote:
Red Beans and Ricely Yours at Sunny Brook Ballroom . Pops.

Back at the table they judged it was real enough by the looks.
“I just walked in and got it,” I bragged, as if a miracle
hadn’t transpired, as great as any I’d ever know.
I bragged as if my part in it all were important somehow,
and God hadn’t just looked down and said, Well okay -- him.
And what remains from then? Not the paper, long since lost,
nor the lovely, silken girls, Sally and Barbara,
nor the cousin, as I’ve said, who crossed the foulest river,
nor that brash, that truly and stunningly blessèd younger I,
nor the heavenstruck beasts and the trees and the moon and the sky.

Just a handful of opening notes from a horn which are there forever.

This morning, the wind is all we have of time.

And though no one drowns, Tomales bay seems an afterlife
your father would want to enter, balloons lifting into sky

like the little boats cornered in his last breaths,
and the body's torturous slowing
winding the joy of a dozen children taut.

Look at how they dive and leap
just beyond our reach.

Look at how their gravity dissolves
and then returns, as if to practice leaving.

I know you feel it too:
how the laurel bays nod to the horizon;

How the endpoints of your father's history
suspend you in the thick blue dream
of a late summer noon,
the children gathered now around the candles.

And as they bend to damp the flame,
I want you to put your arm in mine;
I want to touch the girls we once were
in exactly the way they need.

I want them to hear you whispering, It will be alright,
just as here, high above the bay,
a flock of cormorants arrows west.

Their wings make a thrumming cloak
as they rust past, and then just as quickly
fall away,

so that suddenly we are undressed
of all our ordinary shame, and perilously beautiful

in the winter of what follows after:
that orchard of dark rain
unfolding in the distance--

always the distance
ripening, gathering weight.

An actual place in the actual city
where we all grew up. You and I pass it
on the way to school or on the way home
after work. It's where the old house
once stood, its wide eyes open day and night,
replaced by nothing. Call it an empty lot
though it's not empty. Wild flags in April,
a froth of lacy white flowers Mama called
wild chicory, and milkweed, rye, broom,
in autumn the aftermath of rhubarb
no one ever harvests, a long trench
suitable for warfare and once propped
with spare timbers from the first house
that crashed here.

Three blocks away,
where the local police station once ruled
over seventeen abandoned bungalows
and the pharmaceutical warehouse
the mice sublet, the traffic light stuck
on yellow years ago, so now the big semis
bound for Wyandotte go through
without bothering to slow. It grants
a certain misleading permissiveness
you'd expect to find in the brighter
neighborhoods of Amsterdam or Vegas,
those places where blown roses spread
their private charms on long stems
lacquered like toenails.

The real city
awakens on a late Saturday morning
in the new century to find its river
working seaward, the faceless moon--
awake all night--has stolen off
without a word. In the house
that stood here, a shade is raised
to let the day in, a woman's memory
almost takes shape as she stands
frozen at the window. If we're quiet
we might hear something alive
on the move through the dusty alleys
or the little, abandoned parks, some-
thing left behind, the spirit of the place
welcoming us, if the place had a spirit.

Truant

Trail

Over Arlington Cemetery