Amor
Fati
Adam Merton Cooper
Odium
Fati
Adam Merton Cooper
Mrs.
Onassis is Spying on Patrons
in
the Temple of Dendur
Mark Nickels
Body,
an Aviary
Evan Eisman
March
Voices Daphne
Tobias Deehan
79
Reese Thompson
Microvision
Jay Chollick
Krishna
Waits in the Car
Rob Wright
We had no choice but
to work westward
God is a westward
working god
Pushed out the west
end of the nest
we staggered onto
the solar track
that leads straight
to the red
and cool and comforting
western shore
So when I fucked a
man I fucked him
westward, and spread
my legs and bared
my womb westward to
give good birth
and pushed my choking
babes out
the west end of the
nest. I bade
my men and babies
wander westward
in my wake. These
are the fruits
we pick ripe from
the tree
Our god is a westward
working god
who plies his rule
on rotting fruit and meat
Who knows whether
the sun that rises
is the same that set
beneath the red
and cool and comforting
western shore?
Lakelong they walked
what used to be a swamp,
walked windward, walked
against the wind and worked
against their times,
their own times and the past,
although the sibyl
urged them into flow,
although they loved
the sibyl, loved her words,
and swallowed each
word whole deeming it fine,
as fine as water flowed
from Meribah,
as any cool lake craved
by Leto,
they were like latticework
before their times,
they strove and dared
not count the cost, they spread
like willows in the
swift swampwind,
desiring wishing needing
to be wrong
like willows in the east swampwind.
[Adam Merton Cooper, a featured
poet at Carnegie Hall, has won multiple Lyric Recovery™ awards.
Ed.]
Mrs.
Onassis is Spying on Patrons
in the Temple of Dendur
Mark Nickels
Mrs. Onassis looks at the museum with her telescope.
Home from the airport, she takes off her shades
and eats assorted greens, spiked like the rampion
by the rounded feet of saints in Flemish paintings.
Kindling the radio, there are concertos by Vivaldi,
the brown, the umber loneness of bassoons.
Her telescope awaits her, a gift of Templesman
the wise. To spy on those below reverses
her polarities, rhymes with the days
she wandered Washington as Inquiring Camera Girl.
She trains it on the Metropolitan below her,
the Temple of Dendur. It has a magick'd lens
with which she looks through walls and time.
Men living and men dead bourée, brocaded,
in full view, and then recede. They rally at the plinth
behind the Met, where they put on horse's clothes
and are ridden through the park.
A character in a room in that Museum, as it was in 18th Century Vienna.
A mock-up 18th c. Venetian room
has mirrors on the wall. Now, these mirrors want
resilvering, but in that room and on that day
I dipped a crust in runny yolk. Betimes the sun
exploded on the casements, signaling
the everyday ignition of the gold canals.
I rose and peed into the china pot,
the room invaded with a buttery smell.
Last night I had some cuttlefish in pastry shells,
some roasted meadowlarks, new wine.
Today, a little crowd of pimps and urchins
drift and hover, watch me sashay mirrorwards
with a rococo bounce before I shoo them out,
the offspring of domestics who extol
the virtues of their sisters with an undulating hand.
Outside, Hot Sister Venice, she both
dank and fair, a lovely ageless girl
pulled from the sea. I hear blue Zephyr
galing lust into the city, the stones like
piping loaves, the sun delving in canals.
How are you, Signore? the urchins ask.
I'm dying, how are you?--sweating blood into my
silks,
shitting, drooling, spare, like a gisant.
A doctor, Viennese, is cupping me
and always whistling: basset whistling, low.
Welts surging on my flesh, like café-table rings,
Der Arzt uncorks a mincemeat of jarred leeches.
I'm dying. I'm in a lust for humankind,
and everything about them: their homely smells,
the secret places of their bodies.
In dreams I'm walking golden, stunned,
out of the picture, in a delirium for touch:
rind, not essence, the watcher who
remains obscured. Cold news billows
in my arteries.
Last night, undressing, I saw behind me
her, half curtained in the dark, in this gimcrack,
gilded gloom, a woman with black hair
who looked like Death in Cocteau's Orpheus,
the one who said, when speaking of the gods,
They go on and on, like the wind in your forests,
like the tom-toms of your Africa.
She watches as I sleep.
In truth, she comes in every night
with grosso hair, in a Cassini winding sheet
with nubby weave, and I see it all
from up there by the gilding, as though
the whole tableau were happening for someone else.
And soundlessly we talk about the ghosts
entwined around our spines in tired clothes.
And we are older than anyone.
(Prior publ. Cicada, Rattapallax Press, 2000.)
A green ibis lifts
off its stump.
Eyes adjust from the
bird to the sky-reflecting swamp.
A red bird is stamped
on the eyes.
Inferior-oblique muscles
pull the eyeballs up,
ciliary muscles relax,
suspensory ligaments
pull taut—
this is how eye lenses
thin,
how we focus on the
circles of a broad-winged hawk.
Flocks and flocks enter
the body this way:
spermous birds swim
through semen-skies,
permeate egg-like
eyes;
light birds glide through
millions of cones and rods,
squeeze through the
optic nerves,
nest in the parietal
and hatch in the frontal lobes.
*
As memory swoops close
to these branches
piled on the chimney
of the brain stem
—to pounce and lap
the nestling to its tongue—
the lungs congest at
the thought of a wood stork
bawling from its nest
in the mid-brain.
March
Voices Daphne
Tobias Deehan
Lest we forget the
reasons
we are nothing but
a dream
moon slide beneath
linen horizon.
Reaching above was
your hand
in branch climb circles
a gray static surge
hold close my body.
Interesting to understand
you in control
you tell of yourself
maybe that is why
some weary making
friends
or making love.
Were I a tree
it would grow in Manhattan
hard in vigil reach
no country affair
of maybe two motor
cars
all day pass.
The compass fixed to
sate a sickness's need to compensate --
so they say it does
not exist, and certainly I've witnessed its
absence in many --
but having also named the thing (too late
to take it back) we
go on contriving at compassion in fits
far better fitted to
selfishness. I love more than I love myself.
Consult a textbook
if you like, charity is a privilege, far-fetched
and ultimately inconsistent
with evolutionary theory -- the gulf
between us is the
work of words and not loneliness, snatched
from the fondlings
of hate and furthermore called 'human.'
Perhaps that's why
it would be so difficult without the wealth
of your friendship,
to survive on the scarce instinct of one man
in a world this relentless.
I love more than I love myself.
The need that names
you, thing un-existing, is reason enough
to rejoice in the
lack of names for all the needs which poets bluff.
When I look up, see
over me
my ceiling's broad
domesticated sky--not
whole, oh no--its
overwhelming
footage too forbidding--I
mean
its crack, its plaster-slapped
mortality, I study
it; reveal its white
philosophy and
if its logic sags
at epicenter.
Or looking down, this
Euclid sees
rectangular, sees
roofs not multifarious
but dully black; of
numbing
uniformity--dead surfaces,
I am my
window's lonely face--from
there
I ruminate on tar.
And then, I might apostrophize:
my button's
shape; its thread;
a knotted rug but
just one patient inch
of it, I take from eyes
a single inoffensive
lash, from speech
I pluck its syllable
and from my cat I swoon
and take from him,
insouciance.
There is no larger
part of me; I am a
continent of single
grains, an office
bustling on a paperclip--and
on
a rag, its insubstantial
livery
of dust--add that
into my blameless head where
nothing lives that
is its whole environment,
but snatched
from it--how frail--a
poignant winnowed
entity.
And even love--what
is it,
but every day's dead
ribbons tied to
spring? Or if into
a languid day
I think of owls,
not of the tree its
midnight sits, or feathers,
or the wisdom of its
swooping or its
compact meat; oh no,
again my owl only is
its stare--and with
it, hung from air its chilling
hoot.
Krishna
Waits in the Car
Rob Wright
I
He drove, as agreed.
I begin to load the
parking meter
spooling out the silver
from pocket to palm.
He waves me on in
that off-handed, too-cool,
love-child way of
his.
Magic? Godliness?
If you can fox a parking
meter,
why not do the other
thing?
(I forget if I say,
or think this.)
Can’t, he says, drumming
the wheel in poly-rhythms
I am the
I am the I am the
You know why, he continues,
running over a thought.
He is all thought,
I am thinking him
or he me, I forget
which.
If your heart closes,
breaks…
Please stop! I say
…or becomes dry, he
continues
a light will go out of the world,
we say together.
A woman pushing a stroller
passes, looking at me oddly.
Her towheaded babe,
propped up in blue
stares at Krishna
as if he were a cloud of electrons.
II
Inside, the Vet smells
Vetish.
Name? a woman asks.
She is small with
square eyebrows
and wisps of hair
invading her temples
like nettles in a
field.
Bubastis, I say.
The woman looks into
the cage
Her name, not mine,
I add, unnecessarily.
Tortoise Shell?
Was, I almost say,
as if it were all accomplished.
Age?
Seven.
And why are you here,
little girl? she asks through the bars.
To be killed.
The word, the delicate
word
the word used now
is 'euthanized.'
'Put down' is passé
and 'put to
sleep' is quietly horrifying.
Bubastis and I are
put into a side room
which smells even
more like Vet.
Under the medicine
and urine is something else
a something-wrong
smell.
Bubastis lies down
and bats my finger coyly.
I used to believe,
and still do
that she was one of
the ten most beautiful things
I’d ever seen
but I am trying to
forget.
Close-up:
a frame-by-frame examination of an eye.
The pupil expands
pulled by watchmaker muscles
woven together and tied off like Flemish lace.
The Vet enters. She
is pleasant and doglike
in the way that her
assistant is catish.
She fills her needles,
one after the other.
Looks at me and explains—
I have no idea what.
I nod. The explanation
takes a long time.
One needle goes in.
It’'s been ten years
since I left Krishna in the car.
Bubastis’s breathing
slows and at the same time becomes larger.
More oxygen, her cat-brain
cleverness is true to the end,
extending itself in
time as the space around it gets thick.
Her eyes close, first
the false lid
then the other, the
color of lips and skin.
One big breath and
she sinks into herself
and lies inert, like
a balloon crashed in a field.
I study for the last
time the pattern of her fur,
wonderfully without
reason, and unique to her.
She takes another breath
the lip flaps out.
Die, I say and kiss
her head.
But this is for me.
She does not want
to die.
Today we played
the first time in
years
and that too was for
me.
Frame by frame:
a cone of sodium light roving in the indigo
plates and rivets crusted in polyps,
muscle shells, eddies of silt, a porthole.
The Vet returns. Bubastis
is feeling nothing now, she says,
interrupting the bathos.
What does her name
mean? the assistant asks.
It’s a town, I say,
or was.
They worshiped cats
there,
on the Nile, I think.
She nods as her boss
puts a long needle under Bubastis’s ribs,
now visible under
the emptying fur.
Her spark becomes
ash.
The electrons are
still dancing
but they are no longer
Bubastis.
III
The muddy hands I first
saw as a child
pulling ducklings
down into a lake.
Each day one fewer,
following the mother,
one fewer,
are here again.
My mother insisted
it was a snapping turtle,
but even from the
bank I could see the muddy hands
grasping. And here
they are again
in the shape of a
needle no thicker than a whisker.
Krishna is in the hot
car
still cool, tapping
out his poly-rhythms
against the diddle
of valves and pistons.
'No answer' is written
all over his blueness.
'No answer' is not
the answer
because that is an
answer
and therefore illusion
like Bubastis and
the baby ducks.
Krishna put the car
in gear
and pulls out effortlessly
into the flow of cars.
He's driving and that's
all.