Angie Estes

"TRUE CONFESSIONS"

If I'd been a ranch, they would've called me the Bar Nothing.
Gilda, 1946

I can never get a zipper
to close. Maybe that stands
for something, what do you think?
I think glamour is its own
allure, thrashing and
flashing, a lure, a spoon
as in spooning, as in l'amour
in Scotland, where I once watched
the gorse-twisted hills unzip
to let a cold blue lake
between them. St. Augustine says
the reason why humans behave
as they do is because they are
not living in their true
home. In Rita Hayworth's
first film, for example, Dante's Inferno
is a failing Coney Island
concession, and Margarita Cansino
plays the part of Rita
Cansino playing herself. And the true
home of glamour, by which
I mean of course the grammar
of glamour, is Scotland
because glamour is a Scottish variant
of grammar with its rustle of moods
and desires. Which brings us back to
the zipper and why we want it
to close, each hook climbing another
the way words ascend a sentence, trying on
the silver suture like clothes. In a satin
strapless gown, Gilda slowly peeled of
her black arm-length gloves, showed
how to strip down, diagram a sentence: Put
the blame on Mame, boys. In 1946, a pin-up
of Rita Hayworth and the name Gilda
rode on the side of the atomic bomb
tested at Bikini Atoll; it was summer
and you could buy a record, hear the sound
of her beating heart. By her last
film, The Wrath of God, her hair was a burning
bush; she couldn't remember
her lines, whether it's memory or loss
we're in need of most: to remember
the way home or forget
who we are when we get there.
Every man I have known has fallen
in love with Gilda and wakened
with me. St. Augustine asked, But when I love you,
what do I love? He asked the earth
and the breeze, perfume, song,
flesh, the sun, the moon
and stars: My question was the attention
I gave to them, and their response
was their beauty.

Taken from http://www.slate.com/id/2114182

Brendan Gavin

A MILE DOWN THE ROAD FROM HOME

I've caught myself
whistling a bumpy version
of "Take the A Train." and only
because this catbird in a beach-plum thicket has
taken me up on it,
or close enough, the bird
keeping a breath or two behind,
as if trying to hear where
I'm taking him, then diving
back into his own song line,
improvising along his strung-out
warbles and gutterals, and now
a few kingfisher rattles
and perhaps a black-billed cuckoo
or something else he's brought
up the hemisphere for this
season of courtship, cackles
and chucks, even a tree frog's piping.
I can feel Darwin frowning over me
like a thunderhead. A little
shaky about messing around
in natural selection, I look
both ways, taking care the bird
and I are alone before I donate
a ragged thread from "Peter Grimes"
to this slate-colored, black-capped
male who has only
a rufous undertail for flash.

Atlantic Monthly, Fiction Issue, 2006.

William Stafford

WHERE WE ARE

Fog in the morning here
will make some of the world far away
and the near only a hint.
But rain
will feel its blind progress along the valley,
tapping to convert one boulder at a time
into a glistening fact. Daylight will love what came.
Whatever fits will be welcome, whatever
steps back in the fog will disappear
and hardly exist. You hear the river
saying a prayer for all that's gone.

Far over the valley there is an island
for everything left; and our own island
will drift there too, unless we hold on,
unless we tap like this: "Friend,
are you there? Will you touch when
you pass, like the rain?"

Elaine Fargas

IF THERE IS A

If there is a God, he has a lot to answer for.
Crocuses, purple cups that bloom through snow.
Cerulean, cornflower, azure, turquoise, ultramarine.
Mist of round haybales along the Sand Road
just after 5 a.m., when the foxes go to ground.
Not only the obvious evils, but also these other things
we should not mistake for easy.

AT POPLAR POND

There are angels right there between those trees.
Don't be frightened, I'm not seeing things.
The spaces we call empty are full of—
not tree, not sky, but us. We station our angels
aloft to make our place in the holy ordinariness.
So these simples—chalky water, poplar,
moth-flown light—are that blind, sacred flesh.

A LITTLE CHAMPAGNE MUSIC

Should there be a poetry of men? "Why do you suppose
everyone's writing about God these days?"
Taffy-colored hair and damselflies, amaryllis
vulgar as a flatted horn, clavicles and happenstance.
We should be coupling and uncoupling like the Atchison,
Topeka, and the Santa Fe. Our daily bread
and foxtrot. And a-one and a-two . . .

An Animal of the Sixth Day
1996 Winner of the TTUP First-Book Competition

Galway Kinnell

EVERYONE WAS IN LOVE

One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus
appeared in the doorway, naked and mirthful,
with a dozen long garter snakes draped over
each of them like brand-new clothes.
Snake tails dangled down their backs,
and snake foreparts in various lengths
fell over their fronts, heads raised
and swaying, alert as cobras.
They writhed their dry skins
upon each other, as snakes like doing
in lovemaking, with the added novelty
of caressing soft, smooth, moist human skin.
Maud and Fergus were deliciously pleased with themselves.
The snakes seemed to be tickled too.
We were enchanted. Everyone was in love.
Then Maud drew down off Fergus’s shoulder,
as off a tie rack, a peculiarly
lumpy snake and told me to look inside.
Inside that double-hinged jaw, a frog’s green
webbed hind feet were being drawn,
like a diver’s, very slowly as if into deepest waters.
Perhaps thinking I might be considering rescue,
Maud said, “Don’t. Frog is already elsewhere.”

 

Atlantic Monthly, September 2006.

Alan Dugan

LOVE SONG: I AND THOU


Nothing is plumb, level or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh, I spat rage's nails
into the frame-up of my work:
it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planned it, I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

 

Rachel Hadas

BODY OF BOOK

This is one way to talk about a book:
I woke into the locus of my body.
In sleep's thick envelope, what poems fit?
Dream-card sealed with a kiss and then sent out.
What we meant was musing, nothing else.
Did the dream not spring from memory?
Remembering who said what or what I read:
The sin of middle age, misattribution.
Cherished, it writes itself upon your skin.
I could tell the time of day without looking at the sun.
Salted with a tear and wiped and sent:
You take it with you to the land of sleep,
Body of book to read and to be read to,
Out into the world, its face still damp.

Cherished, it writes itself upon your skin.
You take it with you to the land of sleep.
Remembering who said what, or what I read,
I could tell the time of day without looking at the sun.
Body of book: to read and to be read to,
Salted with a tear and wiped and sent
(The sin of middle age, misattribution)
Out into the world, its face still damp,
Dream-card sealed with a kiss and then sent out
Until we all went wearily to bed.
I woke into the locus of my body
Where what we meant was kindness, nothing else.
Did the dream not spring from memory?
This is one way to talk about a book.

http://www.slate.com/id/2182659

 

Tomás Q. Morin

THE BOX

So I remember the hidden: every night my zaydee
at the ballet watching Zizi
kicking her petite leg above the outstretched claws
of the chorus line as they moved in perfect ruby unison
through third position and then spun
their tulle skirts into a twirl.
All that I know of the interior paramour
I learned from patient zaydee sitting shirtless
off-stage in his old pajamas,
waiting for his crop-haired Zizi to flick
her gypsy fan onto his lap in a mighty crescendo
of leaps and bounds and how could I not love this
and him and all his knowledge of the carnal
life inside the box and so it is
for his sake alone I placate the lovers shaking their fists
in the park, pitched in battle over all the new thinking
outside the box they call their lives
and the faces they make as I pull from my coat
the Lobster Ballet I can never remember
because always I am too busy abandoning their hearts
and engaging the subtle mechanisms of dance
and pointing and blabbering in my delicious nervousness
so that I even forget to tell them they should hum
something Iberian or Basque
and that even "April in Paris" will do
as I gently shake the scarlet dancers of Carmen
to stockinged attention and then the watching,
the blessed watching of lovers
rediscovering the pageantry of the interior.

http://www.slate.com/id/2164498/nav/navoa/

 

Gavin Bantock

HEATHEN

The gold earrings with little bells on them
you gave to the river, are probably,
if you think hard enough,
still there.

When you flung them into the overwrought
waters, did you ever think, I wonder, how
godforsaken they'd seem, sitting down there
among the cold-shouldering stones?
And do you realise they're now no longer
really a pair?

Maybe they were cheap, as you murmured
with a half apologetic smile. I only hope
the gesture itself was not also carelessly
flamboyant, done in ingenuine frenzy.

Never fear: it is not my intention to scold:
I know that your lifelong christianity gone to seed
already bears the most splendid of wild flowers;
and one of the rings will one day perhaps be
found and treasured by a smiling dragon
who knows even now that before you were born
you also were the stuff of the incorrigible
hard-bitten heathen.

Oxford Today, Hilary Issue 2007