Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013

by Sixfold

  the senseless odor of death now

  hushed and violent upon this city’s

  summer air to every overgrown child

  migrated here from provincial town

  in doomed hope that memory’s

  quick shame and long haunt will dim

  these thousand lights still shining

  on that jasmine branch I break again

  and thrust into your drowning hand

  Tangerine peels

  two women and a man

  sit in winter light

  eating chocolate and tangerines

  from a crystal bowl

  mint tea steams the turquoise pot

  a green canary sings Mozart

  among dying hibiscus

  the man hears familiar talk

  of transsexual politics

  does gender hold the heart

  at bay in heterosexual love

  when bodies are the same

  which can dominate the other

  is coupling war or just a game

  and if a game whose metaphors

  furnish the players’ rules

  how do they know to play

  a game whose rules get written

  even during the act of play

  not sure what to say

  or which to love

  the man stands up

  to clear the plates away

  the woman in white

  has eaten all her peels

  only the chocolate’s

  silver wrappings remain

  on a single green leaf

  the woman in black

  has torn her peels

  into tiny bits and stacked

  them in three heaps

  upon three green leaves

  the man stacks three plates

  in the turquoise sink

  he wonders how

  each woman’s hunger

  can include a man

  he chews a shred of bitter

  peel to find the answer

  pappa pappa pappageni

  the canary’s song is clear

  above the women’s laughter

  tart tangerine in a wounded ear

  R. G. Evans

  Dungeoness

  The worst part about being the guy in the cartoon

  hanging shackled to a dungeon wall is the mirror.

  It wasn’t always here, like back when I was young

  and sure of rescue, hurling curses at my jailers

  wherever, whoever they were. I was vain enough then

  I’d probably stare for hours, mugging at my reflection,

  sucking in my gut. But no. They slipped it in

  one night last year as I hung sleeping. When I awoke,

  both I and the haggard old man across from me

  screamed ourselves hoarse. Or is it as I hanged sleeping?

  If I could shrug, he’d shrug too. Xylophone-ribbed.

  Hair and beard an inseparable, lice-ridden thicket.

  I know it’s just a mirror, but I also know he watches me

  as I sleep, or pretend to sleep, dreaming that instead

  of being stretched by time here in this god-lost dungeon,

  I’m somewhere in the Caribbean or South Pacific maybe,

  just me and a lone palm tree, no one who looks like me.

  No one at all. One day if I’m lucky a bottle washes up,

  a little rolled note inside that says only, “Look.”

  And when I do, he’s there in the glass surface of the bottle,

  hollow-eyed and screaming at me loud enough to wake me

  but not to rouse my jailers. They wouldn’t come

  if he screamed all night, the way he’s planning to.

  Something about a Suicide

  Something about a suicide makes us

  tread more lightly as if the ground

  once trod by the voluntary dead

  grew spongy and unwell, as if to move

  might send distress signals like a fly

  in a web to whatever hungry mouth

  might be waiting to eat us.

  We make a thousand secret shrines

  we think no one can see, but pass another faithful

  on the street and you know. The bowed head.

  Eyes looking straight at someone no longer here.

  Every one a reliquary, bearing pieces

  of the one true do-it-yourself cross,

  ready to nurse doubt into belief and beyond.

  The Edge

  Go to the edge. We have always gone to the edge,

  to the place where the land becomes the sea,

  where with one more step we become something less

  solid, less substantial as well. This is why we can’t stay,

  why the edge compels us to take a bit of it away.

  A handful of scallop shells. A bit of sea glass

  bluer than our memory of the sea itself. Perhaps

  one larger shell, one with an obstruction

  that looks like a concrete seal, no way to hold it

  to the ear and have the imagined sea remind us

  of the edge. Take it away. Take it into your home.

  Forget it for a day or two. You will find it or

  it will find you, the way the wrong breeze

  from the salt marsh finds you: by the nose.

  You will find that the obstruction was a living foot

  that dragged its spined and sacred safety

  out of the closet and onto the bathroom floor

  to its final rest on the rough, sea-less tile.

  The edge never comes to us, and this is why.

  We know no better than to think we have control,

  that the edge will bow to us. Go to the edge

  with your shell-shaped ear. A sound like the sea

  will be waiting.

  The Magi

  The alpaca seemed resigned to the vultures

  that ringed it where it lay in the mud.

  The black-headed birds stood sentinel,

  not moving a feather, just watching

  as the alpaca’s chest rose and fell

  and rose and fell again, rapid, shallow breaths.

  The vultures waited. A soaking rain

  had fallen for hours, only stopping

  when the birds arrived. The alpaca lay

  sunken so far in the black and deepening slop,

  the stillborn cria beneath her breast

  all but concealed, only a pair of legs

  motionless in the mud. The mother panted

  and tried to lick her child’s wool clean.

  The cria disappeared into the muck

  under its mother’s weight. The vultures

  stood in a ring, watching, waiting.

  The low skies promised rain.

  The Maximist

  When he thought he loved the human race

  he wrote novels, brick-sized monuments to lives

  in chaos, filling the holes in those lives

  with every word he could. Then he fell in love

  with days that certain people lived

  and wrote short stories, road maps to guide them

  through the intricacies of 24 hours in a life that

  as a whole he could never love. Then he became a lover

  of organs: heart, brain, liver, the generous lock and key

  of penis and vagina. At last he was a poet,

  scribbling 15 minute odes to love and loss,

  drunks and other philosophers, and he would

  stand up at a microphone and read them,

  like a man fellating himself in public.

  But now he is a hermit, more wisdom than love in his life.

  He writes maxims in the sand, and when the tide comes in,

  in the water. The wise man knows,

  but tries to love nonetheless. A single fist

  contains more truth than all the libraries in the land.

  This is the s
and. That is the sea.

  Try to tell the difference to a word.

  David Kann

  Dead Reckoning

  For Beth Buxton

  Well, you died by inches

  fighting the filthy crab,

  surgeons carving important pieces

  from you,

  always one step behind.

  Tell me:

  when you lay

  together with your lover,

  though your desire had become

  no more than an echo,

  and when you let him

  uncover you

  and reveal the gnarled landscape

  your body had become,

  did you turn your head away

  in the slant lamp-shadows,

  like a child believing

  not to see him meant

  you were free

  of his gaze

  while he read

  the chart of scars,

  some red and purple and new,

  some tallow-yellow and settled-in—

  that odyssey of agony—

  could he squint through the map

  and regain the territory,

  and navigating by dead reckoning,

  did he lay his cheek by your tender navel

  and breathe you in,

  honey-sweet as an infant?

  Bolus of Flame in the Sistine Chapel

  The moment after Michelangelo

  finished

  the Sistine ceiling,

  he cleaned his brushes,

  snuffed

  his lanterns, turned and walked away

  for wine and a lover, needful,

  stunned

  by completion’s void,

  leaving the room, leaving God

  swaddled

  in a cloak red as sunrise,

  by pink, cloud-rounded cherubim

  lifted,

  with his finger almost touching Adam’s.

  In the reeking dark,

  filled

  with snuffed candle-smoke and drying plaster’s smell,

  life’s bright unruly spark

  leaped

  from God’s finger to Adam’s,

  and like sunstruck oil

  flowed

  and filled his palm, while God

  rose into the night and

  faded

  indifferent, leaving

  His orphan reclining on bare rock. Adam

  raised

  his burning hand to his mouth,

  swallowed the bolus of flame, then

  stood,

  staggering under the weight of conscious flesh,

  found his fiery tongue and

  spoke

  himself and all his get into time.

  Report from Planet Senex

  Whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

  —Lorca

  Oh, but this is a hard land

  to love.

  Grey hills slump

  and thick rivers

  sprawl in deltas

  splayed like dead hands.

  Tan sand’s strewn

  with flakes of flint and chert.

  No steel to strike.

  No kindling.

  Nothing to slice

  but brown lichen,

  rags of dead flesh

  on empty skulls.

  The shambling wind skins

  dust from the ground.

  Sunrise is a gray smear,

  and sunset stains

  the sky with spilled ink.

  All night

  in the dark

  sick fish wail

  from a stagnant lake,

  tearing the clouds.

  In the black gashes

  a few stars dim,

  their voices growing red,

  like opals sinking

  in thick oil.

  Pieta in Red

  I found a liquidambar tree,

  blazestruck with autumn and sunset.

  Among its five-point leaves,

  a red-tail hawk

  pinned a sprawled dove

  to a branch.

  She dipped her sickle beak

  to shredded pink meat.

  The naked dove didn’t move,

  complicit in the slow

  tearing toward its heart.

  In the windless evening

  the red light died

  in night’s slow slide

  up the flaming tree.

  When the Red-Tail gutted me

  with her eye.

  I filled

  with the icy consent

  of lichen, mushroom and frost.

  Then she closed

  her switchblade talons

  and rose above

  the leaves

  with the lolling dove.

  Ricky Ray

  Death, a Wife, and a Life of Broken Rules

  I

  Is it because

  I’m tired tonight

  that I don’t want

  to think of death,

  my lifelong confidante,

  the ear in me

  that has no flesh,

  that never had a drop of blood

  to spill

  between some crack in the desert—

  the ear that,

  as far as the eye can tell,

  is not here

  but is nonetheless wholly listening?

  II

  Whatever the reason,

  I must decline.

  No, my friend, I do not want

  a glass of wine with you,

  a tray of cheeses

  and fine cuts of meat;

  I do not want to shove you in my mouth

  and savor your descent into my bowels.

  III

  I want the simplicity of water

  tinged with the minerals

  of my hometown,

  the familiar blend of sulfur,

  iron and arsenic that makes

  hotel water taste wrong.

  IV

  I want a joke

  and the knowing laughter

  that swells in wit

  born of sorrow,

  sorrow that bites

  and leaves a mark

  that mars

  every flawless mirror.

  V

  I want a broken back that has just experienced

  an uncommon day of relief,

  a spine stretching toward the heavens

  that doesn’t recoil in pain.

  VI

  I want to know why the pigment in that painting

  made me feel the way I do. I want to live

  another night in the company of my wife’s skin.

  I want the moment when her shades of cream

  conspired to teach me what I could never

  have taught myself about the complexities of snow.

  VII

  I close my eyes

  and I am there;

  she is next to me

  and we are happy;

  the future

  is a condition

  apart from

  our time together.

  VIII

  They tell me I am foolish to dwell,

  that there is no life in death

  and no bringing back what’s gone.

  But I tell you

  they don’t know everything

  and life is a breaker of rules.

  IX

  And what my heart does with me

  when I turn myself over to its aims

  makes me a firm believer

  that love can do anything it wants.

  X

  When I want to be with her,

  all I have to do

  is sit like this

  and close my eyes.

  Then it’s easy,

  it’s like

  I’ve awoken in the night

  and all I have to do is

  peel back the covers<
br />
  and feel my way

  to her

  through the dark.

  The Music of As Is

  Dearheart: forgive the extreme tardiness of my reply—

  I meant to reply much sooner, but, alas, intentions

  are weaklings who hardly ever muscle their being

  into keeping its appointments. Interesting, the notion

  that we’re nearly always late to or altogether missing

  the meetings set up for us by our desires,

  and thereby run around on the stringy detritus

  of our potential. Why stringy? I don’t know,

  but when I think out the field and walk through its grass,

  I envision the shed potential not as flakes of skin

  drifting down, but as strung out guts falling in ropes,

  though without the gore or macabre mess—no,

  these are the guts of something finer within us,

  some heavenly-feathered cross-fiber, some

  suddening strings of energy that break into music.

  When I lie down in that field and feel the wind

  make followers of my hairs, I envision us running

  over these barely perceptible snakings of failure—visible,

  like much of beauty, only if we actively look for them—

  and think yes, there’s music in the air, so much music

  that the strings beneath us and the strings of us

  combine and conduct for the ear that cocks

  with ache to hear it, and that’s the music I want:

  the music of the way things go, not the way things

  could go, if. Oh, I meant to write you a letter dearheart,

  but I guess this is as it should be—I was never much

  of a correspondent. Still, imagine the possibilities

  of all that music, waiting like starlight to be

  plucked, threaded through the ears and taken down.

  The Blooming Noses

  Flowers, these people are flowers who can brace the wind of a winter’s day, but not the wind of a bullet. Most aim is bad despite the years of training and most rubber bullets will miss, but the few that don’t will scatter the majority into hiding, the rebels into hills, while dissidents shiver in abandoned buildings, heating beans over small blue flames. Some of the shooters will want to change sides, but will be bound to ignore their consciences and abide by the pullers of strings. Strings of the purse, not strings of the heart. Strings that say plant the drugs in the pocket and watch the felony grow. Mace the face and watch the dissent shrivel into tears. Rough up for good measure, but not in front of the camera, and not the pretty female face or the old face or the rest of the faces where it’s blatantly visible. A kidney shot for the mouthy ones and a stomach jab to widen the eyes of the poorly dressed and highly educated. Raid the encampment in the middle of the night and make a racket that would make your scalp seeking ancestors proud. Burn the library and break the cookware. Accost the medics, dump their stores into the sewers. Herd them all like sleepy cattle. Hint at slaughter. Make them feel that their life is in danger and tell them that you’re doing it for their own good. Their hygiene has been declared a public hazard and their health is in jeopardy in more ways than one. This is the land of baby powder, not the land of shit and mud. This is the land of tightly controlled chemical stimulation and the doctors are standing by to diagnose your condition. The pharmacists are standing by to fill your orders. It’s time to put away the signs and pick up your belongings and head up the mountain of debt. It’s time to think of your children in the present and forget about a nebulous future. It’s time to face the facts of your position and make your journey along the predefined routes. And if you insist on questioning rules, if you insist on picking at scabs, then it will be time to call in the hounds, and there is nowhere left on earth that escapes our gaze for long. If we have to hunt you down, we will, and then it will be time to teach you a lesson. Then it will be time to taste the blood of a traitor. Then it will be time for locked doors, brutal beatings, and the torturous hands of power. Then it will be time to wake up day after day and smell the bloody, blooming noses. And then, then it will be time to listen to the blood in our bodies, the blood down our faces, the blood on our hands, and feel our hearts pump with the truth of what the blood tells us to do.