April - Poem 12

The Bridge  contd/ Maureen Alsop

I think of the older spirits who want to come and enjoy the folly. I think
of the sea turning in its angles and projections against us. You asked
how might i become u?
On wonder of recognition to my life at this juncture
The rippling surface of the dream—a courtesy, a fraction
and a flip-tide—the closing and opening of my soul in all
the ways you were alone/ unstoppable/ this grief/ this,
your grief or mine/

On wonder of recognition in my life at this juncture
You recede. Recognition recedes, the ebbing now.

Hair / Bob Bradshaw

At 20 my hair
    was shoulder-length
    like Il Magnifico’s.

    Soon it was longer 
    than Raphael’s
    or Botticelli’s curly locks.

    Everywhere 
    my long-haired friends
    and I talked art. 

    In a few years
    my younger neighbors
    looked at me  

    as if to ask, 
    "Why are you here? 
    You’re old."
    
    Now? In my 70s 
    I'm as bald 
    as a frog.
   
    Yet when I look back
    on my days 
    in Haight-Asbury

    I never worried
    that I’d shed my hair.
    Or grow old.

    Wasn’t youth like a lover 
    vowing never 
    to leave?

    What happened?
    What always
    happens.

    In old age
    don’t we always
    ache 

    for the one
    who got 
    away?

The Death of Catreus / Stan Galloway

News of death is never convenient:
postponements must be arranged
daily tasks delegated
supplies marshaled
travel details mapped out
chaos wrangled.

No time to mull the circumstances
                         rumors that it was my uncle
                                     that Catreus was nothing but a pirate
Such wild stories should be dismissed.
Leave the guests to Helen.
Make the trip to Crete and back
                                                   as quickly as a stork
Then return to pick up pieces
                        put life back in order.

Early Spring / Ava Hu

*

Substitute the sound 
of a flute for bird call. 

The river rings 
the bells of haiku.

The mind of a river
is here and now. 

Ringing temple bells
break air,

shake leaves into essence 
a listening.

*

imprecise efforts at welding / nat raum

we were supposed to be gold, supposed to be a david
rose and patrick brewer kind of love, where we are both

the flashy dramatic one and the voice of rationality
in tandem. what i mean is i thought this was real, despite

signs to the contrary, because i am trying to trust people.
we were supposed to be new cycles, not endless barbecue

dinners where i find out lies by omission. you said open up. 
it’s safe here. i was okay to still fall asleep and dream of locked

doors, triple deadbolts. the light of the morning sieves
through clouds, silver at best. never was i precious enough.

There, the Apalachicola River unspools   / Kirsten Miles

Cutting through the tupelo apiaries and the sundew.
You found your Helen, or perhaps she found you,
a woman whose heart beats in the same green meter,
mirroring your passion for the Florida I remember.

Together, you two  returned me with my daughter
down the glass-clear pulse of Wakulla Springs
the same waters where, as a toddling child,
I first followed your boots and had my eyes blessed open.
You brought the wilderness to my door, 
an orphaned bear cub tumbled
with a four year old in a thin nightgown on a wood floor,
fawns cradled like kin, you never let me get away
with childish selfishness.

Your voice like no other, wise, both bold and restrained, quick to laugh.
You, who marched me, awkward, into an officers' ball in my first gown,
wept together over The Yearling and wept again
with my children over its tender breaking heart,
knowing that to love the wild is to know its cost.

It was always a matter of looking closely, wasn't it?
From my first rain soaked hike in the pacific northwest
to name the swifts that spend their lives in the breezes,
in the mud of a paleoarcheological dig in Savannah with my daughter
returning to the Spanish moss-drip of the Florida panhandle,
a 300 year old dwarf cypress grove in Tate’s Hell
finding a miracle of access at Rish Park to give her back 
again to our beloved Gulf Coast waters.

More than my first book of natural history,
than names of flora and fauna,
you gave me the gravity of the earth,
a world never empty
the holy, tangled history of the dirt.

Now, when the wind leans into the pines,
I’ll gaze through a pair of your eyes, 
mine forever open,
reminding me that we are only as deep
as the things we stop to notice.

The Lament of Cognito Amor  / Sergiy Pustogarov

as we climb to the top tonight--
a slow and steady cranking fills the air:
the turning gears creaking and groaning pause the world.

we have reached the initial plunge,
as we stand above it all for a single moment--
we see the land below spread out for eternity--

a circus laid out for the amusement of the rich,
unchecked without precautions for the masses--
ready to send millions hurdling down a roller-coaster.

the ride holds no basis in physics,
but rather claims the pursuit of a thrill for the few:
for death counts no longer matter this time.

jump down--
set off your paraglider, and hope 
you will each the ground in safety.

watch as the cars fall off the tracks.
reaching up your arms in angst--
and wait.

catch--
one soul, and then another;
as many as these feeble hands seek.

breathe--
and do not die during this time
from a plummeting track upon your neck.

oxygen 
will only assist the others,
when you have put on your mask.

Hypothesis / Daniel Avery Weis

He is alive in my dog's eyes. 
He is alive in clay.
He is a microbe,
a macrobe,
and a bathrobe.
He is alive in my printer, where he
drinks from the ink cartridges, he has
peeled off the curtain he used to hide me
from the view of his indulging in his
favorite things alone
(cover the eyes of your children—joy
comes creeping in).
He is alive in a text box, which is an urn.
He is alive in the “fun guy” of the fungi
in a bad joke.
He is alive and playing pool (he is also
riding the balls like circus balls and guffawing
at how silly this image is).
He is alive in a suspicious rendition of für elise,
composed by my dog, which is the sound of
his heartbeat beneath the fur.
He is alive in between unstoppable forces and
immovable objects.

pathways / MK Zariel

my life is a reflecting pool full of algae and pollution
you can only figure out who you are by combing through
distortion, through the endless drift of people-pleasing.
i just gave a reading advertised as a midnight event
that turned out to start at 7pm. i felt a little guilty
despite myself. i will get hate mail from the militantly nocturnal

and then i'll wake up, knowing it was another anxiety dream
for nobody. artificial light reflects on the ceiling, the window
brightened only by distant neon—the entire Midwest a collection
of houses that look like each other. copy and paste neighborhoods
and you have a doom spiral, a human cost, a wayward rippl

that floods through everything. it's easy to procrastinate
when everything you're trying to do leads back to personal growth.
i don't want to heal. i take a deep breath. i want to have healed.i take a shallow breath. i cancel plans, smile despite myself,
make other plans, walk through liminal spaces only to get yeled at
i want to have been loved and i keep walking.