MODERN HAIBUN AND TANKA PROSE 1

Modern Haibun

& Tanka Prose

Modern Haibun

& Tanka Prose

ISSUE 1 SUMMER 2009

ISSN 1947-606X

Edited by Jeffrey Woodward

MODERN ENGLISH TANKA PRESS

Post Office Box 43717

Baltimore, Maryland 21236 USA

www.themetpress.com publisher@themetpress.com

Modern Haibun &Tanka Prose

Issue 1 - Summer 2009

Front cover art, “The Balcony” by Edouard Manet, 1868-69.

electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems

without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers and scholars

who may quote up to six poems.

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose , a biannual print and digital journal, is dedicated to the

publication and promotion of fine English haibun and tanka prose. We seek

traditional and innovative haibun and tanka prose of high quality and desire to

assimilate the best of these Japanese genres into a continuously evolving English

tradition. In addition to haibun and tanka prose, we publish articles, essays, book

reviews and interviews pertinent to these same genres.

Send all submissions and editorial correspondence to: mhtp.editor@gmail.com

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose

Issue 1 - Summer 2009

Published by

MODERN ENGLISH TANKA PRESS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 2009.

Print Edition ISSN 1947-606X

Digital Edition ISSN 1947-6078 [PDF & HTML versions]

www.themetpress.com/modernhaibunandtankaprose/

Contents

Editorial

Haibun & Tanka Prose—Down at the Crossroads, 7

Haibun

Dawn Bruce, 13 ~ David Cobb, 14 ~ Emma Dalloway, 22

Tish Davis, 24 ~ Cherie Hunter Day, 25 ~ Lynn Edge, 26

Ruth Franke, 27 ~ Charles Hansmann, 28 ~ Jeffrey Harpeng, 29

Penny Harter, 36 ~ Graham High, 38 ~ Ruth Holzer, 43

Larry Kimmel, 45 ~ Marylouise Knight, 46 ~ Rona Laycock, 47

Gary LeBel, 48 ~ Renée Owen, 50 ~ Patrick Pilarski, 51

Joanna Preston, 52 ~ Ray Rasmussen, 53 ~ Ynes Sanz, 54

Adelaide B. Shaw, 55 ~ André Surridge, 56 ~ Zinovy Vayman, 57

Jeffrey Winke, 58 ~ Tad Wojnicki, 59

Tanka Prose

Cherie Hunter Day, 63 ~ Amelia Fielden, 64 ~ Jeffrey Harpeng, 68

Larry Kimmel, 70 ~ Ingrid Kunschke, 71 ~ Gary LeBel, 80

Bob Lucky, 82 ~ Giselle Maya, 85 ~ Michael McClintock, 88

Stanley Pelter, 91 ~ Dru Philippou, 95 ~ Patricia Prime, 97

Miriam Sagan, 100 ~ Linda Jeannette Ward, 104 ~ Jeffrey Woodward, 105

Short Works

Hortensia Anderson, 111 ~ Marjorie Buettner, 111 ~ Owen Bullock,113

Ashley Capes,113 ~ Tish Davis, 114 ~ Jamie Edgecombe, 116

Charles Hansmann, 117 ~ Jeffrey Harpeng, 118 ~ Marilyn Hazelton, 119

Ed Higgins, 119 ~ Colin Stewart Jones, 120 ~ Michael Ketchek, 120

Shelley Kirk-Rudeen, 122 ~ Bob Lucky, 122 ~ Mary Mageau, 124

Francis Masat, 126 ~ Michael McClintock, 127 ~ Renée Owen, 130

Carol Pearce-Worthington, 131 ~ Dru Philippou, 131 ~ Patrick Pilarski, 133

Joanna Preston, 134 ~ Ray Rasmussen, 134 ~ Duncan Richardson, 135

Adelaide B. Shaw, 136 ~ Richard Straw, 136 ~ Linda Jeannette Ward, 138

Diana Webb, 139 ~ Jeffrey Winke, 140 ~ Tad Wojnicki, 141

Jeffrey Woodward, 141

Articles & Notes

Jeffrey Woodward, Wheeling through the Cedars:

an Interview with Michael McClintock, 145

Richard Straw, Democratic Haibun, 161

Close Reading & Commentary:

Dave Bacharach on Linda Jeannette Ward

& Michael Dylan Welch on Joanna Preston, 165

Book Notes, 169

Contributors, 173

EDITORIAL

Haibun & Tanka Prose—Down at the Crossroads

I’m pleased to welcome readers and contributors to the inaugural issue of

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose , a gesture that I make with a sense of the

historical nature of an occasion. Haibun and tanka prose are relatively

new in English literary practice—roughly 50 and 25 years old,

respectively—and have survived in subterranean fashion, surfacing at odd

intervals in the back pages of haiku journals or in private and limited

edition collections read predominately by the cognoscenti.

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, the first digital and hardcopy periodical

devoted exclusively to haibun and tanka prose, represents, therefore, a

significant turning point toward broader acceptance of these two related

but distinct prose-plus-verse genres. This recognition, in turn, is a product

of the rapid development and maturation of able practitioners during the

past dozen years, dating, at least, from the publication in 1997 of David

Cobb’s ambitious and accomplished literary haibun, The Spring Journey to

the Saxon Shore .

To tire the reader with a long digression upon the similarities and

differences between haibun and tanka prose would be improper in a

general editorial. Both forms are in flux and daily redefining their

boundaries, at all events, so it would be an act of presumption to strive

to offer any conclusive formal definition of what haibun is, what tanka

prose is. Writers and readers alike, in these mixed prose-and-verse genres,

may frequently discover themselves down at the crossroads, that

sometimes desolate, sometimes bustling stopover—hardly a

destination—that inspires reflection not only upon the road that led there

but upon the routes, also, that diverge immediately ahead.

A simple coarse distinction between haibun and tanka prose will suffice

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

7

for our purposes here. Haibun normally weds the two elements, prose

and haiku, in a single composition while tanka prose joins prose and

tanka. Experience has taught us that most readers prefer the poem to a

discussion of it and that the curious individual who desires theory and

explanation will seek it out independently. For the latter, the note that

follows this editorial offers a brief bibliography of writings that touch

upon these matters.

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose aspires to present as fully as possible the

broad spectrum of haibun and tanka prose today—to aim at inclusion,

not exclusion. Our first interest is good writing in a contemporary

English idiom, regardless of the subject matter, form or treatment assayed

by the poet. A collateral aspect of catholic editorial principles is to identify

symptoms of ossification, of premature attempts to limit the acceptable

subjects, techniques and forms of haibun and tanka prose. Haibun, with

a slightly longer history of English practice, has been prey to such

aesthetic censorship more often than has tanka prose. It is useful,

therefore, to counter some of the misconceptions most commonly

encountered:

•

Haibun may adopt the form of a travelogue or diary but are by no

means required to do so. Travelogue and diary are only two of

many options available to haibun.

•

Haibun are neither invariably autobiographical nor limited to the

experiential or sensory observation nor are they limited to the

present tense. Haibun need not be confessional or ‘factual’ but

can as easily be fiction. Do not safely assume that the first person

singular in a work is identical with the author.

•

One paragraph of prose, one haiku, fini, and in that order: this

form, especially in haibun in haiku journals, is dominant but,

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Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

again, only one of many options available to the poet. The

number and placement of verses in relation to the prose is one of

the chief determinants of the harmony, tone and flavor of a text.

To fail to explore formal options other than the above cited ‘basic

unit’ is unduly restrictive and can only curtail the full range of

subjects and treatments available to the poet.

These remarks, of course, are applicable to tanka prose as well.

Other than reflections upon flexibility and catholicity of taste, only a few

general remarks upon format and policy will further detain the reader.

The main body of Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose has been divided into

three sections: haibun, tanka prose and ‘short works.’ This final category

does not imply, due to brevity, that the compositions so designated are

‘lesser’ or ‘minor.’ It was devised, instead, in recognition of the fact that

a healthy percentage of haibun and tanka prose works do not exceed the

120 word mark. To place haibun and tanka prose side-by-side, in this

section only, will hopefully permit clear comparison and possibly promote

mutual influence or cross-fertilization of the two forms.

Future issues will include, like this premier number, an editorial preamble

as well as a section devoted to articles and book notes—graced, in these

pages, by a lively and informative interview with Michael McClintock, a

cogent essay by Richard Straw, and the close readings and commentaries

of Dave Bacharach and Michael Dylan Welch. Descriptive book notes

will be offered in lieu of full length reviews so as to devote more pages to

original haibun and tanka prose works. Reprints of creative or critical

writings, by policy, will be few in number, and at the editor’s sole

discretion.

I thank the many fine haibun and tanka prose poets who contributed

work to this first issue and invite poets only now discovering Modern

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

9

Haibun & Tanka Prose to share their writings in the future. Haibun and

tanka prose contain the adventure and promise of a new world. I wish

both reader and poet a share in that world’s discovery.

Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit

May 1, 2009

Notes

“Haibun Today? And Your Point Would Be . . .?,” Haibun Today (Nov. 22, 2007)

at <http://haibuntoday.blogspot.com/2007/11/editorial-haibun-today-and-your-point.html>

“Haibun Minus Haiku,” Haibun Today (Nov. 30, 2007)

at <http://haibuntoday.blogspot.com/2007/11/jeffrey-woodward-haibun-minus-haiku.html>

“The Road Ahead for Tanka in English,” Modern English Tanka V2, N2 (Winter 2007), 180-181

at <http://www.themetpress.com/MET/vol2/no2-MET6.html>

“The Elements of Tanka Prose,” Modern English Tanka V2, N4 (Summer 2008), 194-197

at <http://www.themetpress.com/MET/vol2/no4-MET8.html>

“Introduction,” The Tanka Prose Anthology (Baltimore: MET Press, 2008), 9-34

“Tanka Prose and Haibun Today,” Haibun Today (Sept. 25, 2008)

at <http://haibuntoday.blogspot.com/2008/09/editorial-tanka-prose-and-haibun-today.html>

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Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

HAIBUN

Dawn Bruce ~ David Cobb ~ Emma Dalloway

Tish Davis ~ Cherie Hunter Day ~ Lynn Edge

Ruth Franke ~ Charles Hansmann ~ Jeffrey Harpeng

Penny Harter ~ Graham High ~ Ruth Holzer

Larry Kimmel ~ Marylouise Knight ~ Rona Laycock

Gary LeBel ~ Renée Owen ~ Patrick Pilarski

Joanna Preston ~ Ray Rasmussen ~ Ynes Sanz

Adelaide B. Shaw ~ André Surridge ~ Zinovy Vayman

Jeffrey Winke ~ Tad Wojnicki

Dawn Bruce: An Act of Kindness

I know the time will come when I must return to the busy routine of working

days followed by quiet evenings strung out before me, like so many dull beads.

But on a sleepy Sunday, I’m not prepared for a banging on the window and the

raucous laughter of Fred and Katrina.

an open door

the maiden hair fern

quivers

‘Cheer up,’ they call and plop down on the nearest chairs. From a shopping bag

they throw down a stretch of yellow, so bright I blink and wish I could put on

my sunglasses.

They tell me this was a bargain. 'A lovely curtain to brighten things up. Just what

you need for that gloomy kitchen of yours.’

Before I can say anything they pull off the tulle excuse for a curtain and standing

on tiptoe, Fred manages to slip the replacement onto the timber rod. Long

streaks of glare inflame the kitchen but my guests are so joyful what can I do but

thank them.

They sit down again and after an hour of chat and coffee decide to move on.

Twilight at last and the evening light dulls to dingy. The curtains grey like tired

sea birds flapping at the window. I sit on and on—welcoming my ghosts and

making friends with them, until their haunting strength fades.

morning

a gold moment

flutters me awake

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

13

David Cobb: dance of death in a smiling city

As I knew it, forty years ago . . .

City of Angels―

the gong of rising sun

on rusted tin

Echo of castanets. Papayas piled in baskets, murky pails of seething tripes,

hawkers hoisting them onto their shoulder yokes. Plump-waisted women in

sarongs raucous in the market shed, moulding rice balls, slapping bananas flat

with wooden paddles, tiger-striping them on griddles over charcoals, searingly

hot but not allowed to glow. How breakfast was prepared for most people and

served in that quarter of Bangkok.

Then, in the dawn shadows cast by dented roofs, hurrying along duck-boards

straddling capillaries of scummy water, came the young women on the ways to

their employments― government clerks, shop girls, teachers, students, sugar

slum fairies, angels from one of the minor heavens, neatly skirted, in blouses

starched and white as you'd never seen cotton cloth before, on pin-shiny black

high heels. Their black hair coiled.

Young women like those would sometimes tell you they had no expectations of

long lives. It would be like a tantalising dance, in which dancers sometimes

attached brass extensions to their fingernails, sharp and scratchy, and if they

were careless someone would suffer.

without a tongue

the brass bell used in spleen

to snuff a candle

The first death . . .

Two funerals so close together she could hardly separate one grieving from the

other. Her husband, first, tuberculosis. Their son observantly taking leave from

his work to become a monk and, with the merit so made, assure his father's safe

passage through the world of evil spirits to his bliss beyond. Neighbours and

friends had offered the five permissible gifts: saffron robe, umbrella, water

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Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

strainer, food bowl and fan. Then the close family had got the young man ready

for his induction. Seating him on a chair in the yard, his sisters had shaven his

head, mocking him as the locks fell away from their shears.

'Like making a landing on the moon!' shrieked one. 'Just look at the craters!' His

skull, he was tall, failing often to duck the teakwood lintel over the door. 'Watch

out, here comes an astronaut!'

'More like an alien,' retorted her sister, poking her finger at a wart her scissors

had just revealed. 'Better not touch! Aliens bite people and turn them into pih !'

The wart left with a crest of bristles on its top.

But the sisters cut his toenails too. And then he was jubilated off to the temple

on a tumbrel, amid a hubbub of bamboo oboes and clapping and thumped

drums.

Three days later the abbot let him out of the temple with the fully ordained

monks, to walk the streets and let people make merit with their kind offers of

food. Last in the line, his alms bowl so patently new, he came at last to the

gateway outside his own home. His mother had been standing there one whole

patient hour already, training her mind to think of him not as her son, but as a

holy man. Must lower her eyes and not say a word. Be mindful not to touch the

rim of his bowl with her profane spoon.

Oh, but discreetly she mothered him with curried vegetables, and most especially

with the prawns― how succulently they glistened in a polythene bag strangled

with a rubber band! Monsters like that were seldom within her means.

How could she know they had been feeding on the outfall of a sewer, where a

drunk had fallen in and drowned with a million salmonellae in his gut?

is it for ocean

the grey shrimps are groping?―

scree of crunched ice

The second death . . .

You won't hear his tick-tack in the soi today. Until last week those dwelling there

had listened for it Wednesday afternoons. Tick-tack, tick-tack, tack― the lottery

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

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ticket seller tapping his way along the busy lane, striking against his white stick

the bulldog clip that gripped the tickets. Yes, he was blind. But just halt him with

a touch on the shoulder, choose that special number you'd dreamed of, detach

the ticket, put the exact coins in his hand. Be sure he would check them between

finger and thumb before he dropped them into his pocket. Not a word spoken.

People assumed he was deaf as well as blind.

But on his day last week workmen were unblocking a drain that had clogged up

after torrential rain. Couldn't finish the job because the trouble was right deep

down, and when they set down their tools in the evening they carelessly left the

manhole cover lying beside a gaping hole. How was the blind man to know? The

woman in the nearest kitchen was pesteling chillies when she heard the cries.

Why connect them with a man you had never heard before? She carried on

pounding.

But when a new man fills the blind man's place, she remembers the exact time

and date of those cries and chooses her ticket according to those numbers.

Always heed a tip from gham . And, marvellous to tell, she has picked a winner!

Not the main prize, of course― isn't that always reserved for the top man in the

junta, the field marshal with seven rows of medals? But what a poor woman can

do when Fate delivers even a second prize . . .

a little treat―

a smoking joss stick

for the greasy gods

The third death . . .

Far down the soi is a wooden house where two young missionaries live. White

men, Mormons, from the inscrutable bowels of America. Renting a room from

a woman who calls herself Susi and runs a massage parlour on the ground floor.

Sometimes, oblivious to the business going on inside, they even stand just

outside the parlour, offering leaflets to her customers. Mistranslated prophesies

of a saving grace.

At least once a day they march abreast down the soi , like an honour guard for

their carrier bag of tracts. Acne pimples, scoured twice a day, swim in the sweat

of their necks. Dogs, pariah dogs, shrink from the smell of carbolic. All except

one, a sick animal that failed to avoid a tuk-tuk as it juddered through. Wounded

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fatally, it loafs in mid-road, foam dribbling from its jaws.

One Mormon has rabies but the other carries on.

a parcel from home

his late friend's too late pie―

taste of cinnamon

The fourth death . . .

Nai Pin has a numerous wizardry of amulets. Each with a special power of its

own. This to guard against fire, that to prevent a theft (even of itself), yet

another, if well rubbed, to aid the lovelorn lecher to seduce a woman. And so

on.

Nai Pin, more collector than dealer, doesn't like to part with any of his hoard,

but the Vietnam war has sparked a brisk trade, and he is tempted: you can name

your own price for an amulet that deflects a bullet.

Tomorrow there's a GI coming and Nai Pin is making sure the appropriate

charm is up to pepper. It hasn't seen active service for some time, so he builds

an altar on a rickety table in the yard, brass buddha with a rope of jasmine buds

around its neck, places the amulet before it, wrapped in a rag. Sewn onto the rag

is a skein of silk thread which he unravels and attaches to all the defining points

of his house: gables, gutters, doorposts, water butts. He bows his head over the

amulet, repeating some special words and sprinkling lustral water.

Oh, your clever man who knows some science may scoff, it's simply a lodestone,

with enough magnetic force to turn a small iron ball from its path.

When the sergeant comes, he itches to test the amulet and bargain Nai Pin

down, then get back to the business of 'rest and recreation'. Barely a nibble of

one of the mangosteens Nai Pin has cut up for him, barely a sip of the iced

coffee. 'C'mon, let's get on with the show!'

Nai Pin, who believes rituals should be dignified, slow, loads an ancient

handgun, places the amulet between himself and a water melon― the target.

Decorously he pulls the trigger, there's a loud bang, the melon is unscathed. The

recoil has stung badly, but Nai Pin tries not to wring the bruised hand. Puts the

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

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other hand on the melon and pats it.

The sergeant won't be taken in. 'Hey, c'mon on. Jeez, that's play-acting! Seen

stunts like that before. How the hell do I know what you aimed at? Call a

fucking melon a live target? Might crack off a shot at you, Nai Pin, but wouldn't

risk the chance of homicide. Tell you what― tie up that darn crittur an' I'll fire

the gun this time!'

Nai Pin's protests are ignored. The house dog has to be tied up to a post or the

deal is dead.

The sergeant, eye along the barrel, draws a bead and fires. Too much for the

antiquated pistol, it explodes, taking off one of the sergeant's fingers and pulping

his left eye.

The lookers-on wag their heads, they are not astonished, there are many reasons

why such an outcome was to be expected. The farang didn't wai the amulet before

he touched it, he didn't hang it correctly around the mongrel's neck, it's sinful to

abuse a dumb animal. Above all, the charm's power was for Thai people, not

Americans.

multiple choices

a letter from battle HQ

to the next of kin

The fifth death . . .

There were no trees in the backyards and every housewife had to tie her washing

line to a hook in a wall. But in the street outside the squalid terrace of lock-up

shops with living rooms above, there was a tree. Just the one. A very small,

nondescript tree, with a few puny branches, meagre dusty leaves, never seeming

to grow much, even when the rains drenched it in the monsoons. You had to

walk far to see another tree. It was special.

Special most of all for little Doi. Since the morning when she folded her hands

and gave it her wai greeting, the day there was a spelling test at school and she

came up with top marks, she knew there was a good spirit in it. Each evening

she took the tea urn and tipped the sugary dregs over it, her libation. Held her

tongue as her mother chided her, 'What are you up to, little Doi? Encouraging

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ants?'

Then one night, far gone in drink, a driver swerved to avoid two scattering cats,

sheared down the small tree, right down to its stump. Drove off, as the

neighbours flip-flopped out of their homes to share the kindling.

What did Doi do? She bathed the stump, wrapped a red cotton rag around it.

People laughed at her.

Was it some kind of resurrection she had in mind? She recovered a shoot and

planted it in a pot. Gashed her hand and infected it with soil as she patted it

firm.

At the hospital the doctor tried to explain lock-jaw to Doi's mother, but it was

all garbled by the time she told her neighbours. The general impression was

Tetanus was the name of the spirit, who really had been in the tree all along.

hanging things out―

even on damp hand-me-downs

she dries a tear

The sixth death . . .

At the funeral, each of the junior teachers has been given a memento, Aphorisms

of a Guru . They sit in silence, pondering which one of them might be asked to

take over his class.

Quite an honour, and a small salary raise. He will inherit the classroom next to

the city's busiest road, where you can hang out of the window and actually touch

a car. Its back row of desks closer to a bus stop than the blackboard. Exhaust

gases excoriating throats reciting irregular verbs. Fumes burning eyes strained to

recite the chemical elements. Taxi hoots and the eternal racket of combustion.

Only when, once a year or so, the King passes in his limousine, the traffic halts,

and the silence is so shocking everyone rushes to the window to see what's up.

The Old Guru had a way of dealing with it. Stood in the middle of the room and

shouted his lessons to the class. Shouted almost the whole of six lessons a day,

then went to the temple to pray.

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

19

a lump in his throat―

unfolding chaste petals

of a lotus bud

The seventh death . . .

Until the girls in her class are fifteen years of age she uses the pronoun 'mouse'

to talk to them. 'Has mouse forgotten to do her homework again?' When she

speaks to the school principal she also refers to herself as 'mouse'. 'Headmistress,

is it all right if mouse talks to her girls about their monthlies?'

Mouse is also astonishingly pretty. So pretty, when she is sent on an in-service

training course, the professor in charge seduces her, with a promise to abandon

his tiresome wife.

Yet on a trip to the seaside she catches sight of them together, walking on the

beach close enough for elbows to rub. She mutters an old saying to herself, 'The

snake can see the hen's nipples, the hen can see the snake's feet!'

When the police visit the school, the principal gives them 'tea money' to go away

and come back after lessons end. The arrest can wait, surely? The evidence is

lodged so it won't disappear.

skull ashes

the lead slug wiped

of its dust

The eighth death . . .

The wail of the baby lying in its hammock. The shrieks of its siblings at

hopscotch on the hardwood landing. The barks of the house dog never

stopping. On a grindstone the man of the house scritches rust off a long knife

and tied up in its sty a fat pig squeals. Even through all this din you hear the faint

groans of the grandfather dying in the back of the hut.

What is about to happen is against the law. Another general with seven rows of

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medals owns a monopoly of the slaughter houses. You can't kill a pig without

paying him. Is that a police siren? The man with the long knife strains his ears.

The mother, plump, comely, hair switched back in a gold clasp, moves from her

cooking pots to feed her baby, ladling out a milk-tumid breast as she nears the

hammock. The baby's loud mouth now hangs on her teat. Fagged out by their

play, the older children lie down, all but one stripling who goes to the bath

cubicle, tossing his towel over the corrugated tin, lunging at it in kickboxer's

style. The man of the house lays down his knife to swill water over the floor

where he will kill the pig. The pig is deluded into sensing all danger is past. All

is peaceful, except for the grandfather's groans, becoming now less frequent.

the house dog

twisting its head off―

never finished fleas

In the City of Angels a cool breeze sifts the fetid heat and circulates the dust.

The young women, at the end of their day's work, saunter back along the

duckboards, reach home and pull pakoma over their outdoor clothes. They grip

the ends of the sarongs between their teeth, knotting the corners above their

breasts, so they can strip to the skin, tossing into a pile the blouse, bra, skirt and

knickers, all to be scrubbed against the next working day. After bathing they

summon the hawkers and select some spicy dishes for their suppers. Then they

go to the temples and join the throngs circumperambulating the bots , to rejoice,

to mourn, to move life along. Mosquitoes, faintly excited, drape muslin over the

rising moon. Incense. The smell of jasmine. Smoke, ashes.

it ends when it ends―

the dance with long brass fingernails

by candlelight

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21

Emma Dalloway: The Bathhouse

“Follow the women and children to the white door in the medina, just past the

bakery,” we are told. We find the hammam with little fuss on our first afternoon

in Marrakesh.

The attendant takes our money but gives no instruction. After removing our

clothes, we head through the bathhouse chambers, feel the aged wet heat on our

faces, and breathe the thick, stony languor of the walls. Columns of scalding

water pummel through ageing copper pipes.

Until this moment, the women had been the silent, unseen half of Moroccan

culture, but little mystery now remains. Heavy and darkly glistening against the

walls, each behind a fortress of buckets, sucking oranges and scrubbing

themselves—until they see us.

We stand, all the more naked without a bucket between us.

a fish

from the pond . . .

sunlight

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Emma Dalloway: Kerouac and Lucy

She read On the Road when she was heading off it. After a year of backpacking,

Lucy was killing time on some unspectacular Thai beach, waiting for the plane

ride home. At the hostel, she had swapped Pride and Prejudice for a battered copy

of Kerouac's novel, hunkered down on a mile of fine, white sand and got her

some of that crazy beat prose. It made for a satisfying homecoming.

Ten years on, Kerouac's rambling account of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty's

hedonistic journeys across America were intimately associated with lashings of

her own travel nostalgia.

still in the pages—

a Bangkok bus ticket

bookmark

Standing in the poetry section of her local bookstore, Lucy was cradling

Kerouac's Book of Haikus between her hands. The pages had been pre-

roughened to appeal to tactile readers. It was square and weighty; and for her,

it combined an age old passion for travel with a new found love—haiku.

Once home, blanket around her shoulders, steaming cup of sweetened tea on the

window sill, she began to read.

digging through

gran’s old jewellery—

small fingers

She put the book down and looked up.

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose – Issue 1, Summer 2009

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Tish Davis: Chenille

tract housing—

every night-light

on at eight

Before pulling down the covers, I give my bride doll a break from her routine

in case she wants to stop smiling. Her pearly gown and veil are draped across the

white crocheted square just moved from my bed to the dresser. Wearing only

her slip and ruffled knickers, she sits with her back against the mirror while I

adjust the venetians so she can wash her face in the evening light.

The storybook—black, hard-bound and heavy—is under my pillow. I prop it up,

turning the pages, trying to remember where I left off. But it doesn’t matter.

There is a white horse with wings in every chapter and his name is always Chenille.

I read out loud so that we can both hear. Soon the harsh voices fade; the

occasional sound of broken glass is a barn cat knocking over a jar of honey. The

doll and I ride bare-back, climbing up and away from the rooftop’s silhouette.

My hands wrap around her waist; hers gently hold onto the reins. Pinned into

my yellow hair is her wedding veil. The folds of delicate netting flow out and

back, changing like clouds. Only the moon shines through them. .

birdsong

the blink of my doll’s eyes

against my cheek

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Cherie Hunter Day: A Map Not Drawn to Scale

You’re walking on a dusty path. The air temperature is pleasant. You’re

optimistic. There isn’t any hurriedness to be somewhere else or hesitation, like

in grief, to linger and fill your pockets with souvenirs. The scene is reminiscent

of a Dutch oil painting at the turn of the century with the weight of the canopy

in branches overarching your head. A golden hue rimming the leaves is the only

clue that the day has slipped past mid-afternoon. Around the bend, trees taper

to grass and up ahead on the straightaway a figure is coming towards you. In the

ease of the afternoon, there is no need to rehearse what to say or do for it will

become apparent. By the clipped silhouette, you judge it’s a man that

approaches. A small brown bird darts behind a hummock. Stranger or friend, it’s

still too early to tell. Enter the green space as if it is the center of the

canvas—informal and relaxed. There is something familiar about this meeting.

It’s not the man, or the angle of the sun, or the simplicity of the situation. He’s

been around that bend all your life.

crickets—

a momentary silence

for each passerby

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Lynn Edge: Growing Up Texan

Before I started to school, I sat on the top of a cowshed as the men worked

cattle. Daddy lifted me onto the tin roof where I had a bird’s eye view of the

action, but would be safe. The cowboys roped, threw, and branded the calves

with a red-hot iron. I remember the stench of burning hair when my father’s

brand, an upside down hat, pressed tender hide.

A few cows in the herd were descendants of Texas Longhorns. When they

walked through the cattle chutes, they swung their heads from side to side, their

sweeping horns clicking on the posts as they passed. Western historians write

about the noise restless cattle make when their horns collide. I know that sound.

deep creases

in his bronzed Stetson—

a family heirloom

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Ruth Franke: Georgia on My Mind

It was love at first sight. She was already standing on the quayside to greet us as

our yacht docked at Vónitsa. The crew spent their afternoon with her. She kept

us company on the steep trek up to the castle and on the stroll around the port.

Marie, our youngest, named her Georgia and would have liked to invite her for

dinner as well. So she remained on the quay, but directly facing us.

In the half light of morning we are out already, fetching rolls from the

baker― and Georgia tags along. Marie provides her with water once more and

says goodbye. As we sail away, Georgia runs the length of the harbor wall beside

the boat, her bark within range for a long time. There are tears on board.

After that only one thing would make Marie happy: a black and white mongrel

puppy with dark eyes. Its name had to be Georgia, of course . . .

harmonica tunes

on the port side

a shoal of dolphins

translated from German by David Cobb

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Charles Hansmann: Evening at Home

We walk through the room to the row of long windows, and because of the cliff

and thin white mullions our view feels weightless. The house hangs in the air like

a cantilevered showroom; we gaze at the clouds from the sky’s own level. There

is a cumulus roll of banded colors, and as the sunset deepens, the illusion lowers.

The sky goes dark, and then flares up, a parting shot as the sun slips away. There

is glint to her surprise. I watch as she raises her fingers to her throat, her dress

so gossamer I think waft is all the air could possibly do to it.

moon through thin mist

the pond overflowing

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Jeffrey Harpeng: Matchbox Bible

Our half acre on the urban edge of Ipswich sloped down to the Bremer River.

The kitchen faced the bushy battlement-rise of Wulkuraka and its gnarled tree-

line. Westward from there with a meander north following the river’s arc,

stations on the line: Karabin, Walloon, Thagoona. This is not the land of milk

and honey. Here are small crops, grazing beef, milk herds, paddocks undercut

with coal seams. Termite mounds are an earthy variant on the fate of Lot’s wife.

Flesh to earth, earth to grass, and grass feeds the termite mounds. Colliery slag-

heaps stand waste-dark among sun-blanched wavering grass.

mid-winter

blacked faces rise to sunset

exaggerating itself

In 61 our family moved in from the edge of acres, laid open like a book that the

cardinal winds or an angel might read: wet pages dried into wrinkles of ranges

and farmland fanned out from the railway tracks that stitched the long paddock 1 .

Tracks that glistened all the way to the Great Divide and over the Downs,

through the terser language of country talk, the ambling yarns of immigrant

tongues. Fred and Emil from over the sea, began the lyric my father cobbled together

when he was a kid. And it had stuck, like tobacco paper to a wet lip.

pulling weeds

among the pumpkins

a cicada husk

Soon after we settled in the big smoke 2 in a short street, my sister and I were

found by the all seeing God and a neighbour who taught Sunday school offered

us tuition in the holy: hymns by Wesley and yarns about good Samaritans on the

road to shambles. After a tour of Genesis and the Gospels, about the time of a

prison break in Acts, he had us making a Bible out of Matchboxes for

homework.

Each box of matches was a book, the books of Moses painted red, redder than

the newborn Esau. Red stew, red stew, a bowlful for a birthright. Once upon a

later I sold my house and bought a black hat. Red Sea, Red Sea, I parted my hair,

I parted with my hair. This boy’s hair was anointed darker with pomade. Like a

real dude his coiffe was fingered and combed slick with Californian Poppy:

poppy leaves boiled in olive oil and perfumed with the holy unction of image.

The books of Moses were Redheads 3 , water- coloured an earthy rouge. Fifty two

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matches per box, how many struck on the strike pad before the death of Moses?

The burning bush is still smoking. God as incense, as a cloud of nicotine, rising

to himself.

My father thumb–rolls a pinch of Havelock Fine Cut. He works that into the

fate–line valley of his calloused palm, rolls that in a Tally Ho, licks and seals,

plucks a hanging shred. With that thread cast back into his tobacco pouch, he

offers the thinned end of the durry 4 to his lips and strikes a light.

old barn porch

two kids light as paper—white hair

thinly halos us

A rural past in lost matchboxes. In our Bible made of matchboxes, the wind got

in the pages. All comfort is here; the emptiness of these books offers the

meaninglessness which is from end to end. My father mixed-dead heads 5 with

the living in the dark of his book of yarns.

In the Old Testament there’s a ploughed field of sods you could crumble in your

clench. Two draft-horses, Nancy and Tom anchor an old German, anchor my

grandfather to the soil. Reins are his anchor ropes. Call him daddy–pop. He

treads in the wake of the curved plough blade. His sisters and brothers have

stood in the blasted fields and broken cities of two world wars, lost a child or

three there. For everything there is a season.

reading, dozing

on the verandah a butterfly

on a work-boot

The Book of Psalms is the colour of a fig tree leaf. A fig tree is a Book of

Psalms. How every verse mutters at once as a breeze rustles through.

Let us hear a winter psalm, 1926, the midwife’s song.

Blessing of another child in the house of mourning.

A dark angel passed over and took the first born.

Though a tent is pitched for the sun,

when the moon eyes the world with a slow wink

when August wails, there’s a skin of ice in the horse trough.

A sharp wind eddies and circles, seeks every crack

and gap in the slab wood house.

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There is a kerosene lamp and a wood–fire glow.

A dog slumbers by the door.

The words are old as words. The head is showing

crowned with golden light.

All loss and grief and giving are already in her,

warm as blood against the ice of the August wind,

the first rush of that is in her lungs. A reason to cry.

May the meditation of my heart be.

Some boxes in the Bible queue were never painted, only showed the colour of

their strike-pad, waited for a match. They could have found their colour in a day

between Egyptian and Persian Blue. In the water–colour tin, all the royal blue

was spent. A brother was born . . . deaf. And the word was with God. No signing

in the heavens, the clouds were mute. There were silver and copper coins in a

wooden plate padded with green felt, and envelopes offering deeper mysteries.

A childhood fever etched gullies in my father’s fate and heart lines, made a

breathless trek out of a stroll to the pub. There were sign and omens, ECG’s and

X-rays. Some matchboxes were full of lamentation. Hear the wail of feedback

from a hearing-aid.

Cuckoos lunching in a galah’s nest, our country cousins descended on the stroke

of Sunday lunch. Strange tales of going to choir practice to fix football injuries.

Oh the healing of praise, the mysteries of childhood wisdom.

front gate

under the concrete slab

the blue tongue’s 6 glance

The Gospels are painted eucalyptus green, travelling to blue, and the scent of

eucalyptus is in the text. Jesus and the disciples are resting by a creek. Could be

the Jordan. Kangaroos graze where a fallen gum tree bridges the water. The far

hills are blue with a haze of eucalyptus oil. Beyond the hills smoke rises.

A country mile up the road there’s the Walloon Pub. That’s where you might

meet the Son of God. While you are downing a cold one, a voice behind might

exclaim, “Jesus Christ! I haven’t seen you in years.” A fellow would just have to

take a gander 7 . Might not be what you expect.

Over a counter lunch let us hear the parable of the man who loved Yatala 8 pies.

Another deaf child smuggled into the society of hand–talk by his peers, lookouts

posted for the verbal hand smack. Read my lips and talk! Keep your hands to yourself!

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31

I have seen the image of the angel, hand about to rest on the shoulder of a child

at the cliff-top. I never heard a word. The angel in its nightgown kept watch for

years in the painting at the foot of my bed.

Before the way to the Gold Coast grew concrete walls to hide the lost bush, the

half–way station was a Yatala pie; welling with mushy peas and mashed potato.

The whole conspiracy of deaf boys knew the way, but this one always broke the

journey.

Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything , even a face that greets the

world with a grin, a charm to chat a hearing girl into the meaning of his world,

charm to frame a happy home sweet and jest into sweetness three children. Such

charm must be fed and charm was at the heart of the appetite of the man who

loved Yatala pies.

Strange signs on Sunday, his hunger was tired and he had to rest. Eternal rest

was restless in him as he slept stiff necked. Unseen wings fanned him to a fever.

By afternoon he was swollen with dying, and by evening he was no longer

himself.

By these things shall they remember him: a cheese and bacon, a peppered steak

or a plain old mince pie. These things shall fill his friend’s hands with silence.

The meanings of their glances speak.

I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the

Son of God and those who hear will live . And the beasts of the field and penned

livestock and caged birds live again in us. As one they cry. “The end was heavy

as a hammer. How easily the breath went out of us. There is no Promised

Land.”

The Jordan never flowed there. From the headwaters under Somerset and

Wivenhoe Dams the Brisbane River soils every reflection, where once it flowed

fresh water, green and lucid, and men dark and naked swam. At twilight, let us

stand at the water’s edge and eavesdrop as the angels in their nightgowns ripple

the watery names of God.

in the coal-barge wake

the view from the rail bridge

From an island in the river’s meander flying foxes filled the sky, rose westward

over Dutton Park Cemetery: concrete tombs in dun earth terraced down from

iron gates. Floods have taken souls from the cemetery’s lowest tier. With their

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decaying sins they were washed away.

When drought caked and cracked the earth a child’s thoughts could beckon him

to look down into dark ruin. Let commoner and king without a kingdom gaze

down through cracked earth to see a broken coffin, to see the stillness of a

shriveled heart, webbed to crumbling ribs. And, at the hour of shadows passing

to shade, flying foxes are muscular ashes against clouds diffuse with moonlight.

Fruit–bat bickering, made of virus and hunger, hung wherever there was a

mango tree, or a paw–paw or two. A mulberry bush was a terrible chorus of

shades, shape–shifting, by their fingered wings, from fruit to fruit.

Slung in traction a father could become a different man from suffering. For this

is the key to the kingdom. In this king–less kingdom–come there are no princes,

only horses for the running. Let us gather at the bar and hear their names be

praised, let the oracles of racing form be consulted and underscored. For my

father, between Beer Street and Affinity winning the Caulfield Cup there was a

long decline.

In the pale yellow ward father tells us that it was all alarm around that bed across

the ward, just ten minutes before visiting time.

after code blue

how soon the swaying

curtain settles

around the bed

at visiting time, children watch

the curtain hang

If this is what you hear when there are green leaves on a dry branch, what shall

we hear when the tree has fallen and sighs with grub and beetle, ant and

millipede.

The time is coming when I will cut short your strength and the strength of your father’s house,

so there will not be an old man in your family line . . .

Time lifts and adorns us again with blinkers. The child, no longer a child, travels.

How they said of him as a child “He’s got that travelling bug. You can see it in

his eyes.” He opened his eyes in another land.

Here there is celebration, a wedding at Mt. Eden, at the heart of a volcanic

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33

isthmus: on each dormant cone the terraced traces of a Pa, grassed over with

decades. Here sheep graze; taro and hangi pits are green in soul-less meditation.

At the summit group photos are taken with backs to the sun. Mt. Eden Rd. goes

by, descends and rises to Three Kings. There is a rented punch bowl and a

home-made wedding cake on a trestle table under the Hills Hoist 9 . Hear the

parents of the bride and groom speak through telegrams.

The wine of God is mulled. There is cinnamon in the text, flour, oil and

cinnamon in the cake, commerce in the recipe, pearls of promise in the vows.

Then there was the voice of a grocer in a white apron. He was keeping tally with

his pencil in a small docket book. He said, “Will that be all?”

A spacious poem is pledged, a poem with rooms to accommodate two souls, a

spacious poem with wide windows for the view. Already there are names written

in crayon in another room. The names are birds nested in the tree of life that

grows by the shore of the river that swells to flood when the rains come.

The tree of life has a canopy of swirled crayon, blue and green. An orange stick-

figure child with his back to the sun is not blown away by the hovering

helicopter. The gale force wind gets in him.

Then there was the voice of a butcher in a blue and white striped apron. He was

keeping tally on a corner torn from a sheet of clean newsprint. He said, “How

many are you expecting.”

The Book of Revelation is blue. It is full of sultanas, dark and sweet, sweet and

dark, and small in the sweetness, a small dark stone. There are slices of cake

wrapped in napkins for the wedding guests. There are musicians playing guitars.

They sing the songs of old that were sung by the prophets. Alleluia!

Yeah I’m sitting here wonderin’, would a matchbox hold my clothes. I ain’t got no matches but

I got a long way to go 10 .

The last book is painted blue as the palest summer sky. The name of the book

is a cloud on the horizon. Looking west Mt. Marrow is to the right.

neath a cloudless sky

close your eyes and listen

to the brown river

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Notes

1: Long paddock

2: Big smoke—a city.

3: Redheads—An iconic brand of Australian matches.

4: Durry—A hand rolled cigarette, a rollie.

5: Dead-head—A used match.

6: Blue Tongue —A native Australian Lizard.

7: Take a gander—have a look—check it out.

8: Yatala, famous for its pies, used to be on the highway from Brisbane to

the Gold

Coast. A concrete sided six lane now pours the traffic past.

9: Hills Hoist: A brand of Australian rotary clothes line.

10: These lines are common to a number of blues songs and the Carl Perkins

song

“Matchbox,” which was improvised around them. This version was

covered by

the Beatles.

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35

Penny Harter: Moon-Seeking Soup

Last night when the December moon was closer to the Earth than it had been

in years, huge on the horizon, blazing hills and craters, I saw it too late, too high

in the sky. Still, I could almost count the peaks that held the sun.

Tonight, after slicing red potatoes, yams, carrots, onions, and garlic into a base

of chicken broth; after shaking a delicate rain of basil and tarragon onto the

surface and stirring those sweet spices in—while the soup simmered, I threw on

a jacket over my nightclothes and ran out to look for the moon. My slippered

feet were cold as I searched the sky, wanting to raise my face into white light.

But there was no moon, no glow over the apartment roofs to say it was rising,

so I came back in and stirred my soup, raising the ladle to my lips to taste again

and again the dark fruits of the Earth.

moon-seeking soup—

my own face reflected

in the broth

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Penny Harter: Two Stories Down

Two stories down, outside my bedroom window, a train rushes by, its lit

windows answering my own. During my six years here, I have catalogued the

varying sounds of the trains that run past this apartment building day and

night—the quiet electric passenger engines, the abrasively loud diesels, and the

clatter of cars with flattened wheels.

It's bitter cold tonight, and snow still mounds the dirt between the tracks. I

remember the dead deer we saw sprawled across those tracks two winters ago.

Several mornings after, we watched vultures dig deeper into its flesh, and then

the crows. Within a week, only bones remained.

just meat

that body on the train

that hurtles by

The winter our cat Purr died, we climbed down onto the wooded slope above

the tracks to bury her, heaped a pile of brush and dead leaves on her grave.

Earlier today, driving over the railroad bridge, I looked down but could no

longer find the spot.

moving day—

a few leaves still

on the trees

I turn away, pull down the blind. I have boxes to pack.

saying good-bye

to echoing rooms—whose face

stares from the mirror?

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37

Graham High: Between the Window and the Door

My wife is away for a few days and I’ve been anticipating with some pleasure the

prospect of having the house entirely to myself. Now that it is a reality I feel

unsettled, unable to concentrate. Strange, since in earlier periods of my life I’ve

spent years living alone. I wonder when the postman might come. I’ve never

really noticed exactly when he comes. Perhaps he’s already been.

keyhole sunbeam—

for no known reason

I open the door

I’d planned to use my time well: to take advantage of a day with no family

distractions; to focus on my writing. Instead I find myself wandering round the

house putting things in order. There are a few cracks in the plaster that need

filling. I must take a note of that. I go down to the cellar and forget what I’ve

gone there for. Then somehow I find myself in the kitchen and take the

opportunity to check out if that leaky washer has fixed itself.

drip-dripping tap—

water talks to the clock

in its own language

I return to the bedroom to collect the special pen that I keep beside my bed. For

a while I look out of the window. The yellow leaves are beginning to turn brown

and are falling one by one. I’m pleased that I’ve taken the time to notice. After

a while I go back down. Soon the clocks will be going back.

on the winding stair

a vase of dried grasses

which never stir

At last I arrive at my study. I open the folders of my current project. I shuffle

the chapters. Perhaps I’ll do some serious revision. It’s hard to get started. Today

I have no relish for words. I’m alert to my senses; to all the small incidents that

a quiet house amplifies. A fly jousts at the window, gets tired, then rests

somewhere behind the curtain.

listen—

the sound of silence . . .

I still can’t hear it

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At lunchtime I return to the kitchen wondering where the morning has gone. As

I stand at the sink to fill the kettle I notice that my wife has cleared out her

summer plantings. No doubt she has some plans for something else; something

that flourishes in winter.

empty window box—

trying to imagine myself

with no name

And so the afternoon goes. While there is light there are distractions; birds busy

in the trees; cars passing; the crisp footsteps of a woman with her dog. As the

light begins to fade I feel sure another cup of tea will help me focus on my work.

the kettle boils

the LED goes out—

eternity

Back at my desk a few thoughts find their way onto paper: new ideas, not

relating to my current project at all. I open a bottle of wine to think about it.

Maybe I should write a play? Or maybe there’s a poem cycle here?

elusive thoughts

in the twilight—

draught under the door

Eventually it is time for bed. My writing folder has been closed. The wine bottle

is empty. I take a final look around and head for the stairs.

something I forgot—

a cellar light bleeds up

through bare floorboards

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39

Graham High: Restorers

When Vijayabahu I, the Sinhalese king, drove the Chola of south India off the

island of Sri Lanka in 1070, he kept Polonnaruwa as his capital. Now the ruined

city is visited only by tourists and their attendant familiars, the beggars.

at the Royal Baths

an invalid proffers

a polystyrene cup

The ancient metropolis is as timeless as a postcard, held in a condition of stasis

between continued slow decay and the desultory attempts at restoration. The site

is huge but the visitors are still quite thick on the ground: anonymity among

many; anonymity among immensity.

dismantled temple—

each stone has been given

its own number

Men work slowly in the sun. One cements a fallen brick onto another brick that

forms part of a small remnant of red-earth wall that is so much like many others

that the guide book glosses over them all. The man works with a simple wooden

trowel, recreating the action of a thousand years.

in front of the altar

a workmen’s table and a

teacup full of slime

There is no urgency. These men have no kingdom to build. But they can earn a

little money in this job that can never reach an end. Weeds are kept at bay.

Children are fed.

Sometimes new bricks are fired in earthen kilns that intrude upon the site. As

slowly as the walls disintegrate one or two begin to rise again. Every day one

man comes especially to sweep, with his coconut broom, the dust from the

symbolic creatures of the moonstone thresh-holds of the temples. And every day

a little more digging reveals another stone.

at the ancient site

a child-archaeologist

finds a plastic spoon

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Graham High: The Buddha’s Feet

I came here once before, long ago. Now for a second time the sheer size of the

carved figures takes my breath away. Revisiting the same place twice after a long

gap can feel strangely like reliving one’s existence over again – perhaps the

nearest precognition of the possibility of rebirth one can have in this life? But

of course it is subtly different. Last time I arrived by coach among many other

tourists. This time I walked.

smaller than his toes—

the stone steps leading

to the Buddha’s feet

Last time there was a sun-filled sky. This time it is raining slightly. And I am here

almost on my own. The figuring of the granite as it darkens and shines in the

rain both reflects and absorbs the light. It is a different kind of beauty. The stone

softens almost like skin as I look up, camera in hand.

rain spots on my lens—

a ring of stars around

the Buddha’s stone head

The great standing figure is seven meters tall. The lying figure is twice that in

length. These four carvings of the Buddha were all cut at different times from

the one enduring slab of granite outcrop. I stand and admire the subtle interplay

between the weathered layers of rock and the complex folds of the carved

drapery.

hewn from rock

the Buddha’s pleated robes

enfold the strata

Standing in front of this standing Buddha I become self-aware at least in terms

of posture. As I move to the two seated figures I decide to take a rest, sitting on

the granite terraces in front of them, conscious of mirroring their pose. Coming

to the great reclining image of the Buddha I consider lying down in order to see

better the beautiful grain of stone across his face. However I resist the urge. To

mimic further seems lacking in respect.

reclining Buddha—

his granite feet a head-rest

for a sleeping dog

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41

This Buddha is entering Nirvana. His toes and ankles are carved with a stiff

symmetry.

dead or asleep?

just a small difference

in the placing of feet

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Ruth Holzer: Heimerzheim

In a dimly lit room, he sat on the one hard chair and I on the sagging bed. He

told me he was worried about his youngest daughter. I met her once—she had

a nervous laugh and called him Vati. Daddy this, Daddy that, in the end, she got

on my nerves. She had a long thick neck, more tower than swan, but was

otherwise of unremarkable appearance. Her boyfriend, a theology student, had

built his own harpsichord and could play a passable fugue. In his spare time, he

was learning Sumerian. In short, a decent enough person, but they were for

some reason unhappy together. He showed me her letter and shook his head.

Liebeskummer, the pangs of love. I don’t know how it ended.

plaisir d’amour—

the cello

reminds me

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43

Ruth Holzer: Venetian Glass

When I finally got there, the city was already sinking into the polluted lagoons,

but it was still the most magical place I had ever seen. Setting out from

Giudecca every morning, I entered an irreplaceable adventure: islands of

mosaics, of lace, of cypress-shaded tombs. A glass-blower on Murano handed

me a flame-colored globe, calling it a reject.

ghetto square—

the clang

of church bells

Artists and street musicians were my companions. We came from all over and

swore we’d always stay together. When you’re in Venice all you think about is

Venice, and when you’re not in Venice, when you’ve gone back to the world,

you think about everything but Venice.

red Venetian glass

broken

on the road

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Larry Kimmel: Wooden Chain

Found in an attic and given to me, years back, this wooden chain of three links,

holding the shackle of a lantern-like cage, a cage of four corner-bars that hold,

in turn, a wooden ball the size of a marble, on which you can see the fly-eye

faceted flatness of the knife's work, yet perfectly round, and all this marvel

carved from a single piece of wood. I ponder its pedigree, as no one remembers

who carved it, and ponder, too, how the works of an artist live on, have a life of

their own, taking their chances about the same as any progeny, and further ask

why it is that old half-known things so tease the mind?

clasping my dad's hand

as once he gripped his father's hand

whose hand had once . . .

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Marylouise Knight: Urban Homestead

The Master sees things as they are. Without trying to control them,

he lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.

—Lao Tzu

In his hand, the faded black and white photograph of the house I was brought

to when I was three. My grandparents stand on the porch in front of the

oversized rounded oak door. Like sentinels, they seem to guard the portals of

home and the past. He looks at me, as if surprised that my roots are in another

city but then, there are so many stories I’ve never told.

My grandparents, his great-grandparents, look back at us.

the rose garden

is no more—

his flight leaves in an hour

coming or going

to or from my children—

circles close

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Rona Laycock: Mountain Pass

After a rough journey along dirt tracks leading through the mountains, we stop

for a moment on a small plateau. We can see the snowy summit of Koh-i-Baba

to the north; the bone-dry air crackles with static as we wash the dust out of our

mouths with bottled water. Nomads’ tents are pitched a mile or so distant and

from those black tents tiny dots speed towards us. As they grow closer, we see

they are children, so out come the sweets and pencils we carry for just such

occasions. When they reach us they stop, chests heaving in the thin air, and

make a request we cannot understand until, eventually, one of them takes grease

from the vehicle’s axle and rubs it on his arm. Grease—that’s what they want.

We rummage in backpacks and dig out suntan lotions and hand creams and the

children are delighted.

rationing oxygen

on ancient trade routes

cobalt skies

The air is so dry that their skin becomes parched and shrivelled in no time; then

we realise that many of the elderly people we marvel at toiling on the terraced

fields and running sure footedly up and down steps hewn into rock faces are

probably no older than us.

The older boys play us a farewell tune in thanks and send us on our way.

mountain air—

boys’ flutes

answer a nightingale

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47

Gary LeBel: Kingdom

… the even temper of the mineral kingdom

— Galway Kinnell

As I roll it over, the log crumbles to pieces with its bustling avenues of scurrying

ants. Shining in the sudden sunlight with a polish of black sedans, they run

about with grave alarm and yet maintain a stoic order and precision about what

they do, for there is but one intent that passes in the mystic scent between them:

to safeguard the sacred eggs and thus the unborn dreams of a species.

So old is the trunk in which they’ve built their fragile metropolis, it’s already the

color of the red clay that waits beneath. Off in one corner, a black salamander

creeps away with cold, plodding steps, sleepy commuter through the mineral

kingdom.

For what is it waiting, or I,

the housecat staring

into April’s eye?

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Gary LeBel: Noisy Things

I ring the doorbell to pick up my son. Behind me on the family’s large estate, the

pond at the edge of the hayfield teems with a high-pitched, ethereal sound. An

old woman comes to the door and I introduce myself saying why I’ve come.

Snapping the brittle awkwardness of waiting with her in the doorway, I say that

the sounds of the frogs from the pond are nice to hear, that they’re lucky to have

them in such abundance to enjoy each spring.

“ What?” she asks crabbily. “ What frogs?” I look down toward the pond,

pointing. “There—can you hear them? They’re called spring peepers, M’am,” I

say while gauging them with my thumb and forefinger to give her an idea of

their size.

She listens a moment, shrugs. “Oh, those noisy things. I’ll get your boy.”

Almost home

the lights of our kitchen

one street away.

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49

Renée Owen: The Color of Nothing

Atop the pitched roof of the old barn, white pigeons perch still as statues, while

wispy clouds float across the pale winter sky. On the far horizon, at the edge of

the glittering sun-white sea, sits a bank of fog, gray shadows bisecting its fluffy

center. Had this been the Arctic, or even Alaska, I’d swear it was a tall mountain,

its ridge line completely covered in snow. A luminescent pearl on the lip of a

giant shell, the sight of it would call me out across that silver expanse. An

adventurer hungry for unseen sights, I’d traverse the lengths of the wild to

ascend its peaks. To record the flora rooting in its soft, fertile soil. To sit

motionless on its steep slopes, as out of the hillocks creep every size and shape

of fauna. White hares and foxes, white fallow deer, swans and polar bears,

woolly bighorn sheep and the rare albino goat, white cows, horses and tiny

chickens, laying eggs so translucent they’ve no color at all. And I, so silent and

still on the banks of the great white mountain, sit transfixed. Over the hours and

days, over the months and years, my color too slowly disappears. One day, like

them, I’m the color of nothing. A vessel to hold snow or fog or clouds. Or an

armful of white lily blossoms, their brilliant orange stamens the only color seen

for miles, a light calling out from the unknown, across the sparkling sea, to the

other side of the world.

windswept footprints

in the deer tracks

light of the moon

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Patrick Pilarski: Freefall

In the dream we are sitting in our apartment, orange streetlights painting the

evening skyline. There is no shudder, but I notice the TV is tilted, the coffee

table sitting on a crooked floor. One tea cup falls from the table and shatters on

the carpet. I think earthquake as the room shifts back to level. We fumble for

handholds; maybe it's just a tremor. But the room keeps going, careens sideways

like a ship's cabin in a gale. We hang for a second on the edge of the sofa then

tumble toward the skewed wall. I grab for her fingers as I slide past, but the

room drops out from under us. As the sick feeling of freefall takes hold, I

remember to tell her . . .

the silence

after her hairdryer . . .

soft morning rain

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51

Joanna Preston: Birthday Lunch at the Cubee Pub

This place burnt down the year she was born. Built again in brick and no time.

We’ve hired the back room for her birthday lunch, dressed her in cherry red, sat

her by the fire. The new owners had it stoked up long before we arrived, stood

at the door smiling as we made the slow way across from the car in the sun.

Winter in the Wheatbelt feels like summer to me. But she is always cold now, as

though already underground. She is twig and husk, a frond of bracken curled in

on itself. Feather snagged on a brittle stem. Cirrus cloud teased to thread by the

wind.

Tomorrow, she will not wake up, and we will take turns to not say what we’re

thinking.

102 today—

only strangers wish you

Many Happy Returns

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Ray Rasmussen: Intruders

Dusk. A vee of geese sweeps past and splashes down on Lake Edith.

“I hate those ravens, they sound like cattle.”

She’s wearing thick dark glasses, a tilley hat and plaid shorts. I notice hearing aids

in both ears. Does she have them turned up too high?

“Those are Canada Geese.”

The geese are gabbling—reminding me of the talk of friends sitting around the

cabin’s fireplace.

“Well, they sound like ravens. Awful noise. Are you renting?”

A loaded question. I’m staying at my brother-in-law’s place, so I’m not part of

the community of cabin owners.

“No, not renting, I’m an in-law.”

The geese are settling down on the beach. She shakes her fist at them: “Damn

mess—shouldn’t be allowed here.” And turns back to me: “What do you do?”

Another loaded question. If I’m not doing something lucrative, I’ll likely be seen

as just another tourist, or worse, a beach bum.

“I’m a professor,” I say and, to gain sympathy, add, "retired."

“Oh, one of those,” she huffs.

She shuffles off pointing at a dandelion: “Get rid of that!”

rain squall

the persistent tapping

of her cane

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Ynes Sanz: two dog night

it's three a.m. a house mouse is fussing in my office a possum is plodding

across the metal carport roof towards the honey gem bush and a night bird is

blasting its way through the smudged suburban sky but what wakes me is a

howling here in my room

my skin is damp hip-joints are stabbing me fingers are numb again

inside my head is a mess of worries that keep churning despite my knowing that

they will have shrunk to nothing by the time I'm up and dressed

I picture tomorrow as a day of quiet gardening a day to cut unruly plants

gently back to shape see through to the hidden things

on my way to the kitchen for a cool drink I trip a huntsman spider's single strand

slung across my doorway

night becomes morning

my greyhound dreams

of being a greyhound

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Adelaide B. Shaw: Portraits

Next to my wedding photo is one of my mother on her wedding day. The

pictures were taken 30 years apart. Comparing my face as it is now and as it was

then, I see the same bone structure, thick eyebrows, a small indentation in my

chin. My face now has wrinkles around the mouth. My hair is white and my

neck is crinkly. When I compare the two it is always with a surprised feeling of

time, not just time flying, but never coming back. Looking at my mother’s

picture is less startling. I don’t think of her appearance when she died. I see her

photo every day when she was young. I imagine knowing her then. Dark eyes

and hair, smooth olive toned skin, a delicate nose and a mouth showing the

tender beginnings of a smile. A beauty in a Juliet cap and ivory velvet gown, the

smooth fit showing well her slim figure.

stillness

before the midnight bong

her face in shadow

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André Surridge: Ballroom

I love Ireland, some of my ancestors came from that intriguing country, and we

still have friends there, the Elkins who live in Omagh in County Tyrone. Jack

Elkin was born in Omagh and went to New Zealand on a working holiday many

years ago. He married Nancy and they went back to live in Northern Ireland,

despite the troubles. They have a dairy farm with a very small herd, 20 or

something silly like that.

I vividly remember our holidays there. On one occasion they took us to the

Giant’s Causeway and then to the Bushmills distillery in County Antrim. The

guide showing us around took a particular shine to Nancy and they struck up a

fine conversation. Then suddenly in a shocked Irish brogue he said aloud in

front of the touring group. "You're telling me you met an Irish man in New

Zealand and came back to live in Northern Ireland? O they'll be renting the

space between your ears for a ballroom."

lingering

along the coast road

whiskey breath

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Zinovy Vayman: For Genrikh Sapgir

family picture—

the parents smile,

the baby does not

When I read books to my small daughter, I sometimes wonder where her spirit

was before conception. I ponder the infinity of the Universe and get frightened

imagining flying through its endless emptiness. On one of my children's books,

the author’s incongruous name is printed: Genrikh Sapgir. A Jewish guy, I decide

on a whim. The majority of Moscow’s half million Jews have German, Polish or

even Russian last names. The author’s name is so Hebrew that it cannot be

recognized as Jewish, even by experienced human resources’ officers who

concentrate on the discrimination of Soviet Jews.

Tverskoy Boulevard

random rain puddles

swept with a broom

Twenty five years later, I see Genrikh Sapgir, now a star, live at the First

Moscow Festival of Poets. He walks with a cane and chants his lucid

incantations. “The language pronounces us,” he says. And he rhymes:

I wake, I shave and I knot my tie

I won’t notice when I will die

Shortly after, we accidentally meet at the new Turgenev Library. I compliment

him on his recital. He smiles weakly. Days later, the American Radio Liberty

announces his passing.

autumn deepens—

sleepiness

and fear of death

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Jeffrey Winke: Bait Floats to the Bottom

He orders breakfast, with a voice raw from too many unfiltered cigarettes, and

smiles politely at the waitress. She is too busy staring at the pale blue lines on her

order pad to notice. He tries to catch a glance with his alluring sea-blue eyes. He

tosses bait out, like a good fisherman, and hopes to catch something. She’s a

cute sunfish—smooth scales glistening moist with glimmers of color. Most of

his bait languorously drifts down to the murky depths where he occasionally

snags a bullhead or catfish—bottom feeders. The waitress is preoccupied. She’s

wondering if her graduate thesis topic—“Metaphors and Paradigm Shifts in

Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea ”—will be accepted by her committee.

catholic 1st grade

half the boys yearn

to become priests

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Tad Wojnicki: Fall Fallout

It feels like the end of something, but of what? I haven't been fired; I have no

job. I haven't received any eviction notices; I trash them unopened. No overdraft

slip spoiled my mood, either; I write no checks. If anything, the opposite is true.

It feels like a new beginning. The hills are burning, figs cloying, watermelons

fleshing, grapes bleeding.

leaf flurry

yellow wheelbarrow

almost full

Still, it feels like an end. I schlep down Main Street, my ribs broken, tendons

torn, joints twisted, and I see it now—I dreamed of a love nest, but I ended up

in a rat nest; I craved to write for adults, but I ended up teaching kindergarten;

I hoped to live it up in the Salad Bowl, but I hop around, scraping the bottom.

That's the end. That’s the end, but that's also the beginning.

spinning sycamore leaves

one crackles

under my pen

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TANKA PROSE

Cherie Hunter Day ~ Amelia Fielden ~ Jeffrey Harpeng

Larry Kimmel ~ Ingrid Kunschke ~ Gary LeBel

Bob Lucky ~ Giselle Maya ~ Michael McClintock

Stanley Pelter ~ Dru Philippou ~ Patricia Prime

Miriam Sagan ~ Linda Jeannette Ward ~ Jeffrey Woodward

Cherie Hunter Day: Button

the odds

of finding a match for this

one-of-a-kind button

the nestling’s firm grip

on the rim of its nest

The placement of the nest on the wobbliest frond of the tree fern is

questionable. But the choices of thyme sprigs, fine grass, lichen, and spider webs

are favorable ones. A jeweled pair of Anna’s hummingbirds tries their best at

parenthood. Two tiny white eggs laid two days apart—unequal chances to get

it right. Younger equals less insistent when begging for food. The second chick

fails to thrive. A week of rainy cold compounds the chick’s odds. The soggy nest

jostled in the wind tilts to one side then collapses. The stronger chick clings to

the rim; the second one falls to the ground. In three days, there isn’t even a

reminder—no bones, no button, no pearly everlasting.

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63

Amelia Fielden:

'When I grow too old to dream,

I will have this to remember'

what shall I say

when we meet once more,

the lie

that I am happy

you're happy without me?

Western Japan, late autumn. In the darkness just before dawn, I step out of a

small 'business hotel' to find my historian friend already waiting in his shiny red

car, its heater running.

Come to spend the day touring me around locations associated with his hero, the

great educational philosopher, Yoshida Shō in (1830 - 1859), he will have

prepared an extensive itinerary. He gets out of the car, kisses me on the cheek,

talks about where we will have breakfast.

so logical

it would have been long ago

to fall in love—

yet you greet me, treat me

as a dear old friend

We are soon out of the shuttered city streets, and heading north towards the

Japan Sea coast.

a 'sea of clouds'.

he turns off Highway 4

to show it me—

I divert my desires,

focus on the landscape

Hours later, when hunger for toast and coffee is more overwhelming than the

multi-colours of November leaves under now brilliant sunshine, we stop to eat

at a beachside café.

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translucent waves

rolling towards the shore

gradually

I have come to see

we'll never be lovers

Today is the last time we will be together like this, maybe forever. So much in

common, so much to say. As always, some subjects we avoid.

your silence

seems impenetrable—

this time

I won't be seduced

into speaking first

I pay the bill: "my treat, you are giving us this whole outing." An independent

woman, I need to share the costs.

We drive on into the ancient samurai city of Hagi, the heart of his Yoshida Shō in

research. Visiting the relevant museums, graveyards, temples, shrines, purchasing

local product souvenirs and postcards, we encounter smile after smile which

seems to acknowledge us as a couple.

the warm light

on persimmon branches

over white walls.

'falling in love again,

I can't help it'

The here and now overlaying exploration of a different century. And yet:

a bronze Kannon

curling slender fingers

beckons me

into her ancient past

at the hill-top temple

Ever present, too, are tanka thoughts. My notebook records wisps of

'inspiration', scraps of scenery.

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65

scarlet branches

of maples mirrored

in the pond

suddenly set a-sway

by a flock of white ducks

releasing

yellow leaves one by one,

the mother tree

lives another autumn—

kiss me, and don't look back

A rush now to drive to the next city in time for tea with his new friends who

have expressed their curiosity about this Japanese-speaking poet from Australia.

Traffic lights on every corner, streets thronged with Saturday afternoon

shoppers.

that solo hawk

circling swooping circling

in gritty winds

of urban ugliness

what can sustain it?

Then comes the oasis of traditional hospitality with all modern conveniences, in

a suburban home. We spend the night there chaperoned by the priest's family,

chastely accommodated on separate floors.

the short bright day

becomes a night too long.

lying awake

in a rain-wet world,

pillowed on rice-husks

The next day is the next day is the first day of the rest of my life.

remembered dreams

wrapped in silk squares

to stow away

in a secret drawer

for sharing with no-one

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On the return journey, a surprise compliment: "you open your heart to everyone

and everyone warms to you," he says.

to new friends

I may open my heart, yet

we both sense

it would be disastrous

to do the same with you

he loves me

he loves his wife

he loves me

he loves his wife

he loves me not

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Jeffrey Harpeng: The Lark Ascending

after Vaughn Williams

Early summer, and over a shoulder of macadamia branches the upper spears of

a palm frond are feathers in a head-dress. Clouds of a peace-pipe drift over.

They are just clouds. They have a pact with the green.

My father is in the garden, with a half smoked durry pinched out and tucked

behind his ear for later. The weary valves of his heart give him pause. His eyes,

in the shade of a gray felt hat worn through where it peaks at the front, consider

the order he has made. Before him the green rows of staked tomatoes and beans

trained up the diamond grid of Cyclone wire, mounded potatoes . . .

He's been dead for twenty-five years. He plucks that pinch of tobacco from

behind his ear, lights up and draws deep. I stand in the garden with my coffee

going cold.

The Lark Ascending . . .

from the speaker in the window

violin ascending

the garden shrill with insects

a magpie lark follows me

white moths are ashes

of the sun’s fire glistening

on leaves and leaf fall

as I rake macadamia

and weeds yet to bloom

last night’s bath water

waters basil and parsley

my mother's father

and my father both set crops

days before they died

white moths are ashes

in shadows and deeper

macadamia shadows

Dives and Lazarus

hovers in my ears

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Listening to Vaughn Williams, I am as strung and bowed by the airs and haunts,

the shimmering ascents of the music, rephrasing folk songs and biblical stories.

The joyous mournfulness is full of men working in the fields, women in the

kitchen, childish wonder, the making of babies, old men telling stories, fragility

and dying. Those airs rise and fall among the susurrus of insects and the

quivering chatter—the cracked and chipped cooing whistle of a butcher bird.

From flower to flower, there are bees in the garden.

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Larry Kimmel: Of What Significance

For some years now, this phantom tableau, often seen—a knight; a snowy field;

a barberry bush, its red berries bright above the snow, but prickly to the eye

without its leaves. The knight on a palfrey beside the bush, and all environed by

clear air and hush of snow—an expanse of snow bounded by a distant smudge.

A smudge which is forest. And like the forest, the middle-distance vague, as well.

Details adverting from any tic to know, like peripheral presences which will not

be confronted with a stare. Turn, and like that! they aren't. Unlike the knight; the

snowy field; the barberry bush; and this—words without voice—this: "The

Christ Child."

and what have you come

to tell me, finch

at my morning window?

making easy the belief

of speaking birds in fairy-tales

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Ingrid Kunschke: Thistledown

That night the wind died down.

I've had enough, he said to himself. Who cares anyway? No one does. Not for

me, that is. And he lay down to sleep among the thistles at the far end of the

meadow. Only his dreams were seen to swirl about a little longer. Gloomy

dreams about howling when nobody heard and wanting to hide in a bucket.

The trees fell silent. All creatures of the night held their breath; even the old

shed stopped moaning.

Sleep. Let him sleep, they thought. He's strayed too far, seen too much.

Watching over the wind's sleep, they drew up an imaginary list. Wind-tossed , it

read, a nipping wind, a fair wind, a puff of wind and wind farm , which was something

a bird of passage came up with, and much else. Not forgetting refreshing wind , the

thistles thought to themselves.

In his sleep the wind nodded imperceptibly, indulged now in consoling dreams

about bowing grasses, sea spray and the Arctic Owl's softest feathers. For the

first time in his vagrant life he felt he belonged. Where on his travels had he seen

the like? Ah, yes . . .

sound asleep

in the Mongol steppe:

nomads

dreaming of cattle

and horses, horses

No one stirred that night. But the thistles spilled woolly seeds and tried to hold

in their prickles just this once.

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71

Ingrid Kunschke: For a Lark

What are we bowing for, bowing for? the grasses whispered. And to whom, to

whom, to whom?

Thus they asked among themselves—not so much for an answer as for the

pleasure they took in the sound of the words. On a whim they bowed deeper still

and spoke softly in each other’s ears, well aware that their murmur would spread

all the same.

The crickets were the first to hear, and soon the plains were singing and

humming about the silly grasses and their mysterious lord and master. Insects

and birds alike poked fun at them, grateful for a diversion at the end of another

long summer day.

Some got all worked up about the issue.

Whoever it is, he must be truly adorable, the pheasant said, assuming an air of

importance. I’d say they were bowing in honour of me.

As I trail

my gorgeous tail

even the sun

must blink, blinded by

the brightness of my cloak.

Dear me! Your brightness doesn’t show in your shallow speech, alas, nor in your

poetry, the praying mantis commented. Mind my words: the glory of the

venerated is of different cast.

Pray, be meek

like the little lambs

pure in heart

and always prepared

to face the Grim Reaper.

And rocking from side to side he focused on a tiny beetle that had listened

keenly to his advice.

Some prophet you are! the skylark sneered. As sure as eggs is eggs, these dewy-

eyed grasses know nothing about death. They confide in a much stronger power.

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Soaring straight up, and in hovering flight, the skylark quavered again and yet

again:

What to think

of secret love?

Hidden

among the grasses

it never reveals itself.

Everyone hushed, marvelling at this magnificent song and its overtones.

The grasses, however, had long forgotten about their droll question and never

cared to listen to rumours. Gently stroked by the wind, they bowed playfully,

whispering silken words until dark, until daylight.

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Ingrid Kunschke: Wings

Wings? You?

Why, yes!

Are you quite sure?

All morning the sea spray had listened to the goose barnacles’ boastful talk.

Hanging down from the wave-swept crags, they had been spouting over small

sips of sea water. Now that he pressed them, they were remarkably tight-lipped.

They’re like that, the seaweeds said. Don’t fall for it.

But the spray was taken in by the barnacles’ ramblings about a world beyond the

cliffs. A world where their kin lived as birds — if he were to believe them. Oh,

to soar up and hover...

Mere foam

ceaselessly swept

by the tides

I’m washed ashore

only to perish

the spray brooded. And in another effort to break free, he splattered the rugged

rocks.

We can do better than that! the wind called out. He had come all the way across

the ocean, and not lost his force yet. Beating the waves, he churned up the sea.

The tide pools flooded. Starfish, crabs, mussels: whoever hadn’t been prepared,

was tossed about, smashed or carried away by rough waves. The surf rolled in

higher and higher, to break at last at the bold cliffs. The air was salt-laden and

veiled in vapour.

What a sight! the spray cried, peeking beyond the steep coast.

What a treat! the wind sighed, refreshed after his weary journey.

And as he continued on his way over land, passing grey inland towns, he

contemplated on rapture and zest for life.

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What a treat! he sighed repeatedly, his thoughts still with the spray. Wherever he

went, the wind left behind a whiff of brine and somewhat brighter faces.

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Ingrid Kunschke: Few and Far Between

Perched on his mound in the snow-covered tundra, the Arctic Owl looked

around intently.

Nothing to be seen, he noted. That is, if I can't be seen either.

He carefully examined his feathered feet, one after the other. He spread his

white wings and didn't find a speck on them or on the thick plumage that

warmed his bones. He squinted his yellow eyes. As far as he could judge, he was

invisible now.

Amazing! he thought. I must invite the wind to have a look. And on his next

flight, he wrote a letter in the sky.

Dear Wind,

snow's falling

and no one finds his way

to this place,

whence even mice flee

leaving not a trace.

Do come and see me—

if you can.

The Arctic Owl

Then he sat and waited for the wind to call and some prey to show up, since

starving was his constant worry.

Mice were scarce indeed, as was all prey. Even carrion was hard to find. When

the wind came sweeping over the tundra, the owl was down and had to screen

his eyes from the biting cold. The wind in turn, was blinded by the dazzling

brightness of the white expanse.

Owl! he cried, oh dear Owl,

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your feathers' hue

is lost among the snow—

if only

one could hear your hoot

and know you are at hand!

But as he was too loud himself, he couldn't hear the owl clap his beak. Thinking

his friend had starved to death, he moaned:

White snow

has fallen and drifted high

around that mound—

if not buried the bones

of him, who lived there, once.

Too late! I've come too late, he sobbed, and after days of fruitless searching he

turned away in grief to calm down at last, some place further south.

Dear me! the owl cried, what have I done. And oh! what am I to do? Seized with

remorse, he tore out his whitest feathers until he was chilled to the bone. Only

then did he come to his right senses again.

This'll end in nothing, he thought. And nothing means: without me, the Owl. I

must be off, before it's too late.

With the last of his strength he headed south, where the wind was, where the

mice were, where he was embraced by milder air. He took care to let his hoot

resound in the vast blue skies, where his friend would be sure to spot him and

see him like he really was: a worn out, wretched old bird.

The wind was about to get up, when he noticed something white float down on

a nearby rock.

Nothing in the world is as white, he cried, nothing but the feathers of him, who's

gone! In my grief I see him everywhere . . .

White snow's falling

covering all alike—

how else

could even boulders wear

the Owl's softest feathers?

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Hearing the wind speak like this, the Arctic Owl dived and circled all around his

friend, caressing him with what feathers he had left.

All day, and for many days to come, they were seen together, laughing, crying,

playing tag in the skies. And while the owl gained strength and ate his fill, the

wind told him all he knew, or thought he knew, about other masters of

camouflage, like the Walking Leaf, the Goldenrod Crab Spider and the

Chameleon.

Gaily coloured? the owl asked. How's that? But he loved to listen to the wind

and never questioned his stories.

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Ingrid Kunschke: The House Cricket

I’m invited to come and visit Japan. Everything, no doubt, will be taken care of.

Still, I never travel by air, drive on the autobahn or book a tour if I can avoid it.

Living at the edge of a small village I learned to treasure doldrum days.

Japan—not a country to visit in a few days, is it? You should approach it by sea

like Couperus and explore it on foot like Bashō did. To prepare myself I

consulted travelogues by Aafjes and Bouvier; I’ve been on the road with them

for weeks now. This year, my autumn was the rustling of yellowed pages. And

I only noticed a cricket when I found it, of all things, lying dead beside Lafcadio

Hearn’s Japanbuch .

To be on the safe side I also prayed for wings that might carry me through this

adventure. But you don’t always get what you wish for, do you? I've never been

known for airy lightness. And so nature did the only right thing to do: all clothes

I packed for the trip are a larger size. Nothing worth mentioning really, when

you’re nearly forty, but not until now, that I’m pushed out into the world, do I

realize how suffocating some things had been for a long time.

my aging body—

with the women I have been

I soap my skin

eager to feel like the one

I'm about to become

Notes by I.K.

Louis Couperus: Nippon (1925)

Bertus Aafjes: Mijn ogen staan scheef (1972)

Nicolas Bouvier: Chronique Japonaise (1989, German translation from 2002)

Lafcadio Hearn: Das Japanbuch (German translation from 1921). The included

story Kusa hibari is about a tiny cricket kept in a little cage for his song, since it

cannot survive for long out in the cold.

House cricket translates to the German title of my tanka prose: Heimchen , which is

also a deprecatory word for housewife, like in the phrase Heimchen am Herd

(cricket at the cooker). Also, there is a parallel to me: it’s easy to write poems for

yourself, but who knows if they will last for long in public?

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Gary LeBel: Knucklebones

Down the forehead to the nose

one straight line of beauty runs:

they fawn they laugh they play,

Niobe with her daughters

one unrepeatable day . . .

That the nameless artist’s eye adored them is plain to see: how fine their

feminine hands and sandaled feet, drawn with a sensitivity to line that would

match any Old Master. No ungainly presence disturbs the rarefied air of

simplicity. A staple subject of European art for centuries, the theme that runs

from Fra Angelico to Picasso, found in Matisse, perhaps, its warmest brush: the

loveliness and deity in the female form.

Gathered round their fateful mother, the daughters number four though Sappho

counted nine and Pindar ten. As Niobe takes her daughters’ hands, she looks

mournfully past them into myth, for she will lose them all, as any guest would

know as they crossed the threshold of the Roman house where this image once

hung.

Squatting down on hands and feet, and rapt in their game below, the two

remaining sisters play Knucklebones , a hand-me-down from ancient Greece.

Liveliness fills their dresses out with a nimble, youthful verve.

And how deftly the artist gave them each a distinct personality: the keen

observer on the left absorbed in her counting, and on the right, the player whose

pith is honed by lips she parts in concentration, and always the line of profile

from the forehead to the nose so classically, gorgeously straight—

is it more than myth the artist seeks, if only an evocation of the charmed,

protected lives a nobles’ daughters must have lived from day to day,

or secrets, lush and deep,

his fingers could not bear to keep?

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Gary LeBel: Assyrian Music

The hush in the exhibition space is fraught with tension. The Assyrian stele is

the tendon of a monumental fist that clenches to commit something

unspeakable. On the Victory panels , the cuneiform’s precise music has no

descriptive text, but nerves along the bones translate it infallibly, even as the

mind hears itself boast, “I fear no king.” Glanced at from the other side of the

room, the little wedges of words are a swarm of locusts devouring stone.

In the bas relief above the text, serious looking men in ‘screw-haired’ beards and

coiffed hair stand rigidly in chariots tethered to magnificent steeds . . . but

behind the chariots, behind the edited histories and propaganda, another army

moves like underground water. They are the stonemasons and carvers whose

unwritten commentaries overreach the high-pitched commands of the boy-king,

the celebrated victor of a war and a place that no longer calls itself by any name,

the spear of a single broken column hurled by pure ambition into the desert’s

forgiving emptiness.

Astride the golden yellow fields

Flows a long tidal inlet:

Yes, Poet,

But it is only we

Who go.

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Bob Lucky: Drum Roll

in this heavy rain

the Perfume River

smells of nothing—

the Tomb of Tu Duc

empty all these years

I call my mother from Vietnam. She is crying and her gentle sobbing gives our

conversation a certain rhythm. She recalls a time forty years ago when my

younger brother got a drum set for Christmas.

“Oh, he was up at four in the morning and beat those drums until everyone was

awake. Remember?”

It came back to me as she recounted it. As it no doubt came back to her when

my other brother had Santa bring a drum kit for his eight-year old son.

“It’s hard to believe it’s been five years.”

“Well,” I begin, not knowing what to say, “it sounds as if the beat goes on.”

“Who do you think you are,” she laughs, “Cher?”

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Bob Lucky: On the Verge of Regret

on a crowded bus

the beautiful woman’s

dark tooth—

my stop is before hers,

which is all I’ll ever know

Sitting alone at the kitchen table, which is bare except for a coffee cup and a

bottle of Tabasco sauce, I remember Jacaranda trees raining purple blossoms

along the streets of Funchal. I get up to look for a bottle of Madeira, but there’s

not one in the house. In the search, however, the name of a popular bread, bolo

do caco, slips off the tip of my tongue, and I wonder if the past ever overwhelms

you unexpectedly, if you remember me. You had such a beautiful name, I’m

fairly certain, but right now my memory is filled with bread.

foggy morning

mangling the spout

on a milk carton—

life’s simple things

require concentration

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Bob Lucky: Things That Stick

Diamond Dave worked in the set shop of the old Tyrone Guthrie Theater in

Minneapolis the summer I stayed there with my aunt and uncle. One day, Dave

says to me, though I’m not sure why he says it to me, “Iowa is a great place to

raise your kids, but you wouldn’t want to grow up there.” I laughed at the time,

but since then I’ve been to Iowa and think Dave may have been crying out for

help.

On another day in China thirty-five years later, K, my boss, surveying a lunch

room full of kindergarten kids, says, “It’s a good thing I never had children. I

would have been just like my father. He was a loving and caring man, but no one

ever knew it.” I laughed at the time, but being a father myself, I wondered what

kind I might be. When I tell this story to my son, he just laughs.

Sunday mornings

I go out early to buy

steamed bao zi—

in one more year

my son leaves for college

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Giselle Maya: Wild Boars Enchanted

I dreamed that a group of wild boars— des sangliers —were drinking from the

stone water basin in my garden. One of them, unusually large and stately, had

long tusks and an ebony fur coat. What a strange dream I thought upon waking.

Next morning, when walking to my garden in the valley below our village, I met

a hunter with his dogs who said that roaming boars had damaged a field near my

spring.

without rain

a maze of cracks

riddles the earth

green fields pale

into burnt sienna

As I was painting ochre pigment onto the walls of my little stone cabanon at

dusk, I heard some crackling of branches, as though someone were coming to

visit. Sometimes Madame Bosio brings me iris roots or comes with her dog to

chat a while. The cabanon was still open. I put all my rakes, shovels and paint

brushes away. A box with walnuts and quinces was ready to be brought home

to the kitchen.

I was ready to go and there, drinking from my stone basin of clear spring water,

was a large boar with his clan—just as in my dream. I stood very still in surprise,

amazed at their strength and bearing, when I heard a soft grunting sound from

the great grandmother which sounded to my astonished ears as follows: “Do

protect us from these hunters. We know you are not one of them. Each night

we come to drink and rest on your land.”

“What can I do?” I said.

“Let us stay this night in your cabanon. Tomorrow, it being Sunday, the hunters

will be up early. They won’t find us and we will be safe, until you come to open

the door. When they all go home for their sacré déjeuner , we can run free, eat,

drink and go to another of our secret hiding places.”

“Excellent idea,” I grunted, “Let’s do as you wish.” And I spread dry lavender

hay on the floor of the cabanon and let them all enter with a big welcome. They

settled in comfortably for a good night’s rest.

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where

do we come from

where do we go

between lime cliffs

a flicker of light

Next morning early the hunters looked up and down the valley—not a sanglier

in sight! One of them, Moretto by name, wandered over to the cabanon to check

it out. Tiles on the roof, a fresh ochre pigment wash on the back wall, iris

planted in front and— ma foi —a new window!

I wonder what is stored in there, he thought. Carefully, he put his nose to the

windowpane. Behind the glass a giant face, dark with reddish gleaming eyes and

enormous tusks, stared back at him.

“ Barbe de Dieu . . . Pieds de Marie ,” he shouted, turned and, glancing back once,

took to his heels, running uphill all the way to the village . . . where no one

believed a word he said. He started early on his red wine today, they winked.

within the wild

footprints of foxes

and boars

through an oak grove

to a hidden spring

Meanwhile I got up at eight as usual—breakfast, and work in my studio. Just

before noon, I remembered my promise to liberate the sanglier clan. Quickly I ran

downhill, through fields and vineyards, taking shortcuts, arriving out of breath

to open the cabanon door.

And who was waiting there to greet me? Why Moretto, who had turned into a

wild boar!

He spoke in his own Provencal French: “Maya, you must save me or I will have

to stay in this form forever. It is my punishment for hunting sangliers for fifty

years. Do kiss me on the forehead, please . . . .”

A just punishment? Well, I’ll be darned if ever you should catch me planting a

kiss on that scrubby brow.

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released

from human form

a wizened peasant

no longer endangering

untamed creatures

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Michael McClintock: Juliana of Norwich

Just once,

to be that bird

broad-winged and strong enough

to cross the inner sea

behind your eyes.

Writing her revelations of divine love, Juliana of Norwich in the end looked

away and said no more, knowing men have never understood the finer points

of angels.

Cities will return their walls to the womb of sands, the world provide ample

weeds for covering all remaining quarrels.

Imagine, then, Juliana, your last night in the world, all the stars wake as orioles.

Surprised, they fly away singing.

For the first time you hear the stars chirp within the bony meatus of your ear:

O voiceless wedge of prairie,

O nameless place.

Out there in the night a warbling bird finds water and bathes in stars bright from

creation. The bird does not know a name for God but the water it loves, without

reason, and the stars in the water flow down its wings and breast, and down the

singing throat.

At Jiddah,

port city of Mecca,

bird-shadows

thunder past

the tomb of Eve.

Eyes closed, what must you be seeing now, beyond our seeing? I think that

other place called home.

Your soul in dream reposes by that river where, mind to mind, you draw the

waters, you drink your fill of time; in pleasant sleep you swim time's curving,

empty way—it's always there, and always knows your name.

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Michael McClintock: The Sand House

Hear the halls of the house whisper sand.

Hear the sea winds lift and settle. Hear them walk the stairs and above, in the

ceiling, seasoned by salt and oil of palm-wood by old hands dead a century.

Hard, spare hands.

No throat can sing these lines now, no tongue can shape these poor lines.

The city out in the desert under the dust isn't waiting for someone to come along

and find it. The towered city lifting the light from the dark, out of the sun, out

of the streets, drawing in height upward into morning; intricate and clever the

geometries of wall and ramp, square, arch and bridge: scooped from dried sea-

bottoms, mixed and recast.

Sieved out of the world: ideas from dead matter, given number and form, out

of the same ground as these words: taken root and grown out of dust, naming

the new creation.

The people who lived and died there epochs ago wait for no one. They are gone,

every one of them. No one knows the city is there, no one cares that it ever was.

Every desert in the world contains this same desolation. It is a wind-haunted,

sun-bright emptiness. A wide hall become still.

Where once were faces:

a walrus man

a bright-eyed ferret

the freckled, plump frog

an aged wizard

in a thin suit

the dusky princess

poised and secret

the unknowable cipher

sitting beside Saint John

A shape cleaves to the thing it wants to be but can’t do more than be a shape.

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A mantle worn

outward upon the shoulders

of a ghost:

we think we know,

we know nothing.

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Stanley Pelter: arc walk

moon mirror

alters his face

smears of soap mask him

in a rattlebag

of cheap scents

Definitely. I do want to draw him. But not like this. Not sitting at a fractured

table. Not eating. Not even when he shaves, staring at his stretched image in a

small mirror with a crack edging out from a missing corner. Even holding one

end of an old leather strap that sharpens a cutthroat razor travelling close to his

soap covered throat, even though in a compact position more easy to draw, this,

too, is not how it is meant to be.

as preparation

a sharp turn to the left

an unwilling model

his increasingly creased skin

still quite attractive

I want to draw him walking. He is in motion. When young, very poor, and hand-

held movie cameras more rare than eggs, this is not a hurdle easily jumped. If

walking, I will, drawing, be behind him. His scale diminishes step by step. A

considerable hurdle. Anyway, he often needs me by his side for support. I can

never know in advance when he might slip. Often, he was up and away before

me.

into a high smile

a stifled image

2 magpies

swap pencils

for a rabbits foot

But it is his walk I want. Although a perversion of inheritance it is not unique.

There is a lot to learn about his walk. Not automatic, it needs thought processes

to kick-start it. Mechanistic care is required. Mass produced, straight-line walk

is, by comparison, ordinary. Repetition enables it to go about its business

unnoticed. Unremarkable. Of course there is a bit of variety. There always is.

Mostly it is a method of our getting from here to a similar there.

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91

checks and rechecks

a cutthroat blade

for a scratched edge

with one strong leg

his mind walks backwards

His walk is different. I want to draw it. Starting point has to be the unusual

reality of a rearranged motion. Your walk is finely crafted, a regular straight line.

Effective. Dull. Lacks potential for awe. Appropriate placing assists his swing.

Wherever he goes, 2 wooden uprights have to land in front. Crutch landing.

Swing. Success of Siamese twins. Not always. Getting on a bus, for instance,

though usually successful, is a different mishmash of connections. Swing-

through line is non-lineal propulsion, weighted balance with circular rhythmic

beauty. A sweeping motion, it is an arc, somewhat like an upside down rainbow,

the bottom half curve of a full moon. From daily familiarity, am sort of aware

of dangers. His snow walking scares me.

ice cold river

blurs spaces

between front and back

beyond the surface

a single leg reflection

No man wants to be closely noted. It is an uncomfortable magnet. They cannot

control such a focus any more than stop and start heartbeats. Sometimes wish

with all my heardheartbeats he was as one with us. But, contrarily, I love that

walk. Love it. Can watch it all day. Admire it in bed, looking at every star rich

sky. For him, for me, it is a swing that works. From my distance, it is a motion

to live with not get over, a stand-alone action.

an expected arc

floats aromas in a drift

of adagio notes

remember bombs

that work at night

Still want to draw that different rhythm. In those days when I drew every day,

he was always in a different place, with insufficient this or that. Never did I ever

draw his strain of arc walk. Knew it could lead to a bad death.

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day after day

a childhood fix

sketch book collusion

in a book replete with marks

that exclude him

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Stanley Pelter: not knowing

fragrant rose

whose name is lost

in circles of sleep

only wheat fields

know the time of day

I think I once asked my mother whether she knew her mother’s mother. I’m not

sure she said she did or did not. Ditto her mother’s father and her father’s

mother and father. I know I never asked my father. He never mentioned them.

He never even mentioned his mother and father. He never spoke about his

eldest sister who died when he was a baby. He never told us the name of the

brother who died maybe in the war. He never said anything about an older

brother who had to emigrate to America until he (I cannot even remember his

name) turned up at the Council Estate house dressed richly smooth and looking

vibrant. By this time my father was rough fading. Knew about the sister and her,

I think, tailor husband who brought him up with her many sons. No, I’m sure

he never mentioned anything about being young in the East End, even after I

searched the few remaining photographs, him sitting at the small table in the

small room. Portraits inscribed for only a celestial moment. Anonymous

unknowns. Expunged. Who looks like who? None look prominent, none

promising. Have to be satisfied carting their genes everywhere. That’s it. That’s

what’s left. But, when the mirror is buried with the fictional image, is there

more?

single image

of a papoose

is studied in secret

another lost memory

inside that photograph

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Dru Philippou: Ringed

brittle heads

of marram grass

in the wind . . .

a sprinkle of seeds

down the dune

Sand blows against the panes of a deserted beach house, grinding them opaque.

Metal columns rusted from the salt spray support an upper deck. There are jacks

lifting up the building and a giant board, warning: DANGER. The ebb and flow

of the tide strands a ghost crab at my feet. With the stairwell long collapsed, I

hear water bubbling through a pipe on the first storey. I lean against a structural

beam that’s twisting out of its foundation. On a wall, there’s a spray-painted red

flower, and through the disappearing floorboards, a spreading blanket of moss.

I see bits of blue sky through the fallen roof and close my eyes to the sun.

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Dru Philippou: Midsummer Eve

Here along the garden path, after you pass the bench and reach the gate, you

enter another world. From the east and north, a clustering ivy covers the old

wall. From the west, near the statue of St. John, ashes drift along the ground

from festivals gone by. You can view, further down, the full moon rising over

the ocean. Then if you veer south, you’ll see the yellow blooms.

a sprig of yperikon

Euryphon places

under his pillow . . .

stars unfolding

dreams of cures

outside Athenai

in a forest

Titania’s abode

of oxlips, nodding violets

and sweet musk-roses

ruby red drops

to honey-sweet nectar . . .

Melancholy’s

latest elixir

lightens night

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Patricia Prime: Black Ribbons

I would bind Janufa with the black ribbon of long illness, the pain, and the sighing of my

daughter Olga and my little boy Vladimir.

—Janáček

The dead populate my dreams. Some I recognise. I don't know the others.

Where do they come from? One wears black ribbons on her Victorian bonnet,

another shows himself only as head and shoulders, while another whispers from

a corner of the bedroom. They speak the language of the dead, and their grief

washes over me like surf on a beach.

I beg them to go, to rest. But even if they grasped what I wanted, they could not

grant my wishes. "Please," I say, "be patient and listen." But they speak in their

strange tongue until with daylight they vanish.

"Be happy," one says with a parting gesture. "Don't cry for me."

through a crack

in the curtain

a red airport beacon

shines its light

on off on off . . .

a monster

jangling my nerves

in half-light

my dressing-gown hangs on

a hook on the door

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Patricia Prime: Between the Lines

opening the book

a letter in red pen

falls out

in the distance, lightning

of an approaching storm

The secondhand book I ordered contains a hand-written note. It is from a

German girl to a boy I presume she met while he was there on holiday.

Well, if you’ve found this then congrats because you must actually be reading the book that I

stuck in your backpack as you were leaving.

I started bawling after you gave me your wallet for collateral. I asked Gerda why I was crying

and she said because you and I had a lot in common. So anyway we had some great adventures

and maybe there will be more to come. I hope things are going well for you in Australia and

will continue to do so. You are one of the few people who are actually enjoying life and I hope

you never become a zombie like the majority of society. Don’t let them get to you because if they

do then there’s no hope for anyone. You are the most free-spirited person I have met. Anyway

enough soppy crap. Don’t forget about me here in the land of steins and cold beer.

I hope life brings you the greatest of adventures and opportunities and one day, when we least

expect it, you may stagger drunkenly in front of my car again. Hopefully this doesn’t involve

broken body parts!

Excuse my English. It is not so good. Maybe in the future we can once again entertain each

other with some good stories over a cup of coffee. I miss you a lot. Stay out of trouble. I hope

your luck Downunder continues to hold.

Auf Weidersen, pet. Keep strumming that old guitar.

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see, in full bloom,

the red rhododendrons

in summer rain

I remember those days

of youthful dalliance

those trysts in the park

beneath sylvan trees

I dwell on this

but that time is far away now

as though behind glass

how little needs

in letters

to be said

a small purple cloud

merges into the sun

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Miriam Sagan: Javalina

I always wanted to see a javalina—one of those wild peccaries of the

Chihuahuan desert. I spent two weeks in Marfa, Texas in a writer's residency and

every morning I'd look out the window and say: I want to see a javalina. But I

didn't.

trying to solve

the koan—

flock of birds

crosses the telephone wires,

empty sky

Years later, my husband Rich and I drove to Big Bend. It took two days to get

there, starting with digging the car out of the snow in the driveway, then

speeding south in a crack in the storm. Rich said later that the happiest moment

of the trip for him was just getting to Las Cruces, a nice motel with a free happy

hour, eating a bowl of chips, knowing we'd left home.

Big Bend was truly that—a huge bend in the Rio Grande, far-away, vast, blue

mountains. We sat in the sand and just looked at Mexico across the river—a

place exactly the same and yet completely different.

"I want to see javalina," I said

"Stop whining,” Rich said.

"But I didn't see the elk that time," I whined.

True, on the Cumbres and Toltec Railroad out of Chama I'd missed the elk. This

was my punishment for not following instructions. No sooner had the

conductor told us to take our seats than I'd jumped up to use the bathroom.

While I was there—everyone else saw a herd of elk.

But driving along in Big Bend the first morning—javalina! A little group, dark

shapes crashing through the brush and psychedelically pink prickly pear cactus.

A minute later, a mother with a little one. I just burst into tears, much to Rich's

surprise.

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century plant

silhouetted

at sunset—

beneath Venus

I sit waiting for you

Later on, I raved to my student Tom about seeing the javalina. "I hate them," he

said. "Last time we were camping at Big Bend, they ate our tent. We had to sleep

in the car. When we reported it to the rangers, they just shrugged and told us it

was the third tent eaten by javalinas that week."

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Miriam Sagan: Faith

playing soccer

in the street—

migrant workers

by Guadalupe Street church

waiting in the cold for work

It seems they've always been there, ironically grouped in the park next to the

Department of Labor. But recently something happened that hadn't before—a

few mobbed my car as I was turning right on Agua Fria. The economy has

worsened across the country, and on this corner too.

Inside the cathedral:

a silver ship

on wheels,

monstrance for the host,

virgin adorned in pearls,

the beggar woman's hand

At the show of Latin American colonial art, the rosy cheeks of Madonnas tilt

towards blue and clouded heavens. The chic saleswoman follows me around,

enquiring how I heard about the show, do I want a bottled water. A year or two

ago when art was still selling, no one would have paid any attention to me, a

windblown local in scuffed cheap boots from Payless. Underneath these

European paintings of God, the crushed Inca empire.

here the angel

carries a firearm

and why not—

secret glyphs hidden

in the crucifixion

I think about trouble, and what it means to suffer. When I was young, I read

Nadezda Mandelstam's biographies, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned . She

survived Stalin, although her husband, Osip Mandelstam the poet, did not. She

said that this kind of suffering made people stop complaining about romantic

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heartbreak. At twenty-six I believed her, alone in a garden apartment in

California , nursing yet another broken heart .

Now, thirty years later, I'm not so sure.

poems

in the cooking pot

as the secret police

knock at the door,

icon's eyes painted open

The truth is, my own history has worried me as much as the one with a capital

H. Yet they aren't separate.

as for me

I want a cup of coffee

at the corner

of the Plaza—after all

you're not coming back.

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Linda Jeannette Ward: The Halls of St. Elizabeths

We enter at one end of the long narrow hallway, the ceiling high enough to allow

for whatever swampy D.C. air might have wafted through during Civil War

times when the wounded were brought here to recover in a place intended for

those afflicted by lunacy. Now, in the 1950's, Daddy and I seem tunneled in this

corridor banked with murals painted by 19th century inmates of this asylum.

They're rural scenes: women and adolescent boys and girls who never saw the

inside of a plantation mansion or had slaves to toil in their stead. Attired in

tattered dresses and torn overalls they stand staring from brown half-plowed

fields, motionless, expressionless; so unlike those pastoral figures being painted

in France, where peasants can be seen flicking hayforks and urging a draft horse

along, haloed in an aura of straw dust.

Were those blank stares reflecting the paranoia of a deranged painter who went

through life with the eyes of others always on him, or was it a remembrance of

boys and women left standing desolate as men marched off to do battle with

their comrades? Daddy lets me run my hands across the barrenness of earth

with blue sky blooming spots of clouds, dingy with time and smoke from pipes

and guttered candles.

At the end of the passageway a misty grayness fills the open door, a floating

rectangle of non-light. We step through the ghostly aperture to a plot of

filigreed iron crosses and drizzled tombstones . . .

Watered brickwork

surrounding a graveyard

of asylum dead . . .

emanating ancient earth

or fumes of insanity?

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Jeffrey Woodward: The Trial of Dorothy Talbye, 1638

Is this the City of Peace then, with a shore cold and stony enough to harbor a

Puritan predisposition? Call this Salem—the wild and unexplored interior at your

back, the icy brine of the sea in your hair, in your teeth.

here comes a dour man

in buckler and broad hat

and black homespun

and a woman in russet

who flies up behind him

For the poverty of your lot, Dorothy Talbye, let Salem console you. Why must you grieve? Are

you not respected for piety and embraced by your church? Are you not wife to the good man,

John, and has he not blessed you with children? For counsel, visit the Elders and commune

with the congregation. For your melancholia, accept the cure of prayer.

But the private revelations of God drown out a sister’s comfort, a brother’s

advice. Your jousting with neighbors is pronounced and frequent. The Court

summons you for an alleged attack upon your husband. You neglect to appear.

Questioned by the Church Elders, you affirm that God daily instructs you to

starve your husband and children, daily forbids you to spare your own person.

You, Dorothy Talbye, are not quite yourself but house a spirit or several. Will you, Dorothy

Talbye, banish this demon and be freed of his bonds? You will not? Then be henceforth cast

from this Church.

they are your judges

and they are men, the Elders,

in their fine doublets

white ruffs and white cuffs

righteous and portly

they are your judges

dour in bucklers and broad hats

and black homespun

the ones who glare from the bench

while you rain curses upon them

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105

You stand accused of mischief against your husband, Dorothy Talbye, and of incivilities to your

neighbors, and you are summoned to this Court, and yet, good mistress, you are haughty and

do not appear. You say you are directed by God but this Court says otherwise—that you be

bound and chained to the post in the Commons, that you, this July in the Year of Our Lord

1638, be whipped publicly lest Pride persevere.

how many lashes

may the woman bear

how many lashes

before, good sir, all

turn, turn to ashes?

And so you spend some weeks quietly, duly chastised and outwardly

conforming, until now, in October, in a secluded grove, Difficult, your three year

old daughter, is discovered cold and breathless.

Apprehended and questioned, you freely admit that your hand broke the neck

of Difficult, your darling. Was this not mercy , you ask, to spare the child a future misery?

Eloquence does not follow you to Court, however, where you stand “mute for

a space” and will not plead. Governor Winthrop, to loosen your tongue,

threatens to place you under peine forte et dure . You mumble at last, Guilty , with

your world hanging by that thread, but repent you will not.

why deplore the voice

that guides your every step

and whose purpose is

to rain commands upon you?

relent God will not

To the Commons, again, where your fellow pilgrims and your gallows wait. You

will not walk, Dorothy, and so you are dragged. You will not stand and so you

are lifted and supported. Will you repent then, good woman? Nay, nay, it shall not be so.

When the hood is placed on your head, you tear the hood off. The noose is

tightened about your neck—and this, too, you would remove—but the hangman

is a quick one and tires of your tricks.

Even there, at the end of the rope, you try your last to steady your helter-skelter

world. You swing out and back. You reach for the gallows’ ladder but you pass

and win from your townsmen a final gasp.

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Note: Early common law permitted the punishment of peine forte et dure —the

placing of heavy weights on the chest—for persons accused of felonies that

refused to enter a plea. Weights were added incrementally until a plea was

extracted or the accused suffocated.

SHORT WORKS

Hortensia Anderson ~ Marjorie Buettner ~ Owen Bullock

Ashley Capes ~ Tish Davis ~ Jamie Edgecombe

Charles Hansmann ~ Jeffrey Harpeng ~ Marilyn Hazelton

Ed Higgins ~ Colin Stewart Jones ~ Michael Ketchek

Shelley Kirk-Rudeen ~ Bob Lucky ~ Mary Mageau

Francis Masat ~ Michael McClintock ~ Renée Owen

Carol Pearce-Worthington ~ Dru Philippou ~ Patrick Pilarski

Joanna Preston ~ Ray Rasmussen ~ Duncan Richardson

Adelaide B. Shaw ~ Richard Straw ~ Linda Jeannette Ward

Diana Webb ~ Jeffrey Winke ~ Tad Wojnicki

Jeffrey Woodward

Hortensia Anderson: Like Gulls Fly

Silver stripers jump.

I run across the rugged, rocky beach like gulls fly.

My father waits on the other side. "Hurry, Hortensia," he calls, carrying his

fishing pole and tackle.

I scan for the smooth stones, leaping from one to the next.

As I reach the stretch of sand, he grins. We wave, then he turns away from me,

striding into the sea.

dream riptide—

the surfcasting boulder

awash in foam . . .

a silver hooked lure

disappears with his smile

Marjorie Buettner: 4 A.M.

At four a.m. we brush together, our limbs tangled like two old trees in the wind;

we know our roots run deep. Later, that part of you which entered me recedes

slowly like the closing-up, petal upon petal, of a night flower that only blooms

under a familiar moon.

how these snow crystals

house a light of their own

winter solstice

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111

Marjorie Buettner: In a Blue Moon

Just once, at the end of June, a blue moon can change everything . . .so

that summer (crickets calling to an oblique moon) can be sensed as summer, and

time—just once—in spite of the earth's rotation as we careen through a

darkening galaxy, seems to stand almost perfectly still and, for a split second,

stop.

farther and farther away heat lightning

Marjorie Buettner: What the Morning Brings

. . . pure with tree-wind and one mourning dove's song filling those empty, long-

abandoned spaces within, while this old boat, tethered too long, awash in a

golden light from a just risen sun, is untied, set adrift in whatever the morning

brings . . .

lily pads . . .

the oars of the boat

set aside

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Owen Bullock: gallery

I don’t want a relationship, but the desire for intimacy won’t go away. I see the

contradiction, of course. The problem is in the word ‘relationship’—unable to

keep up with where we are now.

I go for a walk

to buy milk

& suddenly

the longing for her

returns

The dreams have stopped, but instead I wake at five with images of her. Some

nights, it takes till one or two in the morning to settle.

awake so long

thinking about her

and something

stuck

between my teeth

During the day, she’s like a painting I linger over in a gallery.

Ashley Capes: little wren

sixteen steps to the gutter and the glitter of lost change caught in a cage of yellow

leaves all through the afternoon crickets gossip their voices bright brittle

castanets exhaust fumes sneak over fences pass tiny bones stuck in gardens at

night moonlight plays an empty bottle and wind brings you up the street turns

wheels

on the roadside

little wren

wise twitch

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113

Tish Davis: Grasshopper

No cash, just a duffle for his wares and railroad tracks from Cleveland to

Chicago, he chews tobacco and spits where he wants.

crossing gate—

the long arm

of a shadow

Tish Davis: On the Path

on a bramble

puffed up

a sparrow

Morning without birdsong, boots shifting over the wetland's sheet of snow—the

right, alongside coyote tracks; the left, beside the rabbit's.

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Tish Davis: Lullaby

The ewe lay motionless in the wet field, her newborn lamb not looking for the

teat. My father ran to them, boots sinking in the mud, yelling back for the

neighbor’s boy to hurry with the cart.

bracing on

the tulip's petal

a dewdrop

in the hankie

from his back pocket

daisies

crescent moon

holding the barn up,

the window open

Our child is nestled against my breast now; in the worn spindles of a rocking

chair, a song.

beyond

the window screen

a dandelion seed

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115

Jamie Edgecombe: Granite Cutters

I light a brick of velvet black peat to smell the smoke of the moor. It doesn’t

catch at first. Match after match burns my fingers into a coat of smooth

tenderness.

Dull thuds begin to patter on spongy grass; the soil beneath already logged with

water, its surface dry, darkening.

Inside, the sides of the granite cleft move through the thick vapours of the peat-

fire. Layers of once cooling rock, constellations of molten mineral spat into

stasis, fold into the smoke, like cave-drawings; potato-eyes, live skulls, fields

ploughed through heat, on a Sunday.

Chiselled white scratches scare the surface of one great moorstone slab. All that

remains of granite cutters.

distant artillery—

peat-smoke in

silver grass

Jamie Edgecombe: Out of the Wind

Beyond this rock-hollow, that roar. The moorland fetch absorbs all sound.

Words leave lips to soon be lost amongst expanses of sky. Voices peel from

standing stones, moorland monoliths, chimneys, quarries, the crooks of tors—a

landscape held and heard within that incessant thunderclap of the inner ear.

out of the wind—

the flooded quarry’s clouds

slide by so quickly

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Charles Hansmann: Vacation

The first day we wake to cool weather and clouds, rain by the time breakfast is

over. In the main room of the cabin are big beat-up chairs and a built-in couch,

and we sit there content, rested and reading. We keep a pot of tea going—it

seems appropriate to the weather—and drink cup after cup. We even have a fire,

though once it is lit, neither of us tends it. It burns up fast, not throwing much

heat, and when it goes out the coals go out with it.

the primrose dripping

first rays at sunset

Charles Hansmann: Paparazzi

I put milk in my coffee and step outside—a beautiful morning, photographic in

its clarity. The minute detail of each twig seems printed on the trees, and a twist

of birch against a dark grove draws forward from the background with

highlighted focus. It’s a cheat to see it like this, like that photo my father was so

thrilled to have taken. He had it enlarged and framed in green matte and tacked

it inside the door of his closet. “A celebrity shot,” he said to me once. “I got that

tree’s autograph .”

morning web

filament

of the firefly

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Jeffrey Harpeng: Sad Toys

in the weeping willows

of Takuboku's tanka

kanji leaves hang . . .

hear the soughing

of Takuboku's words

Setting the doll I bought for my child

By her bed where she naps,

I enjoy myself alone.

In the biographical introduction to Sad Toys I read that Takuboku, his mother

and wife all died of tuberculosis within thirteen months.

And the daughter not yet seven years old, nothing more is said of her.

only one or two

house lights this smoggy night

walking the streets

lighting one cigarette

from the glow of another

Note : Takuboku Ishikawa's poem, in italics above, is quoted from Sanford

Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda, trans., Romaji Diary and Sad Toys (Tuttle Publishing,

2000), p. 198.

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Marilyn Hazelton: Ancestry

Beneath the August moon, as red cherries ripened, my grandmother appeared

to my stepson in a dream.

"It's true," she said, "I was Jewish."

She added that she had loved the man who was her husband for over five

hundred years. "She was a shining presence in the dream," Doug told me, "I

knew it was her." My grandmother's laugh was silver in the grey light of Erie

winters. I remember thick slabs of her cherry kuchen lying easily in my hand,

tasting of God's goodness in her Catholic rosaried house.

a wafer of moon

beyond the pine

not quite whole

cradled by clouds

in this ink-dark night

Ed Higgins: Forging a Fishmonger’s Knife

At his forge in the city of Fukui, bladesmith Masaji Shimizu produces the five-

foot-long maguro-hocho, or tuna knife, prized by Tsukiji’s tuna dealers. The

painstaking process entails heating iron and steel bars to 900 malleable degrees;

the gold-glowing metals fuse under precise hammer blows. The blade is

scrutinized for flaws by master Shimizu-san smiling in the fire’s liquid glow off

his gold-capped teeth. Honed on a wheel, the blade showers sparks that leap in

arcing curves like schools of startled tuna fleeing a predator.

off the horizon

turning away—

a school of bluefin

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Colin Stewart Jones: One

my lover

gathers her clothes

in silence

I trace the moon

on a windowpane

Can love and grief be one? Today, I embrace the rain only to feel it slip away.

Michael Ketchek: Rooting for the Sydney Swans

I am sitting on a bed in Sydney watching sports on TV with my son. We think

it is rugby, but find out later that it is Australian Football.

before understanding

the rules, my son

has a favorite team

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Michael Ketchek: Ocean Landscape

At the port, by the docks or anywhere else, there are almost no gulls, ducks or

other seabirds. The ocean is bright blue reflecting a sky of the same color. A few

clouds dot the sky and provide a visual balance to the occasional whitecaps that

are stirred up by the breeze. There is a minimalist, even an abandoned feel to the

ocean that only increases as we lose sight of land. After an hour, we reach the

reef and don wetsuits and snorkel gear.

a desert above the waves

a jungle below

Great Barrier Reef

Michael Ketchek: Night Flight

Flying over the Pacific at night, the wing of the plane and a thousand stars are

visible when I press my face to the window to keep the glare from obstructing

my view. We have been flying several hours and are a thousand miles from

Australia with a couple thousand more to go before we approach the California

coast.

once in a while

30,000 feet below

a light or two

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Shelley Kirk-Rudeen: Visiting Koya San

Incense among thousands of gray stones and shrines, graves of those who

followed Kobo Daishi, founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism. He was laid

to rest here so long ago, they call the trees “mother trees.” Hidden behind a

massive trunk—rake, kettle and brush.

creeping moss—

some graves so old

no one cleans them

Beside small statues of Jizo—guardian of the souls of stillborn and miscarried

children—people leave food and coins. They tie red cotton scarves on the

statues, layer bright new ones on top of the pale and faded.

water striders

on the pond—

restless surface

Bob Lucky: Imagining Love at First Sight, Briefly

She walks into the room. It is a big room in a small building, a ballroom perhaps

with beige diaphanous curtains sweeping the floor as they billow inwards, as if

the wind itself wants a closer look, wants to brush her cheeks like the fingertips

of a lover, or rub against her legs like a tabby beneath a table. Then she walks out

of the room taking the wind with her.

conference break

the clink clink of teaspoons,

cups in saucers—

in an airless corner

I fiddle with my name tag

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Bob Lucky: Unfinished Lullaby

In the light of the morning in a basket at the door, I find a little girl wrapped in

a shawl, so I take her in my arms and I rock her back and forth and tell her a

story that makes no sense. When I am done, though I never do finish, she says

she has to go.

sweet sixteen

my peach-fuzzed son sips

a glass of champagne—

the child I never had

would be twenty-three

Bob Lucky: Hangzhou Station

electric train

steam rising

from a dumpling cart

The waiting room is packed. Travelers on longer hauls fill in the time between

trains with sleep or a cup of noodles or a cigarette. Two women across from me,

wearing tight black mini-skirts and mid-calf white boots, roll lollipops around

their mouths, the sticks jerking suggestively, and make fun of those who pass.

traveling alone . . .

a father brings his daughter

to stare at me

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Bob Lucky: A Christmas Carol

This morning was the dry tech rehearsal. When I show up for the wet tech in the

afternoon, the director and the music director aren’t speaking to one another.

Standing in the dark of a missed light cue, I began to tap dance. The director

throws down his script and joins me on stage. The music director begins playing

“Tea for Two” on the keyboard and the entire cast starts singing. When the

lights finally come up, I’m out of place.

half moon

whatever’s in the dark

is still there

Mary Mageau: The Dinner

an empty square

in my calendar

tomorrow's date

I’ll mark it with

a coloured heart

We clear away the remnants of his favourite dinner, then sit together with coffee

and chocolates. It’s peaceful as the new moon slowly rises above shining stars.

Finally, we speak about his departure as he tells me once again how his skills as

a surgeon will keep him safe in the field hospital, far away from the front lines

and the fighting. I hold him tightly as he kisses me one last time. ‘Just come back

safely,’ I whisper.

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Mary Mageau: Journey's End

beyond snowfall