July 31st, 2009
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Jonathan Wells
PLEASE HOLD
I am a telephone ringing in mid air,
a chair pushed back from the dining room
table after a long conversation.
Speak to me again. Say my name.
The rice, cold not close, still marries
the bride and groom. The holster
fires like a gun.
The reins of the cottonwood trees go slack
and the field lies down on itself.
Bird songs overlap their notes
in the fluttering.
I am hungry for the earth. Aren’t you?
Come to me. Say my name.
The sun made me ten stories tall
when I walked in the lines
of the labyrinth keeper’s rake. One story
made me wiser than I am and I could feel
the geese fly out of me although
they barely moved their wings.
Say my name.
The dressing room mirror revealed three lives
in that face but she saw only two.
The horse and child mattered to her,
the other life was mine.
Is that call for me?
Please hold
I’m coming.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
July 30th, 2009
Review by Mary Meriam
EASY MARKS
by Gail White
David Robert Books
PO Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106
ISBN 978-1934999066
2008, 80 pp., $17.00
www.davidrobertbooks.com
Encountering a poet and her book of poems for the first time, I find myself fascinated by the slow emergence of the book’s persona. In a book of formalist poems, the persona can be seen in stanzas, like the rooms of a house. Though she may be working with received forms, these are rooms of the poet’s own creation, and she is free to move in and through the rooms as she wishes. Who is this persona? What is she moved by? How does she move through her rooms? For women have always had less space in which to move. Does the enclosure of the form open outward or spiral inward?
The poems in Gail White’s Easy Marks are marked by a central persona known as “woman,” in this case a highly intelligent woman aware of the restrictions around her and the prejudices against her. She’s an outsider, she may have disappeared, she may be a ghost, but she has plenty to do in her rooms, as we can see in this powerful poem:
The Disappearance of Mary Magdalene
At Pentecost, she’s gone. Her tongue of fire
had come already, scorching Peter’s brain
with a subtle whisper, “I have seen the Lord.”
Then, not another sound. As if she knew,
with her next breath, Peter was taking charge:
this movement was for men. There’d be no chair
for her in their tight circle.Underground, her faith ran like a waterfall. She lived
a hermit’s life. If women sought her out,
their stories thumped like washing on the rocks,
buckets in wells. Theirs was a gospel word
that shunned the daylight—tales Paul never heard.
July 29th, 2009
Ed Galing
GUIDED TOUR
germany looks real
good now,
the hills are quiet
the rivers flow smooth
there is an air of
peace
as our travel bus
and the travel guide
tells us all about
bavaria,
in his german clipped
english,
we all look out the
side windows,
absorb this land
of kings, and wars,
and there are forty
of us,
around my age, or a
bit younger,
and this is their first
trip to germany, but not
mine,
I was here during world
war two, as a soldier
in the 3rd army,
and saw the concentration
camps of dachau
where we are now
headed…
the autobahn is a great
way to travel,
almost like I ninety five,
something good that hitler
left behind,
and soon we are disembarked,
and we all walk through
the gates of dachau,
this german guide is so
pleasant, and in soft voice
describes the torture chambers
of long ago,
still here,
while everyone looks on in shock
and dismay, they can’t believe
it, you can see the horror in their
faces,
and then we are marched into
the place where two ovens
are still,
where bodies were once burned
without remorse,
2
and I find it looks
just the same as it did
more than fifty years
ago,
when I was here last,
I look at the german
guide and wonder
where he was during
the war,
perhaps he was one
of those nazis that even
worked at this infamous
dachau?
there is no way for me
to know, except that
he must have passed the
u.s. intelligence survey,
or he would have been hung
up like the rest in
nuremberg,
the group stands before
the two big ovens
while the guide speaks
in a low voice about the
many humans who were
put to death here,
and the group shake their
heads, and some weep a bit,
and it’s just the way it
was when I last stood here
myself, after the war,
except the piles of broken teeth,
jewelry, clothing, are all gone
now…
there is an uneasy feeling
about all of this,
as if I am living in a nightmare
again,
while this group are merely onlookers
who always squirm, even back home,
when they read gory accounts of
death, at home; a kind of aloofness,
after all, it didn’t happen to them…
after some time we all pile
back into the bus, and it is
beginning to rain,
and the sky is getting dark,
and I get an uneasy funny
feeling,
3
and call me foolish
but as the bus pulls
away,
with all of us inside,
and the german guide
with the big moustache
has a funny look in his
eye,
and the german bus driver
is so silent,
I think, what if this bus,
with all of us innocent
people,
are all on our way to some
death camp,
somewhere here in germany,
that nobody knows about,
and we are headed there now,
and nobody will know,
and nobody will find us,
and we will all wind up like
those in dachau…
once again,
and I close my eyes, and try
to sleep, to forget the
thought of it.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
July 28th, 2009
Link • Poems, Tributes • 2 Comments
Bil Lepp
MUSCLED LOINS AND HAUNCHES
Charolais was four when she figured out that
she was named for a breed of cattle—
in a town where everybody
knew everybody’s business
and everybody knew everything about cows.
When she was seven
the older boys at school
told her that
Charolais are a breed of cow known for their
heavily muscled
loins
and
haunches.
Of course that brought laughter from the older boys
and titters from the older girls.
But, she’d already learned to fight
both boys and men
at home.
She was beautiful and kind
with narrow hips
and a small chest
for which she was thankful.
She didn’t need utters in junior high. Nobody does.
Because she was named for a breed
with muscled loins and haunches
it was generally accepted by her peers
that she was a slut
because that’s what the teenage boys were hoping
when they pointed out
the muscled loins and haunches
and that’s what the girls wanted her to be
because
Charolais was so pretty with her narrow hips and small chest.
Of course she never had braces on her teeth,
but the crooked little teeth really just made her that much cuter.
She could have given in.
She could have been what everybody expected
from a girl like her
from a family like hers.
She could have left town
and told people her name was Charlie. Or Leah.
Or Sue. (That, of course, was her little joke.)
But she stuck around
and married a good boy,
the Barth’s boy,
and lived the same ordinary life
that people with their secrets and shames on the
inside
live
in town where everybody knows everybody’s business
and everybody thinks they know everything about cows.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Tribute to Cowboy & Western Poetry
July 27th, 2009
Link • Awards, Poems • 3 Comments
Amie Whittemore
THE CALENDAR
When my grandmother died she stopped making sense.
She refuses to remember she’s dead.
She crashes family gatherings, pesters the tenants in her old house.
It’s hardest in April when her birthday snags her like a loose seam—
the special day cake, the tally of cards in the mail.
I told her to stop.
One blue eye watered, one eye fell out.
When I woke I was holding her,
snared in the morning after her husband died,
knotted in each other’s throats,
my arms girdled around her waist.
It took months for her to slip through the sieve of months—
The first calendar arrived the next year, a note slid
from her side of eternity to mine.
She tells me she hates its datelessness, misses memory—
first kisses, lost marbles, broken legs, farms sold, resold, divorces set.
Dough rising. The warm crowd of days.
Now her face slides off her face. Now she upsets me when I find her
organizing my recipes, rearranging the spices.
I yell at her. I draw a shade
between her insistence and the sleet grey of winter months,
the sun-slate of summer.
I can only stand her in the spring—
The tulip world of new birds and leaf bud,
the swans she once fed webbing her name across the river.
Her face no longer a jar holding a face.
Her face the globe of a peony.
I sink into its scent as she once did,
read the petals until May ends
then I let the wind bow her head into its hands,
her face a patina over mine, cracked in two—
one half, steam rising from the river.
One half the frozen glare of a severed hoof in the snow.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
