October 31st, 2009
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Elizabeth Smither
THE DEATH OF OLD WOMEN
—for Diana Bridge
Our mothers: we’ve described
symptoms you rarely share
outside the family home
and not often there: a scalp
affliction, the body’s efforts
without conscious consent, it seems
to breathe. What kills us:
lack of air. And how death comes
like someone climbing weary stairs
for the last time, forbearing
to ever look back again
on the view below. I mentioned
a blue colouring like the shading of a lamp.
You described a fearful rattling sound.
Not all of these were shared. Death
is individually tailored, like all things.
A dusty angel, with heavy wings
and a pocket of tools, like a lock-breaker
but gentleness as well, a concern
to take each prize into his hands.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
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October 30th, 2009
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Review by Jeffrey C. Alfier
WITH THE LIGHT OF APRICOTS
by Larry D. Thomas
Lily Press
2007, 20 pp.
Free download
http://larrydthomas.com/Apricot.pdf
(1.7 MB pdf)
There is a quietly relentless power running through the lyrics of With the Light of Apricots, Larry D. Thomas’s sixth book of poems, and his first published by an online publisher, Lily Press. Thomas has won many awards for his poetry, including two Texas Review Poetry Prizes, and is the recipient of two Pushcart prize nominations. With the Light of Apricots is unquestionably worthy of these honors, a work that celebrates life’s hard truths and riddles through a determined eloquence.
Thomas’s impeccable imagery is often illuminated through a single word. In “Remember,” the word “teeth” introduces the temporality of fortune into an unfolding scene of idyllic retrospection, one beyond “when the sun / was a slice / of a tangerine.” Are teeth part of a smile or a sneer after the long years of “honeycombs” and “mimosas”? The reader knows that more is vouchsafed the speaker than he or she is aware of. Thus we see this trajectory continue in “Fried Pies” where the fate-laden term “maw” serves the same reflective portent that “teeth” does in “Remember,” hovering as it does just below the surface of childhood dreams.
In “Apricots” we discover beyond “the Santa Fe evening light” the same fleeting radiance presented to the young suitor in Joyce’s “Araby.” Thomas’s young mates who “…lumbered down / the darkening street…” evoke Joyce’s young protagonist “Gazing up into the darkness” to see “as a creature driven and derided by vanity” (James Joyce, The Dubliners). Such is the realm of youthful inexperience, and in “Five Houses Down” the panic of a day-care worker belies the innocent perceptions of toddlers who have wandered off. In their naïveté, the ripe apricots the toddlers found were nothing but fortuitous beneficence, oblivious as they were to the frantic day-care worker fearing for their safe return.
“Interlude Late in an Afternoon” is simply outstanding as it bears the subtle strength of quiet eroticism. Inscribing erotic themes, even subtly, is no easy task, as it runs the risk of sounding like pornographic cliché on one hand, and silly on the other. Thomas elides these pitfalls. Here, the speaker is approached by a young woman “pressing firmly into my hand / the wetness of two apricots, / overripe…” But are the speaker’s romantic opportunities yet lost? The reader is left to ponder, and this is what is so dignified about Thomas’s verse: there are no easy answers, and any potential resolution is pleasantly ciphered.
In “At the One of Solid Silk,” a suddenly-widowed young husband’s memories of his wife are achingly fast-forwarded to the stark precipice of his wife’s passing. In the next-to-last verse she is “cropped” out of time, a memento mori he painfully realizes her silk blouse has become. The depth of such solicitude finds a kindred redolence in “The Picker” and its enchanting bit of mystery in the salience of the apricot’s sheer scent. The reader is suddenly aware that the apricots might outlast the woman’s husband, as well as her infant. Indeed, “The Dream” shows us that apricots cannot be sequestered to solipsist human desire without becoming intensely redolent in the painfully repentant mind. In the same vein, the very elderly man in “The Apricot Tree” finds that near the end of his life the tree pictures the early promises of his youth, when life was “fecund / with the promise of baskets and damsels.” In this poem, it is hard not to think of Frost’s “After Apple Picking.”
One sees intensely the shadows in “Still Life” that make apricots integral to that form of art. The lines, “…The knife / and fork, lying equidistant…” introduce an implicitly ordered demise. Though serving the human need to enjoy apricots, it is hard not to think of those utensils as semiotics beyond their immediate purpose, like the farm implements of Housman’s psychic and shadowy A Shropshire Lad.
What many of Thomas’s poems reiterate is that although there are few convenient truths in aging, what endures near the end of days may hopefully be blessed essentials. In “The Centenarians” we find apricots integral to the sustenance of the elderly portrayed there. We find a moving deliquescence in the lines, “their weightless, / rawboned frames, / allowing them / ghostlike movement, / the inconspicuousness / of a mind / whooshing / through the rooms / of memory.” Who, reading these verses, would not think of their own beloved kin? Such is the transitory nature of life amid the persistence of human love seen so powerfully in “Artificial Fruit,” the last poem in the volume. Here we are reminded again that though the beauty of the false may be intense, better yet is the transitory glory of the genuine. In making this the last poem of the volume, it is as if Thomas offers us fair counsel that in “…symmetry, too perfect…” lies a disingenuous light.
All of Larry Thomas’s works exhibit, with clarity and immediacy, poems that witness powerfully to the world around us. In With the Light of Apricots, a common fruit– overripe, vividly-colored, or pungently sweet—proves a semaphore for that which weighs most on the human heart; a heart that, however subdued, maladapted, or even denied, might finally persevere.
____________
Jeffrey Alfier is an Air Force officer stationed at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. He was formerly a functional analyst with Science Applications International Corporation, and once taught history as an adjunct faculty member with City College of Chicago’s European Division. He holds an MA in Humanities from California State University at Dominguez Hills. In 2006 he received honorable mention for the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize, and in 2005 won first place awards from the Redrock Writer’s Guild of Utah and the Arizona State Poetry Society. His publication credits include The Texas Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Black Rock & Sage, The Cape Rock, Concho River Review, Georgetown Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Pacific Review, River Oak Review, Santa Clara Review, and Xavier Review. His first poetry chapbook, Strangers Within the Gate (2005), was published by The Moon Publishing and Printing. Alfier is from Tucson, Arizona, and much of his poetry reflects the American Southwest.
October 29th, 2009
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Elisha Porat
—Translated from the Hebrew by Ward Kelley and the author.
PAINFUL BIRDS
The helicopters, skillful, painful birds,
Again bombard targets above my head:
I sit shaking at my writing desk,
I bend down to my notebook, clench
My shaking pen. As if they know…
As if they sense an inner tracer, a red laser
Signal: they make another bomb run,
This time circling above my aging heart,
Who hastens to remove its rooms
And empty spaces as though they had become
Black tanks, easy targets, sluggish vehicles
Flooded by grief and suffering.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
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October 28th, 2009
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Louis Faber
SMALL REFLECTION
It is that moment when the moon
is a glaring crescent,
slowly engulfed by
the impending night—
when the few clouds give out
their fading glow
in the jaundiced light
of the sodium arc street lamp.
It nestles the curb—at first a small bird—
when touched, a twisted piece of root.
I want to walk into the weed-strewn
aging cemetery, stand in the shadow
of the expressway, peel
the uncut grass from around her headstone.
I remember
her arthritic hands clutching mine,
in her dark, morgueish apartment, smelling
of vinyl camphor borsht.
I saw her last in a hospital bed
where they catalog and store
those awaiting death, stared
at the well-tubed skeleton
barely indenting starched white sheets.
She smiled wanly and whispershouted
my name—I held my ground
unable to cross the river of years
unwilling to touch
her outstretched hand. She had
no face then, no face now, only
an even fainter smell of age
of camphor of lilac of must.
Next to the polished headstone
lies a small, twisted root.
I wish it were a bird
I could place gently
on the lowest branch of the old maple
that oversees her slow departure.
–from Rattle #23, Spring 2005
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October 27th, 2009
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J. J. Blickstein
WESTERN MOTEL
—for Edward Hopper
Red chair. The human sacrifice, a perfect desert, outside the window
(window the leash on the decay of the dream) is the entire world.
Woman in a red dress on the edge of the bed ready to go or to stay forever—
suitcase on the floor, same color as the undamaged road, green sedan
at the edge of the window leaves no knowledge but assumption.
Death in the shadows of a room without dusk—everything wreaks of
“just passing through.” The bones in your mind can’t be found anywhere,
thin skin of civilization torn between the open curtains just the way you like it.
You amuse yourself with the idea of the girl as automobile, automobile
as girl but you paint her pensive, and relaxed, cross her legs to maintain the tension—
she falls back from shapes and tones when you question the composition.
Your tongue, the silent tongue, silences the perfect pitch in the colored palette—
Blonde in a red dress, red shoes, green automobile, deep stain on the wall, red
sheets washed a pale carmine by the bent light we can’t call the sun—
Simple lamp is simple math, that’s why you included it, the shape of the headlamp,
color of sand to balance the weight of the room.
Your attention to detail, your will for the stark exposes your creation to
the impossibility of
chance, of occasion because your real gift is design—
She’s in a poem that looks and smells like real life (No, it’s not a poem, it’s
poetry with nothing to do, never anything to do…)
It’s important how she looks at you, through you, past you—she still looks
for your signal,
lives for you, with you, without you, and you are both still alone. She paints you,
makes you a
landscape (in her mind) as a small rebellion and this is why she must despise you,
for the
vision (she too has become herself). You know, the dullness, the repression,
the squashing
of giddiness, the discipline to stare long enough to see
almost everything and the discipline to pause just before it and you crack and tear.
Her back is to the view because there is nothing more to understand. Yep,
she’s smart and
pretty but who wants to surrender expectation and the belief that something’s coming—
(You could show us longing but you don’t have to because she’s already there.)
The road is the thing that’s really American—there’s nothing on it and you
can see it right
outside the window, and the funny thing is that we are always looking at it
all the time—But,
maybe she is too because everything here and here after all is just an idea.
–from Rattle #22, Winter 2004
