PLAYING BACH IN THE D.C. METRO
by David Lee Garrison

Browser Books Publishing
2195 Fillmore St.
San Francisco , CA 94115
ISBN: 9780982850169
2012, 63 pp., $16.00
www.browserpublishingsf.com

“Having an instrument does not make a panhandler a busker. The simple difference is being able to play competently”
—Oregon Vagabond Motivator News, the street newspaper of Eugene, OR, February 2013, p. 2

What if busking on the streets included poets! They would join jugglers, actors, acrobats, and a whole variety of musicians in that age-old line of work. Perhaps if they wiggled suggestively and jumped around while they called out their words—as they do in poetry slams—and if their articulation, cadence and dramatic pauses were smoothly executed, they might be able to hold down regular performing spots around the cities of the world, to ply their art.

This collection—whose title poem is about a famous violinist briefly agreeing to do a stint as a street musician—might be regarded as a set of potential busking poems: they are brisk, fluid, and conversational. They are full of vivid sensual images and short dramatic incidents of the kind that might stop a commuter as she emerges from the top of the escalator stairs in, say, the Bethesda, Maryland Metro Station, where the low-ceilinged, semi-outdoor parking lot is a mass of concrete that turns even the brightest day into a kind of grayish purgatory.

Here, in the Fall of 2002, I stopped to listen to three teenage violinists quite competently play a Bach double violin concerto, their battered cases open in front of them. So glorious and penetrating was this music that we could all hear it very faintly from the bottom of what seemed to me at the time to be one of the steepest and longest stairways into any underground train system in the world. The music drew us up like gold from hell, numbed and bound as we all were by the deep poison of the city’s endless machine voice. And there, as our heads slowly appeared above the horizon, were the performers contorting on the pavement, and as David Lee Garrison says in his title poem, the music …

sang to the commuters in the station
why we must live.

From this opening salvo Garrison’s poems move deftly through all the senses, including humor. We are offered bits of fruit to lick and crunch as we are treated to a dialogue between God and Dog, in which Dog asks for a companion:

So God made Man

with hardly any sense
of smell and just two legs.

And God said to Dog.
“He has only a few words

like ‘come’ and ‘fetch,’
and he knows little of the earth

and its redolence, but let him
totter along behind you and learn.

After this he (Garrison, not God) offers us two quick and delicate sketches of birds among tree branches, suffused like Japanese paintings, with hints of season. Here is “November”:

Like black notes
on gray staves

of oak and ash,
grackles gather.

Measure by measure,
they lade the branches,

then swirl away
in speckled clouds.

It’s churlish, of course, to hold an author too closely to any theme that might be implied by the title of his book. And yet, although a kind of transition from sense perception and image, into incident and personal anecdote takes place long about the middle of this book, I feel the collection remains quite  true—even down to the food fight on page 43 – to the title’s metaphorical strength. Bach, after all, is a force not to be trifled with, and truthfully, every single piece he ever wrote had a poem in its heart and a story misting out from that poem. If, like the photo on the cover, the heart of this collection remains touched by a violin, it’s most definitely one with gut strings.

____________

Anita Sullivan is an essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

RENTING TOM MIX’S HOUSE ON CATALINA

The technicolor organ roars “Avalon”
and shakes the movie planetarium,
stars blink inside the dome, the travelogue
lights up the panoramic screen—
a sea nymph, with her breast strokes,
parts the portieres of floating kelp,
then dives, flutter-kicking
to a sandy bottom decorated
with the spills of island pottery—
urns, teapots, flagons—as bright as neon
in pacific waters more transparent
than the polished windows of boutiques.
Where cinematic cowboys and comedians,
in white flannels and sailing caps,
chase their second wives and mistresses
around the staterooms of their rented yachts,
the young college women of California
paddle by athletically in their canoes,
Olympic medals, won in swimming pools,
tucked modestly between their breasts;
at the beaches, where the folding chairs
are done in canvas awning stripes,
starlets in bathing caps, treading water,
picnic from floating table tops
set up with brut champagne in flutes,
and wave coquettishly at any seaplane landing;
at harbor side, parrots fix their eyes
upon the marlins in the fountains’ tiles,
tuna leap in trophies, palm trees
flaunt their barren minarets
above the flowers of Grand Canary,
and the little shelving tile-town oasis,
with art deco touches in its shops,
and Tuscan architecture in its houses,
squeezes up the canyon to the mausoleum
of the God of spearmint gum.
From the town, a climbing spiral
of roadside eucalyptus wanders,
like pilgrims with umbrellas,
into the mists or empty blue of desert sky;
on the rugged B-western slopes
where fennel and tossed geraniums
grow wild, a long-haired boy and girl
helloing, and with arms thrown wide,
run naked through the buffalo,
trailing the vines that broke
like victory tapes, against their strides.
O topsy-turvy world—the mountains
lift their shades upon the sun,
the silhouettes of lovers, spinning
from the ballroom, embrace on balconies
that sail above the moonlit boats
like gondolas beneath balloons;
in rippling bars and measures,
the light bulbs of the big band’s notes
waft far from the Casino, and explode
like bombshells over Hollywood.
In the wild interior, deer, in miniature,
leap about the steep ravines;
in far blue coves, pirate ships lie anchored,
swashbucklers topside in their hammocks,
the whole scene waiting to be filmed.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

TIP FOGARTY (1963)

“For graduation I gave her a black terrycloth
bathrobe, only such garment in Milford, Utah.
My dad, hunched shoulders from window repair,
electrical contracting, and sneaking off
to Nevada to guzzle whiskey off big titties,
says, ‘Every man knows what he needs to hack free of,’
which codes out to, ‘Don’t marry Angela May.’
But I love how she poses in the midnight center
of her daddy’s pasture, robe untied, quarter smile,
smackin’ hot in the thick white headlight beams
of my Dodge pick-up, like a special picnic treat,
not one flaw from God, no silly teasing,
like I’m some Swedish film director
at the high noon of his heart’s requirements.”

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

ART FESTIVAL

A woman stands on the crescent of the moon.
She has no face.
Her hair runs down her breasts,
the dark blue night spreads behind her.
Not about to move, she is peaceful
standing with outstretched arms,
a purple cloth around her waist.

I barely speak
to the artist. I carry the painting home
and when I get
to my house it is quiet.
No one sees me walk up to
my door, open it and
close it quietly. I hang the painting
on the wall.

I never feel
the way others expect
me to feel. No one knows
how much I love her. No one
knows that I love her face
blank like that—
and how she stands so peacefully
on the crescent of the moon.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

BELOVED FAMILIAR

When the infected wound has healed,
And final angers all seeped out like blood,

What refills the space that’s held the flood
Of tears? For over twenty years, a shield

Grew like a scab across my heart, concealed
Blue bruises born when memories thud

Against the brain. It’s tough to judge
Wellness, when grief’s old adaptations are repealed.

Funny, how in the moment pain abates,
Its gaping absence cuts as deep as any slice?

Or deeper. While weariness concentrates
On the exorbitant, usurious price

Of fortitude, freedom decapitates
Joy, snaps its neck in apprehension’s vice.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

I WANTED A CITY
by Janet Marks

WordTech Editions
P.O. Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106978
ISBN: 1-59661-162-6
2013, 91 pp., $18.00
www.wordtechweb.com

We read Janet Marks’s poetry with the expectation that she should have something to teach us. She has lived through the Great Depression, two world wars, a presidential assassination and a handful of assassination attempts, and moon walks. She has crossed the Y2K line, she has experienced parental love and emotional distance. She has gone through divorce and has lived in many locales: urban, rural, crisp, muddy. Indeed she has stories to share.

She has survived with the insight—fortunate for readers—to provide us with a sweeping view of her own history in context of the history of preceding generations. I Wanted a City is her first full-length collection, one that has been building since her middle years. The book’s acknowledgments run the gamut of literary journals and her work along the road to this volume earned awards, a prestigious writing residency, and ongoing accolades from colleagues.

Some of the book’s most resonant poems come from her life in San Francisco, where the poem “Small View of the Big One” takes us to “… 2 a.m., my bed/ has surged with the inhaling-exhaling earth in/ Mill Valley where small tremors haunt the countryside …” She goes on to pull us through a quake-filled day (“I think the driver is playing with the brakes” …  “the Bay Bridge has split apart”) on to 5 p.m. when she spots a “black and white dog” that has “bolted through a window in shock.” The dog teeters on a ledge; she urges him to go back, go in, “but he will not go.” In four short stanzas, she addresses the fear in all of us as disaster strikes, down to one of the smaller, helpless beings who can rely only on instinct. Where can we run to escape life’s big ones? What can we do with our fears? She leaves us on the ledge with these questions; she makes us worry. We don’t know if the dog survives. A true Bay Area resident, she is almost casual with her descriptions of the horror, just another day when “houses and apartments/ built on fill are caving-in and burning” while in counterpoint her tender heart enters the psyche of a defenseless creature. We are with her in her shaking bed, we are with her on the bus, we are with her as she walks in the street. Interestingly, in this and many of her poems, Marks does not always use end-punctuation. She maintains the momentum long after the poem is finished; we provide our own periods after returning to reread.

The book’s very next poem abruptly takes Marks back to a distant time and place, to her tenancy in the womb as another trick of Nature—Texas floods—assails the rural population. She notes, “my immigrant mother/ with me in her womb/ climbs a chair/ until father comes to save us.” Deep inside her mother, she is part of the family, part of the “us” that holds it together. She ages several years within two stanza’s of this poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” to allude to her mother’s instinctual response to “my fevered brain … fetching more and more water/ with more and more pieces of herself.”  Mother as protector, mother as nurturer, and in “Growing Up In The Thirties,” mother as stern guide:

she wanted me
to be a piano prodigy but intervened
between the piano & me
compelling me to give it up.

In this poem Marks reflects her generation, one where “college was inaccessible” and studying shorthand the practical path for young women.

Mother as someone distant and private, mother as an angry wife who “… raved at father as though he were to blame” for the Depression. (This father was her mother’s second husband; she lost her first love in the flu epidemic.) The poem “Seeking a Life” goes on to tell how this father borrowed money from an uncle who “never let him forget.” Marks’s mother struggles with her own secret demons, her lifetime of stoic loneliness:

forgetting two old parents she’d sailed away from
never seemed to turn back until the letter
came that her mother was gone
she went upstairs & cried alone

—“Growing Up In The Thirties”

Marks inserts some of her own isolation in this poem; she speaks of sailing into marriage and parenting and throughout the book offers glimpses of her feelings about these states In “Visiting Mother” she speaks of a marriage “cracking in ice storms.” In “A True Victorian Lady” her mother, who practiced her Judaism alone, silently lighting the candles, fasting on Yom Kippur, could not accept her daughter’s divorce and showed her distaste: “To her my words were a foreign tongue/ she picked off herself like fleas.” Despite this disapproval, Marks separates herself from the marriage, yet hints at a type of emotional reconciliation with her former husband in “Visiting Mother”: “now apart we’re kinder/ on the porch he brings our granddaughter home offers me/ his car—I walk this time.” She also lets readers know that despite her innate ability to survive as an independent woman, she misses her parents and her children. On one of her walks that populate the book, this time in Golden Gate Park, “I reach for the steel stays of my mother/ Her voice of loss grips me to her” and she imagines her father, who “comes to say there is too much rain/ on the grave where his bones whiten.” She tells us that the “children I have spawned have learned to swim alone.”

Marks, who describes herself as a wayfarer, belies generations of women who remained in sour liaisons. She comes across as a person who has gone through the funnel of hardship and disappointment yet is whole, who is satisfied with the woman she’s become, a woman unafraid to test herself in many locales. She often views these locales—and exquisitely shares the visuals with us—on foot (“and a blob of jelly quivers to my stick/ makes a hideous face at me./ I am not afraid”) or from a seat on a bus. We ride with her “downtown on the 163 Bus/ on Louisiana Street” when she spots billboards with life messages; in San Francisco she’s on the way to a Woody Allen movie by bus when the quake interfered. She climbs hills, she relishes all she encounters wherever she lives: the animal sculptures of Bufano in Sausalito, at San Francisco’s Aquatic Park pier, where she walks “near the edge of living” with “fourteen Cambodian students …”

Janet Marks has given readers the gift of her youth, the gift of geography, the gift of history, and the gift of her maturity. Yes, she has a lot to teach. She teaches us how to take routes that help us cope with what we cannot control. She teaches us how important it is to embrace the past and to see the present as adventure with no age limitations. And she teaches us how to create a work of art that combines specificity and metaphor. In “I Open My Eyes and It’s Spring,” she carries apples, eggplant, and Sunkist (oranges?) up Masonic Hill; “It’s cold without sun,” she says. Just when we become comfortable with the familiar, in the next moment we see that “the wind heaves me into the Pacific.” Where is she going? Why is she flying? Then back to a beggar at Portsmouth Square who says “all of my former lives were insane.” No insanity here, just a gift of tale. Janet Marks wanted a city and so she created a universal city that transcends any single place in this beautiful collection that mandates several readings to wrap our senses, our emotions, and our eyes around what the poet sees. I Wanted A City is a collection that needs to be read and reread.

__________

Gail Fishman Gerwin’s poetry and reviews appear in journals including Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Caduceus, Pirene’s Fountain, Journal of New Jersey Poets, and The American Voice in Poetry. Her memoir Sugar and Sand was named a 2010 Paterson Poetry Prize finalist and her new collection Dear Kinfolk, was published in 2012. She is associate poetry editor of the journal Tiferet. A Paterson, NJ, native she lives in Morristown, NJ, and is principal of the communications firm inedit.

MATHEMATICS AND MOLÉ

Numbers flicker in front of my eyes as
I give him my full attention.
Differential geometry explains the black hole, he says.
It’s very obvious.
I lean forward to catch his words,
my chin in cupped hand,
eyes intent on his, yet
thinking of Mexican food.

Mathematics is the language of science, he says.
It’s reality.
Take this watch, he points.
It’s either one o’clock or it’s not.
Mathematics is very logical, simple.
I look at his amber eyes,
thick soft lips forming the words,
his strong hands cutting through
the air illustrating his story.

Mathematics is the language of science, he repeats,
The rest is just
it’s just,
he shrugs his shoulders and smiles,
leans back a millimeter in his seat and says,
the rest is
poetry.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

AUBADE

for K.A.

She will remember dark eyes
the scruff to his cheeks, slender arms and legs
a tattoo on his thigh, the sun
in all its passion, deep blue, pale flesh at the center
how the sound of her name was a new word
from his mouth

She will remember the scent of leather and sweet musk
the salt of his skin, his hand against her thigh
how she saw, more than heard him moan
the slight up-movement of his adams apple
the skin on his throat tight around it, his head tossed back
how he tasted his own passion, spilled on her skin

She will remember that he called her Goddess
the circle of his arms in the dark, the hum of the air conditioner
the sudden one-ness of a Vermont hotel room
her blossoming there in the comfortable blur of night
the sweetness of his mouth, the kiss, the drifting off

She will remember the morning
alcohol and music worn away to a dull headache
the shade opened, the light turned on
how he had already dressed
but found her, naked under the sheet
his soft voice
pressed into her neck,

and his whisper
    that he wanted her
        Again

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

THE OCEAN

has always
spoken to me

sometimes just blue
sharp as a thorn

and sometimes cold
like a human

and down
from the sea cliff
there are no strangers
to her sound
all animals
know

waves
dance their way
to the shore
in shouts
at high tide
and dreamlike at low

when night comes in
its darkening face
climbs the horizon

and the poor bones
of driftwood
wait to rise as peaceful
smoke from a fire ring

to a heaven
trailing
like a veil

between us

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

AFTER A MOMENT’S PAUSE

I checked into LA County’s ER knowing full well the results.
That day, a well-intentioned, doctor-to-be, in all seriousness,
had to ask, with his finger up my ass, if I felt any discomfort.
Hours after the ultra sound, the third chest x-ray the blood test …

the doctor oncologist declared it to be cancer in the most
remarkable way, making it sound beautiful. The chest x-ray
of my lungs and liver came back clear of any mutating tissue.
What do you do when cancer calls? What do you do? Say no?

I took notes of the ward, of the other patients sitting for hours,
their IV dripping clear toxins of molecular love. Think of all
the books I could read, and I did. I revised the poems I had always
wanted to write. I watched the millennium celebration by the hour,

and was the most impressed with the Eiffel Tower. I had discovered
pain in the most unfortunate way. I had a C-section inscription where the
passing of mind and body took place. During the procedure, I had asked
to see the Tupperware. After a moment’s pause, I nodded, looking away.

I became the Med school oddity, the something other not yet discovered
Cancer taught me a new kind of patience, of Buddha-like meditation.
Waiting for hours lotus-like for a nod of the head, for an administrative
hand to be raised, calling me closer, to say, “This purple piece of paper

needs to be signed in red.” I was never angry at the world, I always
figured it could be worse. Patients were dying around me, some were
slowly wasting away. Their last days on the 10th floor Oncology Ward,
looking out this window west at the ocean of sprawl that is Los Angeles:

Rooftops angled like the sea when choppy, the grey charcoal sky cooking
the particulate carbon dioxide of pure capitalism, the spider web of electricity.
Is there any solace in the suffering? Anything to be gained then a clinched fist?
When we close our eyes, we enter into that sea, the heaven of our making.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004