May 13, 2023

Diane Lockward

LOVE SONG WITH PLUM

I take what he offers, a plum,
round and plump,
deeper than amethyst purple.
I lift the fruit from his palm.
Like Little Jack Horner, I want it in a pie,
my thumb stuck in to pluck
out that plum.
I want it baked in a pudding,
served post-prandial,
drenched in something potable,
and set on fire, to sit across from him and say, Pass
the pudding, please.
Spread on our morning toast, dollops of plum preserves,
and when we grow old, a bowl of prunes,
which, after all, are nothing more than withered plums.
But today the air is scented with plumeria,
and at this particular fruit stand, I’m plumb
loco in love with the plumiest
man. Festooned with peacock plumes
and swaddled in the plumage
of my happiness, I want to stand at the perimeter
of this plum-luscious
earth, sink a plumb
line for balance, then plummet
like a bird on fire, placate
all my desires, my implacable
hunger for the ripeness of my sweetheart’s plum.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

__________

Diane Lockward: “This poem began as an experiment, an attempt to enter a poem via sound rather than subject. The lead word ‘plum’ was used to create a vertical list of rhymes and near rhymes. The words in the list then became line endings.” (web)

Rattle Logo

May 12, 2023

Kim Hansen

FRANK

I was smitten with a waiter in the dance club,
not romantically, but in the entertainment
division of my delight.
He was long bones and turned-out feet,
his spine like a tape measure
you lock out to its full length,
rigid and wobbly all at once.
His hair bobbed along with the drinks
he carried on the tray palm-up,
and flirting looked like a role
he had overprepared for,
practicing on the DJ, on the bouncer,
on every one of us as he delivered
our seabreezes and my repeat
requests for water.
When I was accepted 
into the master’s program for dance 
and took my place at the barre,
there he was in tights and battered slippers
warming up with grand pliés and cambré.
Every moment was better
with his repartee
whispered behind my derriere
as we pointed and reached.
You could never get all that ballet out
of his spine in modern technique.
You had to put up with it
if you wanted him in your dances,
which was worth it for the stories
about his days with the Ballet Trockadero
where he played Jane Eyre en pointe,
bourréeing with a book across the stage
and Mother Ginger in the Nutcracker.
 
At the upscale Italian restaurant
where he also waited,
he stood in fifth position
preparing your Caesar salad
right at your table,
singing along with the piano man
to I Don’t Know How To Love Him
from Jesus Christ Superstar.
One day he called and invited me to dinner,
his dime,
at The Cork near the apartments
where we both lived.
He looked lovely in white jeans,
his curls shining with something expensive.
We raised our glasses
and his toast was an announcement
of his full-blown AIDS diagnosis
as if it were a part he had fought for.
From that day on
he smelled like Grand Marnier
day or night,
even when I visited him
in a trailer in the Black Hills
after he got too sick
to live far from family.
Neuropathy took the feeling
in one arm and leg,
and his skin was mottled with sores
that makeup couldn’t hide,
but as we walked a brief way
to the river near his home
with his little dog circling
his dandy cane,
he stayed upright and regal
as if a small tiara balanced 
atop his nest of auburn curls.
He wanted me to have his pointe shoes,
ending every phone call
with that promise.
But the phone calls stopped.
The shoes never arrived.
I miss that man.
 

from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

__________

Kim Hansen: “My father calls me to tell me what he is writing about. Sometimes it is about washing dishes or how his father and uncles looked falling asleep in social situations, acting as if they were pushing their hair back or giving their necks a whip. Then we read each other a few poems by our favorite poets, and I get back to writing about how we move and operate in spite of or because of gravity.”

Rattle Logo

May 11, 2023

Andrea Defoe

FOR A PIANO ABANDONED IN THE BREADBASKET

Perhaps it was too heavy
for the horses to haul it all the way west
or something else just mattered more.
Maybe someone was jealous
of how the girl played it
as if sweet little veeries were flying out her fingertips:
Snow White of the new frontier.
Maybe she hated it, but probably
it was her favorite thing and alone
nights nothing to smother the hollering
silence she rocked herself and thought
of her piano gathering snow, envisioned
the prairie rodents caching their food
between its wires, elk nosing the keys
in a song so random they could only
think of it like thunder. Maybe some Indian
had found it and grasped its beauty, hauled
it home to pay his dowry. But in the best
of these dreams she was sleeping and the piano’s
legs came to life—this didn’t frighten her,
she’d always known her piano was alive—
and worked its sunken heels out of the soil,
began to march then trot in the path
of the last wheels to pass this way
till one wind-rattled night she’d hear
a peculiar tap and find it there in the dark,
waiting for her to make it sing.

from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

__________

Andrea Defoe: “I must’ve been about fifteen, in the middle of a forest, when I happened upon a gravestone inscribed, ‘Outward sunshine, inward joy: Blessings on thee, barefoot boy!’ I was amazed at how the right lines in the right place could elicit a gut response from me.”

Rattle Logo

May 10, 2023

Benjamin S. Grossberg

IT KEPT ALWAYS BEING SUNDAY

Before my mother died, and after.
I thought of Paul: before Jimmy died, and after.
The narratives of hope grew irksome.
I’m almost fifty, my body well on its way to ruin,
what are a few chemicals more or less?
Pandora, kneeling at the box, having let loose
all the pharmaceuticals.
The experiment that each generation is,
the experiment that each generation is
loosed on the generations before it.
In this new America, we don’t really get old
until just before we’re dead.
How can I write about PrEP without writing about love?
Go back to Romeo and Juliet, go back
to the Greeks, no one can write about love
without writing about dying.
No way but this, etc.
An outboard motor on my Ship of Death.
At what age does having ambition
become something younger people praise you for?
Before my mother died, her concerns
fell away, importance redefining itself in tighter
and tighter circles around her body.
Just a few weeks before her death, she felt
well enough to get a haircut; she wanted a haircut.
All the conventional wisdom told us to find meaning
in the moment. All the advertising told us we could buy it.
Biologically, we just wanted to sleep in piles
with other mammals.
There was a fire. Somewhere far off
a howling from which we felt insufficiently insulated.
When a stone sounded three times against
the cave wall, when smoke from way back
smelled of a pleasant roasting, we came forward
salivating. I told a man I loved him only a month
after we’d stopped speaking, and only by email.
But, I note in my defense, I used to touch him in line
at the supermarket, my hand against his shoulder.
The problem of too little may be a problem
of too much too quickly, like a crowd
trying to get through a door without first forming a line.
The last time I remember eating meat:
A Sunday. I am at a barbecue
with my brother and his friends.
I am twenty-two, I have just come out,
it comes off the grill in strips,
more sauce than meat, and I put it in my mouth.
The tang of tomato sauce and vinegar.
Does everyone here know I am gay yet?
We are all enjoying the meat.
 

from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

__________

Benjamin S. Grossberg: “More and more these days, I find it hard to write about one thing without writing about everything. In ‘It Kept Always Being Sunday,’ I tried to ride that impulse, rather than resist it. I’ve been writing poems for as long as I can remember, but the first time I was really transported by a poem was hearing a literature professor read ‘Lady Lazarus’ aloud in class.”

Rattle Logo

May 9, 2023

Marie-Elizabeth Mali

MIND TOO MUCH

Some days my mind is like
a gull hanging onto
a sandwich too big
to swallow, beak clamped
on the monstrous bite
as it runs from other gulls
so as not to share.

from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

Marie-Elizabeth Mali: “Ten years ago after reading Neruda’s Poetry on a plane, I stood in the immigration line at JFK and vowed to dedicate myself fully to poetry. I left my Chinese Medicine practice shortly after and entered the MFA in poetry program at Sarah Lawrence College. I love how a poem can upend a person’s life.” (web)

Rattle Logo

May 8, 2023

Bill Garvey

BURGER KING

The first man in line can’t find his money. 
He slaps at the pockets of his jeans and his jacket. 
 
He looks behind and beside himself, then directly at me 
As if I could solve his dilemma, or that I picked his pocket. 
 
I shrug as the aroma of grease sneaks into my olfactory. 
The girl in the ketchup-colored vest and bonnet 
 
Has been waiting rather patiently. 
Finally, he finds it, pulls a bill from his wallet, 
 
Shakes his head, hands her the twenty, 
And we all move a notch on this sprocket.
 

from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

__________

Bill Garvey: “James Tate’s book, Absences, influenced me to write poetry more than any other thing I can remember. It was 1972. I was 17. He was no less a rock star to me than Mick Jagger. Thirty-five years later, I confronted Tate at an event in Brattleboro, Vermont, at the urging of my wife. He sat on stage before his reading. As I approached, he grimaced. I regretted my decision, but it was too late. Sheepishly, I made my request to interview him for a paper. His wife, Dara Wier, sensing his reluctance, said, ‘What have you got to lose?’ I gave Tate my phone number. I’ll never hear from him, I thought, leaving the stage. Less than a week later the phone rang at our home. My daughter answered. I had blocked out the event in Brattleboro until she said, ‘Dad, it’s for you. Some guy named James Tate.’”

Rattle Logo

May 7, 2023

David Kirby

THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD

“Everyone’s good in a crisis,” says my brother-in-law’s wife
to my brother-in-law, who seems less than pleased to have
this information, he having just said, “I’m good in a crisis”
in response to her assertion that he’s not really good at anything:
 
picking up after himself, taking turns with the kids,
cleaning the kitchen after a big meal that she has shopped for
and prepared. Bravado, the marvelous, the startling:
these aren’t as impressive as that which is steady, consistent,
 
reliable. Not Faustus but Penelope. Jack Gilbert says as much
in his poem “The Abnormal is Not Courage,” which
describes a 1939 Polish cavalry charge against German tanks,
their sabers flashing as cannon fire cuts them to pieces,
 
although the best thing about this story is that
it never happened: the cavalry came across lightly-armed
German infantry and dispersed them, though
the Poles themselves were routed when German reinforcements
 
arrived and fired on them with machine guns.
The tanks appeared only after the battle was over,
as did journalists who saw the tanks and the dead men
and the horses and drew the wrong conclusion, although
 
in a way the cavalry charge actually worked, since it halted
the German advance long enough for a Polish battalion
of foot soldiers to retreat to safety. But isn’t
the story better the way Gilbert tells it? Who wants to hear
 
about a mistake? If you’re going to tell a story,
make it a good one. Be patient. When 18-year-old
John James Audubon came to America, he found
some Eastern Phoebes nesting in a cave and, having heard
 
that they returned to the same spot to nest every year,
he decided to test that idea, so for days he sat in the cave
with them and read a book until they were used
to him and let him tie string to their legs to identify them,
 
and, sure enough, the next year the same birds were back.
Don’t try too hard, in other words. “Human speech is like
a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears
to dance to,” says Flaubert, “when we long to move the stars
 
to pity.” Really? The stars don’t need us.
The stars are fine. It’s the bears who need dance music.
On your feet, Smokey! Here’s one you’ll like—
I wrote it just for you. Besides, every hundredth time
 
we sit down to write a bear song, we write one
that leaves the stars shaking with sorrow, their tears
raining down in torrents and then evaporating in the atmosphere
before they reach us. Beauty can’t be targeted—that was
 
Ezra Pound’s mistake, says Brodsky, a surprising one
for somebody who lived in Italy so long. Beauty is a by-product.
Beauty is the stepchild of doing one’s job, as when Cyrano
de Bergerac suffered a neck wound in battle and decided
 
to study astronomy while he recovered, eventually writing
a satirical novel about a voyage to the moon, thus influencing
future science fiction writers but also being
discovered three hundred and fifty years later by the Edmond Rostand
 
who made him famous in a play called Cyrano de Bergerac
in which his love for the beautiful Roxane is thwarted
because Rostand gave him a large and unsightly nose,
an assertion as exaggerated as the false Polish cavalry charge
 
and thus, like that invention, a key element in turning
a good story into a great one. Gordon Lightfoot’s
hit song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
was riddled with so many inaccuracies that the singer-songwriter
 
agonized over his sending the doomed freighter to Cleveland,
for example, when it was really headed for Zug Island
when it sank on Lake Superior in 1975, and the families
of the twenty-nine men who perished in the wreck
 
met to mourn in the Mariners’ Church of Detroit
and not, in Lightfoot’s re-phrasing, the Maritime
Sailors’ Cathedral, but his producer and long-time
friend Lenny Waronker told him not to worry about
 
the facts, to play to his artistic strengths and “just tell
a story.” The Poles weren’t stupid. At the time
of the 1939 cavalry charge, their cavalry
was already being organized into motorized brigades.
 
After all, who won the war? Audubon’s tying
strings onto the legs of the Eastern Phoebes
is the first known incident of banding birds.
Cyrano didn’t have a big nose, but Rostand gave him one.
 
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” charted at #1,
and before long shipping regulations were changed
to include survival suits, positioning systems,
depth finders, increased freeboard, more frequent inspection of vessels.
 
None of this would have happened if Gordon Lightfoot
had made sure all his facts were correct and the song
had turned out to be a dud. Writing isn’t hard.
You just have to be patient. You just have to get everything right.
 

from Poets Respond
May 7, 2023

__________

David Kirby: “When I heard this week that Gordon Lightfoot had died, the first song of his that came to mind was ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ It’s one of those songs that’s both awful and fabulous at the same time: it’s the song you put on repeat to drive out those last drunk guests who won’t leave your party, but it’s also one that can move you to sudden, unexpected tears. The story of its composition addresses every artist’s fundamental challenge: do I stick to the facts or do I try to create a work that will last? Me being me, I precede the story of the composition of ‘The Wreck’ with other similar instances, but I get around to it eventually.” (web)

Rattle Logo