October 23, 2018

Li-Young Lee

SEVEN HAPPY ENDINGS

Love, Love, Love, where are we now?
Where did we begin?
I think

one of us wanted to name this,
wanted to call it something!
Shadows on the Garden Wall.
A Man Rowing Alone Out to Sea.
A Song in Search of a Singer.

I think that was me, I wanted to call it something.
And you? You were happy
with a room, two rooms, and a door to divide them.
And daylight on either side of the door.
Borrowed music from an upstairs room.
And bells. Bells from down the street.
Bells to urge our salty hearts.

But I wanted to call it something.
I needed to know what we meant
when we said we, when we said
us, when we said this.

So call it Seven Happy Endings.
That would have been enough.

You see, I woke up one night
and realized I was falling.
I turned on the lamp and the lamp was falling.
And the hand that turned on the lamp was falling.
And the light was falling, and everything the light touched
falling. And you were falling
asleep beside me.
And that was the first happy ending.

And the last one?
it went something like this:

A child sat down, opened a book,
and began to read. And what he read out loud
came to pass. And what he kept to himself
stayed on the other side of the mountains.

But I promised seven happy endings.
I who know nothing about endings.
I who am always at the beginning of everything.
Even as our being together
always feels like beginning.
Not just the beginning of our knowing each other,
but the beginning of reality itself.

See how you and I
make this room so quiet with our presence.

With every word we say
the room grows quieter.

With every word we keep ourselves
from speaking, even quieter.

And now I don’t know where we are.
Still needing to call it something:

A clock the bees unearth,
gathering the over-spilled minutes.

from Rattle #25, Summer 2005
Tribute to the Best of Rattle

__________

Li-Young Lee: “I’m always listening for or trying to feel, just to get a sense of that field of mind that you’re in when you write, when a poem happens, so I’m always feeling around for that. I’m doing that 24 hours a day, and I’m ready to put everything down to write the poem. I got up this morning about 4 a.m. because I thought there was something happening. I wanted to sleep in because I went to bed late last night, but I thought no, no, no, because it doesn’t always happen. So I got up and started writing—nothing came of it, a couple of lines. I don’t have a system. I just feel like I’m doing it all the time.” (web)

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April 19, 2012

Jack Grapes

SUNDAY MORNING

Sunday morning. Spring. I wake to the sun lifting one leg over the top of the Ticor Building on Wilshire Boulevard. The new leaves on the tree outside my bedroom window are tinged with sunlight. If only I were a photographer or painter I’d freeze this moment and crawl into it.

Sunday morning. I have to get up but my body wants to drown right here in the bed. Spring ambles up the street waving its arms. A matinee today. I have to be at the theater by two. Yesterday, I find out from my agent that I didn’t get the part I was counting on.

Eat this, they say.
It’s good for you.
You’ve eaten it before.
The next one will be sweet.

I eat and concentrate on the window, on the tree, on the sun beginning to beat its chest as it comes over the top of the tallest building.

I drive down Beverly Boulevard, take the curve where it changes into 1st Street, turn on Grand and park right across from the museum. It’s just after ten, hardly any cars on the street. MOCA doesn’t open till eleven. The sun has followed me all the way, reflecting off the Security Pacific Bank Building, glass and steel going all the way up.

I get off on this urban sleekness, especially the unfinished building across the street, another skeleton of steel and concrete. Someone should stick a sign on it, make it part of MOCA, part of the Permanent Collection, and leave it just as it is, unfinished. No clear line where the museum ends and the rest of the city begins. One easy flow, stretching all the way back into our homes, into the very center of our lives.

I walk past the California Plaza sign, running my hand along the chrome and glass, then head downstairs for a cup of coffee and cinnamon roll at the “Il Panino.” There’s a girl two tables over, in the sun. We both drink our coffee in silence, checking our watches, writing something down in our journals.

She’s an art student from Santa Barbara come to see the Jasper Johns. She asks what am I here to see. “Oh,” I say, “the art. Just the art. I don’t care. Just something.”

I AM FIVE YEARS OLD.
I don’t understand anything.
Hot and humid days;
nights, dark and mysterious.
They take me to school.
I stare at the blackboard.
The kid from around the corner beats me up at recess.
Some nights my father doesn’t come home.

My mother shrieks on the telephone.
My pet turtle dries up in the sun.
My uncle dies on the floor in the empty kitchen.
Who is the world?
Why is the moon where the sun is?
If the street goes nowhere, why is it in my bed?
What is the rain that rains just rain,
and why does it rain crows, or bats, or baseball gloves?
How is the pencil writing my name,
and why is my name the name for the thing that fixes tires,
the name for the flag on the pirate ship,
the name for the clown crushed in the box?
Outside, the kids continue to jump rope on the sidewalk,
singing, “A my name is Alice,”
seeing everything, but knowing nothing.

I AM SIX.
The class takes a bus with Miss Cook
to the Delgado Museum on Elysian Fields Avenue.
We’re going to see Vincent Van Gogh.
Later, when I tell my mother,
who was born in Antwerp,
she says to say it like this,
Vincent Van Gough,
and she coughs as she says it.
Van Gough! Van Gough!.
But Miss Cook says Van Go.
We are marched single-file from one room to another,
walking past each painting that hangs just above our heads.

I look up at the painting.
I can’t believe what I am seeing.
Everything mysterious and horrible about the world vanishes.
He paints like I paint!
Trees outlined in black.
All those wavy lines, all those colors.
And he piles the paint on.
He’s wasting all that paint,
just like I did before they told me not to waste all the paint.
He sees everything I see.
The moon is where the sun is.
The street that goes nowhere is in his bed.
It’s not just raining rain,
it’s raining crows and bats.
He sees the blood, he see the faces.
Everything so bright it’s on fire.
Everything so dark it swallows me up.
The man cuts his ear off.
The man leans against the table so sad.
The man dies on the floor of the empty kitchen.
I stop in front of the painting with crows above a cornfield.
The world I see is real.
I bring my hand up and touch the dried paint.
It’s real!
Mounds of paint,
swirls of paint,
rivers of paint!
But it’s not paint.
It’s real.
It’s the world.

“Don’t touch the painting!” Miss Cook yells.
She pulls my hand away.
She yanks my arm into the center of the room.
“Never ever touch a painting!”
She shoves me into a seat in the back of the bus.
It doesn’t matter.
The world is real.
I fold my hands in my lap.
I know what I will do.
                I will write about the real world.

11 o’clock. The girl heads off toward the Jasper Johns. I walk into the J. Paul Getty Trust Gallery and find the Geary cardboard chairs and cardboard houses. “Can I sit in them?” I ask the guard. “They can be sat in,” he says, “but you can’t sit in them.”

“Oh,” I say, and walk into the room with the huge pavilion shaped like a fish. I walk into the belly of the fish. The wood inside is so beautiful.

”Don’t touch the wood, please,” says the guard.

I wander over to the Nauman video. A clown is being tortured on simultaneous video screens. “Clown Torture,” it’s called. Later, in the Permanent Collection, I bump into the girl from Santa Barbara. In the center of the room, a metal sculpture of a man moves his motorized mouth up and down. A silent

YAK
                YAK
                                YAK

This, I understand. I stand as close to it as I can. The guard watches me suspiciously.

Over the in North Gallery there’s an empty spot in one corner. Something was there, but it’s been                 removed. I make a sign for myself and hang it around my neck. I stand in the corner of the Permanent Collection, North Gallery, as still as I can, one arm out in the gesture of an actor about to speak.

Eat this.
You’ve eaten it before.
The next one will be sweet.
The street that goes nowhere is in your bed.
You know nothing,
but you can see everything.

A woman and her little girl walk up to me. “What does the sign say?” the girl asks.

“Touch me,” her mother says. “The sign says touch me.”

So the child reaches out a hand and touches my own.

from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle

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April 18, 2012

Robert Harlan Wintroub, M.D.

CRAYOLAS

Don’t fresh crayolas carry the day?
White, red, green, blue, and black.
A single row in the stiff orange box,
and later, double-rowed
                brown, pink, yellow, and gray.

Then once I proved myself mature
                the box eight rows deep
                with shades of color I never knew
                lavender, canary, silver, chartreuse,
                with squared-off points
                and paper wrappings colored to match.
                My fingers tear a piece at a time
                to extend and unsheathe more of the
                color behind.

But it’s such a struggle to keep them straight
                once two have been removed,
                and if a bunch are out,
                no one least of all me
                can ever again order them anew.

If they came with numbers
                I would know what to do!
                The sequence would be easy
                but who can remember
                whether the greens are to left
                or the right
                of the blues.

Crayolas are meant to last a year
                —if one is careful—
                uses broken fragments and peels
                the paper off the last little bit
                but has anyone among us
                even the most poor
                used Crayolas up
                before demanding new?

Haven’t we all
                done what we had to do
                to show a box deformed
                with stumpy fractured remnants
                paper covers gone
                ends rounded and cracked,
                to win a new and grander box.

Sometimes, I dream of
plunging my hand into that box most incredible
Burnt Siena, Viridian,
Cadmium Yellow, Ochre, Vermillion
Chromium Green Oxide and Sepia,
Phthalo Green, Prussian Orange,
Cyanith Gray, Sepia, Terravert, and Antaverne Blue.

Sometimes I dream
of what I should not dream
of alizarin crimson edging
obsidian black silk,

of stiff milkwood
and soft musk brown
of the taste of Cabernet
the scent of French perfume.

Perhaps the time has come
to put the crayolas away.

from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle

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April 16, 2012

Dallas Wiebe

SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 2003

Tomorrow everything will be all right.
I’ll come to the cemetery
      and bring you home.
I’ll prepare for you a meal
      of oranges, apples and peanut butter on bread.
I’ll pour you a glass
      of carbonated water.
While you eat,
I’ll tell you how lonely I am.
I’ll tell you how empty my life is.
I’ll tell you that prayer changes nothing.
You’ll tell me about the darkness
      and how you like my flowers.
You’ll tell me about the cold
      and the endless hours.
You’ll tell me how much
      you miss your family.
I’ll tell you I’ll come soon
      to join you,
      not to be impatient.
You’ll say,
      “Don’t hurry.”

from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle

__________

Dallas Wiebe: “My wife of fifty years passed away on April 19, 2002. Since that devastating loss, I have dealt with my grief and loneliness by writing poems.”

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April 14, 2012

Richard Vargas

10/6/02 – JOB INTERVIEW

it’s been 4 yrs since my last one
so my gut was queasy
as i sat there in the lobby
wearing my navy blue blazer
trying to look serious and
job worthy
when this baby face
showed up
introduced himself
shook my hand
took me to a room
where a young woman
joined us and i was thinking
both of them are old
enough to be my kids
if i had any

so
since i was being interviewed
by the mickey mouse club
and i had more work
experience than the two
of them put together
any semblance of being
nervous went out the window
my answers were well
thought out as i took
their questions like fastballs
which i easily hit out of
the ballpark

then the girl, er, woman
asked me which would
i rather be: a hummingbird
or a woodpecker?
we all laughed but then i
realized they actually wanted
an answer and i was thinking
what’s next? would i rather
be a dung beetle or a wart
on a fat guy’s butt? a piece
of cheese or a brand new
penthouse magazine in a
men’s prison?
i began to think of all
the possibilities when
baby face cleared his throat
letting me know they were
waiting for my answer

my first thought was i’d rather
peck than hum and since
i too have a pecker and
frequent woodies one could
say my choice should be obvious

but i knew that wasn’t what
they wanted to hear
they had pens in hand
ready to write down
my answer
and all i could think about
was getting the
hell outta there alive

and how good a
cold beer would taste
right about then

from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
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April 13, 2012

Ryan G. Van Cleave

VENOM

God knows what I was thinking when I agreed one day
to trek up to Whigham, GA, with my cousin Beth
for the annual Rattlesnake Roundup, because I’m 100% afraid
of snakes (saw Conan the Barbarian too early, perhaps),
ophiophobic to the max, but good sport I was, I said Sure thing.

On the three-hour drive from Tallahassee, she gabbed
about her last boyfriend, how this Phi Beta Loser liked it rough,
how he wanted their lovemaking to last until a lake
of sweat shone on his forehead; I said well, okey-dokey now,
awkward by this brutal honesty, but she didn’t care,

so as she described how she liked to bite his hairy nipples nightly,
I thought of the Classical Mythology class I taught last spring,
how the ample murmur of those foreboding legends should’ve been
enough to warn me off this trip, not to mention Beth’s savage
vulnerability. I envisioned Python, the hulking serpent produced

by Gaea, how this silver-plated monstrosity haunted the caves of Parnassus,
and I wondered if the roundup would be anything like that,
a torrent of scales and forked tongues waiting to get me like
scavenger birds gobble the night. You know? Beth said,
referring to something about the secret passions of some people,

those hidden mysteries that have small, hard hooves, and I thought
of my father laughing somewhere, saying let a woman
unload their feelings and they’ll gallop away, dragging you by the heels.
Thankfully, we reached the roundup and immediately, Beth
wanted to see the giant plastic tubs of already-caught snakes, huge

black wading pools where they hissed and seethed, a living blanket
of poisonous brown and gold. One of the snake-milkers
asked, Ya wanna see the winner? meaning the biggest one
caught so far, an ankle-thick beast some six feet long, coiled now
in a Pyrex-type of bowl atop a table near where the milkers

corralled rattlers by the throat, then stuck the fangs into rubber hoods atop
clear jars, letting the yellowish fluid drip, burn, sizzle
down the side of the glass. Beth said yeah, it’d be great, and not
wanting to hear more about Bobby the Porno-Loving, Nipple-Bitten,
Likes-it-Rough Frat Boy, I said sure, let’s go, but this snake

had zeroed on me, his shovel head swiveling like a missile turret atop
a navy ship to follow me as I circled the container. Lemme snap
a photo, Beth said, then yanked out a disposable camera just as
the prize rattler opened wide and went for me, two inch fangs
oozing poison as it slammed face-first into the plastic between us, leaving

smear of venom on the glass. I jumped back and bumped
the milker, who dropped the snake he had, and just like that, one was free
and in some kind of psychic link with its leader, the huge one
in the tank who’d already lunged at me, this now-loose one coiled,
then RTTT-tttt-TTTTT-tttttt-TTTTTT went the tail, warning

me, mocking me, and even as the milker slammed it to the earth
by the neck with a pronged wooden shaft, it eyed me
unflinchingly, daring me to come just a little closer. The milker,
a squalid skinny guy in overalls, gave me a disgusted look,
then said, You be more careful or this fella’ll have you right quick.

And I believed it, too, the way this snake thrashed and spat,
pinned to the ground by the wooden V of the shaft. I let Beth
snap a few pictures, then convinced her to go, blaming
a bad stomach, though, in reality, I knew these snakes had it in
for me, each a piece of hard undersea rubber I couldn’t

hack apart even with Hercules’s sword or the Minotaur’s golden axe.
As we drove south towards the cloth of growing twilight,
Beth reached over, saying Kind of funny about that snake, huh?
as her hand came to a rest on my knee; kinetic energy zipped
through jeans to skin sure as sea-sailors dreamed of mermaids, and I

could but nod, afraid of her fingers, the bite of those dark teeth
on my too-fragile flesh. She smiled, I cringed—an Apollo without arrows,
a rabbit too afraid to move, stunned powerless, senseless
by the latent power in each coiled slither, the shake of brown horny rings.

from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle

__________

Ryan Van Cleave: “What I like about ‘Venom’ is the juxtaposition of elements and the strong narrative feel, the long, luxurious lines that pull the reader ahead. I got tired of seeing so many blocky-looking poems, rectangles of language on a page. Why not strive for a more elegant physicality to poems? I tried about two dozens variations and ended up with this simple form, and I like the five-line stanzas which, to me, drive the poem forward nicely, give it an awkward nudge at each stanza end that keeps the reader moving. I truly labored over the lines here more than I do in most poems, and oddly enough, with the paragraphical look to the stanzas, most readers assume it’s kind of a rambling, one-shot deal. Anything but. It’s a challenge to keep up the forward momentum without having fluff, or as A.R. Ammons once called it, ‘dead air.’ A number of writers have written poems that operate like this one does (C.K. Williams, Barbara Hamby, Tony Hoagland, Campbell McGrath, and many others), so I think of this poem as having a good pedigree. This was a poem that took weeks to write. A bit here. A few lines there. But once I had all the component parts, it took only thirty minutes or so to cement it all together nicely. I briefly considered swapping out the title for something long and wild since I’m a sucker for oddball, eye-catching titles, but I finally thought this one-word title would snare (bite?) more readers. Sometimes that’s all the rationale you need to make one choice over another. Am I really afraid of snakes? Does it really matter?”

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April 12, 2012

Francine Marie Tolf

MAYBE SHE DREAMS OF RIVERS

I love her because she is exhausted and has fallen asleep on the train
with the book still clutched in one hand
while the other trails the aisle like a willow branch in slow green water.
(Maybe she dreams of rivers.)

Because her shoes are thick-soled sneakers
and she wears a brown shoelace around her neck
strung with keys that rise and fall in a cluster against her breast
as they ride the rhythm of her sleep.
(Maybe she dreams of horses,
maybe her body is gleaming and supple.)

Because her hair is the orange of cheap dyes
and her skin is a blend of browns with freckles adorning
a face that is no longer young,
and her earrings are small bells
that are not silver but are delicate
as the eyelashes that flutter now and then,
as if a slight breeze combed the length of our car.
(Maybe June shimmers inside her,
maybe wind chimes are talking.)

I love her because the title of the book in her lap is How to Create Poetry,
and when she awakens with a start,
she looks down at it before she gathers her packages,
pulls a cap over her ears,
walks out of the train into a wordless winter night.

from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
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