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S A N D R I V E R J O U R N A L
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Sand River Journal is a collection of poems gathered from the newsgroup
rec.arts.poems; it is posted monthly in ascii and TeX formats to r.a.p. and
related newsgroups. Current and archive issues may be retrieved by anonymous
ftp at the site etext.archive.umich.edu in the directory /pub/Poetry. This
archive includes PostScript versions of the formatted journal, which is
publication quality and can be printed on most laser printers.
Poems appear by authors' permission and constitute copyrighted material.
Free transmission of this document (electronic or otherwise) is permitted
only in its entire and unaltered form; to inquire about individual poems
contact the authors by their email addresses. I take no responsibility
for the fate of this document, and claim ownership only to any poems I have
authored. Send comments and finished contributions (please reference SRJ)
to
[email protected]. Enjoy!
Erik Asphaug, Editor
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Issue 10 - Summer Solstice 1994
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
------
Winter
------
I raise my hands to the white hush-kiss
of the snow. It's light as parachutes,
cold as river water. Downhill
a rabbit crashes, tumbles through heavy juniper
looking for safe haven. She sees a falcon
or the falcon sees her; both are lost to me
in the early thin sun.
Karen Krebser
[email protected]
------
Spring
------
Dead feather skeletons
Bud cautious yellow-green, rust,
The dove wails welcome.
David Goldberger
[email protected]
-------
ecstasy
-------
you should not be watching me like that
your gaze is a climbing rose - twining
you and me in fragrance and thorns
the iceland poppies are shedding
their green cloaks like timid novitiates
shyly flirting with the dawn-sun
the air is like sangria - each flower
bleeds among the swords of grass
singing chords of music
do not weep over the scent of jasmine
fresh crushed rosemarys - hold me
and heal the stigmata of my hands
zita maria evensen
[email protected]
-----------
Don Quixote
-----------
he wandered the dark
shrouded streets
murmuring memories
that were never
his own
nights spent sifting
through the garbage
of the world
only seeking out
the odd photograph
or tattered letters
abandoned to the past
when the days came
he'd meet sleep
clinging to every line
every time worn smile
stolen in the night
yet each word
of separation
would coil raging
beneath his
heavy lids
as they fluttered
into red
then darkness
Jody Upshaw
[email protected]
---------
she bends
---------
she bends
to kiss
me.
her hair
falls on my
face like a
warm breeze
and
shuts out
the world
like a
fragrant
summer
night.
zazu
[email protected]
---------
Lake View
---------
The wind walks the waters
Rippling the sky into a mosaic
of tiny blue tiles
The breezy fingers
caress the grasses
Making them whisper
hissy secrets
William C. Burns, Jr.
[email protected]
-------------------------------
In the Armenian Theater Company
-------------------------------
I.
A desultory summer: I had nothing left to do.
I offered to do the lights. Why?
Admiration of her morroccan pantaloons?
Nonsense! the answer is simple: Loneliness!
I spent an evening at an old gentleman's house:
he served us tea from ornate pitcher in the boggy dark
a citrus-sweet yard, we built sets...
turkish doorways and a dais.
II.
I didn't do the lights.
I said, "I am sorry: it is too much for a neophyte"
She said, "we are all neophytes here"
I said, "Yes, but it is your play, and besides,
we only just met... in a cafe"
She said, "I understand. I will do the lights myself!"
However, she made me spinach pie after a Saturday hike.
And told me, two hours too late:
"There is no possibility, Ron, of romance."
Ronald Bloom
[email protected]
------------------
Joanna, on Parting
------------------
She lives not closer than the sun
across whose tarnished Realm
sharp-fangled moment fears to run
and love, to overwhelm -
she changes faster than the Sky
beneath whose pallid arch
delirious fury gushes by
and blazing footprints parch -
she speaks like springtime nightingale
resplendent and estranged
in passion strong, in lifetime frail,
and in deceit avenged -
An apparition come and gone,
A rainbow in the desert Sun.
Ilya Shambat
[email protected]
------
Lilies
------
once upon a cliff
in lily scented air
I found the face of god
at eight, the universe
was green
and juicy sweet
I threw my body
in rapture
into a heaven
of crunch and scent
flawless communion
of yellow and pink
my falling unbound
in me the glimmer
of a ravishing joy
which being born
in me that day
has never died
Judy Stanley
[email protected]
-----------------
Isabelle Brasseur
-----------------
l'ombre blanc de son p`ere
danse dans ce requiem
elle tombe du lancement
sur une vive ar`ete tout en gravant
un arc qui atte'nue sa de'tente profonde
the white shadow of her father
dances in this requiem
she drops from the toss
on a sharp edge scribing
an arc that eases her deep recoil
E. Russell Smith
[email protected]
--------------
Recitation Day
--------------
I have never seen anything
clean manhatten's twilight
like this stormy apocalypse of rain
through the coolness and blur
of the water-lens window
a light green odor of leaves
while I memorize and recite and
recite in rainy gusts of voice
the poetry of Robert Lowell
Kelly Anne Berkell
[email protected]
-----------
Connections
-----------
That was no miracle, no mere coincidence,
my friend--you with the raised eyebrows--
when you answered the telephone and knew
before a word was spoken;
who thinks to put a letter in the box,
to raise the flag, and one is there.
The mind will muse when no one watches.
Like Phaedo, we make our case
with other selves and turn the page
before they answer--a case that smiles
with teeth only when it is caught.
You will swear like a don you were not there,
or like a witness who was and saw nothing,
but they will out as surely as a bell sounds
or a parallel thought is spoken--
as surely as dreams are found by sunrise.
Larry Whatley
[email protected]
-----------------
Pastoral Escapade
-----------------
You mutilate language to see how it works,
if it can still escape your maze.
You boil it down to poetry, the bones into glue.
The only proof's a broken-down confession;
shelter for the night.
To say that trees are silent is to say that the wind
whispered to you with her eyes. If it were love,
she'd hide the broken crockery. Lost for words,
the sky seeps through cracks in glued porcelain,
or more simply, dead, brittle elm branches
that would love to sway in storms
just one more time but as daylight drains
away through the swirling moonhole
they know it's too late. What's left is just an island;
were it a lakeside, it wouldn't curve away so.
A swig of blue and suddenly things are back
the way they were before - abandoned haywains
of desire, a distant cockerel, then rain delaying dawn -
but part of the night remains: the black, wrinkles;
the brown, blood; the pink, whatever you like -
after all, you paid. Its flowers will hunt you down.
Tim Love
[email protected]
-----
Bears
-----
She found finally
that she loved him
but he was too expensive
as bears usually are
to keep around her heart
he had rough ways which injured
and his claw-marks on her life damaged and wounded.
There is this about bears
a near-sighted obliviousness
so large they simply do not notice what is in their way
and they have no familial feeling
the males
and no protectiveness neither
and he went through her life like the ravager he was
in one end
tearing through the other.
She visited a zoo years later
she recognized that look
and squeezed the soft hand of the man she had chosen
and felt sorrowful anger
towards the large brown form
alone in the passing cage.
Ralph Cherubini
[email protected]
------------------
Those are the days
------------------
Those where the days
and my heart belongs to my mamma
but today
I need something that I can't understand
those are the days
we walk together to our Odysseia.
Jari Suuronen
[email protected]
------------------
The Fairytale Game
------------------
a thimble and a hatpin
were all she'd given
in a trembling whisper
two common objects
to act as fodder
for the fairytale
our favorite game
closing eyes
i saw the forest
the daughter, the darkman
and the dying father
felt the cool thimble
filled by healing water
carried down
the high mountain's
side
i felt that poison prick
biting into skin
heard the beast howl
from the shadowed trees
heard her breathing
under me
and let the story flow
Jody Upshaw
[email protected]
---------
beginning
---------
I don't want to think or sing tonight,
I don't want to do anything but place your face
into my hands like a gift I could stare at for hours.
I want to slip you into my fearless arms
and tell you that I love you until I run out of breath.
As background clocks whir loudly in this aging night,
I want to brush your hair softly and study your pupils,
wet in their overwhelming honesty
and fuller than the dark we sit in.
I want to fingertip your sentient lips
and feel the start of a sigh deep in my belly.
I want to be as old as I am right now,
embodying what your eyes say,
and believing with unflinching certainty
that the soul exists.
And though it's nearly summer
with its towel of heat blanketing us.
Holding you as our skin forms a human seam
is as right as the smell of the air before it rains,
pristine and almost intoxicating.
Let me hear your voice speak one more time
before we sleep,
for the motion of air climbing your langorous neck
rings like a fragile chorus,
while seductive and exotic as the shape
of your eyes.
You have struck me like a thunderbolt,
saturated me with life brimming
and bathed me in the delicate knowledge that petals know
when they eat the morning dew.
Today I am wholly breathing this love
and it fills my lungs
like my first taste of chocolate.
ivan garcia
[email protected]
-----------------------------------------
Albumen and the Myth of the Walking Women
-----------------------------------------
Your legs stretched so far that you
recalled the Barberini nude locked
up as you were
in that Noho garret in '65
with the torturous beeping noises
and mysteriously contracting lenses
Her breast were a pert template
for rayon
make-overs in steel as you
dropped her hard as cardboard outside
the Mary Boone praying that death
would not skulk in the guise of
a yellow taxi.
Now she stumbles in straw filled heels
again past the Royal Bank on Spadina
with huge Chinese characters
-a black profile with no armholes
seething with the remembrance of
ogling stares.
Kate Armstrong
[email protected]
------------------------------------
Mark Antony, from Home, to Cleopatra
------------------------------------
Octavia came to me this morning bearing fruit
from the orchards: sweet pears and persimmons,
figs thick with the scent of earth
--for our trees and vines are overflowing now--
and sat near me while I ate, her look hard to divine.
Could she know that even now you are in the fruit,
that the taste of figs is the taste of your tongue
crossing mine by night, long ago but remembered,
at dawn, that the scent of orchards swept
by the wind off the Tiber before the morning rain
is your sweet musk, and that I cleave
to this orchard, to this house,
even to Octavia, because all things are you
and you are in all things?
I have grown old, my love, sitting here
by my wife's orchards, sending my dreams
outward toward you over the sea.
You would not know me now.
I am going gray and too often I feel
the morning mist seep into my muscles.
The figs revolt my stomach, the persimmons erupt my bowels,
but I cannot tell Octavia. I drink too much.
I fear that if I cross the seas again
as you have bid me a hundred times,
come to you again, you will see me
and cry out to think I am a ghost,
Julius Caesar, returned.
I could not endure that.
We are draped in our ghosts, love,
we wear them like tatty gowns.
When they blow aside, lifted by the winds
that drive us, we are exposed,
our bared private flesh, held out to aging
and the scorn we have engendered
in two worlds at once.
We are damaged goods, love: tired rags
that have lost their shape and color, hanging
on dressmaker's forms in separate rooms.
We have learned everything except how to dress our lives.
Octavia, Caesar, a hundred camp followers,
hang from us in disarray. Their smells overwhelm
even the redolence of this orchard,
even the memory of your scent.
You are the fruit, at last, my love.
Musk and roses, the taste of persimmons
on your tongue, your sweetened breath against my ear
in your cry of passion released.
That first night long ago, on the barge,
then there was no Caesar, no Octavia,
no bought and paid for love,
only the motion of the Nile
and the motion of your hips
as you drank me into you.
In the morning we stood on the deck and you laughed
at the pair of hippos copulating on the riverbank.
"They are vile to everyone but themselves," you said,
and held my arm. And so they were, and so we are become.
I will come to you again, with this letter,
on the next tide, and let the river itself beware.
Kenneth Wolman
[email protected]
------------
come tuesday
------------
looking opening up at your star face
shine as water reflecting my imagination
wash me into a breaking heartache
i knew knew knew you were here
gena ram
[email protected]
-----------
sand cranes
-----------
sand cranes in flight
with fingers of hard teak
touch light
like a steely gentle brush
from a butterfly's wing
on white sewn skin riding
a taut high wire
like an undecided
marionnette
unforgiving gray grains
flying under take-off
as sun burns rivers of sweat
from sand-weathered skin
sand cranes with butterfly kisses
and wingtips sending bullets
through burning summer
no one no one no one
point point
sideout
zita maria evensen
[email protected]
--------
homesick
--------
home is where
the heart is
is where
you can't go back to.
is when it is august
& the days stretch
like shadows or cats
& fold in by degrees
too small to measure out.
before you realize it,
(eyes closed, cup to lips,)
twilight pours into night
& you are racing
thru backstreets
as the crow flies
the smell of ocean
breeze & seaweed
fly away home
Jamie Jamison
[email protected]
--------
On Paper
--------
shouldn't it be
that that which can't be said
remains most beautiful?
dreams
shouldn't all be remembered.
what we remember,
the abstraction that sifts through time,
waves that chop against the shore now and then
the wind gets rough,
what we remember
gets locked,
distilled and distinct,
put down on paper.
Erik Asphaug
[email protected]
--------
Full Jug
--------
Summer trembles in a breeze
like Li Po stooping for a hand of white grapes
and these grapes are white rooms of summertime
jiggling in the eye.
Here is a clue
to antelope eyes and to my hands anchored
to this yoke which is my collarbone
laid brittle and bare.
And I see
a man to his thighs in the current
scooped at and torn as a secret.
This
fruit is wine and never stagnant,
it tumbles into gorges like blown silk
pitched into summer and round.
mike finley
[email protected]
------
beauty
------
there are moments
which make them stop
speechless and opened
reminded of something
long hidden
something supple and green
beyond hill or horizon
beyond reward or retribution
something lost in frenzied
avarice or desperation
something so lithe and yielding
so whirling, trembling, born of bliss
lines and light of unfathomable joy
colors which enfold and resurrect
their deadened souls
and make them weep
Judy Powell
[email protected]
----------
our bodies
----------
our bodies,
backs arched,
are like the petals of a flower.
a humming bird rises
burning brighter and brighter.
the petals wilt
leaving behind
the sweet smell of
decay.
zazu
[email protected]
----------------
metallic highway
----------------
barreling down the metallic highway
streaking a smear of moods and hours
lithium patient, yes, lithium patient, please
please don't wander off too far.
but the cars, they are turning their wheels towards me
i know, i saw them do that, the parked
unoccupied ones.
and the people, they are sending thoughts to me,
and they're reading mine, i know, i can
tell from their gestures and still backs.
nothing is as it seemed. there is more to
reality than the old reality.
this is a little like watching tv
with the color knob turned up.
this is a little like putting roses in stainless steel vases.
this is like no trip i have ever done.
barreling down the metallic highway
i am the shining
i am the whirling
i am the connected one.
Marek Lugowski
[email protected]
-----------------
a common language
-----------------
every beginning contains it's end
lacking common language
we barter w/ words
a form of exchange
he is still able to believe
in a sense of progression
of intelligent/rational decisions which lead
to improved opportunities
like manifest destiny
stretching to some distant certain future
& I on the other hand
Jamie Jamison
[email protected]
--------------
mourning nixon
--------------
so we oh god
we oh oh godded
our way through the night. twice.
then he said "i always wanted
to be a gigolo. you know.
make women happy then go away. though
it never seems to work out that way."
after that the flags were at half-mast.
it happened weeks after the president's death.
JJHemphill
[email protected]
