Live, Eternal

1933
Lynda Hull

Whole countries hover, oblivious on the edge
of history and in Cleveland the lake
already is dying. None of this matters
to my mother at seven, awakened from sleep

to follow her father through darkened rooms
downstairs to the restaurant emptied
of customers, chairs stacked and steam glazing
the window, through the kitchen bright with pans,

ropes of kielbasa, the tubs of creamy lard
that resemble, she thinks, ice cream.
At the tavern table her father's friends
talk rapidly to a man in a long gray coat,

in staccato French, Polish, harsh German.
Her mother stops her, holds her shoulders, and whispers
This is a famous man Remember his face.
Trotsky—a name like one of her mother's

fond, strange nouns. He looks like the man
who makes her laugh at Saturday matinées,
only tired. So tired. Her father pours the man
another drink of clear, bootleg gin, then turns

smiling to her. She has her own glass.
Peppermint schnapps that burns and makes her light,
cloudy so grown-ups forget her when she curls
on a bench and drifts then wakes and drifts again.

At the bar, her mother frowns, braids shining
round her head bent to the books, the columns
of figures in her bold hand and the smoke, voices
of men, a wash of syllables she sleeps upon

until her father wakes her to the empty room.
The men are gone. A draft of chill air lingers
in her father's hair, his rough shirt,
and together they walk the block to morning Mass.

Still dark and stars falter, then wink sharp
as shattered mirrors. Foghorns moan
and the church is cold. A few women in babushkas
kneel in the pews. Still dizzy, she follows

the priest's litanies for those who wait within
life's pale, for those departed, the shades humming
in the air, clustered thick as lake fog in the nave.
The priest elevates the wafer, a pale day moon

the spirit of God leafs through, then it's
a human face—her father's, the tired man's
and she is lost and turning through fragrant air.
Her lingers entwined make a steeple, but

all she sees is falling: the church collapsing
in shards, the great bell tolling, tolling.
1933 outside and some unwound mainspring has set
the world careening. The Jazz Age

ended years ago. Lean olive-skinned men
sport carnations and revolvers, and in the country
of her father, bankers in threadbare morning coats
wheel cartloads of currency to the bakeries

for a single loaf. The men who wait each night
outside the kitchen door have a look she's seen
in her father's eyes, although it's two years
until he turns his gentle hand against himself.

But now he touches her face. Her father stands
so straight, as if wearing a uniform he's proud of.
She watches him shape the sign of the cross.
She crosses forehead, lips, and breast, and believes,

for a moment, her father could cradle the world
in his palm. When they leave the church and its flickering
votive candles for market, it is dawn. The milkman's
wagon horse waits, patient at the curb, his breath

rosettes of steam rising to the sky that spills
like a pail of blue milk across morning. She prays
that God take care of the man in the gray coat,
that her father will live forever.

Hull, whose poem prays for a father's eternal life, died at the age of thirty-nine in a car accident in Massachusetts. She produced a body of work and received recognition in her time. Still, it is a sorrow that she did not have a longer life. There are many such sorrows, and many joys, and the world has need of poets who can sing them all beyond the span of one life's time.

Creed

First Do No Harm
Bob Hicok

While trying to extract a fly from a spider web,
I pulled one of its legs off.
There is the thought of small prosthetics, image
of a tiny hospital, tiny being too big a word
for the nano-this and micro-that, calipers
and scalpels and whats-its.
Once I grant soul, it’s hard to stop.
Does a carrot have any, and if any,more than cucumber
but less than squash?
Philosophy should lead to salad.
I was trying to help. By this phrase
we have watch fob, atomic bomb, the Red Cross, how often
does anyone believe otherwise, does anyone say,
I was trying to muck things up.
A limping fly.
Were I a Hindu, I’d say it was or will be me.
I like that as the name of a river:Wasorwillbe.
TheWasorwillbe flooded, hundreds were killed.
Six months later,
the best crop of wheat in a century.
I see a boat, a man asleep in the boat, his hand asleep
on the water, a fly asleep on his hand.

Waiting for the Call

If the Owl Calls Again
John Haines

at dusk
from the island in the river,
and it's not too cold,

I'll wait for the moon
to rise,
then take wing and glide
to meet him.

We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching
with tawny eyes.

And then we'll sit
in the shadowy spruce
and pick the bones
of careless mice,

while the long moon drifts
toward Asia
and the river mutters
in its icy bed.

And when the morning climbs
the limbs
we'll part without a sound,

fulfilled, floating
homeward as
the cold world awakens.

Plain Extraordinary

In Celebration of Surviving
Chuck Miller

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you're getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
won't get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart's trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
fifty below
you're warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

There are poems galore singing the joys of romance and other forms of love, delights sensual and spiritual, and other extremes and extravagances. As all too many people know, sometimes survival merits celebration in and of itself.

Everywhere, Now, Forever

the corgis of queen elizabeth
Diane Wald

the corgis of queen elizabeth
on wednesday september 10th 2003 i was visiting my friend larry
who is chronically ill
larry knows everything about the corgis
and queen elizabeth
who now has five or six corgis
who mill about her feet and the feet of her dressmakers
and all the kings and queens before elizabeth
and he knows what the corgis have for breakfast
and he knows that they get fresh vegetables not raw
and they get turkey
in little silver bowls
cut up in little cubes not slices
and queen elizabeth serves them their meals herself
she had a favorite corgi named daisy
whom she buried somewhere on the palace grounds
with a little corgi funeral
and i do not mean to make fun of that
because i am happy she loved her corgi
but let’s be clear it does not always mean
that a person who loves a different kind of creature
is totally good
as i understand hitler loved canaries
and not to compare her to hitler
but queen elizabeth also indulges in hunting
and we all know about those presidential dogs

while larry is talking i’m thinking this is very fascinating
but i’m also watching the digital clock
over his shoulder
which displays hours minutes weather wind velocity
and alerts you whenever the airport closes in boston
if there are disasters of any kind
this is a very special clock
that he bought with part of the money that he received
from his suit against the massachusetts bay transit authority
occasioned by a trolley driver closing the door of the trolley
on his already painful foot
as part of his affliction is a dreadful neuropathy
to which he rarely refers
although that trolley incident really pissed him off
because the driver could have easily seen his crutches

he tells me the corgis have their own bedroom
next to the bedroom of queen elizabeth and prince philip
yes the queen does sleep with the prince even now
except on the nights when he’s out very late
and comes home after she has retired
when politely he goes and sleeps on a special princely bed
right in his dressing room
the corgis however always sleep in their own room
just next to the queen’s own queenly bedroom
and recently when a man
was somehow able to break into the palace
and walk boldly into the queen’s suite of rooms
finding the queen cloaked and crowned in terrycloth
as she had just taken her queenly evening bath
and was carrying her gin tray and a big yellow towel
the queen was most relieved that the corgis were not able
to get out of their bedroom
because she feared that they would have used
their little diamond-sharp teeth
to shred the silly man like turkey
so loyal and so fierce (but so sweet) are those corgis

and while larry is telling me about the queen and the corgis
and throwing in a lot of extra information about prince charles
and camilla and how camilla and her father
actually have suites of rooms in one of the royal buildings
where diana’s sons now live
i cannot understand how this can be true
but larry swears it is
in any case all this amazing information pours out of larry
in a way that i never would have believed possible
since he is normally a rather circumspect fellow
and while i’m watching the airport clock
over his right shoulder
i’m watching over his left shoulder
his tiny television
which for some unknown reason he has set to show captions
for the hard of hearing
they are showing newly released tapes from al qaeda
showing pictures of osama bin laden
or someone made up to look like osama bin laden
walking up and down the hillsides
somewhere
looking a lot like a shepherd
from the old testament
and underneath the captions are reading
“is it osama?
is it not osama?”
there is an investigation to try to find out
whether the tape is real or a hoax
and whether the soundtrack (or what shows on larry’s tv
as italicized captions) was added to the tape after the video
was shot and i’m thinking
what difference does that make
it doesn’t mean that it isn’t really osama
or even that it isn’t really
a shepherd from the old testament

and perhaps it’s all happening in cleveland or barcelona or honolulu
and not in afghanistan or iraq or hollywood
or any of the places we’re always being conditioned to think
are the only places anything of significance ever happens
when really everything is happening right here
right here with the corgis and queen elizabeth and larry
and the trolley driver and the lawyer who handled larry’s case
and the democratic presidential candidates
and the people who are sitting out on their stoops
just the way people did fifty years ago
on washington street in jamaica plain
but it’s right here and not twenty years ago or five years from now and

everything’s happening right here
right here where you hear or read this and make up your mind
about it
right here and right now and not anywhere else forever

Beyond the Love

The Silence
for RJ
Philip Schultz

You always called late and drunk,
your voice luxurious with pain,
I, tightly wrapped in dreaming,
listening as if to a ghost.

Tonight a friend called to say your body
was found in your apartment, where
it had lain for days. You'd lost your job,
stopped writing, saw nobody for weeks.
Your heart, he said. Drink had destroyed you.

We met in a college town, first teaching jobs,
poems flowing from a grief we enshrined
with myth and alcohol. I envied the way
women looked at you, a bear blunt with rage,
tearing through an ever-darkening wood.

Once we traded poems like photos of women
whose beauty tested God's faith. 'Read this one
about how friendship among the young can't last,
it will rip your heart out of your chest!'

Once you called to say J was leaving,
the pain stuck in your throat like a razor blade.
A woman was calling me back to bed
so I said I'd call back. But I never did.

The deep forlorn smell of moss and pine
behind your stone house, you strumming
and singing Lorca, Vallejo, De Andrade,
as if each syllable tasted of blood,
as if you had all the time in the world. . .

You knew your angels loved you
but you also knew they would leave
someone they could not save.

What We Mourn

Spring and Fall
to a young child
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.