Midnight
By Louise Glück
(Winter 2014)
At last the night surrounded me;
I floated on it, perhaps in it,
or it carried me as a river carries
a boat, and at the same time
it swirled above me,
star-studded but dark nevertheless.
These were the moments I lived for.
I was, I felt, mysteriously lifted above the world
so that action was at last impossible
which made thought not only possible but limitless.
It had no end. I did not, I felt,
need to do anything. Everything
would be done for me, or done to me,
and if it was not done, it was not
essential.
I was on my balcony.
In my right hand I held a glass of Scotch
in which two ice cubes were melting.
Silence had entered me.
It was like the night, and my memories—they were like stars
in that they were fixed, though of course
if one could see as do the astronomers
one would see they are unending fires, like the fires of hell.
I set my glass on the iron railing.
Below, the river sparkled. As I said,
everything glittered—the stars, the bridge lights, the important
illumined buildings that seemed to stop at the river
then resume again, man’s work
interrupted by nature. From time to time I saw
the evening pleasure boats; because the night was warm,
they were still full.
This was the great excursion of my childhood.
The short train ride culminating in a gala tea by the river,
then what my aunt called our promenade,
then the boat itself that cruised back and forth over the dark water—
The coins in my aunt’s hand passed into the hand of the captain.
I was handed my ticket, each time a fresh number.
Then the boat entered the current.
I held my brother’s hand.
We watched the monuments succeeding one another
always in the same order
so that we moved into the future
while experiencing perpetual recurrences.
The boat traveled up the river and then back again.
It moved through time and then
through a reversal of time, though our direction
was forward always, the prow continuously
breaking a path in the water.
It was like a religious ceremony
in which the congregation stood
awaiting, beholding,
and that was the entire point, the beholding.
The city drifted by,
half on the right side, half on the left.
See how beautiful the city is,
my aunt would say to us. Because
it was lit up, I expect. Or perhaps because
someone had said so in the printed booklet.
Afterward we took the last train.
I often slept, even my brother slept.
We were country children, unused to these intensities.
You boys are spent, my aunt said,
as though our whole childhood had about it
an exhausted quality.
Outside the train, the owl was calling.
How tired we were when we reached home.
I went to bed with my socks on.
The night was very dark.
The moon rose.
I saw my aunt’s hand gripping the railing.
In great excitement, clapping and cheering,
the others climbed onto the upper deck
to watch the land disappear into the ocean—
Easter Island
By Kay Ryan
(Summer 2008)
The people of the island built those amazing stone statues, and in the process cut down every last tree. No trees, no wood for houses and fires; no protection from erosion; no useful species, and so on.
—Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle
It worked without
a hitch: the last
big head rolled
down the last logs
to its niche.
As planned,
a long chorus
of monoliths
had replaced
the forest, staring
seaward, nicely
spaced, each with
a generous collar
of greensward,
and prepared to
stand so long
that it would be
a good trade: life,
for the thing made.
Analogies and Metaphors
By John Koethe
(Autumn 2011)
I want to get out of myself and what I’ve written,
Yet I wear each moment like a hat. The brim,
The feather stuck in the hatband—what do they mean?
What kind of metaphor is that? What kind of hat?
I remember an essay I wrote in Luther League
About the soul’s journey toward salvation: like a rocket,
I said (it was just after Sputnik), a three-stage rocket
Fueled by discipline and faith (the hydrogen and oxygen)
That roars inexorably aloft until the third stage fires
And the satellite separates and the soul settles into its orbit
Around God, emitting little beeps of praise. “Analogies,”
Said Pastor Paul, “are fine, but never take one to its logical conclusion.”
Who needs an MFA when you have Pastor Paul?
I was raised Catholic, then my mother restaged the Reformation
And we all became Lutherans, but I’m indifferent to that now.
What passes for religion in my life is whatever these syllables portend
As your eye moves down the page, following a train of memory and thought
To its nonconclusion in a momentary state of mind. All around me
Life pursues the uneventful course that physics sets,
While I navigate another Easter Sunday time and entropy
Are already starting to dissolve—like someone become so immune
To disappointment that it doesn’t hurt, for whom salvation lies
In a resistance to reality, in analogies and metaphors that give life shape,
Because the truth is inert. I sometimes used to feel
There was something missing, but I think I’m over that.
The day is wide and meaningless. I doff my hat.
Personals
By Rae Armantrout
(Spring 2022)
The symbols are inoperative.
Worry about the expanse
of dark water
The “done” button
doesn’t work.
The relentless march of cattails
into northern lakes
The blanket of cloud
cover
“Your response needed”
A plaintive address
to a phantom
beloved
*
I’m into nuance, quaver,
half-notes.
I am half-hearted,
forked tongued.
Strange as the Rules of Grammar II
By Terrance Hayes
(Summer 2022)
I have uncovered evidence your broken secret heart
holds a hairline fracture held together by kite string
Carol Burnett is heralded
in a criminally low number of imaginations
The leaves in the fall burn a copper like fire in a storm
of applause around a laugh strange as the rules of grammar
Ladies & Gentlemen put your hands together
for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s beautifully iambic name
Do not think of all the tall in him
squeezing into a stall at the mall as strange
Some days his father whispered to himself
Someday that boy’s going to change his name
I ran away from home as soon as I had a chance
when I was four or five in the Carolinas
Certain words never used to cross my mind
A god who claims to be on the side of good
but remains hidden is strange as the rules of grammar
The mouth fills with mouthfuls of grammar
Strange as the flowers a lost child finds
in the woods and consumes
Strange as that that a toddler cries in public
when something shiny appears
a candy hard as a ruby wrapped in plastic
a lonely coin blinking in the grass
or at the bottom of a fountain
within the toddler’s grasp
The first time my parents left me alone
with a babysitter I ran away before noon
They spent hours looking for me
before going home to find I had been
waiting on the porch the whole day
they say
You too may recall a story
so old you never thought to mention it to anybody
Strange as the first wound you ever received
The scar so old others must tell you how it was made
The Chair
By Wong May
(Winter 2023)
You have to first
Sit in the temple gloom
In the mahogany chair
& despair.
The only glimmer
In the temple (being the inlaid bits of
The Mother-
Of-Pearl shells
On the tall, more than humanly tall
Chair back, for these
These too
Are the reputed “Tears of Things”
Of this world as seen
By the world.
In that other chair behind
Temple curtains
Sits Mother
Mother
Who believed
For a good part of her later life
You were there somewhere
In the temple
Writing
A book
About her. She could hear you
In prose
Telling tales.
Mother had an interesting life
Because she was beautiful
& she wrote poetry
& poetry ruins lives.
(Does this sound like a fatwa,
Girls? “May your life be messy,
Your poems tidy.” )
Mother’s life was not tidy.
About mother poems were written
By several poets, including herself
“Non-fiction” (her own)
Some very good.
Now what is sweet as poetic justice
When it is meet?
On that score
No fear, mother
I say
Mercy,
Goddess
Most merciful
Most just
As if she didn’t know already
The daughter will not in a thousand years write
: But poetry only
As for that she said, she said you must
Remain in that chair
Be a seated woman
& despair.
Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany
By Gary Snyder
(Summer 2009)
There must have been huge oaks and pines, cedars,
maybe madrone,
in Tuscany and Umbria long ago.
A few centuries after wood was gone, they began to build with brick and stone.
Brick and stone farmhouses, solid, fireproof,
steel shutters and doors.
But farming changed.
Sixty thousand vacant solid fireproof Italian farm houses
on the market in 1970,
scattered across the land.
Sixty thousand affluent foreigners,
to fix them, learn to cook, and write a book.
But in California, houses all are wood—
roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines laid underground—
hundreds of thousands, made of strandboard, sheetrock, plaster—
They won’t be here two hundred years from now—they’ll burn or rot.
No handsome solid second homes for
Thousand-year later wealthy
Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers here,
—oak and pine will soon return.
Halo
By Rowan Ricardo Phillips
(Summer 2016)
We wander round ring after ring of life,
One after another, blossoms of light
To which we’re but a mere flotsam of bees.
And although this isn’t true, the poem says
This is true; life, light, flowers and bee: truths.
So stop and hold this poem above your head.
Hold it up to whatever light you find.
Then let it go: forget it if you can.
If it is meant to remain, it will remain.
And if it is meant to light, it will light.
Your hands will have moved on to something else
But your head will have, say it, its halo.
