Number 289
January February March

Poetry
Copyright © 2002 Poetry Flash

"And of the Nature of the Sea Which in Ebbing
and Flowing Seems to Observe so Just a Dance,
and Yet Understands No Musicke"
-- A Song of the Drowned
SAM WITT

The Lives of the Poets
JOHN BALABAN

The Beginning
STEPHANIE MENDEL

SAM WITT

Into the voice of the dead girl pulled out of me.

Drink the forgotten recently afraid.
Drink of my face beneath th'unbroken nervure.

Of we, who provided new bodies (softer), which bore me
Drink of the impure gazes: If we had lips (soft), to speak:

They swirl around my ankles benumbing them,

Grown out of the cold foam which bore me stand.

At what angle to the slanted rain.

Waves break at my feet among pebbles, shells.
Where the sun hid itself among sea-waste: glazed branches, strings of jelly
And the sea rang each of its tiny, missing bells in my inner ear.

Roaring its rasures through my eyelids---
Thrall to the sea: the form
Of liquified perukes
That I might lift my hair (the eyes torn in me) and baldheaded,

Bow to the sea in a moment of prayer,

They shawl me as under a black, clear tongue immaculate,

The still unmoving dead

Full of medical waste.
Where my heart would be, in this,
A Thule hour, where the poisoning began in me,

A drownedspace to fill. Hearthanged around my neck.

I was born to sound: a voice forgotten its body.
Among those who drowned here was a young pregnant woman,

Flashed at my feet when she broke
Among silvers of annihilated wheat.

Oombed here in your green speaking curled

Into the underbelly of a wave,

Into its cavernous little girl's voice:

(Speak for the abandoned in their shining path of least:)
Blotted out where they took my neck apart at the nape.

Clamoring through these indefinite ribcages,

Through bodies of missing light.
Scrawled, tossed down on broke-backed waves

At what angle to the dys solved mother I carry within me

A portal of mere standing foam. Opening, swallowing, sobbing,
O breast within to consume a newborn throbbing in my chest.

In polluted, holy, insensate pages of sea-marrow
With your many Sabbaths spilled through my toes.

Tossed heavily on decapitating spokes the water
Has rendered
Into white maresilk, in this manner, moan Sea-she,

With flamelike motions of dauncing
Where the sun hid its pale, reflection. Call to your sperme,

That I might finish myself in thee.

I know the hunger behind my face,
Smeared with human light,
Released above me into pieces of dirty white torn away

With a cry, a cry…

A garbage sifting gull cut a wide swathe
In the air above where I was.

Spilling its birthabsences away into the sky,

To be born over and over, away, then swooping back down,
With a cry torn from my throat,
Cut a wide swathe through me.
The one with tinsel in her beak, flashed to me a signal of the drowned:

Rise of this heavy, smokd bodysleep
Formd to fly. Some face

Was trying to be born in me.
Some face my hunger has brought here---

Scrolling through its moments of frightened shilldren.
Its screaming, its silent silver screaming

Lashed to my own spine, thrown down in a hooping motion:

Thole: cast ounds of it down

Which in ebbing and flowing seemes to observe

One day, one day when I stand missing at the sea's edge,
So just a dance: letfall, let all

Into the hour of erased faces
Suck of her drowned flesh.

(from Everlasting Quail, by Sam Witt, Middlebury College Press/University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire, and London, 2001)

Sam Witt's first book, Everlasting Quail, was selected by judge Carol Frost for the Katharine Bakeless Nason Poetry Prize given by Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review, The New Young American Poets, Pleiades, Virginia Quarterly, Louisiana Literature; he also received the New Millennium Writing Poetry Award in 1999. He lives in San Francisco and will shortly travel to St. Petersburg, Russia, on a Fulbright to write his second book.

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JOHN BALABAN

"The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets' testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering.…So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here." ---Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Fact is, it's a reality that grinds us all,
even those who whisper to themselves: "if I
were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep,
thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either."
Still they collapse at meetings, on tennis courts,
pig valves going ka-boom in their hearts,
pitching into their Wall Street Journals
as the train lurches home to the Hamptons
as the cab crawls uptown to the condo on the Park.
Dying in their dandruff, on their treadmills,
taking their sips of dioxin seepage,
eyes fried by computer screens and boredom.
The huge need for cocaine said it all.

•

Well, these were the thoughts that came to me
on a high wooded bluff outside Port Townsend
just after Levertov died. Her Times obit
ran next to some admiral's from the Vietnam War,
apparent adversaries, now side by side,
true to their conflicting truths.
The hand that gives. The hand that takes.
All about me clumps of sweet pea, purples
and pinks, cascaded down the grassy hillsides
as dawn mist raveled a wreath through inky tops
of Douglas firs. Far off, the distant Straits
of Juan de Fuca pulled tides below a cloudbank
and ferry foghorns called, each to each.
Can sung words calm the guns of a steeled fleet?
("Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet
can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle
out of the solar system.") At Sotheby's,
Ginsberg's top hat went for $258 after
the bad gray poet launched his last exhalation.

•

Unsettled, I drove to Seattle's Blue Moon Tavern
where soon I annoyed a man in straggly hair
and baseball cap, reading Cicero through wire-rims,
hunched at the beat-up bar and railing at me
"Man, I told you, I don't know those people!"
My mistake. He looked like he might have
perched on that barstool reading Latin
for decades since abandoning a dissertation.
But he didn't know Roethke, or Hugo, or Wright
whose framed lugubrious black-and-whites
still hung from the rough plank walls
where once they drank and howled like Humboldt.
The only woman among them: Carolyn Kizer,
with her huge sultry eyes and severe French hat,
Dorothy Parker to this Algonquin of moonstruck boozers.

•

"The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved
in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair
of these martyrs.…They succumbed, poor loonies."
One thinks of Roethke weeping over a dead mouse
cupped in his huge hands. Of Hugo sweating out
a hangover in the bleachers of a sandlot game.
Lew Welch walking off forever into the scorpion Sierras.
"Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And Jarrell
falling in front of a car. And poor John Berryman
jumping from a bridge." (And Plath and Sexton
gassing themselves.) Delmore Schwartz,
Humboldt Humbert, shouting from the moon.

•

So, praise to those still coming through on song,
a bigger tribe than one can name and tough
as anything put up by corporate America:
Maxine Kumin with her horse-broke neck, still
writing, still hitching up and riding Deuter.
William Meredith struggling back towards speech.
Hayden Carruth raising a toast with his "poet's
cheap, sufficient Chardonnay." Richard Wilbur
calling us to morning air awash with angels.
Merwin in Hawaii, Snyder in the Sierras,
both taking the nothingness of sunyata
to conjure up a habitation.
Walking
their Sonoma farm with Kizer's husband John,
we stopped before a storm-struck, twisted pear tree,
a remnant from an orchard of 100 years ago.
Out of the hulk of its blackened trunk,
one smooth-skinned branch sent forth some leaves.
"Still blooming?" I asked. "Madly," he said.

*All italicized quotes are from Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift (Viking, 1975), page 117.

John Balaban is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose---his books have received two National Book Award nominations, a National Poetry Series selection and an Academy of American Poets's Lamont Award. He is the translator of Spring Essence, The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, an eighteenth century Vietnamese concubine. He read this poem at the Associated Writing Programs annual meeting in Palm Springs, California, in April 2001, at their Tribute to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer.

____________________________________________________________________The Beginning

STEPHANIE MENDEL

I balance the smallish box on top
of two weeks of mail, use the small blade
of the box cutter to free the jar of honey,
a present from a college roommate.
L Shana Tova Tikatevu, May you be inscribed
for a good year. The sweetness flows
onto my fingertip, and I lick it as I phone
my sons to make sure all is well
and it is. I'm happy from the splendor
of the Canadian Rockies, the golden moon
resting on the horizon, and now I want
to get back to the everyday---
buy cottage cheese, apples, baby spinach,
splurge on two papayas, and the next morning,
cutting fruit and scooping out the seeds,
I turn on the TV for the weather, hear something
about terrorists, and outside my house
is the familiar traffic noise, a barking dog,
the louder sound of the garbage truck,
yet there's also a silence like time has stopped,
and I wonder if I can, and yet I do, take
the berry stained blouse to the cleaners,
get the gas I need, fill a prescription
at Long's Drugs where people are saying
Welcome back, Have a good day, and at the cleaners,
No problem to the stain, and no one
mentions the bombings even though
the flag at the Fire Station is at half mast,
and I'm angry at the owner of the yogurt store,
his sign saying We are closed today. Something
is not happening yet, something that will happen,
and it begins when I hear two hundred firefighters
are dead, and a wail is beginning to overtake us
and I call my sons to tell them I love them
and David says Holly is listening to the radio
with ear phones because Joshua doesn't know
the word death yet, but it was just last month
that he pointed to a door in a picture book
and said it was dead, and I didn't ask him
what that meant because I wasn't prepared
to explain and so had turned the page.

Stephanie Mendel's first collection of poetry is March, before Spring. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Cream City Review, and Seattle Review. She teaches a poetry class at her home in Marin County, where she is poetry coordinator for the Belvedere-Tiburon Library.