From a shared youth, a once-long-ago
When all things seemed possible.
Their tributes call to mind the promise
Of your early days; the golden circles
In which you traveled, in a time out of time,
Beyond recapture. I grant now what
I begrudged you then: you were the
Best of us, gifted of mind and body,
The center of every company, destined,
It seemed, for great things or, failing there,
At least happiness—at least that.
All of us deceived, looking back, perhaps
You most of all. Some missing gene,
Some somnolent flaw, lay in silent wait for you.
It stole upon you slowly, unrecognized,
Disguised as the excess of youth, a canker
Of burgeoning power, unbeknownst, that
Hollowed you out from within. Unmatched
With any heart true enough to anchor you,
Or call you back, you foundered—
more vulnerable than ever we dreamed.
Growing up in the long shadow
Your talents cast, I burrowed deep,
“An inner émigre,” like Heaney’s wood-kerne,
“Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows,” husbanding
The sources of my slow-building strength:
The un-David, the blocking back,
The-one-that-could-be-relied-upon.
Lower profiled but better moored,
I became, for as long as memory serves,
In all that mattered (save strict chronology),
The eldest; strapping on the first
Of the many obligations you shed,
One by one, year by year, until,
At the end, your passing was strangely
Without context or consequence,
Barely a ripple in our daily lives.
Our shadow brother, long since
More wraith than real, you slipped
Away one night as if determined
To spare us any further trouble
Or drawn-out goodbyes; no fuss
Or bother that would be unbefitting
A life so empty and bereft of purpose
As yours had become (thus holding onto
A sort of pride, a kind of dignity).
Would that you could have spared me,
As I’m sure you would have wanted to,
My leaning over the lip of Adams Falls,
Shaking your ashes into the thin stream
That dribbled to the shallow pool below;
So weak a flow that it could barely
Carry you: your remains a gray sludge
I had to shove over the ledge
With my fingers, ingloriously apt.
Even so, one good rain will
Wash you down Linn Run into
A soil that knows much of rebirth
And renewal. If Ree was right
And we all come back again,
Know that I wish for you smoother
Sailing next time through; fewer gifts,
If need be, but more staying power,
And the same gentle, generous heart.
Farewell, my brother.
Legacies
A contentious day at preschool.
“She has a stubborn streak,” I offer.
“Not from you!” their smiles opine,
And I smile back, as if to concur.
What can they, who see me
Only in corpulent middle age,
Benign and becalmed,
Know of the fire that once
Burned blue from within
In a youth inseparable from
My thought, quoting Yeats,
Because I’ll have no other?
And how often you were singed
By that unforgiving flame,
Flaring like a solar storm
Each time you fell short,
Or stumbled, along
The twisted, stony path
That led us both away
From that single, calamitous, event.
Sojourners
What if between this life and the next
A soul, if only for a moment, knows
Where it’s been, and where it’s headed:
A blinding instant of self-awareness,
A glimpse of The Big Picture it spends
The next life trying to recall, a fading
Imprint on the closed eyelid of a soul
Plunged back, ready or not, into the trial
by existence?
What does it feel in that moment,
That grace of respite, catching its
Breath before heading back down?
Relief, to know there’s meaning to it all?
Reluctance, to be stretched on the rack
once more?
Or, most likely of all, longing,
Unreconciled and inconsolable,
For the life left behind. The hands
Now forever unclaspable, a parent’s
Or a child’s; memories of a lover’s
Touch, warm breath, whispered
Promises, circling then disappearing
Down the drain of eternity. Recollection
Stripped, identity shed and reentry
Accomplished, naked and soiled, again.
George Longenecker
Bear Lake
Just three lights shine on the opposite shore.
At ten the waxing moon is only a dim sliver,
the sky still too bright for me to see stars.
White pelicans fly low over the water,
their wings beating slowly, so close
I can hear feathers against air.
The stars brighten and the pelicans
are still flying as I fall asleep.
When I awaken after midnight
the Milky Way lights the sky to the horizon,
from Idaho south to the dry Utah hills.
A plane blinks red and a single
satellite moves east to west.
All the rest is stars.
I lie on the desert shore
watching stars who shone
billions of years ago.
Eons from now somebody
may be watching our star.
By then we’ll probably be gone;
maybe we’ll have blown ourselves away.
It’s hardly important to the Milky Way
whether one star shines—
but perhaps it matters
that twilight comes already at four
that across the lake a porch light comes on
that already the Milky Way is floating into dawn
that already one white pelican flies low over Bear Lake
perhaps it matters—
all the rest is stars.
Samarra
A boy looks up at the gold-domed
mosque in Samarra as he does each morning—
it’s stood a thousand years, it’s reflected
the sun at dawn and dusk, it’s echoed
thousands of morning prayers. He falls
backward in the explosion, his head crushed
beneath a fragment of ancient mortar and gold.
Bricks scream through the air and obliterate
prayers. The blast shakes minarets
which sway and crack in the explosion.
One of his eyes looks left to the Euphrates,
the other to the Tigris, but he doesn’t see
gold leaf that rains down and shimmers in the sun,
doesn’t see dust that rises where the golden dome
had been. Blood trickles from his mouth;
who knows to which river it will flow.
I saw it in the news the next day—
but probably it’s already
been forgotten in the long history
of Babylon and America,
another small war,
not news anymore.
There’s prayer as sirens wail:
Return your artillery and blood
from the Tigris and the Euphrates,
reverse the explosions,
turn back the sunrise.
Return the child’s sight
so he may watch the golden dome of Samarra
come gleaming back in the morning sun.
Completely Full
As we board, the flight attendant announces
that our plane is completely full. I want to ask
how it can be more than full, for isn’t full by
nature complete? We leave Florida completely
full, next to me a mother and her young son.
Two hours later I’m jolted from my nap. The plane
bucks with turbulence, bounces, then brakes hard
as we land on the icy Newark runway. The whole
time the mother holds her son’s hand and leans
close against him. He says only it’s okay Mom.
It is this then, the taking of a child’s hand
that is more than full, more than complete.
He puts his other hand on hers.
We have landed and the plane taxis to the gate.
Salt and Sorrow
A kitchen in a residence in Aleppo, Syria damaged Sunday in fighting.
—Narciso Contresas photo, The New York Times
Walls are blackened, there’s a refrigerator
with rust at its bottom, stickers of yellow
butterflies and blackbirds on its door.
A dish towel hangs on the door handle
and atop sits a vase of purple paper flowers,
On shelves jars of spices still stand upright.
We can’t see what’s upright in the rest
of the home, if its power is on,
or if walls and windows are intact.
Charred ceiling plaster covers the floor,
no mortar shells or shrapnel though;
a jar of beans lies unbroken and a tiny drawer—
maybe for salt, we don’t know, but nobody
can live without salt or sorrow,
no matter where. On a lower shelf rest
three small pairs of sneakers—
we can’t see the children,
their parents or the photographer,
they must all be somewhere.
Outside—but outside is not in the picture—
we can’t hear if there are explosions and artillery fire.
On the wall hang pans, a strainer and measuring spoons.
Why do some things fall and not others?
All the utensils are blackened,
but we can’t tell whether from cooking
or just war. In a dish drainer cups dry;
they’ll need to be washed again
if the family returns—
if they live—their blackened
kitchen sent naked around the world.
Squeaky Fromme Remembers
I’m one of only a few women
who ever fucked Charlie Manson
I’m one of only two women
who tried to kill a president
I wore a red dress
the day I almost shot Ford
(I wish I’d shattered his head)
I loved the world’s most famous killer—
(I wish I’d been the one to stab Sharon Tate)
plunging deeper and deeper
deeper and deeper—oh Charlie
stab me like you did then—
I had him more
than Patricia or any of The Family
the year of my trial
I got more mail than Charlie
I was the only woman
ever to escape from Alderson
(but they caught me)
I’m free now
(parole sucks and I miss the food)
my photo’s in the Ford Presidential Museum—
you can Google me—
I get more hits than Charlie
(sometimes I’d like a hit of acid)
I did more drugs than Betty Ford
you know I was in a Broadway Musical?
Assassins
the actress wore a red dress
I’m more famous than anyone in my family
than anyone in The Family
except Charlie
Charlie, Charlie
I’m free now
I almost assassinated the President, Charlie
I’ll come in my red dress
stab me, make me bleed
Benjamin Dombroski
Because Your Questions on the Nature of Memory Have, at Times, Threatened My Buzz
Ahead, the coal train enters a long curve
and here we watch it slow
as if into the memory of curve. Below
the river courses through evening
and the island goes skeletal
in shadow. Woody
spit of land from which captured Federal troops
once watched this city burn—
a light not unlike tonight’s lowering
on the horizon—and nothing grand
in those flames, what they promised
then; an end nearing
only in the slow exhaustion
that all fire reveals—ruins
to comb beneath empty
warehouse windows. It must be easier
here than at the yards upriver—
no one walking the rails,
cutting wide arcs of light
through the woods. So, from the balcony
we watch the boys creep through scrub pine
and up embankments, disappear
in the trains’ chuffing.
You tell me you’ve known coal
the promise of heat. You’ve written it.
Heaped in car on car of freights
pulled easy along the rim of these bluffs,
I think of it as memory
of the mountains which held it.
Bored, these boys hop the trains,
only to leap from them when again they slow
through the far side of the city
at Hampton, the bay
and sea. Doubtless you’ve dreamed the sea
a kind of memory. And the coal,
which carries to the sea
the weight of mountains, wears tonight
ragged coats of melting snow.
Oh, frozen wards of snow
carried down the mountains.
Oh, motion. Oh, absence
and he longing for shapes
of things the snows have covered.
I reach for your glass and refill it.
I reach for the night and stars.
I reach for the train. Let us speak plainly
now—as the wind dies, and the noise;
as the tail end of it disappears
like a dark thread
pulled through evening.
My mother called yesterday
with news of the fourth
suicide this month:
a girl this time, who stepped in front
of the 5:38 carrying traders
home to their suburbs by the sea.
In her voice I heard the reach
toward what question
the child’s mother must have asked.
No, she didn’t ask it.
Nor have we talked of the others.
Though I know
she wonders. I wonder. You must wonder.
But we talk instead of a room
walked out of, row of empty dresses
hanging in a closet. Or laundry; the scent
of someon
e else’s idea
of mountains in springtime.
If a mother needs answers, let her
find them. Let us have another drink.
And if we must speak of ghosts,
tonight they shall be the ghosts
of a boy’s hands on a window as a train starts:
fingertip, palm-print and the world
pulled through them like a sheet.
Tie and rail bed, parking lot and platform clock.
Bright sheet of the world
through which a few gulls glide.
South of Paris
. . . perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.
—Cesar Vallejo
Horrid to die on a market day
in a foreign town, like this one
in the Loire valley, in November, with a light rain
passing its secrets to the slate roofs
and opened umbrellas.
How ill, beneath the plane trees
and between the stalls of vegetables
and strange meats,
the fish and foreign, fish-like faces,
among gestures of buying and selling
how black, even surviving the Thursday
after feeling suddenly behind you the presence
on the cobblestones
and balking at a case of aged cheese
before asking in broken tongue for a taste.
Afternoon with My Nephew
Pushing your racecar through the grass,
you say, shooo, the car says, shooo.
The plane says, grrrr overhead.
Its shadow is t-shaped, or boy shaped,
when older, you’ll run with outspread arms
through a field. Its shadow says nothing.
The birds say hello, even the buzzards say hello,
but you can’t hear them, they’re too high.
Their shadows are eaten by the air.
There are people in the plane, you know.
A pilot, yes, and passengers too.
What do they say? All kinds of things.
They’re coming back from a war which isn’t yet over.
And if they’re talking about it
we don’t hear them either, only the plane,
which keeps on saying the only word it knows.
Ryan Kerr
Pulp
There are hours of tonguing the loose tooth
before I decide to remove it with my own fingers.
In my memory it feels much the same
as the resigned detachment of sectioning a grapefruit.
The same resistant tug of sinews
clinging either to ivory or the fleshy meat.
It is reluctant and stubborn,
bringing with it nerves and tissue,
coaxed by a child’s impetuousness.
The dance of spit and blood
in the stainless steel sink.
The tooth is a lesson.
The pulp and papery matter of childhood.
The space of wistful, smiling mouths.
Trimming