Scott Hightower

(Paved Paradise, John Kelly, 2009)

The first television program put
into re-runs was “The Lone Ranger.”
-a Snapple bottle top

A frame. Two keyboards, a bass,
a dulcimer, and five guitars
set the stage for “Dagmar Onassis.”
Kiss. Kiss. What? Has it been
sixteen years? What does
it matter that the roses upstage
on the grand piano are red?

If you have been asked
to wear the dream,
what difference does it matter
if the dress is white or blue
and the shoes shine red? We park
the day’s carousel
and heed whatever
falls out and captivates.

With ghosts—Damia? Hutch?
Jacques Brel? Judy
Garland?––shimmering
somewhere nearby–the evening
nears its end: John Kelly’s guitars
and Joni Mitchell’s plaintive
melodies about longing, sex,
our Frankenstein technologies,
science’s tunnel vision.
Tunnel vision.

The wingless moon floats
beyond the encapsulating
spotlight, and each one
in the theater must find
each’s own way home.

Lois Beebe Hayna

He says swallows circled over them.
She remembers no sound of wings. Only
of water harsh with autumn. Sometimes now
birds–cries shrill through dream–converse
and she wakes awed by a strange
sense of flight, just as he says he must
have imagined the swallows.
He speaks of an apple tree
bee-loud with blossom. She insists the tree
stood bare, the harvest long past. Yet, in odd
moments she catches the scent of flowering.
He shivers in recollected wind.
His memory jewels the sky with a crescent moon
and Orion. No, she says, wind and black clouds
scudded with storm. Now, looking up at a half-gone moon
she remembers a faint light
silvering his face. He ponders a moment,
admits to the dark.

Michelle Askin

Those memories go to my brother’s eyes: kidney red
from drugs. My mother rubbing them with a dishrag,
praying to the saint of addiction. Then on our row house lawn
he swung clubs with an Asian woman,
who one midnight said, you teach me golf.
My mother worried: the husband might mind.

He would watch from the doorway. His cigar smoke
moving like stories: a school bombing in a Saigon village—
blood from flesh and orchard fruit, the first carwash
he opened in some ghetto off I-395,
and how he took her in that shaky attic at a cousin’s wedding.
Not against her will, but against all the city gardens’
orange blossoms and sirens for a gas station robbery.
Against whatever else nights are lit and burned by.

Terra Brigando

Recently, you have been everywhere. I carry
your journals as weathered talismans, a sign
of misguidance – the way you stole
my voice when I was five and I learned
that mountains shed such long shadows
in rooms that don’t face the sun. I thought

I saw you, the other day, walking down West St.
It was you, gaunt face, faded
baseball cap, hooked nose. Only you disappeared
up some unknown gravel driveway and walked
into some unfamiliar house. Lately,
you have been visiting me and I don’t have the strength
to tell you to leave. You never mentioned

my name in all of your nine journals. I searched, checked the spaces
in between the words, scanned the yellowed pages. So I wrote
in black felt tip, “He had a daughter.”
Maybe now that you are gone

you will remember.
I have been seeing you often. Not as a ghost,
but bodily, solid. I remember the way your flesh looked
in the end – elastic and pale. Maybe that’s when you remembered me –

doesn’t death always reclaim names from the subconscious?

Like smells from childhood. Your grandmother’s
wooden cupboards decayed by moths; your yellowing
heart buried in sequestered pages I’ve uncovered.

I swear you descended our backyard steps late last night, swear
I heard you say my name; whispered it with the breeze in
the tomato plants that are now just rising from your
ashes beneath the walnut tree,
so tall and wide –

the towering father
amongst the inconsequential grass.

*Out of all this I’ve learned the steady art
of breathing. In and out. Over and over. Lungs
expanding, rib cage widening, the soft innards
of  sides making hollow space.

Leonore Wilson

That which goes into the mouth and is eaten

is mortal, perishable, transformed

like knowledge, the way a subject takes within himself

something important, alien, that which is hard

made soft, deliquesces, and this thing becomes him,

doesn’t it, isn’t this what Dali wanted us to see,

to understand in the teaspoon, the prolongation

of its handle and the shallow bowl which contained

the little watch, or the ossification of a railway station,

the soft clock making its first appearance

in The Persistence of Memory, saying all gnosis is found

in phantoms, dreams, the fourth dimension…

I listen to the sax and trumpet made malleable

by Billy Holliday’s limbering voice, I take

the host in my mouth, crack its weight against my palate

and it bends, I remember how my breasts

were sex once, when the rigid milk ducts filled,

then the little pump’s blue horn, the rich liquid rising

inside the midget bottle, the yellow colostrum

like chrism, and I remember my son who tried to stuff

all my mother flesh inside him, in his small Pavarotti mouth;

how heroic it seemed when the string of milk left,

that sudden ribbon of white, opalescent, when he thirsted

like a night-blooming flower, his gullet becoming

sated, fed clear to the core, and distance bent backwards;

yes, the stuff of time vanished when I unbuttoned my blouse.

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Scott Hightower

A Pilgrim into Silence, Tiger Bark Press, 2010

_________________________________________________________

Karen Swenson’s newest title, A Pilgrim into Silence, is divided into four sections. Each of the sections explores the life journey of an urban American woman—a woman of a generation and a class perhaps tinged with theatrical qualities of pomp and circumstance; a lady propelled by notions of religion and reason.

The privileges and joys of such a woman are no less real; her observations, no less driving and unremitting. Nor is her will spared in any way from the stifling rigidity of role expectations. Griefs are sedated and finally deadened with alcohol. The metaphysical places of beauty, desire, and love are dished out with heapings of loss on the long road to self-possession. Early on, love and despair become traveling companions in this collection.

Sonnets and villanelles are employed, and the lives of animals often serve as metaphors.  Sparrows are quarrelsome in spring:

But come a warm June evening, rancor gone,
brown pinstripes smooth, one holds the rail, his soft
throat feathers pulsing song, just as my wrist
beats my blood, in the mindlessness of beauty.

(“Sparrows”)

After an operatic evening out on the town, the voice of one of the poems drifts into an instant of third person disembodiment:

At intermission she [a neighbor] leaves in her mink. But
I know the score. While Violetta has
her last ecstatic moments, my ghost, home
alone, holds her pose before her claque of empties.

(“The Phantom at the Opera”)

In an unexpected leap in the section, in a food court somewhere in a more modern Teheran, girls giggle across tables at the close of a sonnet:

. . . even
a Tex-Mex. An isle of adolescent liberty,
where boys stroll by to look at faces that leaven
dreams, creating divine and political difficulty.
The essence of adolescence is invariably heathen
and totally in opposition to religion and reason.

(“Teheran, The Food Court”)

The second section of the collection is composed of poems that take place in or near Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitute in Calcutta. Ironically, it is not only a home for the hopeless, and those with more privileged, languishing spirits also abide.  In their service, they find life among the death.

The poems oddly dovetail with the poems in the opening: the themes of need and an abandonment of maternal love; infantile—even animal—survival instincts; again love and despair. But even here there are small gestures of collegial cooperation in a world of almost Darwinesque competition and unrelenting denigrations. It arises between two foreign women volunteers:

In Holland
a psychiatric nurse, here she’s bemused,
as I am by how habit-forming
it is to wash the clothes and patients, their
skin crackled–sun parched, river mud.
We shop, lunch with our fellow foreigners
on meat, not dahl. We move with ease
from the Dead to the Oberoi Hotel
at night watch Rambo videos
or else read Indian philosophy.
Returning in morning air, sour with exhaust,

we find a white wrapped shape . . . The
nurse and I agree, it feels as if we almost
have a life here—a white-wrapped gift from Death.

(“Two Foreign Volunteers”)

In another, the will to live is animated:

. . . no, not pity, rather astonished admiration
for the sheer willfulness of life—a blind
and cornered cat slashing at Death’s dogs.

(“The Austrian”)

The third section is an account of the poet’s pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash—a holy mountain in the Himalayas. Still the journey of exploring will, sacrifice, and discovery.

Had this book ended with the third section, this reviewer would have set the collection down feeling the book’s promise fulfilled—the arc of a journey of discovery to the edge of self-possession. But the last section—poems returning to the themes of motherhood and urban scenery—made the collection feel less artful and more valedictorial and willed, an unnecessary bringing of things full circle. An outstanding sonnet about an aging mother’s demise, “Driving,” could have served as the sole closing poem for the book:

When she picked up the hitchhiker Death,
that beggar’s first demand was the alms of her eyes,
the cataracts were the blur of his breath,
his exhale shrinking her boundaries without reprise.
He shut her highways, lowered his border bar
till the only way out was on his road, in his car.

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