Tremblay, McCord, Cooper, Averill, and Petersen
Poems by Bill Tremblay
Iron Mountain
At timberline
beside a hanging lake
tinted the teal isotope of iron
as I look at Long’s Peak
butterflies flutter Bach trills
among tundra flowers.
Two elk bound past.
Then as I cross scree fields
granite talus bows out, tilting
my balance so askew I gag,
brain spun with light oxygen
and spider belly-down hand
and foot, spraying debris
into air below, setting off
a childhood memory—
once in the black punishment
corner of my bedroom
when I was nine I saw a Cro Magnon
sitting cross-legged at a cave mouth
in the Pyrennes, gazing down
at a river valley. No longings,
no regrets clouded the membrane
between the sea of grass
and the green sparkle of eyes.
Notes on Grace
Driving back east through cornfields,
cornfields under fluorescing skies
stalks with outreaching palms, receiving light,
turning it to life, what they are, how they’re
formed
perfectly together, the highway
loops up ramps and suddenly towers, in rows,
brick red, marble white, with mile-long
freight trains slow rolling through stockyards,
stockyards, steam, smoke, rising, making haze.
Come with me,
if you want to go to Kansas City,
I find myself singing out the car window
to Charlie Parker’s ghost,
feeling him reach inside the fibres of song
to leap oxygen scales with night’s blue statement—
So long, pretty baby,
the time has come for me to bid adieu
and the promised poetry of the road
becomes a sky filled with neon
Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch-
chain…
don’t cry over me, ‘cause I’m goin’ to Kansas City.
An effortless movement of alto air,
corn leaves lifting in a rain-filled breeze.
A Front Range Sky
From kitchen windows gold
sunset pastured horses drink and graze,
raising their body heat
for the coming January night.
Cottonwoods stunted by having
only the dirt road’s spillover to
nourish them lie closer to the ground
than the well-fed. The wind
that makes their branches dance
in praise of the changing light
also drives an almost slate-colored
cloud the size of Rhode Island
over the foothills, buoying a smaller
cloud’s flight, undulating its wings
like a manta ray, and beyond
like a company of steel guitars
other clouds scud west
out to pagodas of snow.
A polished aluminum sun
brightens as evening gathers
so bright time skips a beat.
(from Rainstorm over the Alphabet,
Bill Tremblay, Lynx House Press, 2001)
Poems by Howard McCord
(from The Collected Poems)
IN THE FLOWER WORLD
a poem for my son
Wyatt leaned against the cliff
of the narrow cwm between
Lost Peak and The Wedge.
The heat had told him
sit in the shade, rest.
I had been in the same spot
fifty years before, and seventeen
as well.
This day
my hip and knees had sent
me back defeated
two hours out.
The tumbled cliffs in the Organs
are a kaleidoscope of granite’s possibilities
so full of richness they never
leave my mind.
Wyatt closed his eyes to let the patterns sink
and under the curtain of his lids
heard a cough.
He looked, and heard a deep cough again.
Something stirred in the brush
twenty feet away, a head emerged,
the long dun body
the flicking tail
and Lord of this Cwm, this Mountain
this whole angelic range of beauty
gazed at him with care.
Lord Lion stepped noiselessly
along the cliff,
unhurried,
walking in his kingdom.
Wyatt’s eyes went with him
into the flower world
the Yaquis tell about.
So rare to visit that a man gone there
is blessed beyond all others.
To how many living has Lion shown himself
at twenty feet, in leisure,
without yapping dogs and gunfire
or the sting of tranquilizing dart?
This is the rarest visitation
and the deepest kinship
with All
held those moments in the net
of consciousness
forever.
Kathmandu Valley: A Hillside
Tibet is fifty miles away
and the requiem of all that is fugitive
is the low and moaning cry of the wind.
The mountains here break out toward the sky
in a spasm of rock and snow
and hungry villages. Below,
a white stupa covers a relic of Buddha
like cupped hands
and I am very close to walking to Tibet.
It is moving into a falcon’s eyes
and brain here on the hillside,
a funny pilgrim rocking on his heels
talking to a brown child
in some tree language of gesture
while out beyond our faces are the Himalayas
and fifty miles away
my cinnamon Tibet.
The Rim of the Great Basin
Q. What is the holy power of the wilderness?
A. The holy power of the wilderness is innocence of man.
—–The Catechism
Darkness is another kind of light,
and stones are sweet as air to breathe.
In the depths of canyons
for a thousand years, the unlocked
the rocks themselves and slopped
inside like bones fit into skin.
They watch as the bristlecone
pine signals form the ridge,
and know how flames leap from
flint and steel.
The bighorn desert sheep nests
like a bird above the falling land,
unseen by man, and mountain boomers
play their cylindric minds
on the silences which are wisdom.
Canopus hangs like a breathing eye
in the arms of the pine, and the long
interchange of their awareness
is the heart beating at the core of everything,
a music of smoke and crystal, an impenetrable
language shaped out of time and the graceful,
falling curve of space between them.
Work by Allan Cooper
WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUMS
WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUMS
I didn’t come here to meet you, but here you are, and the world is better for it. I don’t know if we’re male or female, black or white. These are questions the crickets never ponder.
For now there’s silence in the garden, so the blossoms will have to wait. I remember the black carnations nodding their heads in the wind. And the white chrysanthemums, each bloom as radiant as a human face in love.
The Cricket
There’s that cricket again. His voice
in the heat of the day seems urgent,
but at night grows more relaxed.
He knows the cold is coming,
but his song has something more
important in it. He has appointments
with the night and the day.
Issa loved crickets, and no wonder:
they were his friends, and he knew
how to let down the secret veil
between their two worlds. The crickets say
the cold is coming, and the inevitable dark.
If only we could sing until we die.
The Banquet Table of the Light
Wind sounds rise inside the pines. This is the music that draws the deer close, and the chickadee in his black cap and mask. Here there are notes full of resin and seed that make the mind fertile, and the body leap up from its seat.
The body wants the windows of the air to open, so that clouds can come near, and the winter thunder sometimes heard at a distance, as if a wall were levelled at last. It reaches out to touch the doe’s hair as she passes, and holds the chickadee as he swings up and down from his cone.
The body sits with all this, at the banquet table of the light, where it’s possible for all things to come together at last, full of laughter and watery sound, a tone that rises half in this world and half in the world that lives in the air.
Poems by Diane Averill
Creed of an Unrepentant Pagan
I believe in the resurrection of forests,
the sanctity of solitude,
and the communion of crickets and humans.
I believe in the preservation of frogs,
their skins so different
from our own outer layers,
wet, more
like the skins of vaginas.
I believe in god the brother
and in god the sister
doing her angel fish dance.
I consider the word holy and the word sexual.
I study the power of green and yellow
and the holy spirit of blue.
These are the powers of the child who died
because he drew a picture of sky
and forgot to draw the sun in.
I believe in art, not as pinnacle or pedestal
but as a way to breathe with your ribs expanding
the way branches of any winter tree lift
around their bird hearts in the wind.
I subscribe to the tease of my own ignorance,
the way it allows me to know.
I know the laughter of twelve-year-old girls on a bus
who can’t stop themselves from laughing
faster than freeway traffic despite the turning
of adult frowns in their direction.
And I believe in young men who double up laughing
so hard they become one laugh.
I believe in the one god
of wildness, in the preservation of possums
and in the divine commandments of dream dragons.
And I know the doctrine of dogwood
shadows the immortality of fireweed.
I practice release from instant religion,
from worship at the golden arches of Self.
I believe in the consciousness of all creatures
and I know that spiderwebs under my mail box
receive messages from the morning sun.
I believe in the rainclock ticking on my roof.
Clearly the eyes of my brown dream
animal were the eyes of my grandmother,
and I know a multitude
a blue-green leaves died and came back to life
in the eyes of my granddaughter.
I know and believe that the raccoon’s
watch-jeweler fingers sort through the garbage
of our civilized minds. I learn from the long trail lit
by lantern leaves in the early fall
of humanity. I believe in sin
of omission, which is a tourist turning
his back on the deer who walk the spine
of Hurricane Hill because
Deer don’t photograph well.
I believe in ethereal grasses and orgasms.
I know that time is a wave
of blackberry bushes rising
over a weathered fence wearing
flowers of summer foam—whole minutes of them.
I listen to the different dialects
of pine and cedar and believe
in burning sadness to the ground
even though it will spring back.
I know there is prayer,
a red geranium lifting its many red heads
to the firmament, and I believe in sky,
a river of flame so fluid
a child could skip stones along its back.
I know and believe in the roots of this flame,
reaching deeply into the earth,
to bring forth salal and salamander.
I receive the pulse of water
in the depths of Lake Crescent and I watch
the galaxies on its surface. I know
the little round ball of moss in the Hoh Rainforest,
peaceful as a lightly formed fist
is another kind of prayer.
Finding the Dark Time
Insubstantial now,
she lies down below fern,
leaf-shadow on a half-cloudy day.
Above, hail displaced apple blossoms,
filling the air with the scent of white melting into moss
where a newborn
dinosaur-headed sword fern
began its soft uncurl.
Under her were the roots of fir,
seeking water, going as they must have gone,
step by rooty step
in their own decade-slow way
towards the marsh for centuries.
As sun came back she recalled the bones on rocks—
was it just this morning—right above a veiny stream.
Bones of a small animal she couldn’t name
because it was no longer dressed in a face.
Naked jaw’s teeth serrated
like a sword fern. It was this which had
given her the gift of time
stopping for awhile, for long enough
to lay herself down.
(from For All That Remains, Diane
Averill, Fir Tree Press, 2007)
Poems by Paulann Petersen
Appetite
Pale gold and crumbling with crust
mottled dark, almost bronze,
pieces of honeycomb lie on a plate.
Flecked with the pale paper
of hive, their hexagonal cells
leak into the deepening pool
of amber. On your lips,
against palate, tooth and tongue,
the viscous sugar squeezes
from its chambers, sears sweetness
into your throat until you chew
pulp and wax from a blue city
of bees. Between your teeth
is the blown flower and the flower’s
seed. Passport pages stamped
and turning. Death’s officious hum.
Both the candle and its anther
of flame. Your own yellow hunger.
Never say you can’t take
this world into your mouth.
Jim:
This anthology is bringing together so many poets that I love and respect. Here’s a new poem (or series of small poems) called “The Invisible Book.”
Love and energy to you,
Allan
THE INVISIBLE BOOK
The invisible book
writes itself
whether we know it or not.
It’s in love with the small things we abandon.
*
I like sentences that begin with rain
and end in silence.
The stones love it too,
and the white rabbit feeding at the edge of the field.
*
Heaven can wait.
But I seem to find it
in the fox sparrows
kicking up bugs from the leaves.
*
No one knows when the last word will come.
That’s why I talk so much.
Let’s spend the rest of the day with a stone Buddha,
who is always silent, always aware.
*
I can deal with silence, and age,
two or three books on my shelf.
I want to wander with Rilke near the dark roses.
I want to tell Hesse our homesickness will never end.
*
I’d like to take a little walk
that ends at water.
All the roads inside me
are turning to sand.
*
The earth breathes evenly,
takes everything inside: the bones
of a vole, the blue shadow hiding
inside an empty shell.
*
The brook sound reminds me
of the earth’s hands,
holding everything steady.
What catches the earth when it falls?
*
I want to be playful with the light,
show it my shadow in late afternoon.
At night I am the lone presence
moving from room to room.
*
Night comes. The whole field
is soaked through with dew.
Lovers don’t mind: they spend
the night wrapped in a cocoon of light.
*
3 am. I step outside to take in
the moon, the clouds, a little wind.
Someone keeps changing my name,
and the small things I fall in love with.
*
Don’t worry.
Someone looks over us.
It would be a shame if the world
were a garden where nothing ever grew.
*
I am the voice that never leaves you.
I am the hand that never sleeps.
I am the voice of the wild grass ripening,
the light inside the light.
*
It’s a good thing that the earth
shakes itself now and then, like a giant
waking from sleep. In the earth’s cells,
whole pastures of light are waiting to be born.
*
Let’s be playful, then.
It may be the only way to mend the soul.
A woman stitched it by moonlight
from the sorrows of passion and dew.
*
Let’s call down the black and white angels of the air.
It may be the only hope we have.
Wings keep turning the pages of the invisible book
that we write but never know
Allan Cooper
December 16, 2007 at 8:10 pm