February Blues

The city is a tired eye

swaddled scarf

a pulled down hat

Wind an unchained mongrel

its relentless grip

clamped onto bones

Snow banks form a frozen surf

car exhaust fog low hung

over a sea of yellow headlights

We are the cave people

dark and gutteral

in search of hibernation

in wait for that morning

when the sun outstretched

extends the evening

Debbie Calverley

Track

Track

Tomas Tranströmer

translated by Robert Bly

2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped

out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,

flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when a man goes so deep into his dream

he will never remember he was there

when he returns again to his view.

Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness

that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,

feeble and cold on the horizon

The train is entirely motionless.
2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars.

Lisa Ampleman

Mouth: To Say

To say a word, we put it in our mouths.
       It may roll between the teeth
or hum on the palate. Love, after all, starts
       on tongue against teeth and ends on lips.
To communicate once meant to take communion.
       I take the wafer into my mouth:
speech. Silence as it melts on my tongue.
       Your speaking hums in your chest
when my ear is to it. There's a wasp nest
       under my porch. They fly home at dusk,
but you know how to suss them out.
       And in my kitchen, plaster cracks on
one discolored wall. Is it water damage?
       Is the house settling? You put your hand
on my wall, say It doesn't look like water—
       (water, which begins on pursed lips).
The cracked pipe in the wall seals up.
       The glass of water we share is cold.
You kiss my mouth, which tastes like your mouth.

LISA AMPLEMAN

Full Cry 

Quote

"When writers die they become books, which is, after all,
not too bad an incarnation."                                           —Jorge Luis Borges

A Sacred Unhappiness

There’s a few things I want to say

about the un in happiness

and why it’s sacred to be.

His love came boiling up like

like the sea rolling and boiling

up until I noticed him there

I just hadn’t before.  Only sand

no footprints, a sharp breeze

out of the north-west -

that was it.  I had walked there

forever next to the rolling

boiling sea thinking

nothing of the whole thing or

what might come out of it

until he emerged all covered

with sea-weed and barnacles

a short stint on the shore he

said I never walk here.

That was a happy day and

the wind shifted to southerly

no bite at all only that switch

and bait over skin an awareness

that all is somehow right not wrong

until that moonless night

when he slipped away

I awoke to see the curtains

blowing in the wind

distinctly north-west

shivering I again became

un, a little waif in the world

sacred, nevertheless.

The passionate are immobilized.

The case-hardened undulate over walls

of the library, in more or less expressive poses.

The equinox again, not knowing

whether to put the car in reverse

or slam on the brakes at the entrance

to the little alley. Seasons belong

to others than us. Our work keeps us

up late nights; there is no more joy

or sorrow than in what work gives.

A little boy thought the raven on the bluff

was a winged instrument; there is so little

that gives and says it gives. Others

felt themselves ostracized by the moon.

The pure joy of daily living became impacted

with the blood of fate and battles.

There’s no turning back the man says,

the one waiting to take tickets at the top

of the gangplank. Still, in the past

we could always wait a little. Indeed,

we are waiting now. That’s what happens.

from Where Shall I wander:  New Poems, by John Ashbery