APJ Autumn 2007

AUTUMN 2007 "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either." ~Robert Graves About the Poets Page 7 Credits Page 9 Big Thicket Song #3 Big Thicket Song #1 For Jame Byrd, Jr. Seven miles from the highway, down trails truckling through cypress trees— Blacktop yellow stripe down the middle the sun a hint of fire edging the leaves— they dragged a living man down a family of beavers builds a home. Never down until they dragged a dead man broken into pieces enough to participate from the bank of tooth- and tail-crafted pond, I shed on either side, tall pines, planted shirt and pants, strip to bare truth every ten years pulped after growth and wade into brown water, mists tall enough to mill the paper to publish the obituary still rising in the stippled day. Toes squish through ripe mud, bubbles ooze up. these woods have a dead man in them Sink down, descend days and years, broken shredded into black asphalt into first light. Sunlight, banding in waves, head legs torso scattered like needles deep woods whisper here breaks into thin beams between leaves and falling, falling, splatters knees a thousand people drive over red specks and belly, chest, penis, pale buttocks, spread droplets of raging tears but paints the years. Only the sounds a dead man’s dying cannot roll dark thicket into shining light of splashing, rap of a woodpecker on dry bark, rustle of armadillos rooting through damp leaves, breath heavy, alien. So and, again, so. A white heron, immense in beauty, © 2007 H. Palmer Hall breaks flight, dips down, beak open, splashes white from bank to bank. A water snake seeps from a broken limb, no noise, only silence except: a steady rain of leaves, the drop of dead limbs. Something Something whistles in the wind, women weeping for some some bird, perhaps a rocket, cause as old as the thought of war. some sound that breaks the silence. The music that accompanies death Forests climb a high hill plays on and on, no break between movements, and under the trees’ heavy limbs no pastoral, no lyric melody, thousands of men and women grunt, discordant notes, wild abstractions, sweat, haul rifles, ammunition, supplies. Varese and Pierre Boulez, squeaks and echoes and sighs, a little night music. The same very old war keeps being fought, people die Flowers fade, weeds squeeze them out. as they have always died, A single bougainvillea struggles upward, only there are new ways— blossoms like napalm in the hot sun. children clad with bombs— continued on the next page Looking North I am up much too early today blisters on face and back, feet cracked not to watch the sun rise like patches of hard clay. José y Maria, but because of some restlessness what child must come, what rescue some desire to move from from a dry land, what hope for clear this one spot where the earth water and the soft brush of cool breezes. is parched, where water hides beneath the cracked earth. The sheriff of Kenedy county A Monument leads journalists on a trail from the Rio Grande north 1. “Who would put graffiti on her head? to a small highway. The tourist Why would someone scar so sweet a thing?” spots are dry holes near scrub he asks. In the silence she smiles, mesquite, sand dunes with rattle points to shards in the sand. “A long snakes. He points out each time ago, ages. Old wars, old weapons. depression in the earth, each See where the spearhead struck, the gash below the breast. depression that once held dry Last week in Beirut bones in a dry country. “Nine we saw a woman killed, a bomb, a mad people so far this year,” he says. uncertain soldier fired into a mosque “Illegal aliens walking from and turned away, searching for some other so many miles south to some thing to shoot, yes, a thing, not stone, but made of flesh and blood. Yet, we weep north they’ve never seen.” They to see a form of marble gashed, marred. used to drown in the river, now Look. No tears. No blood runs down her side.” their skin shrivels as they walk, turns darker, their tongues dry. 2. They lie down beneath dunes and die. They look across the river, minarets, spires, golden in the too-bright sun, Here in this withered borderland see tanks, Humvees, attack helicopters, no oasis offers relief, no ranchers a canvas of red and beige, towers falling. put water out as they do food “Here Mohammed walked and Abraham. for ranging cattle. I stand beneath An old tower reached heavenward, mystics a bright night sky, looking up spoke of a garden to the south, a snake, a woman tricked, a man love-besotted, at stars undimmed by city lights a child killed in that first light.” and gaze across a barren land. I do “But we have come so far,” he said. not see a woman fall, posed between “All those centuries, all that history.” two dwarf trees, hear the rattle The statue seems to smile. “So beautiful, of a snake, of a last breath of air, so fair.” “Nothing’s changed,” she says. “We walk on the same land they walked only, some small cough, some and do the same old things. Nothing’s desire that floods across the border, changed, only this…we kill so many some search for life, to take and drink, we cannot count the dead, nor give them to kneel and stretch up and out. This names as the old mother did.” is the end, the last days of pilgrimage, Her statue crumbles. She gazes at the dead. Poet bio on page 7. Memories Tall windows open to a curve of sea embracing house and distant white-walled town Death in the Mountains luminous against a sunny sky. Green waters, odoring of depths, So it ends, like this. fill the empty rooms with dankness, a breeze ruffles thickened dust A moment silent, filled and long dead motes shift, momentarily, with past, present, the not-to-be in false exuberance of life and light, beneath snow-crusted trees to settle again in sleep in a frosty morning light, as shifting shadows grey all. the brightness perfect, pure difficult to endure, A musky silence perfumes but you must. of dreams that used to be, and footsteps that were Time fills with a blessed here-and-now, but are no longer the warmth of moments lived give walk silently up a path peace to preparations, that is no more. to gatherings, reconciliations as the whitest of lights descends Loss to flare, then soften, to fade at last in the dusky night Eyes darken of death. as images flesh from thoughts that brush the heart with painful sweetness. Via Appia, Rome Loss ever present Stones burnished by hooves in life recomposed, that echoed once with sureness pieces rearranged over rounded rock, to disguise the absence scraping the granite surface illuminating all. with clatters carried by winds that swept the ancient world. Before Adam Heaviness placed by sure hands in rough mosaics Night comes. reflected unimpeded power Stars gleam and scanning distant hills, nebulae float, dreaming conquest. lazy notes of euphonious symmetry Softened now drifting through to greys and browns, the wide spaces of eternity, by airs perfumed of centuries past holding present, past and future the antique road yet glints all there is to be of armored ghosts that guard her stones in a music heard under clear Roman skies. long ago when dreams absurd disturbed the restless sleep © 2007 Janet Butler of a god that wept in desperation at the loneliness of heaven. Poet bio on page 7. Wobble The world brims with gimcrack and wobbles on its own ignoble ore where once it held a canyon wall and mountain ledge in place Wearing Out like embryonic glue now leans to earth toward level land All summer long you put your face to the wind. and bleeds its copper blood. Walked through the narrow streets along the sea, Where once the clearest stream up the long hill beside cottages that came down refracted back its golden grind to the road with their garden-greened back yards as dazzling dust shining through picketed fences. All along the way now flows brown and slow you said, “Let it never stop,” the sappy smell of bark like clotted blood. and rose, the ant mounds on the pavement that we All that once was element counted (two hundred and seven), and the thrilling defiled now in molded forms exhaustion in every moving thing. When autumn came turns up as knickknack figurines, you found a room more captivating, and it is there cans, coat hangers and coins, where you remain, while I am left to walk your world. in kitschy reincarnations, nothing more than wasted guts of slaughtered mountains. Gloat of the Molecular Biologist Abstract Painting in Autumn All that can happen in a test tube The metronome swings through trees will happen, in time. I know, I’ve dispassionate upon the hinge of winter watched the lime turn into lemon, across the twigs and unflexed arms beamed as legion tied to legion, that once held September’s thin embrace. one long feathered DNA wing; and yes, I coaxed the reagents Yesterday we heard from the plaintiffs- like a mother hen, clocked the a mockingbird frozen without a call annealing polypeptide, its every a robin no longer prowling the grass piquant turn shedding the odor a blue jay with far too much to say of new skin, the leather of vinyl, incubated and fractionated, a pause before the splitting of the light coddled into likeness of being a parting of a skin, a taking on.

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