THE POETRY MISCELLANY 45 ANNIVERSARY RETROSPECTIVE ISSUE Featuring New and Selected Poems and Interviews from the Archives GENERAL EDITOR RICHARD JACKSON EDITOR CODY TAYLOR Copyright 2015 Poetry Miscellany English Dept. UT-Chattanooga Chattanooga, TN 37403 Submissions to [email protected] NEW POEMS 6 Bruce Bond 7 Roger Weingarten 17 POEMS 1972-2012 23 Donald Finkel 24 Carol Frost 25 Carol Muske-Dukes 26 Thomas Reiter 28 David Ferry 29 David Ignatow 30 Philip Booth 31 Carole Oles 32 David Wagoner 33 Bob McNamara 34 Elizabeth Thomas 35 Marvin Bell 37 Sharon Olds 39 A.R. Ammons 40 Carol Frost 41 Charles Simic 42 Dara Wier 43 John Hollander 44 Paul Mariani 45 Maxine Kumin 48 Michael S. Harper 49 Fred Chappell 52 A R. Ammons 54 Louis Skipper 55 Charles Simic 56 James Tate 57 Linda Pastan 58 Jim Simmerman 59 Laura Jensen 61 Rodney Jones 63 Paula Rankin 64 William Hathaway 67 Hayden Carruth 68 Dabney Stuart 69 Laura Jensen 70 William Matthews 72 Paula Rankin 73 Edward Hirsch 74 Shelby Stephenson 75 Mark Cox 76 Sandra Moore 78 Cathy Wagner 80 Mark Doty 81 David Wojahn 84 Linda Hull 86 Christopher Buckley 89 William Matthews 92 Marvin Bell 93 Mary Ruefle 94 James Tate 95 Richard Katrovas 97 Leslie Ullman 99 Jim Daniels 101 Gary Margolis 102 Thomas Rabbitt 103 Art Smith 104 William Pitt Root 105 Pamela Uschuk 107 David Wojahn 109 William Olsen 114 Paul Guest 116 Gerry Lafemina 118 Dara Wier 120 Chad Prevost 121 Colette Inez 122 Bradley Paul 123 Bill Rasmovicz 125 Hannah Gamble 127 INTERVIEWS 128 Mark Strand 129 Charles Simic 133 Stanley Plumly 138 Maxine Kumin 142 Jean Valentine 147 W.S. Merwin 151 John Ashberry 155 Marvin Bell 161 Dara Wier 167 NEW POEMS BRUCE BOND Quinceanera The girl you see in a snowfall of lace is no girl. She is a path in the heart of winter that leads into the dark wood. Look back, she says, step by quiet step filling up with snow. A doll knows what it is to wear the silence of dolls, the shatter of light that falls and falls, never touching down. Doll marries doll. A child marries the child in the clouds. The girl you see is too old to be a god. She is a candelabra, veiled in fire, the cold apple of every god’s attention, bride of the future, the white widow of the past, the snow globe in the palm of a woman she wants to want to be. That kind of toy does one thing only. Two, if you count the stillness after. Say you were to shake her gently now, to sweep her out of her crystal palace. Would she tell you what this thing is that is happening to her, to the body that does, confused, what a body does. Would you release a Pandora of doves. Is that what her silence is asking you. That she longs to break down a little, to break open. Like a blizzard, a bride. That she is thrilled as the child she cannot 7 be. Is that a shroud of joy that falls. A flock of angels, terrible with wind, cast out in frozen millions from the sky. 8 Thomas Not long ago he could crawl inside a jar like this, monstrous for a jar, tiny for the child who breathes there, just to experiment, to be the thing that fills the blank like a signature, a choice. Not long ago he had no choice. Only a womb. And in it a growth force people take for will, but it is not, any more than wombs are paradise. Though they might be, in retrospect, as knowledge is, as knowledge longs to be. No. To fill the vacancy wherever— in your arms, your body, another’s body— it is not heaven. Only a miracle space where bodies begin, before they look up to find their mothers missing from the room. The boy who carries the jar in his arms is missing an explanation. What is a jar that giant for, if not for smaller boys and the thrill of panic that they find there. When he was smaller he asked his mother, what is death. And his mother replied, nothing really, nothing to worry about. Which made it sound like a place inside her, a place of worry, sure, but also a jar, an emptiness like the longing that brings a boy into the world. He came from nothing. Not all that bad, so far as he remembers. Like some strange thing that is about to happen. 9 The name we are about to be given, the voice in the air that becomes our reason to respond. Let us call him Thomas, this boy with his enigma, and the jar a specimen jar. And what he longs to study, everything. Let us begin with that. And what he pours into the free space will be a little more his for being there, his nothing a little less nothing, less free. A collector of jars, not because he loves any one in particular, but searching makes him able to love, to pour his want, his blood, from jar to jar and back again. Such is the rhythm of a boy who walks. When he was smaller, he asked his mother, where did I come from. And his mother froze a moment, hearing in her mind the word, me, and then the word, God, and then no word at all, which was another word that gathered more and more significance in time. Like sand into the hourglass. 10 The Crown The girl with a crown of candles will tell you, there’s more than one way to break a circle, to break a girl for that matter, her eye ringed in silence like a shattered object. There is more than one way to slip through the zero of the diadem, and wear it, if not with pride, then with a look firm and awkward as death, as wanting what you fear. So black this iris, impossible to tell how much is the pupil, how much the rest, as if she stared through the bullet hole of some unspoken thing, forgotten even, the darkness in her made large to take the darkness in. So needle-still this gaze, it penetrates all things, or nothing at all, hard to tell, in the chiaroscuro of no world, her face the only lantern, her shoulders bare, her temple gemmed in little fires. Smoke blows back in no gesture, no wind, save that of naked being as it burns. What is light after all if not a break in the chain of things, an undoing of the dizzy spell that spins the atom. What is a birthday without its tiny beauties, its ribbons and its disappointments, its flames. In time, it is an old soul who gazes back through a girl’s eyes, her hair far too close to the hazard that makes of her a princess. Not the spoiled or the flighty sort. 11 Something more dignified like a chimney, a trophy, a life alone. To be on fire in the corner is to be the thing people look to when they face themselves, their flesh pale and radiant as wax. No, she is not alone. Nor is she wedded to the regal heartbreak she carries for us. She is far stranger than mere solitude promises to be, unto death. Out there, what we do and do not know of spirit smolders from the oil drums in vacant lots, among the makeshift dwellings of the docks. Who can resist it. The power of the split limbs and furniture turning into air. A ring of men too is a thing of power, not because they are chained to the blaze, but because they cannot be, because chances are some of them were strangers when the night began. They dismember what they stumble on to fuel the circle while it lasts. Some are strangers still. And as they talk, they stare into the center, as if to see each other there, in this place that is not a place, this eye of heat that is each man’s eye, that is a broken window inside each eye, a broken girl’s gold band, crowned in fire, or not at all. 12 Girl with Dog Do not be deceived. The dog you see, the one who pulls the chain of his leash stiff and with it the rope of the girl’s arm that holds him back, the arrows in his eyes aimed at yours and trembling in their bow. Do not be fooled. He has a darker side. And yes, he is half black fox, a shadow in the mist that casts no shadow. But she who is thin as an exclamation, pale as mist, she is her shadow’s shadow. She is no one’s fool. She is somewhere between a child and a woman, between the bare-shouldered nature a girl thinks nothing of and the suspicion that knows: eyes want what eyes want and dread as much. She is lovely as a tree drowned in fog. If you see yourself in her, tell me, is it empathy. Or displacement. Does your heart beat a path to her heart. Does it pace the cage that once was hers. For she is a stranger. She has that look that takes the measure of what you believe you are. Hunger knows what hunger does. It rises from the fog as worshipers rise, or strength inside the weak and wounded, or fear from anger and anger from the new fear.