An Adam Fell Poem (1)

Corporation

                        I don't know how to say 

how I feel politely, or poetically, or without 

the jugular and collapse of the immediate 

heart, so tonight, I won't say anything at 

all. Just stare out the window at our 

stunned little writhe. Hold back the 

strongest urge to knock out a few of the 

capitol's most critical walls, replace its 

fiber optic cables with lightning bugs, 

replace the investment bankers all with 

bunker busters. I lock eyes with the 

capitol's bright and empty rooms and admit 

that, sometimes, deep in my affluent, 

American cells, I miss my body carved to 

projectile. I miss trebuchet shoulders and 

knuckles flaked to arrowheads, miss my 

hands massive and molded from molten to 

the bolts of ballistas. I miss blackjack and 

cudgel and quarterstaff and flintlock. I miss 

pummel and pike and I am not proud of 

this. I know it's not a healthy feeling. I try 

to un-arm, to un-cock. I try to practice my 

breathing. I try The Master Cleanse, The 

Stationary Bike, The Bikram Sweat, The 

Contortion Stretch, The Vegan Meatloaf, 

The Nightly, Scorching Bath, The Leafy 

Greens and Venom Television, The Self-

Mutilation of a Winter's Run, but we can 

only cleanse our bodies so much before we 

realize it's not our bodies that need 

detoxing.

(2012)

A Samuel Greenberg Poem

Conduct

By a peninsula the painter sat and

Sketched the uneven valley groves.
The apostle gave alms to the
Meek. The volcano burst
In fusive sulphur and hurled
Rocks and ore into the air—
Heaven’s sudden change at
The drawing tempestuous,
Darkening shade of dense clouded hues.
The wanderer soon chose
His spot of rest; they bore the
Chosen hero upon their shoulders,
Whom they strangely admired, as
The beach-tide summer of people desired.

(1915)

POEM: "Rehearsal"

Rehearsal


Alright I’ve said it the ass
depends upon the legs like
a clock on a minute’s notice
the banjax awaits the band
there’s nothing new under
the sun except the sun while
we’re roaring like monsters
dammit you didn’t know it
now I say it the form attends
an invisible quiet thing.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Louise Glück Poem

The Night Migrations 

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds' night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won't see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won't need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.


(2006)

POEM: "The Afternoon"

The Afternoon


Why you were an hour late
planned to shuck your husband
to meet me later in the room
I felt strangely neutral like I was
your husband wanting to know
why it takes 2 hours to buy rice
after when you were a bag of rice
we were just a pair of stomachs
& we looked out of the window
there was a man painting
his balcony red in the rain
the sky was mostly grey &
not much chance of letting up.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Shanna Compton Poem

Panoramic View


Last week Mars suddenly got a lot closer.
It used to be the place we'd throw out
as impossible, utterly unreachable, so red
and foreign and sere. Not anymore.
And I'm trying to figure out why watching
the panorama makes something in the hot core
of me crumple like a swig-emptied can,
intoxicating though it may be, vibrant
with out-of-this-world color like the whole thing's
a sand painting, a dimensional mandala
some galactic monk took her sweet time pouring
freehand, blowing on it between sips of her tea,
ruffling up the most dramatic of its rumpled crests.
It's bluer than I thought, attained. Like most things
I wish we could take back.


(2012)

POEM: "Archy In The House"

Archy In The House

this long hard climb 

youre on how much 

further do you have to go 

good lord i hope that 

youre not entirely on 

your own the poems i

mean they help like 

flowers do so never 

dismiss that comfort   

in the speak tonight i

saw a chinese guy regale 

his birthday gal with a

bouquet of toy bunnies

but nothing she could

do till they got home

© 2012 Rob Schackne

A David Hernandez Poem

At the Post Office


The line is long, processional, glacial,
and the attendant a giant stone, cobalt blue
with flecks of white, I’m not so much
looking at a rock but a slab of night.
The stone asks if anything inside the package
is perishable. When I say no the stone
laughs, muted thunderclap, meaning
everything decays, not just fruit
or cut flowers, but paper, ink, the CD
I burned with music, and my friend
waiting to hear the songs, some little joy
after chemo eroded the tumor. I know flesh
is temporary, and memory a tilting barn
the elements dismantle nail by nail.
I know the stone knows a millennia of rain
and wind will even grind away
his ragged face, and all of this slow erasing
is just a prelude to when the swelling
universe burns out, goes dark, holds
nothing but black holes, the bones of stars
and planets, a vast silence. The stone
is stone-faced. The stone asks how soon
I want the package delivered. As fast
as possible, I say, then start counting the days.


(2011)

An Emily Dickinson Poem

(472)


Except the heaven had come so near,
So seemed to choose my door,
The distance would not haunt me so;
I had not hoped before.

But just to hear the grace depart
I never thought to see,
Afflicts me with a double loss;
’Tis lost, and lost to me.

(ca. 1864)

A Ravi Shankar Poem

Lines On a Skull (Haiku Erasure of Lord Byron's "Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull") Start spirit; behold the skull. A living head loved earth. My bones resign the worm, lips to hold sparkling grape's slimy circle, shape of reptile's food. Where wit shone of shine, when our brains are substitute, like me, with the dead, life's little, our heads sad. Redeemed and wasting clay this chance. Be of use. (2012)

POEM: "Rondelet Aux Apaches"

Rondelet Aux Apaches


Get this thing on
maybe he struggles to keep up
get this thing on
she’s leaning over his table
he feels his future wed to breasts
her mind reaches for big monkey
get this thing on.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Larry Levis Poem

 

Fish
                                    
                                 for Philip Levine


The cop holds me up like a fish;
he feels the huge bones
surrounding my eyes,
and he runs a thumb under them,

lifting my eyelids
as if they were
envelopes filled with the night.
Now he turns

my head back and forth, gently,
until I'm so tame and still
I could be a tiny, plastic
skull left on the

dashboard of a junked car.
By now he's so sure of me
he chews gum,
and drops his flashlight to his side;

he could be cleaning a trout
while the pines rise into the darkness,
though tonight trout
are freezing under bits of stars

under the ice. When he lets me go
I feel numb. I feel like
a fish burned by his touch, and turn
and slip into the cold

night rippling with neons,
and the razor blades
of the poor,
and the torn mouths on posters.

Once, I thought even through this
I could go quietly as a star turning over and over
in the deep truce of its light.

Now, I must
go on repeating the last, filthy
words on the lips
of this shunken head

shining out of its death in the moon—
until trout surface
with their petrified, round eyes,
and the stars begin moving.


(1972)

A Charles Simic Poem

 

Butcher Shop


Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.

An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.

There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.

There's wooden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean–a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.


(1963)

A Horace Poem

Odes BkI:IX Winter

See how Soracte stands glistening with snowfall,
and the labouring woods bend under the weight:
see how the mountain streams are frozen,
cased in the ice by the shuddering cold?

Drive away bitterness, and pile on the logs,
bury the hearthstones, and, with generous heart,
out of the four-year old Sabine jars,
O Thaliarchus, bring on the true wine.

Leave the rest to the gods: when they’ve stilled the winds
that struggle, far away, over raging seas,
you’ll see that neither the cypress trees
nor the old ash will be able to stir.

Don’t ask what tomorrow brings, call them your gain
whatever days Fortune gives, don’t spurn sweet love,
my child, and don’t you be neglectful
of the choir of love, or the dancing feet,

while life is still green, and your white-haired old age
is far away with all its moroseness. Now,
find the Campus again, and the squares,
soft whispers at night, at the hour agreed,

and the pleasing laugh that betrays her, the girl
who’s hiding away in the darkest corner,
and the pledge that’s retrieved from her arm,
or from a lightly resisting finger.


tr. A.S. Kline (2003)

POEM: "3 Dog Senryu"

3 Dog Senryu


One time a monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"
Joshu answered, "No."
Another time, a monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"
Joshu answered, "Yes."


The patient trees bow
A stray dog is quizzical
Do we have our souls?

It's barely autumn
Already the bad haiku
Wind and leaves make friends

The patient trees bow
Stray dogs are barking again
Do we not have souls?


© 2011 Rob Schackne

A George Oppen Poem (II)

Ballad


Astrolabes and lexicons
Once in the great houses—

A poor lobsterman

Met by chance
On Swan's Island

Where he was born
We saw the old farmhouse

Propped and leaning on its hilltop
On that island
Where the ferry runs

A poor lobsterman

His teeth were bad

He drove us over that island
In an old car

A well-spoken man

Hardly real
As he knew in those rough fields

Lobster pots and their gear
Smelling of salts

The rocks outlived the classicists
The rocks and the lobstermen's huts

And the sights of the island
The ledges in the rough sea seen from the road

And the harbor
And the post office

Difficult to know what one means
—to be serious and to know what one means—

An island
Has a public quality

His wife in the front seat

In a soft dress
Such as poor women wear

She took it that we came—
I don't know how to say, she said—

Not for anything we did, she said,
Mildly, 'from God'. She said

What I like more than anything
Is to visit other islands...


(1967)

POEM: "Ledge Dark Somewhere"

Ledge Dark Somewhere
                                 
                                       I.M. Charles Bukowski


Maximum power is a river
it flows past wild rocks
something hits my ass   mon dieu

the Chauvet cave paintings
“celebrate the stupidity
of our endurance”   only wait

qu’est-ce que c’est   delinquencies
satisfactions have been reckoned
they look pretty damn small

consider the initiation of art
the Late Stone Age in France
goddamn there were rhinos

far back from the light
rockfall sealed the cave
careful   bear tracks   framed

si ça se peut   not my business
old wines stretch my brain
cat on the sofa   watermelons   summer


© 2012 Rob Schackne

An Alan Shapiro Poem

 

Flowerpot


I lay back on the carpeted bottom step
Of the stairwell that like a well extended
Darkly up to the window near the ceiling,

Up where the Chinaman under the wide-brimmed hat
That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held
No flower across the sill no one could reach.

There was a television on somewhere
Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking,
Someone was saying. Someone was saying something

About a blockade and a quarantine,
Who would blink first, lose face, or push the button.
A fat man banged a shoe against a desk.

The Chinaman however didn’t care.
Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers,
He was content to be a clot of darkness

Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass—
The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms,
The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled.

And everywhere within the light’s slow fall
Infinities of particles were falling
Into the flowerpot they’d never fill.


(2010)

A Mark Doty Poem

A Green Crab's Shell


Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like–

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
–size of a demitasse–
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this–
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.


(2012)

A Kris Hemensley Poem

"to come away with Hesiod"


to come away with Hesiod
and leave the rock as though to rocks
the tree to trees and dwell on other things

imagine the injunction
to leave the mint to its own devices
amongst the dust & stones in the shadow
of rocks or tree-roots hard as rocks

imagine poems like tended mint
or poems like wildest mint which survives
the oblivion of feckless gardeners
until plucked by knowing fingers
after the fiercer heat’s abated

imagine poems left to their own devices
as poets gorge on air & airy thoughts
& figures — the idea cuts me
to the bone of a sobriety earned
at the expense of the airiness Hesiod
was commissioned to name

but who wouldnt seize a staff of bay
or ash or gum and trade common or
garden cough for lungsfull of song
taking the world in one’s stride
careering towards heaven?


(1998)

POEM: "La Magia"

La Magia


How can formulas be literature?
I love that. I laugh and give myself up
To the extra breath, side-step the beggar
Who is quite interested in my loot.

I’m watching you while something else
Is spreading like an eager plant
When the conditions are right.
The moon is bright. Maybe no pines.

Seeing all the forms of things
How they change before your eyes
Wait a bit for the lights and the darkness.
You watch the F1. The directions are on TV.

Take this poem. Stop and look awhile.
It has only my wallet on its mind
Sitting in an Italian restaurant
Walking down a street back home.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "The Atoms Of Books"

The Atoms of Books


3. If reader wants to keep book and buy it:
 i) Supply name of book store.
 ii) The library cannot sell books to individuals. The books are the  property of the Library Board.
4. If reader says he pays taxes and the book belongs to him:
 i) State that the Public Libraries Act makes books property of the Library Board.
                        
                Chinook Regional Library Procedures Manual (2007)


Running up the path to the treasure house
I always maxed out the borrowing limit

The craters of the moon, insects, stories
Of people who lived differently than me

Geography and history, Greek myths
Astronomy and atoms, the pyramids

Tycho Brahe, his noses, magic moose
Telescopes and heliocentrics of sad

The blue-stocking's reprimand
This is not appropriate for your age

Once I even cried to show her that it was
And a guy said, Jesus give the kid his book!

Pliny the Elder, Pompeii, Alexandria
The Cairo Geniza, my forefathers, herself

On a carved page suddenly discovered
Where silence is no longer special virtue

Now books cannot sit squarely upon a shelf
With furred pages, the silverfish and worms

Growing older & more important in the shade
Happily replenishing the nutrition of words.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Carl Dennis Poem

 

Change


Just yesterday my poem lamenting the power
Of time to sweep away all trace of the beautiful
Seemed done at last, but the light this morning
Shows it to be a sketch, evidence that my vision
Cleared as I slumbered, that my sense of beauty
Grows in the night like corn or bamboo.

Maybe a poem in praise of time
Ought to be next on my agenda,
The time required for seeds to open,
For leaves to push out on tender stems.

Yesterday, the teacher didn't believe the excuse
Her student offered for missing his appointment—
A tire gone flat on the Thruway—but today
His story seems almost convincing,
Suggesting how quickly the bruise to her ego
Has begun to heal, the first small step
From the tiresome realm of insult and umbrage.

Yesterday the lover couldn't commit himself.
Today he wants to write his beloved
A check for a million dollars,
Though the time hasn't come, he admits,
For her to cash it.
Meanwhile, though he has nothing,
Whatever he has is hers.


(2012)

POEM: "Almost A Haiku"

Almost A Haiku 

But even then
I've got one more question
Are we there yet?

© 2012 Rob Schackne

An Ada Limón Poem

Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America


It's a day when all the dogs of all
the borrowed houses are angel footing
down the hard hardwood of middle-America's
newly loaned-up renovated kitchen floors,
and the world's nicest pie I know
is somewhere waiting for the right
time to offer itself to the wayward
and the word-weary. How come the road
goes coast to coast and never just
dumps us in the water, clean and
come clean, like a fish slipped out
of the national net of "longing for joy."
How come it doesn't? Once, on a road trip
through the country, a waitress walked
in the train's diner car and swished
her non-aproned end and said,
"Hot stuff and food too." My family
still says it, when the food is hot,
and the mood is good inside the open windows.
I'd like to wear an apron for you
and come over with non-church sanctioned
knee-highs and the prettiest pie of birds
and ocean water and grief. I'd like
to be younger when I do this, like the country
before Mr. Meriwether rowed the river
and then let the country fill him up
till it killed him hard by his own hand.
I'd like to be that dog they took with them,
large and dark and silent and un-blamable.
Or I'd like to be Emily Dickinson's dog, Carlo,
and go on loving the rare un-loveable puzzle
of woman and human and mind. But, I bet I'm more
the house beagle and the howl and the obedient
eyes of everyone wanting to make their own kind
of America, but still be America, too. The road
is long and all the dogs don't care too much about
roadside concrete history and postcards of state
treasures, they just want their head out the window,
and the speeding air to make them feel faster
and younger, and newer than all the dogs
that went before them, they want to be your only dog,
your best-loved dog, for this good dog of today
to be the only beast that matters.


(2012)

POEM: "So What"

So What
                      
                            I.M. Miles Davis

The so what starts slowly
whether new-born fan or me
after 50 years of listening
to hope sunk down deep still
I can’t describe the entire song
maybe the so whats are just bookends
& if between swings a chorus
of what actually matters
then so what if it matters?


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Bei Dao Poem

 

The Answer


Debasement is the password of the base,
Nobility the epitaph of the noble.
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.

The Ice Age is over now,
Why is there ice everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered,
Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

I came into this world
Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow,
To proclaim before the judgment
The voice that has been judged:

Let me tell you, world,
I—do—not—believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number thousand and one.

I don't believe the sky is blue;
I don't believe in thunder's echoes;
I don't believe that dreams are false;
I don't believe that death has no revenge.

If the sea is destined to breach the dikes
Let all the brackish water pour into my heart;
If the land is destined to rise
Let humanity choose a peak for existence again.

A new conjunction and glimmering stars
Adorn the unobstructed sky now;
They are the pictographs from five thousand years.
They are the watchful eyes of future generations.


(1988) tr. Bonnie S. McDougall (1990)

POEM: "Hills"

Hills


On the moment of hillside
greeting insects trudging up
the footsteps are breathless
you say I climb to get away
frosted rockets and motor
summit or summon heights
on a hill of a million hills
a billion bumps upon our lives
blue skies or the dark skies
in different suspension
feet never touching home
the easy path to the edge
a ridge after water butterflies
finally ended here are crows.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Mars & You"

Mars & You

                             for Toru Takemitsu


Launched from a million miles away
landing as if it was in your backyard
information always sent from love
from me flows what you call time
like your curiosity lands on schedule
your hair smells as sweet tomorrow
& everything you ask has no answer.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A D.H. Lawrence Poem

 

Pomegranate


You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.

In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek
     women.
No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in
     flower,
Oh so red, and such a lot of them.

Whereas at Venice
Abhorrent, green, slippery city
Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes.
In the dense foliage of the inner garden
Pomegranates like bright green stone,
And barbed, barbed with a crown.
Oh, crown of spiked green metal
Actually growing!

Now in Tuscany,
Pomegranates to warm, your hands at;
And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns
Over the left eyebrow.

And, if you dare, the fissure!

Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?

For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?
No glittering, compact drops of dawn?
Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument,
     shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.


(1923)

POEM: "The Visit"

The Visit


One day in July
three men came

in the same suit
they were polite

we need ya to stay
on the other side

I asked them where
the other side was

see that corner well
don’t go there anymore


© 2012 Rob Schackne

An Arthur Sze Poem

 

Morning Antlers


Redwinged blackbirds in the cattail pond—
today I kicked and flipped a wing
in the sand and saw it was a sheared
off flicker's. Yesterday's rain has left

snow on Tesuque Peak, and the river
will widen then dwindle. We step
into a house and notice antlers mounted
on the wall behind us; a ten-day-old child

looks, nurses, and sleeps; his mother
smiles but says she cries then cries
as emptiness brims up and over.
And as actions are rooted in feelings,

I see how picking spinach in a field
blossoms the picker, how a thoughtless act
shears a wing. As we walk out
to the car, the daylight is brighter

than we knew. We do not believe
flames shoot out of a cauldron of days
but, looking at the horizon, see
flames leap and crown from tree to tree.


(2012)

A Philip Schultz Poem

At the Beach This Morning


There we were, Penelope,
my Border Collie mix, and I,
one godless the other faithful,
observing the fiery orange
at the left side of the horizon,
no bigger than my thumb, say,
shy in profile, exhausting another
of its ration of daybreaks,
while off to the far right
the ghostly white spider moon,
dangling by its dreamy thread.
That's when Lady P barked
at the blind man measuring
each step slowly emerging
out of the shadows, a duel
of balance and resolve. Indeed,
miles from town, how had he
gotten here? Head tilted toward
the waves, as if listening
to their instruction, his own
intuition. That's when, out
of the dunes, the deer came,
a buck, doe and three yearlings,
frozen in a jittery vigilance,
the wonder of their long elegance
turning to find us, Penelope,
obeying my call of silence, bursting
with an excitement the blind man
sensed, turning toward them,
their poise, their keenness,
each of us suddenly an industry
of looking, of not breathing,
a tiny fragile presence, colliding
scraps of discernment, each
suddenly vanishing back
into the bright vagueness
from which we came.

(2011)

A Gerard Manley Hopkins Poem

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme


As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.


(ca. 1880)

POEM: "Seppuku (1962)"

Seppuku (1962)
                                
                                  for Kobayashi Masaki

An infant lies sleeping upon a mat
Father to grandson, father’s daughter
The son-in-law’s a Confucian scholar
Or is it a thousand Tokugawa tales
Refuse promotion higher than private
Etched hard in deserving face, have it
Unfold according to plot, maybe not
Not least because black & white days
Hide luxuries like festival kimonos
On a night when the moon is full of blood
One revenge for a love we understand— 
Right now the cicadas are very loud.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Summer Note To Self"

Summer Note To Self


The little one is burnt and black
Motionless in a tree looks back

Rest on the cicada barrier
Arm cast lackadaisically over
The unnamed it didn’t matter

Wait a minute what’s she wearing
Why cast that way why is she there?

Bend time curl everything you know
Penetrate it like a remote cave
Save bats save yourself save light

Introduce yourself to Tommy Tomorrow
Say goodbye we were leaving anyway

Where music comes out so sweetly
Where summer comes from so loud
Rubbing rubbing the terms of reality.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Richard Hugo Poem (1)

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg


You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.


(1973)

A Richard Hugo Poem (2)

Glen Uig


Believe in this couple this day who come
to picnic in the Faery Glen. They pay rain
no matter, or wind. They spread their picnic
under a gale-stunted rowan. Believe they grew tired
of giants and heroes and know they believe
in wise tiny creatures who live under the rocks.

Believe these odd mounds, the geologic joke
played by those wise tiny creatures far from
the world's pitiful demands: make money, stay sane.
Believe the couple, by now soaked to the skin,
sing their day as if dry, as if sheltered inside
Castle Ewen. Be glad Castle Ewen's only a rock
that looks like a castle. Be glad for no real king.

These wise tiny creatures, you'd better believe,
have lived through it all: the Viking occupation,
clan torturing clan, the Clearances, the World War
II bomber gone down, a fiery boom
on Beinn Edra. They saw it from here. They heard
the sobs of last century's crofters trail off below
where every day the Conon sets out determined for Uig.
They remember the Viking who wandered off course,
under the hazelnut tree hating aloud all he'd done.

Some days dance in the bracken. Some days go out
wide and warm on bad roads to collect the dispossessed
and offer them homes. Some days celebrate addicts
sweet in their dreams and hope to share with them
a personal spectrum. The loch here's only a pond,
the monster is in it small as a wren.

Believe the couple who have finished their picnic
and make wet love in the grass, the tiny wise creatures
cheering them on. Believe in milestones, the day
you left home forever and the cold open way
a world wouldn't let you come in. Believe you
and I are that couple. Believe you and I sing tiny
and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on.


(1980)

A William Stafford Poem

Cutting Loose
                          
                                for James Dickey


Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path - but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.


(1983)

POEM: "Of A Saturday Arvo"

Of A Saturday Arvo


Raindrops don’t regret slow passage
Down windowpanes inconsolable rain
Today we spoke of the late Ching dynasty
The early Edo and of curiosity
How explorers do not extend their lives
How culture can look like an enemy
When junction boxes lie as buried
As Amelia’s silver bracelet in the sand
Li Bai too watches raindrops racing
Weaving the odds he survived the boat
Honoring glass compass and credulity
Till the storm was over it was dry again
There’s no telling where this tale is ending
Another glass is raised the nerve is steady
I wonder how we make things important.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "The Earhart Light"

The Earhart Light


He said he could see it bumping
Against the sea of lost aircraft
At one place on a coral atoll, adrift
Imagined Amelia's body recomposed
In the fish and sand and small breezes
That play about the edges of howland
But like the zephyr we never feel
The eyes and heart strain to know
That we who are left searching
Take deep breaths looking for buttons
Find an old regulator & come up for air
Our rescues from ourselves, I think
That rescue was always on the way
We had nothing more to do but wait.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Howard Altmann Poem

 

Desert Sounds


The iguana is still under the rock.
Blossoms unfurl scents over coiled snakes.
Saguaros arm their shadows
With the long legs of daylight.
And whose limbs got buried where
The grand inquisitor unearths deeply.

So it goes in the Sonoran desert.
Sky shows its teeth with cacti.
The mouth of civilization spits out sand.
Who are we, who are we?
The heart of the blue-throated hummingbird beats
Up to twelve hundred times a minute.

The palm-sized bird can play its hand backward too.
With good reason metaphors stay open past midnight.
When desert sounds coax silence into submission.
When darkness branches off.
O the miss in mystery; the hiss in history.
The tap in a child’s tapping: wake up, wake up.


(2012)

POEM: "Moon & Wine"

Moon & Wine
                      
                      for Rosemary

red wine
at midnight
my neck hurts

thank goodness
the moonlight
another glass

balance it
upon the table
just half-full

indoors tonight
see the moon
see me


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Jacek Gutorow Poem

 

Slur


The problem with boundaries: in the blink of an eye a dozen crows
lose their individuality and become a flock. Same as now:
frayed seconds disappear into quarters
that transfer their worth into the afternoon's account.
Time flows but space isn't any worse:
the flock of crows cuts the sky diagonally.
It's as if a new continent were emerging
to greet halfway the nascent cartographers
and their dreams. Sooner or later the flock will break up
into birds. The sea will crumble into waves.
The waves into drops. A delicate afternoon will be calculable
like harvested grain. The room will resemble
a clock without hands.


(2012)

POEM: "When Interrupted By"

When Interrupted By


When interrupted by
symbols of death
we are supplied
dogs that gnaw & run
the flowers that ride
on the casket, the many
interruptions of gunfire
the quiet mourning
terrified screaming
the processional
the one man rescue
the shock of the loss
of father or daughter
of comrade or son
heads up or heads down
goddamn every kind of bullet...


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Cathy Park Hong Poem

 

Engines Within The Throne


We once worked as clerks      
       scanning moth-balled pages
into the clouds, all memories
outsourced except the fuzzy
       childhood bits when
I was an undersized girl with a tic,
they numbed me with botox
       I was a skinsuit
of dumb expression, just fingerprints
over my shamed
       all I wanted was snow
to snuff the sun blades to shadow spokes,
muffle the drum of freeways, erase
       the old realism
but this smart snow erases
       nothing, seeps everywhere,
the search engine is inside us,
the world is our display
       and now every industry
has dumped whole cubicles, desktops,
fax machines into developing
       worlds where they stack
them as walls against
what disputed territory
       we asked the old spy who drank
with Russians to gather information
the old-fashioned way,
now we have snow sensors,
       so you can go spelunking
in anyone's mind,
let me borrow your child
thoughts, it's benign surveillance,
       I can burrow inside, find a cave
pool with rock-colored flounder,
and find you, half-transparent
with depression.


(2012)