An Alan Feldman Poem

A Man and a Woman


Between a man and a woman
The anger is greater, for each man would like to sleep
In the arms of each woman who would like to sleep
In the arms of each man, if she trusted him not to be
Schizophrenic, if he trusted her not to be
A hypochondriac, if she trusted him not to leave her
Too soon, if he trusted her not to hold him
Too long, and often women stare at the word men
As it lives in the word women, as if each woman
Carried a man inside her and a woe, and has
Crying fits that last for days, not like the crying
Of a man, which lasts a few seconds, and rips the throat
Like a claw — but because the pain differs
Much as the shape of the body, the woman takes
The suffering of the man for selfishness, the man
The woman’s pain for helplessness, the woman’s lack of it
For hardness, the man’s tenderness for deception,
The woman’s lack of acceptance, an act of contempt,
Which is really fear, the man’s fear for fickleness,
Yet cars come off the bridge in rivers of light,
Each holding a man and a woman.




(1978)

POEM: "Muscle Work"

Muscle Work


Stabilizers designed to catch
the unexpected shift of your world
and all else unpredicted

we balance on this bench
argue with gravity wrest it up
wrestling it down

we wait underneath 
the heavy wheels on an axle
this truck going nowhere

a million no-miles the Darkness
down the Trace past the Sun
the deep blue at times of you

crunching tires in the backyard
breaksweat indoors under the roof
of workshop factory floor

some say the bench is illusion
we won’t lift higher than we know
we might be delusional

but having done it once
or twice I know these muscles
power is strength divided by time.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Mari L'Esperance Poem

Prayer

Bring it up from the dark, bring it all up,

the spiny fish with their needle teeth
and wands of phosphorescent light,
all that is waterlogged, heavy with its own
unbearable weight, all that is strange,
malformed, lying in shadow—that
crawls and humps and drags itself
along the muddy bottom, making
guttural sounds no human can imagine.
Haul it up into the light as the rusted
pulleys and frayed ropes creak and groan
with their burden—crates of skulls, broken
cars and bodies, sacks of stones, their
horrible tonnage, the lost and discarded, all
that we would rather forget: our angers
and fears, the lives we betrayed, the souls
we abandoned while we looked after
our own comfort and gain. Let’s see them all,
here in the open, unbound and pulsing
with that which was never extinguished,
which survives even death itself, brave
flicker at the black gate of our oblivion.

(2013)

POEM: "Seagulls"

Seagulls 

Thank you seagulls 
cawing for rotting fish
won't speak ill of you again
on the edge of the toilet bowl
throat stretched wide


© 2013 Rob Schackne

An Evie Shockley Poem

the obsolete army


the obsolete army works with bayonets and horses
             the bayonets they dismantle for parts
             the horses they groom and set free in the newly opened pastures

the obsolete army has time on their wrists
             they take active duty in 8-hour shifts
             their watches are timepieces--they aren't expecting anyone

the obsolete army exercises every day
             they push-up the people who are closest to their dreams
             they pull-up those just getting off the ground

the obsolete army debates the value of war museums
             they know an unlocked world is the key to freedom 
             they know how close memorial is to mourning

the obsolete army is increasingly multi-lingual
             comment dit-on en francais: arabic is spoken here
             when they say tanks, they're practicing their patois

the obsolete army understands nostalgia
              they welcome the obsolete patriots carrying protest signs
              they provide tea, coffee, and athletic competitions

the obsolete army is open 24/7
             the privates promote the general welfare, even non-publicly
             you enter it yourself when you're most at peace

the obsolete army repurposes the obsolete words
             they donate collateral damage to the financial industry
             they apply infantry to the maternity wards' ever-renewing ranks


(2013)

POEM: "Still Reason With Person"

Still Reason With Person


Covered in the sea
loud suck of sand

sing some answer
the wild grasslands

reversing damage
the wind won't argue

boo-boo you say boo-boo
how sharp the knife is

boxed in by memory
the distance agrees

rational boundaries
take you out for a walk

desire replaces reason
grasses waving insects.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Simon Armitage Poem

At Sea


It is not through weeping,
but all evening the pale blue eye
on your most photogenic side has kept
its own unfathomable tide. Like the boy
at the dyke I have been there:

held out a huge finger,
lifted atoms of dust with the point
of a tissue and imagined slivers of hair
in the oil on the cornea. We are both
in the dark, but I go on

drawing the eyelid up by its lashes
folding it almost inside-out, then finding
and hiding every mirror in the house
as the iris, besieged with the ink
of blood rolls back

into its own orbit. Nothing
will help it. Through until dawn
you dream the true story of the boy
who hooked out his eye and ate it,
so by six in the morning

I am steadying the ointment
that will bite like an onion, piping
a line of cream while avoiding the pupil
and in no time it is glued shut
like a bad mussel.

Friends call round
and mean well. They wait
and whisper in the air-lock of the lobby
with patches, eyewash, the truth
about mascara.

Even the cats are on to it;
they bring in starlings, and because their feathers
are the colours of oil on water in sunlight
they are a sign of something.
In the long hours

beyond us, irritations heal
into arguments. For the eighteenth time
it comes to this: the length of your leg sliding out
from the covers, the ball of your foot
like a fist on the carpet

while downstairs
I cannot bring myself to hear it.
Words have been spoken; things that were bottled
have burst open and to walk in now
would be to walk in

on the ocean.

(2005)

POEM: "Untied"

Untied


Buy makeup teach her how
lend weight to lose weight
educate educate god he hates it
might as well eradicate now
she's so beautiful like she is
canst thou remember a time
before we came unto this cell?
sure girls ride mountain mules
sure they ride trails steep as caterpillars
slowly slowly up around they go
mushroom clouds are pretty chilly
she's taking the lift up to his place
later she cooks him a strange dinner.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Gjertrud Schnackenberg Poem

Signs


Threading the palm, a web of tiny lines
Spells out the lost money, the heart, the head,
The wagging tongues, the sudden deaths, in signs
We would smooth out like imprints on a bed,

In signs that can't be helped, geese heading south,
In signs read anxiously, like breath that clouds
A mirror held to a barely breathing mouth, 
Like telegrams, the gathering of crowds--

The plane, an X in the sky spelling disaster:
Before the whistle and hit, a tracer flare;
Before rubble, a hairline crack in plaster
And a housefly's panicked scribbling on the air.


(1974)

POEM: "Germany 3 - Argentina 1"

Germany 3 - Argentina 1

                                              (2006 World Cup)

This week the Germans lifted steins
As they drank to a kind of imagination
That owes a little more to cupidity
Than to the demands of extra time

I guess that tonight by a campfire
On the high plains of Argentina
Gauchos will argue the off-side rule
And if there’s such a thing as free

The wireless crackles, the boys debate
Whether a penalty may not result in death
And several sharp knives are unsheathed
In demonstration of traditional scorn

At last Andreas curves an old ball high into the dark
(Their long beef ribs were burnt mostly black)
Now the herd is slowly moving it around
And occasionally a perfect goal is scored.

                                                        
© 2006 Rob Schackne

POEM: "After Reading Gerry's Poem"

After Reading Gerry’s Poem


Opens out of sleep
surfaces in remnant memory
dread whatever you conceived
maybe departure maybe death
maybe deadly fear of an insane world
you call out you search for it
only to find the darkness is empty
surprised as you say that nothing stares back
for how else does revolution occur
looking for new fears to conquer
the challenge of changes we asked for
if poets inspire dreams of freedom
they’re the first motherfuckers against the wall.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Kodachrome (1974-2009)"

Kodachrome (1974-2009)

                                Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,


                                Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

                                Goethe (1782)

Now that Kodachrome is dead

Will such fine exceptionalism

Be called into the station because

No one can find the film they need

Is it stored someplace did you sell it?

The police are interrogating you

(The sweat dripping from them)

Getting hit a few times in the head

Confess there was once a project

Conceived late at night in a shack

A green man lots of empty poems

Who didn’t know atoms from Adam

Whose one simple moment wanted you

To take that picture then you waited

Waited forty years for it to fade.

© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Vasko Popa Poem

Little Box


The little box gets her first teeth
And her little length
Little width little emptiness
And all the rest she has

The little box continues growing
The cupboard that she was inside
Is now inside her

And she grows bigger bigger bigger
Now the room is inside her
And the house and the city and the earth
And the world she was in before

The little box remembers her childhood
And by a great longing
She becomes a little box again

Now in the little box
You have the whole world in miniature
You can easily put in a pocket
Easily steal it lose it

Take care of the little box


(1987) Tr. Charles Simic

POEM: "So She Like Gets This Letter From Her Dad Like 6 Months After Her Birthday"

So She Like Gets This Letter From Her Dad Like 6 Months After Her Birthday

                           


My dearest Julie, 

Did you ever get that drawing I sent you? Pretty good, wasn't it? 

A thousand light-years from here I climbed to the rim of Yasur volcano 

on Tanna in Vanuatu and I peered down into its awful fire. I looked down 

at my feet there was a red Coke can. I saw a postcard someone had dropped. 

I picked it up. A terrific photo of some very severe ice-covered mountains. 

On the other side was written But what you don't like where you are

you won't like here even more. Only this. I wish it had been sent to me. 

Today they showed us the film A Scanner Darkly. Check it out. 

It's about addiction and prevarication. Everybody's itch has everybody 

doing it. Tell your mother it's just about photography. There in one scene

our addled heroes car has broken down on this shitty California highway. 

They lift the hood. They are peering at the hot engine busy studying it doing 

their best to clamor and convict a mechanical part of intentional malice. 

Finally exhausting all paranoid leads one shouts Don't blame the drugs! 

Which was the moment all of us had been waiting for. So we cheered. 

Afterwards we discussed the million drugs. For what? The old beaters 

we drove? The hunger for explanations beyond the conventional wisdom? 

Hope the 12th grade is OK & you're making friends with good people. 

Happy birthday. 

Love, 

Dad

© 2011 Rob Schackne

A Ronnie Yates Poem

New Smyrna, Florida


She waits in the jungle beside a dirt road

Dead ends into Turnbull Bay, pelicans,
Skeets, close heat, no-see-ums, armadillos
Scratching in the dead leaves beneath the poison-tip
Blades of the killer fans of the yucca gloriosa. Headlights
Ply the dust. Pulling himself out, blinking hard, no reason,
Presents himself to his fare, he’s a 50 something hillbilly skinny,
Damp hair, chews on the remains of a menthol smoker’s
Cough; a juiceless ghoul in a Members Only Jacket,
Gray socks, a blood sugar tester, driving a ‘90 88
In a 2 car fleet run out of a Locksmith’s shack.
She laughs, a little nervous, pictures centaurs assaulted
By ten million stars, dreams of Voltaire’s secular
Angels, a magical technology and fetal abductions. He starts
To wheeze, a vacuum of awkward pity opens up
And she goes weak in the knees. What happens next,
She tells it better. “I’ll do it if you want.” He couldn’t
Hear, she opened her mouth, he gave up only a little prod.
It was like an apology for how beautiful she was.

(2013)

POEM: "Spleen I"

Spleen I 


Bless my heart and cross the street
through the gates of Puji Monastery
past the souvenir vendors and the seers
rent-a-cops beggars plastic Buddhas
thinking a complex faith is best left alone
it was my only meditation on the day but
that night I dreamt Guanyin was running too
breasted the surf in a fiery flower cap a champion
powering a hundred wondrous strokes and stopped
and bobbing in the waves turned and started
working her way slowly back to shore.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Spleen II"

Spleen II 


O spring streets comes the artist 
a pail of water and a large brush 
to draw his frustrated characters 
they dry the moment you read them 
dusk but hard to tell dark particulates 
closing hard with the invisible ink 
this is not the life you ordered 
these are not the epicurean streets
what has gone before is turned to rice
polaroid photos working in reverse
you reach a pale door without a poem 
in a city that is not long-shouldered 
that pushes points between our bodies 

shoves and turns shoulders to make way. 


© 2013 Rob Schackne 

POEM: "Spleen III"

Spleen III

The faces of Chinese women in anguish

           forced detentions

                 the razing of homes

the vanity of old men with dyed hair

the tether of foolishness

           already in opposition

                 at times the only way out 

sits quietly upon the stair

shoo away the temple rats
          (maybe pray away the time)
                 Guanyin please help us
fold these dumplings with extra care

some faces from the years I've lived there:

[CENSORED]

© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Poem

Rendition


Not, please, this creeping elaborate pain
and not slow parody of how lives end,
nor policemen in mufti playing a dirty god,
not the stinking underside of Elsewhere,
regimes of colonels or generals or psychopaths,
not fascination with seeing just how far a body can be made to go
nor the treatment of survival as precisely equal to dying.

Please, not a battering on the door at three in the morning;
not, I'm afraid, you're going to have to come with me.
Not the large plain dull old car
waiting outside your door with motor grumbling
for the quick take-off,
nor the bareness of a shabby room with overbright lighting.
Not Them, moving in.

Certainly not having to take off your clothes;
water, the truncheon, the cold, the blaring, the slaps
and long standing still in one damned place,
not the prodded humiliation of your nudity,
clothed ones treating you as a slab of meat,
not the drawn-out thickness of questioning
and not the detumescence of hope.

Not the naked genitals like frightened mice,
not something hard inserted in the vagina,
not pints of liquid trickled down your throat,
not a bully's foul breath up against your face
as concentration goes,
not the pummelled phonebook against your guts
leaving no distinct bruises.

Not the electrodes.
Fuck, no, not the electrodes
and not your buttocks beaten, then beaten again,
not something pushed right up under your fingernails
nor a bloody gobbet hacked off your left ear –
which you are then going to be forced to eat.
Not weeks without food.

Bodies have been designed frail, by and large, by and small,
ready to be tormented and taken apart.
The shit may run down your cold legs.
You may die.
You will suffer and die.
You will survive, language holding some trace of you for years,
And the mourners, too.


(2013)

POEM: "Climbing Rock: A Meditation"

Climbing Rock: A Meditation

                                      .for the freaky mountain kids

Look along any line keep the light

any grip of angle know the hope

we are distracted

divine winds hum stand off don’t hug

first rule of salvation never hang from a rope

the subtle atomicities of evil

hold my cold flexed hand

maintain the grip on a winter day

where fear is not 

the summit is finally reached
days & nights they pass away 

the happy ending

evidence prominent 
witnesses numerous

the falcon circling us 

one will never say

I cannot do that 

old friend miraculous.

© 2013 Rob Schackne

POEM: "The Turn"

The Turn


You've been brave that way
no stopping in the tunnel
so Li'l Buck just danced today
won't you dance he was asking

but there's no need to answer that
sometimes bravery's just a sudden thing
now consider if you’re dancing high
in gunfire shelling or screams
when did you turn into wolf
smell of gun oil in your bed
the big swans dying from love?


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Carolyn Kizer Poem

On a Line from Valéry (The Gulf War)

                            Tout le ciel vert se meurt
                            Le dernier arbre brûle.


The whole green sky is dying. The last tree flares 
With a great burst of supernatural rose 
Under a canopy of poisonous airs. 

Could we imagine our return to prayers 
To end in time before time's final throes, 
The green sky dying as the last tree flares? 

But we were young in judgement, old in years 
Who could make peace; but it was war we chose, 
To spread its canopy of poisoning airs. 

Not all our children's pleas and women's fears 
Could steer us from this hell. And now God knows 
His whole green sky is dying as it flares. 

Our crops of wheat have turned to fields of tares. 
This dreadful century staggers to its close 
And the sky dies for us, its poisoned heirs. 

All rain was dust. Its granules were our tears. 
Throats burst as universal winter rose 
To kill the whole green sky, the last tree bare 
Beneath its canopy of poisoned air.


(1996)

A Barry Dickins Poem

The Million Australias


You gaze into a wintry silver pond and what do you see there?
Well, your nose to begin with. Possibly an outline of frosty air
And breath, let’s not forget your breath. And your old friends the trees
The outline of something you were thinking aloud: An interrupting breeze
A word or two that say winter in English
Or tell you how cold and sharp it is today in Portuguese
A library pond and pages of wintry words
Now an incredibly important meeting between birds
Who can remember Captain Cook and Mrs. Cook two hundred years ago
When he first saw student dolphins and librarians from Atlantis
Dreamt long ago of Aboriginals inventing short stories in ashes
Years go by taxi and now there are a million Australias all reading
Translations from wintry silver ponds and talking about dreaming
Walking The Long Narrow Road to The North by Basho the Chinese mystic
He is reading his early morning poem to rain that’s almost crystal
Pioneers in the raindrops turning over favourite marked passages of sun
Flemington is tracing the murmured lettering of The Songs of Solomon
Teachers are listening very carefully to their teachers the children
The topics are endless, like glee, mystery, secret access to incredible buildings
Spanish singing overheard from unknown windowpanes
Cranes and sparrows - are they Australians? Oh let us arrange our dreams
Once more in the old design of openness and the one language of dreams
Is it still a hundred years ago or more? This is the Blessed Door
Time to get up and go to work: And what’s the work but writing for God
Up those ancient seawave steps again to write for the poor and give more
Lines of dreaming to the captive schoolchildren in their desks of hope
My Grandmother is getting up to go to work in 1900 did you know her?
A factory job where she worked her brains out to put bread upon the waves
Of sea tables where dolphins memorized their morning prayer and saved
A Fragment of her laughter to share with a thousand other pioneers
The old lady, Australia, shakes the toy world of learning now
Holds it upside down and smiles as meaning tumbles down into snow
Every single person is sitting up nice and straight in classrooms of brightness
Each old story tumbles down in the printed snowflake of brightness
What you said to me a hundred years ago: What I said back just then
What herons said to pigeons and teachers dreamt of in rooms like beacons
All possible and all beautiful because we bothered to record stories.


(2001)

POEM: "Ordinary Bizarro"

Ordinary Bizarro


At dinner tonight I overheard
Someone say, this crummy planet
I turn around – of course the table's Chinese
They're discussing an unrelated matter
Money or some other delicate relationship
Us do opposite all Earthly things
Now I hope I’m not in for this again
Plain speech drifting into strangeness
Confucian lessons in fluent acrimony
How me protector no one here protect?
When you see how it functions
When it goes around in your head
When it comes out different.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Les Murray Poem (2)

The International Terminal

Some comb oil, some blow air,
some shave trenchlines in their hair
but the common joint thump, the heart's spondee
kicks off in its rose-lit inner sea
like an echo, at first, of the one above
it on the dodgy ladder of love —
and my mate who's driving says I never
found one yet worth staying with forever.
In this our poems do not align.
Surely most are if you are, answers mine,
and I am living proof of it,
I gloom, missing you from the cornering outset —
and hearts beat mostly as if they weren't there,
rocking horse to rocking chair,
most audible dubbed on the tracks of movies
or as we approach where our special groove is
or our special fear. The autumn-vast
parking-lot-bitumen overcast
now switches on pumpkin-flower lights
all over dark green garden sites
and a wall of car-bodies, stacked by blokes,
obscures suburban signs and smokes.
Like coughs, cries, all such unlearned effects
the heartbeat has no dialects
but what this or anything may mean
depends on what poem we're living in.
Now a jet engine, huge child of a gun,
shudders with haze and begins to run.
Over Mount Fuji and the North Pole
I'm bound for Europe in a reading role
and a poem long ago that was coming for me
had Fuji-san as its axle-tree.
Cities shower and rattle over the gates
as I enter that limbo between states
but I think of the heart swarmed around by poems
like an egg besieged by chromosomes
and how out of that our world is bred
through the back of a mirror, with clouds in its head
— and airborne, with a bang, this five-hundred-seat
theatre folds up its ponderous feet.

(2002)

An Alexandra Teague Poem

Adjectives of Order

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.


(2007)

An Adam Fell Poem (2)

Coffin Tree

Somewhere in the national forest,
there is a coffin tree for each of us,
chosen at birth, containing us
completely, even in its youngest seedling.
If we keep no one left to love, to love us,
to cut it down, to afford it
carved to order, we will wander,
the flower bridge, the light-rail route,
the geopark lot, unclean ghosts
the clouded blue of our deepening cataracts.
What’s left of us, children moved to city,
smudged air of our once bodies, is holding,
exhausted, the village brinkline of trees
from the road, disappearing as the mist
that beads us shape burns off at dawn.
There is a difference between fire shaped
like a horse and a horse made of fire.

(2010)

POEM: "Hope Is The Mutt"

Hope Is The Mutt


The little things that Emily said –
hope is like the leaves on that thing
feathers are on the bird a word a bone
I'll just say if you were truly of the outside
then you might've explained to me
the vagaries of human commerce
(your hope really is as shabby as a mutt)
goodbye & thanks for the ton of food
I'll think of you occasionally
but if I don’t please know
that it's probably all OK.

© 2013 Rob Schackne 

A Dennis O'Driscoll Poem

Weather Permitting

I

The August day you wake to takes you by surprise.
Its bitterness. Black sullen clouds. Brackish downpour.
A drift-net of wetness enmeshes the rented cottage,
towels and children’s swimwear sodden on the line.

Dry-gulleted drains gulp down neat rain.
Drops bounce from a leaking gutter with hard,
uncompromising slaps: and, like resignation
in the face of death, you contemplate winter

with something close to tenderness, the sprint
from fuel shed to back door, the leisurely
ascent of peat smoke, even the suburban haze
of boiler flues when thermostats are set.

You warm to those thoughts as you sit there,
brainstorming ways to keep the family amused,
plans abandoned for barefoot games on dry sand.
Handcraft shops? Slot-machine arcades? Hotel grills?

In truth - manipulating toast crumbs backwards,
forwards at the unsteady table’s edge - you’d prefer
to return to your bed as if with some mild
ailment, pampered by duvet, whiskey, cloves.


II

Let it rain.
Let the clouds discharge their contents like reserve tanks.
Let the worms burrow their way to the topsoil
from whatever dank Sargasso they were spawned in.
Let dampness rot the coffin-boards of the summer house.
Let the shrubs lose their foothold in the wind,
the nettles lose their edge, the drenched rat
with slicked-back hair scuttle to its sewage pipe.
Let the tropical expanses of the rhubarb leaves
serve as an artificial pond, a reservoir.
Let the downpour’s impact on the toolshed be akin
to the dull applause on an archive recording of a love duet.
Let the bricklayers at the building site wrap
pathetic sheets of polythene around doomed foundations.
Let the limb ripped from the tree’s socket
hover fleetingly in the air, an olive branch.
Let a rainbow’s fantail unfurl like a bird of paradise.
Let a covenant be sealed, its wording watertight.
Let the floods recede.
Let there be light.


III  

                        (after Giacomo Leopardi)

The storm runs out of wind; nature, which
abhors a silence, fills the vacancy with birdsong.
Deserting the airless, low-ceilinged coop,
the hen repeats herself ad infinitum. Replenished
like the rain-barrels, hearts grow sanguine.

Hammering resumes. Humming. Gossip. Croons.
Sun strides down lanes that grass has repossessed,
takes a shine to the brasses at the hotel where,
by the window she thrust open, the chambermaid
is marvelling at the cleansed freshness, calm.

Balm of mind and body. Will we ever feel
more reconciled to life than now, ever
know a moment more conducive to new hopes,
eager beginnings, auspicious starts?
How easily pleased we are. Rescind

the threat of torment for the briefest
second and we blot out dark nights of the soul
when lightning flashes fanned by wind
ignited fire and brimstone visions.
Sorrow is perennial; happiness, a rare

bloom, perfumes the air - so that we breathe
with the ease of a camphor-scented chest
from which congestion has just lifted.
Lack of woe equates with rapture then,
though not till death will pain take full leave

of our senses, grant us permanent relief.


(1999)