POETRY

AQR 2008Author indexPoetryAQR - Vol 25, No. 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2008

Sep 4

ABOUT THE GUEST POETRY EDITOR

Jane Hirshfield, a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review, is the author of six collections of poetry: After (finalist for England’s T.S. Eliot Award in 2006), Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award), The Lives of the Heart, The October Palace, Of Gravity & Angels, and Alaya, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Nine Gates. She also edited and co-translated two poetry anthologies: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan and Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. Her work has appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and five editions of The Best American Poetry.

Second Tornado by David Baker

This time the porch seems to pitch to the side.

Or is everything else shoved that way? Blown

yellow, yellow-green, leaf chaff in big sheets

flying across the porch hard from the side.

What you hear about the train isn’t true.

Yet there are passengers riding the rails

of the wind, larks awing, a wild meadow

variety but more like confetti

than birds, and pages of evening news

in a real hurry. And the gray-green sky

isn’t true, unless the flailing hung ferns

like electrocuted dolls are enough

in the sky to count. Now the squad’s

streaming the block, on lookout for downed lines.

And now the banging of the porch eaves is

inside the eaves. Now the harder rain –

the first was Kansas, devil-in-the-heat,

yet it lifted shingles off a flat house

and tore the tarpaper, toys in the yard,

then the roof as we watched from the ball field.

She was elsewhere, nobody to me then,

unmet for decades coming on. O

wind. O wild love. Whirl me in the sky

sideways to her now and toss me down.

David Baker’s latest books are Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf, 2007) and Midwest Eclogue: Poems (Norton, 2005).

THE SIXTH TRUMPET by Chana Bloch

after Anselm Kiefer

Lately we’ve begun to talk logistics,

to draw up contingency plans

for a war we’re preparing

to lose. We’ve begun to count backward

from D-day. If I die first, we tell each other.

Sometimes: If you die first. Declarations

that flare in the street, the museum.

Our children can’t stand that kind of talk,

they announce in front of Kiefer’s painting.

They see an immense ploughed field

under a day sky seeded with dark stars.

Sunflower seeds! they say. He used real seeds.

We see a bombardment of cinders

falling through the air onto furrows

of emulsion, acrylic, shellac

that converge on a vanishing point.

No place to hide from the sky

– we’ve got to prepare a shelter

for them. We dole out small truths,

sufficient unto the day.

Sunflower seeds, we say.

THE DAILY NEWS by Chana Bloch

Bellagio, Italy

The Romans were here before us.

Before them the Etruscans.

Before anyone, the slow grind of ice

gouging out sheer rock walls and a lake.

I like the long view back, the boulders

stranded by glaciers in their wake.

Those rocks are solid fact; they’re not

going anywhere soon.

Day doesn’t settle down long enough

to be seen. Wherever

the eye alights suddenly it’s dark.

Yesterday rose and fell in a cloud of ash

and already the augurs are bringing reports

of tomorrow’s war.

They’re tracking the travel plans of birds.

Yet today: snow flurries in April,

snow-buds on the branches!

We rush out ready to hope, but the sky

turns to water in our hands.

Wherever the eye rests there is light and sorrow,

sorrow and light,

Escher birds, beak-to-wing,

frozen in flight.

Chana Bloch is a poet, translator and literary critic. Among her published works are three books of poems, Mrs. Dumpty, The Past Keeps Changing, and The Secrets of the Tribe, five books of translation from ancient and contemporary Hebrew poetry, and a critical study of George Herbert.

AN ONION by Robert Bly

The skin of the onion is shiny as a deerfly’s wing, and it echoes the faint blood veins of the eyelid, the Renaissance capillaries one often sees in human skin. A wild greenish-yellow light shows through from the deeper onion. The surface shows dark splotches here and there, clouds moving overhead, darkening patches of the stubble field.

What shall we say of these lines – moving over the vast spaces of the onion – but barely visible, like those curving drawings on the high plains of Peru. The onion lines gradually widen at its center; they catch more sunlight there, glinting with a sort of ruffian, toothy joy; after that they curve down toward the disappointed knot at the bottom. The ruffian lines do grow more succinct as they reach the worried fibers at the bottom. They are like the survival root of the old man, barely able to breathe, who walks with a cane, head down. He’s a tough old guy, who doesn’t care about you.

WALKING OUT IN THE MORNING by Robert Bly

In the city, whenever you walk out,

The air hits you first . . . abundant,

Nonhuman. Where has it been?

It’s like your first college course,

But with better teachers. Farther on,

Your legs begin to feel the cold.

And you learn more. It’s like

Graduate school, in which

Your shoes keep slipping

On the ice, and you notice

The mountains are getting

Steeper, like those in Germany.

If you keep walking anyway,

You’ll have a Ph.D.

You’ll know you’re near God

When your boots are full of snow.

Robert Bly is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (HarperCollins, 2005); The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (HarperCollins, 2001); Snowbanks North of the House (1999); What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? Collected Prose Poems (1992); Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1987); Mirabai Versions (1984); This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977); and The Light Around the Body (1967), which won the National Book Award. Among his many books of translations are The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations, Lorca and Jiminez: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1997); Machado’s Times Alone: Selected Poems (1983); The Kabir Book (1977); Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets – Martinson, Ekeloef, and Transtromer (1975); and Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (1971). Bly’s nonfiction books include The Sibling Society (Addison-Wesley, 1996); The Spirit Boy and the Insatiable Soul (1994); Iron John: A Book about Men (1990); and Talking All Morning: Collected Conversations and Interviews (1980).

Creeley by Thomas Centolella

(1926–2005)

Jackhammers. It must be October.

If the man with the black eye patch were still alive

he might pause in his latest digression,

he might turn to the classroom window and murmur,

“A little something for our attention

to work against.” He might return

to his reminiscence of two green poets

making another pilgrimage to the Master

of New Jersey. They sit in Dr. Williams’s sun room

like two Boy Scouts hankering after a merit badge.

Or he might meditate aloud on the attributes

of Levertov: “Responsibility is the ability

to offer a response,” fixing the room’s fledglings

with his one good eye. Then maybe

another pause, while he digs deep

for his hanky, flips up the pirate patch

and wipes out the moist hollow nobody wants

to look at. Then off he goes again – the time

he and Famous Name went to Famous Place

and took another step toward celebrity –

until, fidgety with tangent and anecdote,

we pull him back on track because,

one day after class, he said he’d go on

and on if nobody stopped him.

We stopped him – when we could.

He would chuckle, which you could say

was his way of being responsible. . .

A jackhammer shatters the concrete

and I’m staring again at the rheumy cave

of an eye socket. We were good students,

I think. We took on the interruptions

and reinforced our focus.

We looked death in the eye

and didn’t blink.

Thomas Centolella is the author of three collections of poetry from Copper Canyon Press, including Views from along the Middle Way. He has been the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the American Book Award. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

SUNFLOWER by Henri Cole

When Mother and I first had the do-not-

resuscitate conversation, she lifted her head,

like a drooped sunflower, and said,

“Those dying always want to stay.”

Months later, on the kitchen table,

Mars red gladiolus sang Ode to Joy,

and we listened. House flies swooped and veered

around us, like the Holy Spirit. “Nature

is always expressing something human,”

Mother commented, her mouth twisting,

as I plucked whiskers from around it.

“Yes, no, please.” Tenderness was not yet dust.

Mother sat up, rubbed her eyes drowsily, her breaths

like breakers, the living man the beach.

Henri Cole’s volumes of poetry include: Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), The Visible Man (2005), Middle Earth (2003), which received the 2004 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, The Look of Things (1995), The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (1989), and The Marble Queen (1986).

Childhood by Greg Delanty

(from THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY, BOOK XVII)

You wax lyrical about childhood being idyllic,

a paradise, Eden, a country under a spell:

a beachball in the air, an uncle with the trick

of a penny up his sleeve, a lick

of ice cream, blithe waving from the horses of a carousel

galloping the hills of childhood. Well,

sure, but look again at the impaled horses circling the carousel,

their faces appear as if they’re being whipped through hell.

(Danus)

Greg Delanty’s Collected Poems 1986–2006 was recently released from the Oxford Poet’s series of Carcanet Press. Other books include The Ship of Birth (Carcanet Press 2003, Louisiana State University Press 2007), The Blind Stitch (Carcanet Press 2001, Louisiana State University Press 2002) and The Hellbox (Oxford University Press 1998).

For I Will Consider the Overlooked Dragonfly by Sharon Dolin

How it is often a damselfly, skimmer, or darner

How it belies the idea that we invented neon

How it mates while in flight, laying eggs on the pond’s lilies

How its blues are purples, its browns, reds

How unfearful it is of the human body

How one will come to bask on my forearm, foot, or the arm of my deck chair

How I praise the way it eats the larvae of biting insects

How a Variable Dancer in lavender and black alighted as I wrote this

For I praise them, not needing to search for dragonflies (the way birders search for birds) but let them fly to me

For sometimes their wings have stigma and in the wind I watch their wings and abdomen sway while their head and thorax are still

For this one’s a male whose spider-web wings and abdomen are tipped sky-blue

For might it be the same damselfly that alights on the arm of my chair as I write?

For his bulgy compound eyes, what do they see?

For his violet thorax the color of a flower

For the honeybees grazing the sea honeysuckle

and the hummingbirds on the mimosa blooms

For their pond world which is oblivious to names

For ours with its naming obsession

For the only way I desire to catch one is with the net of my eyes

For some say a damselfly is a weak flier compared to a dragonfly

For the male clasps the female’s head with the end of its abdomen when mating

For we call mating pairs a copulation wheel but I say they look like a backwards 3

For it flies from spring through late summer (though they live for only a few weeks)

For some darters and skimmers migrate south and the ones returning are their

children or grand- or great-grandchildren or

For after the storm a male white-faced Meadowhawk, its thorax and abdomen pomegranate-red, has come to bask in the windy sun

For the wind, the wind, which causes a stirring within the stillness and a stillness within the stirring

Sharon Dolin won the 2007 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for her book Burn and Dodge, to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2008. She is the author of three previous books of poems: Realm of the Possible, Serious Pink, and Heart Work.

APPARITION by Mark Doty

Oracular pear,

this peacock

perched in a plywood roost

at the garden center,

magnificent behind a wire fence

marked with his name:

Hommer

(pronounced

without the extra m),

and hand-lettered instructions:

DON’T PROVOKE ME.

He’s the provocation:

of what use

the wrought extravagance

he’s not just now displaying?

Darwin: “The sight of a feather

in a peacock’s tail,

whenever I gaze at it,

makes me sick!”

No reason on earth

even eons of increments

would conspire to this,

and is the peahen

that hard to attract,

requiring an arc of nervous gleams,

a hundred shining animals

symmetrically peering

from the dark

of ancient woods?

But if Hommer argues

by his mere presence

for creation, his deity’s

a little hysteric,

rampant attitude

contained in all that glory.

Did he who made the lamb

make Hommer, imperious

metallic topknot shivering

above an emerald field

of anodized aluminum

while he blinks and flicks

his actual eyes from side to side?

And then the epic

trombone-slide-from-Mars cry

no human throat can mime

– is that why it stops the heart? –

just before he condescends to unfurl

the archaic poem of his tail.

Mark Doty’s new collection, Fire To Fire: New And Selected Poems, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2008. He is the author of several collections of poetry: School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005); Source (2002); Sweet Machine (1998); Atlantis (1995), which received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award; My Alexandria (1993), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize; Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991); and Turtle, Swan (1987). He has also published Heaven’s Coast (1996), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Other books by Doty include Firebird (1999), Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (2000), and Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2007).

EXCITEMENT by Stephen Dunn

For years I sought it, had it,

the physical kind – visceral

and a little dangerous –

and would try to wear it

like a bright shirt

so that others might recognize

and be drawn to it,

perhaps want,

with my assistance,

to investigate it further.

But I’ve watched with curiosity

that kind of excitement

slowly give up its spot

at the top of my day,

in effect watched it

learn to play with others,

like its far away cousin,

Contemplation,

like its little known peer,

Emotional Generosity.

Excitement, I might think

to myself on days like today,

and mean something quiet

or tender, or, yes,

passionately quiet and tender,

or maybe even selfish,

and be reminded

that to redefine is not always

to lose. Astonishing

that sometimes we don’t

quite have to kiss

what we’ve loved goodbye.

Stephen Dunn is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, including Different Hours, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

Lifework by Laura Fargas

What hard work it is to be the living.

How much easier they have it,

or, to be exact, he has it, the dear departed

slack in his box like a present that,

once the tissue petals were unfolded,

wasn’t wanted, like handmade socks

in some unspeakable plaid. Well,

that’s okay, just shove this box over

and go on to the next, which might be,

at last, Malibu Barbie or electric

trains. We are gathered to celebrate,

even if the givers got it wrong again –

you think it’s going to be a new house,

and it is, a sort of sub-basement

sub-efficiency and they’ve given you

fee simple absolute, a form of forever

the law calls a freehold, though you

paid with your life. And we others

got the flowers and our fancy clothes,

a smoky set from a wind instrument,

food and decent wines whose outer wraps

guarantee there’ll be no disappointment.

Of course, we had to buy the wine

ourselves – but that’s our work, from

picking the grape to glueing the label,

and in time (which is not the opposite of,

but instead comes before, out of time)

we learn to take it up gladly.

Hell, let’s celebrate that too, even

toast the givers, because they once

gave us you, and ourselves, gifts so good

we were willing to pay in blood,

as after all we will, when the piper’s final note

comes in its windowed envelope that lets us

see inside and glimpse the bill.

in mem. Bill Matthews

Laura Fargas is the author of two books of poetry, Reflecting What Light We Can’t Absorb: Poems and An Animal of the Sixth Day. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Atlantic. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

EARTH, THIS FIRELIT LANTERN by Katie Ford

will master the heart

only in its last hour

of wicking down, flickering to light

its own wounds and mishandlings,

what’s been taken and what collected

on this extinguishing thing.

You whose love once left

but returned

must forget

your human analogy.

Deadly to believe a heaven

might include you.

You had a heaven.

You were its gods.

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Storm (a chapbook), and Colosseum (Graywolf, 2008). Individual poems have appeared in The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, and Poets & Writers.

DREAMING AT THE BALLET by Jack Gilbert

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.

They will do anything it’s true.

And the skin is beautifully cared for.

But they have no sense of it. They are

all manner and amazing technique.

I lie with them thinking of your

foolish excess, of you panting

and sweating, and your eyes after.

SOUTH by Jack Gilbert

In the small towns along the river

nothing happens day after long day.

Summer weeks stalled forever,

and long marriages always the same.

Lives with only emergencies, births,

and fishing for excitement. Then a ship

comes out of the mist. Or comes around

the bend carefully one morning

in the rain, past the pines and shrubs.

Arrives on a hot fragrant night,

grandly, all lit up. Gone two days

later, leaving fury in its wake.

NEGLECTING THE KIDS by Jack Gilbert

He wonders why he can’t remember the blossoming.

He can taste the brightness of the sour-cherry trees,

but not the clamoring whiteness. He was seven in

the first grade. He remembers two years later when

they were alone in those rich days. He and his sister

in what they called kindergarten.

They played every day on the towering

slate roofs. Barefoot. No one to see them on

those fine days. He remembers the fear

when they shot through the copper-sheeted

tunnels through the house. The fear

and joy and not getting hurt. Being tangled

high up in the mansion’s Bing cherry tree with

its luscious fruit. Remembers

the lavish blooming. Remembers the caves they

built in the cellar, in the masses of clothing and draperies.

Tunnels to each other’s kingdom with their stolen

jewelry and scarves. It was always summer, except for

the night when his father suddenly appeared. Bursting

in with crates of oranges or eggs, laughing in a way

that thrilled them. The snowy night behind him.

Who never brought two pounds of anything. The boy remembers

the drunkenness but not how he felt about it,

except for the Christmas when his father tried to embrace

the tree when he came home. Thousands of lights,

endless tinsel and ornaments. He does

not remember any of it except the crash as his father

went down. The end of something.

Jack Gilbert is the author of Views of Jeopardy, winner of the 1962 Yale Younger Poets Series, Monolithos (1982), and The Great Fires (1994). His collection Refusing Heaven (2005), won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His collected poems will be published in 2009.

Grandmother, Cleaning Rabbits by Samual Green

I shot this one by the upper pond of the farm

after watching the rings trout made rising

to flies, watching small birds pace the backs

of cows, hoping all the time she would run.

My grandmother told me they damaged her garden.

I think it was a way to make the killing

lighter. She never let me clean them, only asked

I bring them headless to her. I bring this one

to the fir block near the house, use the single-

bitted axe with the nick in the lower crescent

of the blade, smell the slow fire

in the smoke-house, salmon changing

to something sweet & dark. A fly turns

in a bead of blood on my boot. I tuck

the head in a hole beside the dusty globes

of ripened currants, talk quiet to the barn cat.

In her kitchen my grandmother whets the thin blade

of her Barlow, makes a series of quick, clever cuts, then tugs

off the skin like a child’s sweater. This one was

pregnant. She pulls out a row of unborn rabbits

like the sleeve of a shirt with a series of knots.

The offal is dropped in a bucket. Each joint gives way

beneath her knife as though it wants

to come undone, as though she knows some secret

about how things fit together. I have killed

a hundred rabbits since I was eight.

This will be the last.

I am twenty, & about to go back

to the war that killed my cousin in Kin Hoa,

which is one more name she can’t pronounce.

I haven’t told her about the dead,

and she won’t ask. She rolls the meat

in flour & pepper & salt, & lays it

in a skillet of oil that spits like a cat.

She cannot save a single boy who carries a gun.

All she can do is feed this one.

Samuel Green’s most recent collection is The Grace of Necessity (Carnegie Mellon University Press). He was recently named as the first Poet Laureate of Washington State. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

The Pilot Light by Rachel Hadas

The angers flare up suddenly, blue flames.

Sometimes I can predict what sets one off,

and the dismal precision of this knowledge

angers me afresh:

the innocent struck match

and what it chances this time to ignite;

and underlying every exchange,

meek, deceptive, low, the pilot light.

Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations. Her latest book of poems is The River of Forgetfulness (2006), and her new prose selections can be found in Classics (2007).

EPITAPH FOR A YOUNG MAN by John Haines

I seemed always standing

before a door

to which I had no key,

although I knew it held behind it

a gift for me.

Until one day I closed

my eyes a moment, stretched,

then looked once more.

And not surprised, I did not mind it

when the hinges creaked

and, smiling, Death

held out his hand to me.

John Haines is the author of ten collections of poetry including At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948–1954 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997); The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993); and New Poems 1980–88 (1990), for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award. He has also published a book of essays entitled Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays (1996), and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-five Years in the Northern Wilderness (1989). “Epitaph for a Young Man” was chosen last year by Ted Kooser for his “American Life in Poetry” weekly column. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

ENDEARMENT by Tony Hoagland

Going down the stairs

I call her sweetiepiecup,

and remember who else I used to call that,

into whose cup I poured my sweetieness

And how then I took my watering can

to another garden

and continued my life,

or rather, my life continued me,

– my life, as Basho said, “on which I floated like a leaf,”

though less gracefully than that –

thrashing a little,

accidentally inhaling some dirty riverwater,

banging sideways into the pilings of the bridge,

but going on nonetheless,

saying things

no tough guy would ever say

and then saying them again.

We use the same words

because it’s the same sentiment

that flows through us now as then

and you could keep your mouth shut

for the sake of your aesthetic standards,

and then you would be

a highly principled

beacon of stupidity.

As for me, it’s too late to pretend

to be a genius at affection;

I’m just a pedestrian of love

who found out en route

what destination means.

It all boils down to

words like marzipan and muffinhead,

Miss Potato Pancake and butterlips,

these terms of endearment

we scatter about us

wherever we go

which weigh almost nothing

like ashes, or little flowers.

THE TRUTH by Tony Hoagland

In summer there was some malfunction in the wasps

that wanted to get inside the screened-in porch.

It sent them buzzing against the wire mesh,

probing under the eaves

crawling into the cracks between the boards.

Each day we’d find new bodies on the sill:

little failures, like struck matches:

shrunken in death, the yellow

color of cider or old varnish.

The blue self of the sky looked down

on the self of the wooden house

where the wasps were perishing.

The self of the wind swept them to the ground.

The wasps seemed to be extensions

of one big thing

making the same effort again and again.

I can remember that feeling of being driven

by some need I could not understand

to look for a passage through,

– trying again and again

to get inside. I must have left a lot

of dead former selves scattered around behind

me while I kept pushing my blunt head

at a space that prevented my entering

– and by that preventing, delivered me here,

to where I live now,

still flying around in my head,

dissatisfied

in the land of the unfinished.

THE LONELIEST JOB IN THE WORLD by Tony Hoagland

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,

you are completely screwed, because

the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,

and you are still hunched over

your flow charts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.

This is the loneliest job in the world:

to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,

and all around you, you can hear

the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,

pushing the turnstiles, putting

their coins in the slots.

Paying the price which is asked,

which constantly changes.

No one knows why.

CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE by Tony Hoagland

When I was 17, 20, 24, and 29 1/2,

I said to myself, again and again,

while gazing upwards at the blue, empty-headed sky,

or sometimes while staring hard

at the back of my own unwrinkled hand,

“Life is a dream.”

Now I repeat to myself nearly every day,

with a fierce, almost brutal

desire to persuade my listener,

“This is real,”

and this would be,

as you’ve heard of “captivity narratives,”

a “maturity narrative,”

except for the fact that

I mean now exactly the same thing

as I did back then.

Tony Hoagland won the 2005 Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, for humor in American poetry. His books of poems include What Narcissism Means to Me, Donkey Gospel and Real Sofitikashun.

Ms. Veronina by Ilya Kaminsky

As our neighbor Veronina walked across

her balcony one of the soldiers

said oh and stood and

another stood and the whole battalion

Veronina’s son collected

silver coins with the president’s profile

and she watched

hours pass from bombs in the public garden to bombs

on the theater balcony. Then what, to olive trees?

Hours pass

she understood it better than I did

hours pass

from olive tree to olive tree.

And Veronina touched

her son’s hair & said it better than I can

our kind prostitute from

apartment 8b, you are not

going to cry about it not in front of them.

We let them take her, all of us cowards,

what we did not say

we carried in our suitcases, our coat-pockets, our nostrils.

They took you, Veronina.

And I see myself –

a man’s hand writes on the white brick wall

of an apartment building “People

live Here” like an illiterate

signing a document

he does not understand.

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing in Odessa, which won the Whiting Writers’ Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Prize, and Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine. It was named Best Poetry Book of 2004 by ForeWord Magazine. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

OH, MARIACHI ME by Ted Kooser

All my life I have wanted nothing so much

as the love of women. For them I have fashioned

the myth of myself, the singing troubadour

with the flashing eyes. Always for them

my black sombrero with its swinging tassels,

this vest embroidered with hearts, these trousers

with silver studs down the seams. Oh, I am

Mariachi me, as I had intended. I am success

and the price of success, now old and dusty

at the edge of the dance floor, still smiling,

heavy with hope, clutching my dead guitar.

Ted Kooser is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon, 2004); Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison (2000), which won the 2001 Nebraska Book Award for poetry; Weather Central (1994); One World at a Time (1985); and Sure Signs (Pittsburgh, 1980). His fiction and nonfiction books include Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2003) written with Jim Harrison; and Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (2002), which won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003. Kooser’s poem, “Oh, Mariachi Me,” one of twenty-one annual valentines published since 1986, will be a part of his forthcoming book, Valentines, from University of Nebraska Press. Kooser is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner.

The Winking Vulva by Maxine Kumin

When the old broodmare came down with Cushings, an end-

of-life disease, they took in a friend’s

retired gelding, thinking to have a companion

for their own midlife gelding when

the time came to put her down. The mare sprang

into action, newly young,

squatting, crooking and lifting her tail,

squirting urine and winking her vulva, all

classic signs of estrus. Although

bewildered, the newcomer seemed to enjoy

her slavish attention. What old boy

wouldn’t? But when in the sweltering

heat her heat persisted, they worried: something

endocrine amiss, an ovarian tumor?

Consulted, the vet only laughed, good for her!

At last the inviting vulva gave

up its vigorous winking, the two big guys

lowered their heads side by side to graze.

Between them, regally in charge, the mare

until rough winds do shake and bid no more.

Maxine Kumin’s sixteenth poetry collection, Still to Mow, was published in 2007. She is also the author of a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W. W. Norton, 2000); four novels; a collection of short stories; more than twenty children’s books; and four books of essays. Kumin is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has been awarded the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost medals, and a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Kumin is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.

Make of Me by Lance Larsen

Dirt combed free of snarls twice a day,

tree trunks white washed as high

as arthritis can reach.

Make of me, late fall, what this peasant

has made of her poverty.

Flung potato water gleaming on bricks

outside her window,

an albino dog licking up wet

holiness, legs splayed to keep its paws dry.

Lance Larsen’s third collection of poems is forthcoming from the University of Tampa in 2008. His recent work has appeared in Georgia Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, and Salmagundi.

WESTERN LIT by Dorianne Laux

The goats of Greece ate heart-shaped leaves

from the vineyards of the gods, offending them.

From that day forward their slaughterers wrote goat songs,

epic plays, great tragedies in which many humans died.

Blindings, stabbings, betrayals, mistaken identity.

The goats were ecstatic! They leapt in the fields.

Learning to Drive by Dorianne Laux

The long miles down the back road

I learned to drive on. The boy riding

shotgun. His hand on my hand on

the gear shift knob. Our eyes locked

on the dusty windshield, the cracked

asphalt, old airstrip, the nothing spreading

for miles: scrub brush, heat waves, sky

a few thin contrails. His patience

endless. My clumsiness: the grinding

gears, the fumbled clutch. The wrench of it

popped like an arm from its socket.

His blue, beloved ’67 Ford lurching

into the dirt. I was 16. He was older.

His football-player shoulders muscular,

wide. Where did he get his kindness?

Why spend it on a girl like me:

skinny, serious, her nails bitten, her legs

bruised. Hours under summer’s

relentless heat. His car stumbling

across the barren lot until I got it,

understood how to lift my left foot,

my right hand, in tandem, like dancing,

which I never learned to do, never wanted

to turn circles on the polished floor

of a dark auditorium, the bleachers

hemming me in. I drove toward the horizon.

Gravel jitterbugging under his tires. Lizards

skittering. Jays lifting to the buzz

of telephone wires. He taught me

how to handle a car, how to downshift

into second, peel out from a dead stop.

His hand hung from the open window,

fingers clamped on a lit cigarette,

trailing smoke. We couldn’t guess

where we were going. He didn’t know

he was flying to Vietnam

and I was on my way out of there,

The Byrds singing Eight Miles High

when he turned off the radio

and told me to brake, opened his door

and slid out to stand on the desert road,

to let me go it alone. His back pressed

against all that emptiness.

Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award. Her first book, Awake, was recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press. Red Dragonfly Press will release Superman: The Chapbook in 2008. She is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.

The Other Rhinoceros by Phillis Levin

Actually, there were two

It is spelled the same in the singular

Or the plural

Now there is one

What is the plural of flood

Does more water make it plural

No, only more water in more places

A flood

A big flood

A great flood

Water

The water

The waters rising

And no ark

No dove

No branch of an olive

Live

Olive tree

Live

O live

Olive

O live

Note: “The Other Rhinoceros” is one of two poems sparked by an article in The New York Times on August 14, 2002, reporting on a flood that broke the banks of the Vltava river, the biggest natural disaster in modern Czech history. The front-page story included a photograph of a blindfolded rhinoceros being lifted out of the water. The second rhinoceros, the article explained, “turned violent and had to be killed.”

Not a Prayer by Levin

in memoriam CZES{Lslash}AW MI{Lslash}OSZ

On Lorenzo Lotto’s suffering Christ

There are two tears, two drops of blood,

But now that I’ve heard of your passing

They glimmer differently. Was this

Your gift? For I cannot tell if

The flickering shadow of what is gone

Makes this happen, bare fact suffusing

The skin until our pulse quickens

With the life of another running in

Our own vessels, sending out

Its fluctuating rhythm, a flock of birds

In a net of chance, a shape – of what?

Now that you’re on the other side, lifting

An eyebrow at the view, you would know

What to say. Your bridge that is made

Out of prayer, those feet walking over

The river into a cushion of crimson

Anemones . . . Will you find her there,

That girl on the metro, smiling

An aisle away? Does a waiter turn,

Flashing a silver tray? If only I could fall

Into the arms of my father, asking him

Why he is sad, so that he may weep

The tears he never shed as we marvel

At the symmetry of two drops of water,

Two drops of blood – Lotto’s brush

A chrysalis of dust, a butterfly

Who gave herself back to original light

So the worm again can fly. Every mote

Is a spasm of sight, every wound an eye.

Phillis Levin is the author of three books of poetry, Temples and Fields, The Afterimage, and Mercury, and is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Her fourth collection, May Day, will be published by Penguin later this year.

Paradise Came Over Me Once by Anne Marie Macari

Paradise came over me once. A grove

of tall eucalyptus trees, long red leaves

we picked off the ground, animals following us.

His voice echoing among the trees, naming

everything, filling the silence with brittle

kingdoms: moon-faced owls, finches, a dead mouse,

core of an apple. He couldn’t stop himself.

I mocked him: earlobe, nipple, throat. He floated

from me, brooding like the huge trees with their

gigantic solitude. I turned away.

For a long time we had been enough: what I’d

later name happiness. Sweet kernel within

my despair. Don’t ask why. Think of your own hunger,

how it gets worse no matter what you feed it.

Anne Marie Macari’s most recent book is Gloryland, published by Alice James Books in 2005. Her book, Ivory Cradle, won the 2000 American Poetry Review / Honickman first book prize. Her poems have been published in TriQuarterly, American Poetry Review, Five Points, The Iowa Review, and Field.

BEFORE & AFTER by Morton Marcus

After our breathing stilled

and the slippery patina

cooled on our skins, I imagined

us lying side by side

like two separate statues

imbedded in marble,

as if we were half formed,

never to emerge from rock.

It hadn’t been that way

the moment before

when we were one, bucking

against each other, fighting

our separateness until it

finally gave up for a moment

and let us fall through

each other’s entangled arms.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Nothing” you replied.

What is it I wanted words to say

where words had no place,

where knowing was not knowing?

Like the vase by the open window

that fell in a sudden gust.

Remember? Two green parakeets

were painted on it

amid scrolling red vines.

We didn’t hear it

until it shattered, that vase

we could not replace.

Morton Marcus is the author of ten books of poems. Pursuing the Dream Bone appeared in 2007. His literary memoirs, Striking Through The Masks, will be published in the spring of 2008. His work has been included in over 88 anthologies in the United States, Europe and Australia.

Southwestern Suite by Stefanie Marlis

I could tell it was warmer this morning, even before I opened the door. Without the heat on, the house wasn’t ice, and now, an hour after turning it on, birds are singing in the yard.

* * *

All my life it seems I’ve tried to feel others’ pain, and now and then I accomplish this. The dog looks up at me, a burr – what we call a goat’s head – lodged in her paw, and I can’t take one more step. When I saw Peter for the last time, speech slurred, his body shaky and exposed, the man he was roomed with – a huge Buffalonian twice his size – complained behind the hospital curtain. I didn’t feel Peter’s pain, I felt him feeling all of mine, and the huge Buffalonian’s.

* * *

While I lived in a small mountain town in Arizona, my father died, my only family. I came to love horses in that place. A special five grazed the pastures of an in-town ranch, and it was easy to see that they needed one another. Sometimes all five would stand close, in a horsy pinwheel, their tails swatting flies.

* * *

Sick for weeks, in early light, I saw Gautama Buddha silhouetted under the Bodhi tree, hair knotted upon his head. For a second I thought: “A sign!” The bun was a warped cactus pad, the body a stunted prickly pear trying to get a foothold beneath a tall, greening chamiso on the edge of a gray arroyo.

* * *

A tiny southwestern restaurant serves Spanish and American food next to the car wash. I have guacamole, chips, and a side of beans. Two waitresses and the owner all attend to me. The place is immaculate: squares of color advertising Corona beer hang like prayer flags above the counter.

* * *

A man wearing no hat crosses a sun-struck field in New Mexico: “Come on the happiness of my life. Come on the happiness of my life,” he repeats, and a small dog trots up to him.

Stefanie Marlis is the author of a recent collection of poems, Cloudlife, published by Apogee Press. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

Anniversary by Linda McCarriston

I thought last night – all of it

from day-deepened-as-

champagne-does-into-cognac

to sleep – that it was my heart only

leaning into my chest, shoulder

of my heart pressing, trying the door to

what? Place blood comes from?

Heat? Cold? Weight? Gravity

that down won’t satisfy but

over will, out, against, around?

But it was not I think now

only mine but yours too; it was

across what death erects,

dark matter. You are – as before

you only incompletely were –

breast to breast with me, trans-

fusing pulse: systole. Diastole

mine. I felt the half of it.

Linda McCarriston is the author of three collections of poems, Talking Soft Dutch, an Associated Writing Programs Award Series selection, Eva-Mary, winner of the Terrence Des Pres Prize at Northwestern University, and Little River. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Ohio Review, and New England Review.

L’Ancien Régime by Christopher Merrill

for Sarah Rothenberg

Of the condemned. Of nectar, and a necklace

Of olive shells strung through a chandelier,

And the nomenclature of the last regime

Replaced with ruthless inefficiency

By the henchmen of the new idealists.

Of an order filled for a photographer

Who dropped his pocket watch from the draw bridge

Into the lookout of a wooden yacht

Returning from an auction in Antigua –

An order for Kalashnikovs and Stingers.

Of the intervals between light and dark, defined

As challenges to the prevailing styles

Of thought, worship, decorum. Of desperate measures

That saved no one. Of fossils catalogued

And sold to a collector. Of the condemned.

Tell it again, without embellishment:

How they watched a kettle of turkey vultures

Scavenging in the wetlands, woods, and scree

Below the dam slated for demolition,

And did not mourn their decision to dissolve

What they had held in trust – the farm; the arts

Of storytelling, husbandry, and love;

The household gods instructing them to work

Without recourse to bitterness or blame

For well-made things undone by chance, by weather.

A vulture on a boulder flapped its wings

And lifted off into the blackening

Sky of an early winter. They smell something,

He said. She shrugged. They must smell something, no?

To separate the heavy gas molecules from the light, one isotope from another, hundreds of aluminum cylinders and rotors, magnets and gears, were shipped to a warehouse in Kuala Lumpur, where a team of engineers built centrifuges for clients in Pyongyang and Tehran and Tripoli. The way of the world, said the deckhand loading the unmarked crates onto a freighter registered in Panama, which had caught the eye of a pirate fishing in the Straits of Malacca. Where they might end up was anybody’s guess.

Say the equation’s wrong: x = y

Unless there is no hope for a reply

From your beloved, God, the universe.

Neither at nightfall, nor on the abyss

Will you discover what was integral

To what you left behind: your soul. That model

Was never part of the experiment:

That we could build a tower of cement

From which to plot an assault on the oasis

Settled and squandered by our enemies.

And so we set fire to the covered bridge,

Which dropped into the water like a language

Destined to be forgotten. Conjugate

The lessons that we never learned: how late

And wrong we were, how slow to realize

That there were other forms and other ways

Of being in the world: x = y

Until a plume of ash undoes the sky.

Christopher Merrill’s books include Brilliant Water (poetry) and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain (nonfiction).

THE SILENCE OF THE MINE CANARIES by W. S. Merwin

The bats have not flowered

for years now in the crevice

of the tower wall when the long twilight

of spring has seeped across it

as the west light brought back

the colors of parting

the furred buds have not hung there

waking among their dark petals

before sailing out blind along their own echoes

whose high infallible cadenzas only

they could hear completely and could ride

to take over at that hour

from the swallows gliding

ever since daybreak over the garden

from their nests under the eaves

skimming above the house and the hillside pastures

their voices glittering in their exalted tongue

who knows how long now since they have been seen

and the robins have gone from the barn

where the cows spent the summer days

though they stayed long after the cows were gone

the flocks of five kinds of tits have not come again

the blue tits that nested each year

in the wall where their young

could be heard deep in the stones by the window

calling Here Here have not returned

the marks of their feet are still there on the stone

of their doorsill that does not know

what it is missing

the cuckoo has not been heard

again this May

nor for many a year the nightjar

nor the mistle thrush song thrush whitethroat

the blackcap that instructed Mendelssohn

I have seen them

I have stood and listened

I was young

they were singing of youth

not knowing that they were singing for us

FAR ALONG IN THE STORY by W. S. Merwin

The boy walked on with a flock of cranes

following him calling as they came

from the horizon behind him

sometimes he thought he could recognize

a voice in all that calling but he

could not hear what they were calling

and when he looked back he could not tell

one of them from another in their

rising and falling but he went on

trying to remember something in

their calls until he stumbled and came

to himself with the day before him

wide open and the stones of the path

lying still and each tree in its own leaves

the cranes were gone from the sky and at

that moment he remembered who he was

only he had forgotten his name

W. S. Merwin has published over twenty books of poetry. His recent collections include Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2007); Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005) which won the 2005 National Book Award; The Pupil (2002); The River Sound (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977–1983 (1997); The Vixen (1996); and Travels (1993), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In 1967, Merwin published The Lice, followed by The Carrier of Ladders in 1970 which received the Pulitzer Prize. He has also published nearly twenty books of translation, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2004), Dante’s Purgatorio (2000), and volumes by Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. His numerous plays and books of prose include The Lost Upland (1992); Summer Doorways (2006); and The Book of Fables (2007), a collection of his short prose. He is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress.

FIRE by Joseph Miller

When Axel starts humping the Coupe de Ville’s trunk

in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter

America raises its iron voice

over the coal fields of Pennsylvania:

backyard engine blocks, chain hoists,

bell housings, toothed gears

resting in pans of oil – stammering out

the poem of combustion,

bright tongues and wings, white-hot ingots

glimpsed in the huge mills by the river,

coke ovens, strip mines, brick stacks burning

over the spine of the Appalachians.

Carnegie, gifter of libraries,

Frick with his Rembrandts, his Titians,

both fast asleep in the arms

of the strikebreakers

under the ashes and slag.

Fire with no roots, no memory,

grooved steel running all night to Detroit,

fire of the profit line, fire of the shareholders,

I-beams, pistons, fenders and chrome.

Joseph Millar’s second collection of poems is Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press. Recent poems appear in Shenandoah, DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and Manoa. This is his fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

QUAIL by Paul Muldoon

Forty years in the wilderness

of Antrim and Fermanagh

where the rime would deliquesce

like tamarisk-borne manna

and the small-shot of hail

was de-somethinged. Defrosted.

This is to say nothing of the flocks of quail

now completely exhausted

from having so long entertained an

inordinately soft spot for the hard man

like Redmond O’Hanlon or Roaring Hanna

who delivers himself up only under duress

after forty years in the wilderness

of Antrim and Fermanagh.

Paul Muldoon is the author of eleven collections of poetry including New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968–1998 (2001) and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. His eleventh collection, Horse Latitudes, appeared in the fall of 2006. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996.

AN OLD MAN by Leonard Nathan

An old man that sleep has deserted, strokes

the cat curled in his lap and writes a sonnet –

A what! Next, you’ll say he holds a candle

to the sun, or re-invents the music box.

Does he imagine that the ancient form

will yield him up as-yet unpublished truth

if he can just stay faithful to its rites:

eight lines out toward death, six to get back

again to life – a beautiful imbalance

to the end? – Hopeless, I think, he circles

round again through the same old theme: love

too late except to understand. Well,

let him be, and let the cat sleep on,

its all-consuming dream, to it, no dream.

Leonard Nathan (1924–2007) was the author of fourteen books of poetry. A posthumous volume, Ragged Sonnets, will be published by Orchises Press at the end of 2008.

BIRDING by Dennis O’Driscoll

How dainty the wren’s working parts

must be, how miniature the brain-chip

which triggers its alarm, how tiny

the furnace that keeps its heart warm.

* * *

A perfect touchdown

on the hazel tree:

not as much as a

raindrop is dislodged.

* * *

Living at a hectic pace,

swallows feed on the move

grazing the long acre

of the air.

* * *

A one-for-sorrow magpie,

rough diamond, on the grass.

And two greenfinches:

consolation enough.

* * *

Numbers in decline, dawn choruses

learn to manage with more modest forces

like authentic performances of Bach.

* * *

The blue tit’s mate

keeps watch,

flexing wings,

while eggs – little

bigger than heart

pills – incubate.

* * *

An inspired touch: the red beak

on the black swan – like the yellow

bill toning down the blackbird’s

austere image (the same blackbird

I catch raiding my strawberries:

a burglar red-handed at the till).

* * *

Or for vulnerability

a swan afloat in sleep

resting on the feather

mattress of itself.

* * *

Pigeons, beer-bellied

bruisers, hang out

on the pavements

of building ledges

or stare up and down:

small-town shopkeepers

on a slack weekday.

* * *

Jackdaws curse from a height,

flying off with scoffing sounds

when their protection racket is disturbed.

* * *

A cock pheasant strides

into your life, sweeping

away despair with a flick

of its aristocratic tail,

the illuminated manuscript

of its chest a prophetic text.

* * *

How time flies on May evenings

when you hear birds

belt out sentimental songs

for sheer entertainment.

Dennis O’Driscoll’s eight books of poetry include Reality Check (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). He has edited a collection of contemporary quotations about poetry: Quote Poet Unquote (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). His awards include a Lannan Literary Award in 1999, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 and the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies (Minnesota) in 2006.

Sibling Unrivalry by Sharon Olds

What does it say that my sister was so

relieved to see me, as if she’d been waiting, all her

seventeen months, for me to be born.

It helped that our mother did not love me

to excess – maybe every second child

of the same sex as the first is post-modern.

And it helped that I was humorous,

and savored my sister’s solemness,

and her black Prince Valiant helmet of hair.

And I liked the way my shoulders fit

inside her encircling arm, me in a

small sweater, miniature of the

one she wore, which next year I would wear.

And to walk with her was like walking beside

an Egypt barge, she glided, and I could be the

little fireworks set off from the barge.

Dressed for church, the Junior Mints of our

four Mary Janes asparkle,

I’d cavort beside her. I loved it that she seemed

not baffled, she seemed to know. Now, I can

see it, her dear melancholy,

no one knowing to ask her, How are you

really. But what I saw, then,

was her steadiness – like a young, slightly sorrowing

mother, to me – how could I not

thrive, bad in the shadow of her goodness?

Without her, I might be in a river,

or a sea, or be lightless ashes in air.

When we meet, now, we gaze and savor.

She remembers me as fragile, and as

the one who came to her, in her iso-

lation, and saved her.

Sharon Olds is the author of eight poetry books including The Dead & the Living which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is completing a new collection called O Western Wind. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been included in more than one hundred anthologies. Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

WINTER TREES by Alicia Ostriker

February I am like the trees

not ruined exactly but shorn of ornament

and destitute of motivation

it is possible to find

both beauty and truth in their

pure forms

and I would like to do so

in myself if time could be persuaded

to hold off its heartless green

Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic, author of eleven volumes of poetry. Her most recent book of poems is No Heaven and her most recent prose work is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

HIDDENNESS by Michael Palmer

(Kansai plains)

To enter the temple we had to pick the locks,

put off our shoes, sing to sleep the clocks

watching us.

Peel your skin back

from the top

and pass through the chamber of clouds,

of peonies, elms and pale herons,

of emperors long dead

therein assembled,

the silent, the wild-eyed,

the meek and the violent,

the awkward and the graceful dead

therein assembled.

Entering the temple the rain will follow

and come to rest

there, above your head.

It will lave memory,

it is said,

then ask its one question.

About the hours,

their parts?

A space of time, might we say,

that a glimpse

will not contain?

Count the silent stones

if you can

and the ringing drops.

Michael Palmer’s most recent book of poetry is Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005). In the spring of 2007, a chapbook, The Counter-Sky (with translations by Koichiro Yamauchi), was published by Meltemia Press of Japan, to coincide with the Tokyo Poetry and Dance Festival. His selected essays, Active Boundaries, will appear later this year from New Directions.

A Dozen Roses by Linda Pastan

Their stems in the glass vase

are the color

of beet greens,

and their tight purplish blooms

the size and shape

of summer beets.

If only you had brought me

beets instead of

these formal flowers.

If only you had dressed them

in oil and lemon,

caressed them

with sour cream,

we could feast until

our mouths were as red

as the beets themselves,

then bruise those mouths

saltily against each other.

Lilacs by Linda Pastan

I have followed the lilacs

cluster by

purple cluster

from Whitman’s

dooryards in April

north to New York

where my mother’s garden

drowns in their scent

even without her.

I remember her gathering them

by the armful, blossoms

as plump and pale

as lavender pillows,

the white ones

paler still, shedding

their tiny florets

like baby teeth

over her polished floors.

Now in late May

somewhere near Boston

they are still blooming,

their leaves as heart-shaped

as memory itself.

If I keep traveling north,

I may finally find myself

somewhere beyond the treeline,

beyond loss.

For though I don’t believe

in ghosts, I am haunted

by lilacs.

Rachmaninoff’s Elegy by Linda Pastan

for William Lyoo

Though only 16,

you played the piano

at your mother’s funeral,

to honor her, you said,

and the music was like water

washing over a wound,

each note a footfall

through a darkness

you will negotiate

for years.

Linda Pastan is the author of Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton, 2006); The Last Uncle (2002); Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998 (1998); An Early Afterlife (1995); Heroes In Disguise (1991); The Imperfect Paradise (1988); PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982); The Five Stages of Grief (l978); and A Perfect Circle of Sun (l971). From 1991 to 1995, she served as the Poet Laureate of Maryland. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

SHAME by Robert Pinsky

(Purgatorio XXX, 61–78)

I turned at the sound of my own name, to see

That same veiled lady as at the festival

Of angels. She too turned, and looked at me

From across the water. The folds of cloth that fell

From her encircling crown of Minerva’s leaves

Concealed her face, but I heard her voice: Look well—

In the regal, even tone of one who saves

Her most heated words for later, she began—

Be sure: I am Beatrice. Can you say what gives

You courage, or happiness? Or made you plan

To climb the mountain? What has brought you here?

I dropped my gaze to the water, but looking down

I saw my own reflection, clear in that clear

Mirror—and I flinched and looked away again.

Robert Pinsky is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966–1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975). He is also the author of several prose titles and two acclaimed works of translation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass). From 1997 to 2000, he served as the U.S. Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

LOOKING FOR MY FATHER IN AIX-EN-PROVENCE, EARLY MARCH by Donald Platt

I.

I look for my father in the open-air flea market along the Cours Mirabeau, where they sell raw silk scarves of all colors and straw baskets of all shapes and sizes

* * *

I finger the silk, let it slide across the back of my hand to feel its nubbly smoothness

* * *

I imagine carrying home a dozen brown eggs, russet potatoes, and leeks in a new shopping basket with one cane dyed red, woven in and out among the white undyed canes like a ribbon running around its circumference

* * *

I look and look but buy nothing

* * *

I do not find him at the fountain where the naked stone boys ride dolphins that jet water from their mouths

* * *

They turn the fountains off after midnight

* * *

I look for him at the all-night boulangerie where I buy a crusted baguette “de la festivale” with pointed ends and afterwards walk the dark narrow cobbled streets, eating as I go

* * *

I do not find him, my ghostly boulevardier in his white-on-white pinstriped suit, strolling with the crowd along the Avenue Victor Hugo, which changes its name to the Boulevarde du Roi René, then to the Boulevarde Carnot, to the Cours Saint Louis, to the Boulevarde Aristide Briand, to the Cours Sextus, to the Avenue Napoléon Bonaparte before becoming the Avenue Victor Hugo again

* * *

He does not linger over and savor the truite almandine at the table next to the door at the Brasserie Carillon

* * *

He does not flake its flesh from the small bones with his fork

* * *

He is fog clinging like lamb’s wool to the steep terraced hillsides early in the morning

* * *

No, he is the smoke from the brush fires that farmers tend with metal rakes as they burn off their land

* * *

He is neither of these

* * *

He is not among the cypresses that stand like dark torches on either side of the gate next to the snarling sandstone lions

* * *

I look for him among the rows of pollarded plane trees that line the streets and throw their late-afternoon shadows on the cream-, gray-, or orange-tinged limestone walls of 15th-century houses

* * *

Their shadows are those of upraised hands with fingers outstretched, beseeching blessing

* * *

I look for my father’s sermons among the spray-painted black and pastel hieroglyphs of graffiti on the ancient stone walls

* * *

I find only “Antoinette, On T’Aime”

* * *

Antoinette, whom everybody loves

* * *

I look for him at the salon de thé, where a pregnant woman drinks black tea from Sri Lanka, which tastes like smoke from burning eucalyptus branches, and dips almond macaroons into her cup

* * *

While she drinks, she gives suck to her first, year-old child who guzzles and slurps the thin sweet milk from her white, blue-veined, globed left breast

* * *

Her husband with the three-day beard is slim, beautiful, and attentive

* * *

He bends across the table toward her

* * *

What do they say to each other

* * *

They are so young

* * *

How will they live their lives

* * *

I look for my father on the “Impasse Fleurie,” which translates as “enflowered cul-de-sac”

* * *

Only the pear trees are blossoming, levitating in the backyards of houses with red tile roofs

* * *

They float there like cast-off bridal veils

* * *

The one stout palm tree’s fronds rustle in the wind

* * *

I could say that the mistral roughs up my hair like a father running thick clumsy fingers through his son’s hair, but I would be wrong

* * *

The mistral through the cypresses makes the sound of surf on a white beach three thousand miles away

II.

I look for my father behind the red double doors of Cézanne’s studio on the hill at Les Lauves

* * *

The red paint is flaking

* * *

The brass handles have been polished to the dull luster of lake water at dawn by one hundred and five years of hands opening and shutting those doors

* * *

Inside I find only three skulls on a gray chest of drawers

* * *

Three green bottles, one of turpentine, one of linseed oil, and one half full of red wine, the vin ordinaire

* * *

The rotting fruit Cézanne loved to paint in his still lives – shriveled apples, pears, lemons

* * *

A bowl of small yellow onions, which have sloughed off their dry papery skins

* * *

I’ve always loved how “still life” translates into French as “nature morte”

* * *

My father is the one streak of royal blue among the smeared greens, yellows, reds, ochers, and grays on Cézanne’s rectangular palette

* * *

The thin pine palette has warped, gone wavy

* * *

Its one thumb hole is a Cyclops’ blind eye off-center

* * *

All that’s left of Cézanne in this room is one pencil drawing of a skull and four half-finished watercolors – one of a vase of irises, another of a row of eight large flower pots with shrubs growing from them, another of a white plaster Cupid without arms, and one of a river with thirteen naked male bathers

* * *

Next to the watercolor Cupid stands the plaster cast

* * *

Neither is more real than the other

* * *

All that’s left of Cézanne is a black cap with a visor, his black bowler, his everyday olive overcoat, his black wool Sunday coat, and two umbrellas hanging on pegs by the door, waiting for him to go out

* * *

He will not return

* * *

It is not raining today

* * *

All that’s left of Cézanne is his olive work smock flecked with blue, white, and gray paint

* * *

The only thing that lasts is sunlight flooding through the thirty large panes of glass that form the studio’s northern wall

* * *

The long shadows we cast near dusk, our short shadows at noon

Donald Platt’s third book, My Father Says Grace, was published in spring 2007 by the University of Arkansas Press. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Antioch Review, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, and BOMB. This is his fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

The Boy Who Became a Man with Pockets by Alberto Rios

Putting something in his pockets began simply enough.

A young man, first it was a black comb.

A new brown wallet followed, his own house key,

Some spare change, a small knife –

The gift of an 18th birthday, the last way left

His parents could say, take care of yourself.

These were not any longer the quartz and igneous rocks,

The green-backed, still-moving beetles,

The chewing gum prizes saved of childhood.

These were new pockets, bigger pants and new ideas.

The things in his pockets grew up as he grew up.

The key soon enough imagined its need for a key chain,

And not simply something plain. Perhaps a companion key,

As well, the back shed’s key, that grizzle-toothed brass finger.

The small knife, everyone agreed, would be elegant in a sheath,

A nice, three color plastic-lace braid hanging from it.

The wallet set up an entire business of its own, quickly

Under its own management and with no board of directors:

It gathered cards for all manner of transaction and recognition,

Allowance and identification, direction and appointment.

It gathered photographs and coupons, paper money at last,

And everything else that might be prodded into folding.

The pockets looked like the cheeks of a chipmunk,

And were big enough to give him the aspect of a pontoon boat.

On most days he began to walk more slowly,

But on windy days nobody could keep up with him.

He started to look for pants with more pockets,

Or rather, he had to look for them.

A handkerchief, which he never used, some balled-up tissues

He thought he would use, but didn’t use either,

Sometimes a small book, or his lunch, a sandwich,

Some cookies, and some potato chips.

His new pockets filled just as quickly as the old ones.

He could never wear shorts.

And finally he could not sit.

He tried, but it was easier not to.

And then it was easier not to walk so much at all.

Instead, people came to him.

They came at first to offer consolation, to assure him

It was not unusual, this richness of circumstance, really.

But consolation was soon followed by reward,

Unexpected – a knife sharpening, a new pair of socks,

All the things he had and which they needed.

And they were curious things, not things

Readily available anywhere else, not in stores,

Certainly. These were the things found in drawers,

Discarded at first, or saved for later,

Then suddenly and altogether necessary.

He could not walk but he gave flight to so many others,

A lightness of spirit at having found something

Irretrievably lost otherwise. He gave happiness

Where others had thought to give it to him.

This was the bargain, then, that he made with the world.

He would keep the small things at his side

In exchange for the big things not seeing him,

Not needing him, not paying him any attentions.

And it was a kind of life, free of tigers and danger,

But love, too, free of that and not entirely satisfying.

A bargain was a bargain, however, and his life was calm.

It was a full-enough life, a way to move, a way of breathing

Without moving. He became something else,

Not himself. A place, a garden, a store,

Everything but what he had been – a little boy

Believing in the necessary things of the world.

Alberto Ríos is the author of six volumes of poetry including The Theater of Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2005); The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002); Teodora Luna’s Two Kisses (1990); The Lime Orchard Woman (1988); Five Indiscretions (1985); and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), which won the 1981 Walt Whitman Award. Other books by Ríos include Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), The Curtain of Trees: Stories (1999), Pig Cookies and Other Stories (1995), and The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart (1984), which won the Western States Book Award. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

A Blind Astronomer in the Age of Stars by Pattiann Rogers

He considers himself lucky to have been born

during the Age of Stars, all those beings

in their shimmering shades still flaring, their silent,

untouchable presence. He imagines how

they shine as if they were the work of light

giving sight, like eyes, to a blind universe.

Making his way through fields at night,

he can feel the light from those million

sources touching him like the particles

composing the finest airy fog, touching him

like the knowledge of lives in a silent forest.

He feels each star in the way he hears

each syllable of his lover’s whisper.

And he claims to see the constellations

from the inside out, having been inscribed

from birth, he says, with their configurations.

Indeed his Braille depictions of Canis Major,

Dorado, Lyra, Orion, are to scale and perfect.

Often through summer nights, he lies on open

hillsides to observe the heavens. He describes

the stars as transforming his body with their patterns

like tattoos of light – the wings of Cygnus,

the horns of Taurus. What kind of fortune

would it be, he wonders, to feel the light

of the Southern Cross along his brow?

He believes that the constant jeetz-a-jeetz

of the wayside crickets and the notes of the reed

toads sounding like whistles underwater

and the soft-bristle brush of grasses in the wind,

all together match in cadence the multiple

spacings and motions of the stars. He imagines

that the sudden piercing cry of a rabbit or a prairie

mouse at night corresponds to the streak of a falling

meteor, a helpless descending diagonal of light.

He hears their passing in this way. The earth,

he is certain, is related to the starry sky by blood.

By the solid black existing behind his eyes,

he understands the dimension beyond the edge

of the farthest horizon, that place whose light

has not had time to reach and touch him. He knows

that place, its state and its lack. One he calls

Patience, the other Pity.

Pattiann Rogers is the author of thirteen books of poems. Her latest, Wayfare, will be published later this year. It will include “A Blind Astronomer in the Age of Stars.” Rogers received a Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation in 2005 and is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.

BOMB FISHING by Kay Ryan

One bomb

and the fishing’s

done. Up come

the fish, displayed

upon the sea

as upon a tray:

yellow; grape;

some metal

like the sun;

green-striped;

stippled rose;

blue-grey.

Kay Ryan has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005); Say Uncle (2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994); Strangely Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983). Ryan’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997. She is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

The Goat by Umberto Saba

I talked to a goat.

She was alone in a pasture, and tethered.

Stuffed with grass, soaked

by the rain, she bleated.

That monotonous bleating was brother

to my sorrow. And I answered, first

in jest, then because sorrow is eternal,

has one voice and never changes.

I heard this voice in the wails

of a solitary goat.

In a goat with a semitic face,

I heard all other pain lamenting,

all other lives.

(translation by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan)

Umberto Saba (1883–1957), the pseudonym of Italian poet and novelist Umberto Poli, is now regarded as one of the most important Italian poets of the first half of the 20th century. About the translators: Leonard Nathan (1924–2007) was the author of fourteen books of poetry and numerous translations from a variety of languages. George Hochfield has translated three works of Italian prose published by Northwestern University Press. A large selection of Saba’s selected poems, translated by Nathan and Hochfield and accompanied with biographical and critical materials, will be published in 2008 by Yale University Press.

MARIANNA by Peter Dale Scott

(Poem to my first grandchild)

Buddha face you will quickly lose

for a face like the rest of us

a mask of self

what is it you remember

that composes you

to look so serenely inward?

With my own children I thought

weighed down by self-importance

of what I could give them

now as my mind empties

I see it is you

who give to us

We stare in amazement

as your newborn breaths displace us

nudging us towards that silence

where the long line of children

who in their turn became parents

prepare a space for us

All we ever spoke for

has come back to infancy

the predestined past

Peter Dale Scott’s poetry includes the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta (1988), Listening to the Candle (1992), and Minding the Darkness (2000). In 2002 he received the Lannan Poetry Award.

BUGLER, FT. WAINWRIGHT, ALASKA by Peggy Shumaker

Yellow leaves in July. Damn.

A single osprey banks over birches, cruises

upriver and down. Birch bark splits like the lip

of the bugler hitting a high note

the morning after Tiffany

with a tongue like a mouthful of tadpoles

and a hardhat she neglected

to mention. Gashed knuckles.

He pictures a nicotine chip, his tooth

stuck in an itchy keloid baptized with blood.

No fieldworker with a short-handled hoe

ever had a back that hurt this bad, each vertebra

burnished by fire, each bone a glowing coal, ruby

spine searing inside him. His breath sinks

in and in and in, shriek held back.

Forced through brass his pain

ices over echoed notes of “Taps.”

CHECKLIST by Peggy Shumaker

He pushes up so a sample of av gas

gushes into the cylinder,

checks to make sure

no water’s dripped in.

Our lives depend on this,

two engines propelling us

over the Tanana Flats,

above the bump bump

Joe creates bouncing

above the dotted Arctic Circle.

We have information Bravo

warning us

but we already know

a single sandhill crane

could knock us

out of the sky – not even

a winged one that big –

a bufflehead, a camprobber even,

or a sheer drop of air

or a burst hydraulic line

iced wings, a crystal

in the fuel line,

nicked prop, a flat tire,

burst vessel

in plane or pilot,

quick spiral

we take on faith

won’t happen

today, and that’s how

we get clearance

for take off, lean

into pure power

let earth spin below

without us on it.

Peggy Shumaker is the author of six collections of poems: Blaze, a collaboration with painter Kesler Woodward (Red Hen Press); Underground Rivers (Red Hen Press); Wings Moist from the Other World; The Circle of Totems; Braided River; and Esperanza’s Hair. Her memoir, Just Breathe Normally, was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2007. Shumaker is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.

Save the Last Dance for Me by Gerald Stern

When it comes to girls the Chihuahua

on Ninth Street going down to

Washington on the left side

below the Hong Kong Fruit,

he knows where he’s going, between their

beautiful legs, his eyes

bulge a little, his heart,

because he is small, surges,

explodes too much, he is

erotic, his red tongue

is larger than a squirrel’s, but

not too much, nor does he

walk on a wire with fresh

ricotta in his mouth nor

an apple they sell for a quarter,

a bit of rot on one side but

sweet underneath the skin, more

Macintosh than not, he

loves Velveeta, he knows

the price of bananas, he whines

when there is a death; there was one

drowning in a sewer,

his owner gave me five dollars

for lifting the lid with a hammer

and going down into the muck

when I was twelve, it was

my first act of mercy

and she gave me a towel

that matched the Chihuahua’s towel

and ah he trembled containing

such knowledge and such affection

and licked my face and forced me

to shut my eyes, it was

so much love, his whole

body was shaking and I,

I learned from him and I

learned something once from a bird

but I don’t know his name

though everyone I tell it to

asks me what his name was

and it is shameful, what

was he, a dog? The Klan

was flourishing all the while

we dreamed of hydroelectric

so we were caught in between

one pole and another and

we were Hegelian or just

Manichean, we kept

the hammer on top of the manhole

so we could lift it to get

our soft balls and tennis balls

though he who weighed a pound

could easily fall into

the opening, such was our life

and such were our lives the last

few years before the war when

there were four flavors of ice cream

and four flavors only; I’ll call him

Fatty; I’ll call him Peter;

Jésus, I’ll call him, but only

in Spanish, with the “h” sound,

as it is in Mexico;

Jésus, kiss me again,

Jésus, you saved me,

Jésus, I can’t forget you;

and what was her name who gave me

the towel? and who was I?

and what is love doing in

a sewer, and how is disgrace

blurred now, or buried?

Gerald Stern is the author of fourteen books of poetry including, This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award in 1998 and his latest book of poems, Save the Last Dance for Me, in late spring of 2008. He was the first Poet Laureate of New Jersey, serving from 2000 to 2002 and received both the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry, and the 2005 National Jewish Book Award for poetry. He is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Savin Rock by Chase Twichell

What I know is a slur of memory,

fantasy, research, pure invention,

crime dramas, news, and witnesses

like the girl who liked to get high

and the one who was eventually

returned to her family unharmed.

The rest I made up.

The fathers drank beer in the grandstand,

flattening cans and dropping

the dull coins into the underworld.

It was daylight – we went right under,

down into the slatted dark,

the smell under the bleachers

where lots of men peed,

paper cones and dead balloons,

people jostling and whispering.

Down there were the entrances

to the dark rides, the funhouses:

Death Valley and Laff-in-the-Dark.

Of course that’s not true;

they were right on the main boardwalk

under strings of bulbs lit up all night.

Mom says, To remember something,

go back to the place where you forgot it.

But the place was torn down

forty years ago; there are motels

there now, where the Ferris wheel

lurched up and over the trees,

over the fathers at their picnic table

close enough to feel the Tilt-a-Whirl’s

crude rhythms through the ground.

They make the cars go faster or slower, depending.

After hours the boys loosen up the machines

and take girls for rides.

Hey kid! I flipped a coin in my head

and it came up tails. Want to take a walk?

He looked older than our parents.

How old did our parents look?

He was fifty, or thirty. I remember

the smell of whatever he put on his hair,

and the blue nail on his thumb.

He could flip a lit cigarette around

with his lips so the fire was inside.

I rode a little metal car

into Laff-in-the-Dark to dance

with the skeleton (possibly real

since some teeth had fillings)

that flung itself at me from the dark.

A dog watched me from a pickup window.

The World’s Biggest Pig lay

beached on its side, heaving.

The tattooed lady had a tattooed baby.

No one ever tattooed a newborn child

for real, did they? The “Chinese Dragon”

was only an iguana.

The go-cart man asked me if I wanted

a little on the side. I said no.

His friend in the bleachers

blew me a kiss.

In the Maze of Mirrors

I was fatso and skeleton,

skirt blown up by a fan. Not true.

A fan blew a girl’s skirt up.

It wasn’t me. I was a tomboy. I wore pants.

At the stable girls in love with horses

visited and groomed and fed them daily.

For girls it was about trust,

being part of a couple,

the horse and the girl,

but for the man in the barn

it was about making girls feel

groomed and visited.

Come on over here. Didn’t a guy ever

brush your hair with a currycomb?

I don’t believe it! Not once?

Little honeycomb like you?

And kittens, always good bait.

A little dish of spoiled milk.

Do you think they don’t pass them around?

They pass them around.

Marked kids get shared,

little pink kid tongues lick lick licking

like a puppy! Good dog!

And on the carousel a man appeared

from nowhere to help her on,

hand palm up on the saddle just as she sat,

squirming there until the horse pulled her away.

Little cowgirl, giddyup!

Thus she became half human half animal,

and remained so her entire life,

now a shepherdess, now a sleek young

she-goat, so lithe and small-hipped,

half tame, little goatskin haunches –

hand-fed on SnoCones and cotton candy –

the girl who was eventually

returned to her family unharmed.

Tell me, little shepherdess,

how this bodes for first love,

the centaur pissing outside your tent

in the afterlife, having come down

over the stony pastures to claim you

and feed you trout and fiddleheads

and take you to bed on the high ledges

where the wind holds you down for him.

But he won’t be the first.

Sweet-sharp bouquet of darkroom,

holster with toy six-gun,

hot umbrella lamps nudged into place

by his fat pink fingers.

A little maraschino light presides over

negatives strung up like game to dry.

The tomboy’s showing her rump,

hard little buttocks under the tender wrapping,

the skin. Little wonton.

Chase Twichell is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Dog Language (Copper Canyon, 2005). A New & Selected collection is forthcoming, also from Copper Canyon.

Traveller by Jean Valentine

A matchbox painted & figured

with five gardeners

and thirty-seven flowers, red & blue,

a pretty garden.

One little fellow stands off.

Anybody can see

love is all around him,

like the blue air. Most

dear in the Double Realm

of paint, he is a traveller.

He stands off, alone.

When somebody dies, as is the custom,

he burns the place down.

Jean Valentine is author of eight books of poems, most recently Little Boat (Wesleyan). Her collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

Fire by Rosanna Warren

for Avigdor Arikha

Smoldering coal and Burgundian scarlet, the velvet couch

on which models have sprawled for more

than thirty years under the laser beam

of your gaze, the predatory flick of your brush:

that was the fire that mattered. That was the touch

that set your pulses stuttering, hair

springing in sweat beads, pupils flecked in flame

at the woman’s body poured out as white ash.

Such longing never fits its frame. Her top hip’s pitched

to one side, an arm’s flung wide – the rug

collides with the canvas edge. You are consumed,

consuming. In the new self-portrait you glare

from your barbecued brow, your alizarin scorched

temple and irradiated jowl, your mug

outraged, your wide iris subsumed

in an ice glint at the core of turquoise fire.

Rosanna Warren’s most recent book of poems is Departure (Norton, 2003). Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, will be published by Norton this fall.

BISON by Robert Wrigley

The slenderest of winds walks

among them as they graze, can even be seen

urging them along, herding them almost,

among the vastnesses. Placid, massive,

theirs is the locomotion of planets

or stars, slow boulders in the river’s quick.

All day they have come and gone, a million or more

similarly humped and haunched, their bellies

a darkening blue, swollen with rain.

FLOWER by Robert Wrigley

It was a party trick for company at first,

though he came to love the sawed-off tablespoon

bit just beyond his upper lip and filled

with ruby-colored hummingbird food.

The fractious, belligerent broadtails

feinted at his monolithic face then hovered

and sipped so close he could feel

their petal wings buffeting his cheeks.

And when in the spoon’s shined concavity

only a tear’s worth of red remained,

always one truculent hummer would sit rimside

and suck the last of it up, then rise

to study his eye, blinked open like a day-

blooming deep brown flower

from which it intended also to sip.

Robert Wrigley is the author of Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); Lives of the Animals (2003); Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; What My Father Believed (1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (1979). This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

IN PRAISE OF SPIRIT by Al Young

You’re a natural, baby. A chorus and choir

all unto yourself, you require no coaching.

You reach and yank out hidden meanings long

before big questions arise; no stretch, no yes,

no no; you simply know the score before the game

gets played or called. You hold back nothing.

If I so much as think about phoning you at two, three

or four o’clock in the church-like countdown to dawn,

you beat me to the punch. You inch your way

into my listening presence, our heart-speak well

within earshot. You never read me the riot act,

you cite neither chapter nor verse. Instead

you read me the way our ancestors read the river

or the pasts and futures of leaves. Consider this:

your kiss; the lazy, spaced-out solar systems encircling

its sun. Distilled deep inside your labial caresses

the root-wet light of joyousness listens to me

and to all the rest of what we still call the world.

To sermons of the marketplace, you don’t say amen;

you don’t say shhh and you don’t shout. Baby,

you do exactly what you know. You move. You shine.

Al Young is the author of four collections of poetry including Heaven: Collected Poems, 1956–90 (1992), The Blues Don’t Change: New and Selected Poems (1982), Geography of the Near Past (1976), Some Recent Fiction (1974), The Song Turning Back into Itself (1971), and Dancing: Poems (1969), which won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award. He has also published five novels and four memoirs including Bodies and Soul: Musical Memoirs (1981), which won the American Book Award. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

LA REVANCHA DEL TANGO by C. Dale Young

In my mouth, song. In my ear, your own song:

so much amor, this dance . . . The chin cocked

to facilitate a side-long glance, the arch

of the back, the quick spark of Santa Maria

that races from thigh to knee to ball of the foot,

the stamp, that singular sound, the sound

of you-will-have-me-tonight. Arch

of the back, the return of your body

to mine. Spanish guitar, the slicked-back

black hair, and Santa Maria of the evening

who invites all that is forbidden in public:

the hand on shoulder, the hand on back,

on waist, the perspiration a glue

between curve of hand and the curve

of the neck. Santa Maria of Argentina, I pray

to you, to this beautiful man who follows

my lead. No flowers, no rose in my teeth.

I carry only song in my mouth.

What some call lust, others call the calculation.

We were fooled by the Virgin, by the music’s

instructions to love. Santa Maria of Argentina,

flower behind her ear, the mouth about to sing

the song of laughter. Virgin-goddess, necessary whore –

There is, indeed, a subtle logic to seduction.

C. Dale Young’s collections of poetry are The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007) and The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern, 2001).

Kate TWS

POETRY

Second Tornado by David Baker

THE SIXTH TRUMPET by Chana Bloch

THE DAILY NEWS by Chana Bloch

AN ONION by Robert Bly

WALKING OUT IN THE MORNING by Robert Bly

Creeley by Thomas Centolella

SUNFLOWER by Henri Cole

Childhood by Greg Delanty

Other Answers by Carl Dennis

For I Will Consider the Overlooked Dragonfly by Sharon Dolin

APPARITION by Mark Doty

EXCITEMENT by Stephen Dunn

Lifework by Laura Fargas

EARTH, THIS FIRELIT LANTERN by Katie Ford

DREAMING AT THE BALLET by Jack Gilbert

SOUTH by Jack Gilbert

NEGLECTING THE KIDS by Jack Gilbert

Grandmother, Cleaning Rabbits by Samual Green

The Pilot Light by Rachel Hadas

EPITAPH FOR A YOUNG MAN by John Haines

I seemed always standing

ENDEARMENT by Tony Hoagland

THE TRUTH by Tony Hoagland

THE LONELIEST JOB IN THE WORLD by Tony Hoagland

CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE by Tony Hoagland

Ms. Veronina by Ilya Kaminsky

OH, MARIACHI ME by Ted Kooser

The Winking Vulva by Maxine Kumin

Make of Me by Lance Larsen

Dirt combed free of snarls twice a day,

WESTERN LIT by Dorianne Laux

Learning to Drive by Dorianne Laux

The Other Rhinoceros by Phillis Levin

Not a Prayer by Levin

Paradise Came Over Me Once by Anne Marie Macari

BEFORE & AFTER by Morton Marcus

Southwestern Suite by Stefanie Marlis

Anniversary by Linda McCarriston

I thought last night – all of it

L’Ancien Régime by Christopher Merrill

THE SILENCE OF THE MINE CANARIES by W. S. Merwin

The bats have not flowered

FAR ALONG IN THE STORY by W. S. Merwin

The boy walked on with a flock of cranes

FIRE by Joseph Miller

QUAIL by Paul Muldoon

Forty years in the wilderness

AN OLD MAN by Leonard Nathan

BIRDING by Dennis O’Driscoll

Sibling Unrivalry by Sharon Olds

WINTER TREES by Alicia Ostriker

HIDDENNESS by Michael Palmer

A Dozen Roses by Linda Pastan

Lilacs by Linda Pastan

Rachmaninoff’s Elegy by Linda Pastan

SHAME by Robert Pinsky

LOOKING FOR MY FATHER IN AIX-EN-PROVENCE, EARLY MARCH by Donald Platt

I.

The Boy Who Became a Man with Pockets by Alberto Rios

A Blind Astronomer in the Age of Stars by Pattiann Rogers

He considers himself lucky to have been born

BOMB FISHING by Kay Ryan

The Goat by Umberto Saba

I talked to a goat.

MARIANNA by Peter Dale Scott

BUGLER, FT. WAINWRIGHT, ALASKA by Peggy Shumaker

CHECKLIST by Peggy Shumaker

Save the Last Dance for Me by Gerald Stern

When it comes to girls the Chihuahua

Savin Rock by Chase Twichell

What I know is a slur of memory,

Traveller by Jean Valentine

Fire by Rosanna Warren

BISON by Robert Wrigley

FLOWER by Robert Wrigley

IN PRAISE OF SPIRIT by Al Young

LA REVANCHA DEL TANGO by C. Dale Young

THE TRICKY THING ABOUT ENDINGS by Leigh Morgan Owen