THE REPORT


The wind is blowing on the prison walls
Above the secret towns. In the secret towns
Men are walking through the streets with guns.

Men with guns are walking through the streets
Below the prison walls. The prison walls
Are on the cliffs above the secret towns.

Behind the shattered windows and the shattered doors,
The women kneel and pray. The women pray
While men are walking through the streets with guns.

Men with guns are walking through the streets,
Breaking down the doors. Breaking down the doors
Is what the men do in the secret towns.

The women pray they'll stop. Please stop, they pray,
And let the prison fall. Let the prison fall,
They pray behind the windows and the shattered doors.

But the men are laughing in the secret towns,
And carrying the guns. The men with guns
Walk and laugh below the prison walls.

Below the prison walls lie secret towns
With broken doors. Beyond the broken doors
Men are walking through the streets with guns.



-Dick Allen



ICH WEISS NUR


von Rose Auslander

Du fragst mich was ich will; ich weiss es nicht.
Ich weiss nur das ich traume, das der traum mich lebt
und ich in seiner Wolke, schwebe.

Ich weiss nur das ich Menschen liebe;
Berge, Garten, das Meer.

Weiss nur das viele Tote in mir wohne.
Ich trinke meine Augenblicke.

Weiss nur, es ist das Zeitspiel: auf und ab.


I KNOW ONLY


by Rose Auslander

You ask me what I want; I do not know.
I know only that I am drifting, in a breeze I live
and I, within the cloud, sway.

I know only that I love humankind,
mountains, gardens, the sea.

I know only that much death within me lives.
I drink my moments.

I know only, it is the time game: up and down.


FINDING HER HERE


I am becoming the woman I've wanted,
grey at the temples,
soft body, delighted,
cracked up by life
with a laugh that's known bitter
but, past it, go better,
knows she's a survivor --
that whatever comes,
she can outlast it.
I am becoming a deep
weathered basket.

I am becoming the woman I've longed for,
the motherly lover
with arms strong and tender,
the growing up daughter
who blushes surprises.
I am becoming full moons
and sunrises.

I find her becoming,
this woman I've wanted,
who knows she'll encompass,
who knows she's sufficient,
knows where she's going
and travels with passion.
Who remembers she's precious,
but knows she's not scarce --
who knows she is plenty,
plenty to share.


--Jayne Relaford Brown


AS IN THE DAYS OF THE PROPHETS


Love took the words right out of my mouth.
Not the making of love, the clinging and plunge,
The tongue's deep spiral, but the acts of days,
The sun up and down, the dish and the pot,
The light on the head of first one, then another,
The stairs unswept, the bed cold, the light out,
The papers brought in, the bed made, the money
Paid out, the bulbs dug, the children reverent
At what came next, the rise and the fall
Of coral and ocher, the folding and sorting,
The endless numbering of things, the walking
With babies in slings, in backpacks, in strollers,
Then hand in hand, then the hand dropped
And one of them up to my shoulder, eyeing,
Before I do, the hawk or the waxwing,
The junco, the hermit thrush in the depths
Of our gun-shot city, and just to the south
The great hill we climb, by season, together,
Alone, in pairs, in trios, the slapping
Of mud from our shoes on the back steps again,
The chastening memory of the otter plunging
In the icy water of his adequate tank
At the base of that hill, and love made the otter,
Love made the mud, the ice-slicked bark,
The meals, the shining heads, and the sleep,
The risings, the children, the hawk's spiral.
Love took the words right out of my mouth.


-Christopher Jane Corkery


SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELED, GLADLY BEYOND
THE CAMBRIDGE LADIES WHO LIVE IN FURNISHED SOULS

e.e. cummings

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things-
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
....the Cambridge ladies do not care,above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless,the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy


SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELED, GLADLY BEYOND

e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands


THE PASSING OF THISTLE


This is our first summer without a dog.
Fifteen years of disgraces in the night
(tattered screen doors, overtuned garbage pails,
unexpected puddles on the guestroom bed,
and other misbehaviors) have ended at last.
She had a way of posing in the landscape,
arranging herself against a screen of trees,
upon a lawn or on an outdoor deck
so as to bring out the hero in photographers
who could focus on the challenge of her darkness.
When on the move she carried less distinction:
a scottie, long in the barrel, short of leg,
she trotted country roads like city sidewalks,
so long as a glance behind her could confirm
the support of the authority that gave her hers.
Absent such authority, she panicked:
could be found, after a search, hysterically
galloping somewhere in the wrong direction
if we returned from shopping or the movies
through a region she had not known long enough to own.
On her home turf she brooked no trespassing,
at least by motorcycles, dogs, or horses,
though she'd roll over basely for human intruders.
The children who had grown up while she watched
were patient, watching her as age declined
from sleepiness to blindness, deafness and
incontinence. Before her last collapse
she lived her life entirely through the nose
and sense of touch. And as they watched her sleep
they saw their childhoods disappearing with her
and by so much ceased a little to be children.

I who had shared, in my two-legged way,
in what I could grasp of her doggy memories,
knew we had lived through all the same affections,
felt the same losses, searched through an empty house
for someone who would never be returning,
brooded on sights and voices that had vanished.
Perhaps she had a way of understanding
our loss that she could never share with me,
but now our past belongs to me alone,
now that she's gone, and no one else remembers
the weekends that we spent in the house together
letting each other in and out of doors

-Peter Davidson


HYSTERIA

t.s. eliot

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter
and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a
talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each
momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat,
bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with
trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked
cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: "If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ..." I decided that if
the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments
of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention
with careful subtlety to this end.


HOLY WATER

Your opinion would be welcome.
If you owned your own mind.
Instead you try to shelter me.
With words, those same shallow words.
Rehearsed to the point of performance.
You hold your religion like a shotgun.
Does your god admire such paranoia?
And does he shudder like you
At the sound of criticism?

Why are your eyes so in vacant?
Where is your passion?
Is it so plagued by faith
That you forgot how to live?
And does your god give you life....
So that you may live in fear?
Your words fall like paper arrows against a rock.
Weak and Frail!

For I am alive.
Dancing naked in your museums.
And putting whiskey in your holy water.

C. Oliver Farrell


I'M STANDING IN LINE

I'm standing in line
for unemployment compensation
a long line that ropes around the room
waiting my turn
and hating it
because the clerk
who stands at the window hour after hour
or works at a desk squeezed between desks
in a mustard-colored room
with low ceilings and fluorescent lights
and no windows
the clerk makes it feel like a handout.

I go home and do laundry
and pick tomatoes for a salad
and when the children come home from school
late as usual and with long explanations
I sit and listen
and have a cup of tea while they have milk
and we talk about what they did today
and watch the cardinal
the one with the short flat crest
eat the stale bread in the driveway.

And next day I clean the fridge
and mop the kitchen floor
and when I get tired then or later
or fed up with housework
I sit by the window with a cup of tea
and watch the trees beginning to change
and the light with them
and tell myself that what you do
is not as important as how you live.
I could be that clerk
working in a mustard-colored box
making people feel like dirt.


---FOR MY DAUGHTER---

body within my body, I shape you out of almost nothing,
give you a tight envelope to surround your soul.
I deem you female ---eyes cobalt blue, fingers long
and translucent---without even realizing it. And after
the quantum leap from single cell to complex organism,
much of your body's life is beyond my conscious thought:
your waking, your sleeping, the small objects of your
complete desire. Complete as the perfect wings
of the jay above your head or the pale starts that mark
your birth with nothing but pure light. Daughter,
I cannot give you anything so complete or perfect or pure.
But I can give you something better. Your body,
which is your life. and the fierce love of it that no one
can take away. And these words that will remind you
of that love. And your father's broad hand that opened
the door to it. And the blankness of the rest of this page
for your own words, your own history.


THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


INDIA COTTON SHIRT

She saw it in a secondhand shop,
another woman's shirt given away
in a fury of forgetting
or refusing the imperfect fit,
and she wanted it
because of the man she imagined
taking it off of her.

They would argue a little,
one of a good love's
better arguments:
who gets to perform the small favor
that will bring both of them pleasure?
This time, he'd win;
she could already see
his flickering hands.

White embroidered on white,
the threads pulled through by a needle
so fine it left no tracks.
A geometric design,
none of the limitations
of resemblance.

Every white blouse
is an expression of faith,
the immaculate clothing in which
one may regard oneself
with a little arrogance,
a little vanity.
One has finally got old enough
to see through one's own flaws.

She knew what was wrong with her;
she knew her gifts.
She tried the shirt on, not for size
but for texture.
Was it interesting enough
to come between her
and this new love who had come to her
when she had almost forgotten the unexpected
might take the shape of a man?

She could see him loosening the shirt
as he loosened his own.
Now his, now hers.
The gathered cuffs scalloped and roomy;
the delicate shell buttons
set out in threes, the button loops
softened by use.

-Erica Funkhouser


The Poem IVE GOT A TATTOO

ive got a tattoo
and in 40 yrs
when iÕm a dark, reptile tanned
old man
whos body seems to say
ive lived on a barge converted to a houseboat,
my tattoo, washed out and grey,
will be seen by children
eating ice cream
at a rest stop on I-95
and theyll try to guess
what kind of badass i used to be.

c.gage



THE POEM

we wonder that if on a page
it would make sense.
if it were black or blue,
beaten into shape with a stick

and told how to lie there
just right,
so the men would offer
to buy it drinks,
settle in a bit too close
and tell it stories of drunken escapades;
and so the women would fear it,
eye it from across the room
needing to know
where it came from.

it won't stay down, though.
it squirms to the corner
and shakes like a sheet in the wind.
we offer it a cigarette to calm its nerves,
to placate the tendency to hate its creator.
it draws on the smoke,
and in the cloud it scrambles itself
into an anagram that we can't get out of our minds
and it is done.



LISTENING TO THE GARDEN

Look at it this way: under the brass fanfare
of their blossoms, all those zucchinis
are really incipient oompahs.
And the peavine tremolos? Middle C
rubbed out of a rhubarb stalk?

Now you're beginning to hear it: that line
of radishes ostinato, bean paradiddles,
a beefsteak tomato redballing its cadenza.

Aren't the parts of these vegetables---the phloem,
the calyx and carina---names of woodwinds
you'd love to hear, in counterpoint
to the garden's valves and bells?

Remember that morning you drove
into the main street of a town---Colorado Springs,
was it?---on no holiday you could name?

Nevertheless, the high school band was passing,
majorettes in their short, flippant skirts
frilled like the inner linings of lettuce,
and shakos, corn-tassel plumed, remember,

and the frogging on jackets---cucumber vines
scrolled on themselves. The whole garden's
flash and patootle was moving off
toward a snowed-upon peak
down at the end of that street

-Brendan Galvin



CRONE DRIVES THROUGH SPRING

She can hardly bear to look
out the window:
earth seems to break
loose, fidgets, squirms, restless spasms
of green, and the sky
a whirligig of birds. She cannot keep
the car on the road: it wants
to canter across fields abandoned
to the wanton purple of
tiny nameless flowers. The precision of
snow unbuttons itself
like a girl's blouse, but she is too old
to come spilling out, unlatching
the seat belts, freeing the Toyota.
What would they make of
this aging runner, white hair streaming
down her stooped back, slack
thighs vaulting irregularly
down the astonished creek bank?
What could she be but
an embarassment
to traffic laws?
to city building codes?

Claudia Van Gerven



On Pickiness BEAUTIFUL CHILD

Because I looked out as I was looked upon
(Blue-eyed under the golden corm of ringlets
That my mother could not bring herself
To have the barber shear from my head)
I began to see, as adults approached me,
That hunger a young woman must feel
When a lover seizes one breast too long
On the ideal nipple-balm of the tongue.
When they lifted me and launched me
Ceilingward, I seemed to hang there years,
A satellite in the orbit of their affections,
Spinning near the rainspot continents
And the light globe freckled with flies.
I could smell the week-old syrupy sweat
And the kerosene of many colognes,
Could see the veined eyes and the teeth
Dotted with shreds of lettuce and meat.
When I touched down, one of them
Would hold me to the torch of a beard
And goose my underarms until I screamed.
Another would rescue me, but leave
On my cheek the heart-mark of her kiss.
So I began, at three, to push them away.
There was no ceremony and few words,
But like a woman who has let a man go too far
And, in one night's moodiness, steps
Out of a parked car and walks home alone,
I came suddenly to my life, and they
Did not begrudge me, but turned back
To the things they had done before--
The squeaking bed, the voices late at night.
Mornings I'd crawl beneath the house,
Dreaming how poignantly tragic my death
Would seem, but, having thought about it,
I happily took myself into the darkness
Of the underground, where I was king.

-Rodney Jones



ON PICKINESS

When the first mechanical picker had stripped the field,
It left such a copious white dross of disorderly wispiness
That my mother could not resign herself to the waste
And insisted on having it picked over with human hands,

Though anyone could see there was not enough for ten sheets
And the hands had long since gone into the factories.
No matter how often my father pointed this out,
She worried it the way I've worried the extra words

In poems that I conceived with the approximate
Notion that each stanza should have the same number
Of lines and each line the same number of syllables--
And disregard it, telling myself a ripple

Or botch on the surface, like the stutter of a speaker,
Is all I have to affirm the deep fluency below.
The Hebrews distrusted Greek poetry (which embodied
Harmony and symmetry, and, therefore, revision)

Not for aesthetic reasons but because they believed
That to change the first words, which rose unsmelted
From the trance, amounted to sacrilege against God.
In countries where, because of the gross abundance

Of labor, it's unlawful to import harvesting machines,
I see the women in the fields and think of how,
When my mother used to pick, you could tell
Her row by the bare stalks and the scant poundage

That tumbled from her sack so pristinely white
And devoid of burrs, it seemed to have already
Passed through the spiked mandibles of the gin.
Dr. Williams said of Eliot that his poems seemed so

Cautiously wrought that they seemed to come
To us already digested in all four bellies of the cow.
What my father loved about my mother was not
Just the beauty of her body and face but the practice

Of her ideas and the intelligence of her hands
As they made the house that abides in us still
As worry and bother, but also as perfect freedom beyond--
As cleanliness is next to godliness but is not God.
-Rodney Jones



Venus Looks Coldly Over Her Shoulder

I dread morning, wanting only
to lie back in the wire-cold night
with the boy who lives in the house beyond.
But my feet wear sandals made of cement,
and my eyes, faded of paint, gaze
over my shoulder and past my love
as though I cannot see him.

Each night he comes to my garden, lifts
the heavy heads of roses, oblivious
as I twitch my heavy robes aside,
exposing a breast by uncertain magic.
But what would he want of such a breast,
chill as a store-bought egg, skin austere
as a grave marker
worn smooth by rain and years?

And then as dawn intrudes,
her sticky fingers pulling him
out of the rosebeds and onto the path,
I have no arms to console myself with
nor can I turn my head
past the rise of my own shoulder
to watch him go.



Teaching

I have begun to tell the students
my politics: always dangerous
in box-shouldered academe', walls
where whispers strike thin cracks,
widen, echo, suck. I speak
of women's bodies, choice, language
that keeps men men but makes of women
girls, chicks, cunts, slits, pieces
of a twisted dream of domination.
The eighteen year olds in their warm socks stare
all pink and green, small alligators
dancing on their shirts. One mutters
"women's lib", daring just that much
against the red ink my pen wields.
They will write home to mothers and fathers -
or, most likely, call collect - and tell
of the teacher who wears her hair long,
who says strange things that have nothing to do
with them, their needs, their nights, their money,
the jobs they will hold in four years.

--Katharyn Mach


Samain Night

Music and Lyrics by Loreena McKennitt

When the moon on a cloud cast night
Hung above the tree tops height
You sang me of some distant past
That made my heart beat strong and fast
Now I know I'm home at last
You offered me an eagle's wing
That to the sun I might soar and sing
And if I heard the owl's cry
Into the forest I would fly
And in its darkness find you by.

And so our love's not a simple thing
Nor our truths unwwavering
But like the moon's pull on the tide
Our fingers touch our hearts collide
I'll be a moonsbreath by your side.



The Robin Raisers

If it pass they come to see you,
In the daylight all around,
They'll fill the clear with swirly kin
And bring the flutters down!

Give them wine and give them blossoms,
Let the women touch their capes,
Swing the jug, and jolly Jay-steps
Keep the heart, the Music makes!

Oh, sweet! Christina! To the rounds!
Your fleshy songs, your appled ways!
Come and hear the Robin raisers,
And loose for me your knotted stays!

The liquored air, the hurly-burly!
Dancing sounds and sweet delights!
But curse the hurdy-gurdy Gambols
Who stole the Sweetness from my nights!



4:55

We shut off our typewriters
put our pencils into our pencil holders
screw the tops onto our jars of liquid paper
and glance at the clock
we place our unused envelopes
into our top left hand drawers
and our sheets of carbon paper
into our top right hand drawers
and glance at the clock
we lift our pocketbooks onto our laps
freshen our lipstick
pat our hair
and glance at the clock
we straighten our tangled rubber bands
check to see our typewriters are shut off
and glance at the clock
we inspect our fingernails
notice where the polish is chipped
and glance at the clock
we uncross our legs
and glance at the clock
we smooth our skirts
and glance at the clock



GREEN THUMB

No bigger than a thumb
and palest green,
a tree frog
has stowed away
on one of the plants
my husband brought inside
for winter,
and in the darkness
it fills the spaces
of this house
with disproportionate
song. The dogs bark,
fearing a creature
they cannot see,
and partly to quiet them
we search in vain
among the stems
and roots and leaves
for that balloon
of swollen sound --
either lovelorn,
or joyful, or hungry.
I'm never sure
I want the woods inside,
though circumscribed in pots
these plants seem safe enough --
contained explosions of green
at every frozen window.
Whatever my husband touches
grows. Tonight when he
touches me, black earth
still rings the moons
of all his nails.
I think it is a naked
infant's call
the tree frog's song
reminds me of.

-Linda Pastan



I Have Never Hid Virtues Beneath Eccentricity Of things taught


There was a time when clouds impressed me.
----a dog
----a tree
----a ship.
My mother told me it was nothing:
smoke and mirrors, kid.

--PEG


I have never hid virtue beneath eccentricities

The night before my first communion,
I prayed with a set of white plastic rosary beads,
sick to my stomach,
hoping to Hail Mary out of me my worst sin:
pulling my dress over my head in a store window,
and flashing my little white panties to the people walking by.

On the way into the confession booth,
I passed holy water and wanted to drink it,
pushed my fingers into the soft wax of burning candles,
and admitted nothing to the Priest.
I went home feeling unchosen,
shaking over the toilet,
vomiting up what I thought to be the devil.

What I didnt know then was the story of St. Philip
who lived in an attic and ate only bread and olives,
gallivanted about Rome with his underwear on the outsides of his clothes,
and once had a haircut during Mass.

And St. Simeon,
who walked with a dead dog tied around his waist,
and climbed up hills and rocks to throw nuts at people.
While he did this, the greatest angels visited him.

Others too, half naked and laughing,
running through towns throwing flowers,
bursting melons in the city square,
screaming uncontrollably from their windows,
shaving their legs at the alter,
mumbling to themselves and shaking.

But only when theyÕre laughing at a joke.

--PEG


My Candle




My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night,
But ah my foes and oh my friends
It gives a lovely light.

Edna St. Vincent Millay


Response to a Reading


---a theme after donald justice---

Women At Thirty

Women at thirty
Have been long familiar
With the awkward weight of bundles,
And so it is easy to balance
The groceries and the briefcase
While turning the key.

They flip on the news, then collapse
One the couch, whose cushiony comfort
At times seems more loyal
Than any they've known. The local
Newscasters drone. No time to rest: have to
Start up chicken Marengo, dinner for four.

And while sauteing onions,
They consider minutiae: how the burgundy
Skirt needs mending, IBM is 109 a share,
That client at lunch had a crop of potatoes
Adorning his ears and putrescent cologne.
Katie's birthday is Tuesday - buy a card.

The front door opens. A warbling man enters,
Kisses the cook, disappears to change into jeans.
At fifteen, males were alien beings
With weapons between their legs
That made girls pregnant, girls who quietly
Endured responsibility. Fear haunted every

Kiss good night. How mothers fibbed.
These women know the importance of flesh now,
One of the few things they can count on,
Along with the ache of their monthly flow,
The way it comes and then it goes,
Like the tick of a clock.

Michele Wolf


Response to a Reading

In two of your poems you called that central
passage of womanhood a wound,
Instead of a curtain guarding a silken
Trail of sighs. How many men,
Upon regarding such beauty, helplessly
Touching it, recklessly needing
To enter its warmth again and again,
Have assumed it embodies their own ache
Of absence, the personal
Gash that has punished their lives.
So endowed of anatomy, any woman
Who has been loved
Knows that her tenderest blush
Of tissue is a luxe burden of have.
Although it bleeds, this in only to cleanse,
To prepare yet another nesting for love.
It is not a wound, friend.
It is a home for you.
It is a way into the world.

Michele Wolf


WHEN THE YOUNG HUSBAND . . .


When the young husband picked up his friend's pretty wife
in the taxi one block from her townhouse for their
first lunch together, in a hotel dining room
with a room key in his pocket,

midtown traffic gridlocked and was abruptly still.
For one moment before Klaxons started honking,
a prophetic voice spoke in his mind's ear despite
his pulse's erotic thudding:

"The misery you undertake this afternoon
will accompany you to the ends of your lives.
She knew what she did, when she agreed to this lunch,
although she will not admit it;

and you've constructed your playlet a thousand times:
cocktails, an omelet, wine; the revelation
of a room key; the elevator rising as
the penis elevates; the skin

flushed, the door fumbled at, the handbag dropped; the first
kiss with open mouths, nakedness, swoon, thrust-and-catch;
endorphins followed by endearments; a brief nap;
another fit, restoration

of clothes, arrangements for another encounter,
the taxi back, and the furtive kiss of good-bye.
Then, by turn: tears, treachery, anger, betrayal;
marriages and houses destroyed;

small children abandoned and inconsolable,
their foursquare estates disestablished forever;
the unreadable advocates; the wretchedness
of passion outworn; anguished nights

sleepless in a bare room; whiskey, meth, cocaine; new
love, essayed in loneliness with miserable
strangers, that comforts nothing but skin; hours with sons
and daughters studious always

to maintain distrust; the daily desire to die
and the daily agony of the requirement
to survive, until only the quarrel endures."
Prophecy stopped; traffic started.


-Donald Hall