894 lines
24 KiB
Plaintext
894 lines
24 KiB
Plaintext
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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S A N D R I V E R J O U R N A L
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Sand River Journal is a collection of poems gathered from the newsgroup
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rec.arts.poems; it is posted monthly in ascii and TeX formats to r.a.p. and
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related newsgroups. Current and archive issues may be retrieved by anonymous
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ftp at the site etext.archive.umich.edu in the directory /pub/Poetry. This
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archive includes PostScript versions of the formatted journal, which is
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publication quality and can be printed on most laser printers.
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Poems appear by authors' permission and constitute copyrighted material.
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Free transmission of this document (electronic or otherwise) is permitted
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only in its entire and unaltered form; to inquire about individual poems
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contact the authors by their email addresses. I take no responsibility
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for the fate of this document, and claim ownership only to any poems I have
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authored. Send comments and finished contributions (please reference SRJ)
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to asphaug@lpl.arizona.edu. Enjoy!
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Erik Asphaug, Editor
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_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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Issue 10 - Summer Solstice 1994
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_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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------
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Winter
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------
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I raise my hands to the white hush-kiss
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of the snow. It's light as parachutes,
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cold as river water. Downhill
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a rabbit crashes, tumbles through heavy juniper
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looking for safe haven. She sees a falcon
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or the falcon sees her; both are lost to me
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in the early thin sun.
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Karen Krebser
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krebser@erg.sri.com
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------
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Spring
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------
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Dead feather skeletons
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Bud cautious yellow-green, rust,
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The dove wails welcome.
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David Goldberger
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goldberg@riker.neoucom.edu
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-------
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ecstasy
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-------
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you should not be watching me like that
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your gaze is a climbing rose - twining
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you and me in fragrance and thorns
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the iceland poppies are shedding
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their green cloaks like timid novitiates
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shyly flirting with the dawn-sun
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the air is like sangria - each flower
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bleeds among the swords of grass
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singing chords of music
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do not weep over the scent of jasmine
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fresh crushed rosemarys - hold me
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and heal the stigmata of my hands
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zita maria evensen
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bu016@kanga.ins.cwru.edu
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-----------
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Don Quixote
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-----------
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he wandered the dark
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shrouded streets
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murmuring memories
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that were never
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his own
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nights spent sifting
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through the garbage
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of the world
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only seeking out
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the odd photograph
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or tattered letters
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abandoned to the past
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when the days came
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he'd meet sleep
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clinging to every line
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every time worn smile
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stolen in the night
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yet each word
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of separation
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would coil raging
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beneath his
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heavy lids
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as they fluttered
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into red
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then darkness
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Jody Upshaw
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jupshaw@hfm.com
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---------
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she bends
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---------
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she bends
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to kiss
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me.
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her hair
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falls on my
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face like a
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warm breeze
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and
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shuts out
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the world
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like a
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fragrant
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summer
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night.
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zazu
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daemon@anon.penet.fi
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---------
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Lake View
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---------
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The wind walks the waters
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Rippling the sky into a mosaic
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of tiny blue tiles
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The breezy fingers
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caress the grasses
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Making them whisper
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hissy secrets
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William C. Burns, Jr.
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burnswcb@gvltec.gvltec.edu
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-------------------------------
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In the Armenian Theater Company
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-------------------------------
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I.
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A desultory summer: I had nothing left to do.
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I offered to do the lights. Why?
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Admiration of her morroccan pantaloons?
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Nonsense! the answer is simple: Loneliness!
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I spent an evening at an old gentleman's house:
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he served us tea from ornate pitcher in the boggy dark
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a citrus-sweet yard, we built sets...
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turkish doorways and a dais.
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II.
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I didn't do the lights.
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I said, "I am sorry: it is too much for a neophyte"
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She said, "we are all neophytes here"
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I said, "Yes, but it is your play, and besides,
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we only just met... in a cafe"
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She said, "I understand. I will do the lights myself!"
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However, she made me spinach pie after a Saturday hike.
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And told me, two hours too late:
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"There is no possibility, Ron, of romance."
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Ronald Bloom
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rbloom@netcom.com
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------------------
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Joanna, on Parting
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------------------
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She lives not closer than the sun
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across whose tarnished Realm
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sharp-fangled moment fears to run
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and love, to overwhelm -
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she changes faster than the Sky
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beneath whose pallid arch
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delirious fury gushes by
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and blazing footprints parch -
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she speaks like springtime nightingale
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resplendent and estranged
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in passion strong, in lifetime frail,
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and in deceit avenged -
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An apparition come and gone,
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A rainbow in the desert Sun.
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Ilya Shambat
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ibs4s@uva.pcmail.virginia.edu
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------
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Lilies
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------
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once upon a cliff
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in lily scented air
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I found the face of god
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at eight, the universe
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was green
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and juicy sweet
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I threw my body
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in rapture
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into a heaven
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of crunch and scent
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flawless communion
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of yellow and pink
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my falling unbound
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in me the glimmer
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of a ravishing joy
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which being born
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in me that day
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has never died
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Judy Stanley
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powell@ingres.com
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-----------------
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Isabelle Brasseur
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-----------------
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l'ombre blanc de son p`ere
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danse dans ce requiem
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elle tombe du lancement
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sur une vive ar`ete tout en gravant
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un arc qui atte'nue sa de'tente profonde
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the white shadow of her father
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dances in this requiem
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she drops from the toss
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on a sharp edge scribing
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an arc that eases her deep recoil
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E. Russell Smith
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ab297@freenet.carleton.ca
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--------------
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Recitation Day
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--------------
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I have never seen anything
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clean manhatten's twilight
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like this stormy apocalypse of rain
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through the coolness and blur
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of the water-lens window
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a light green odor of leaves
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while I memorize and recite and
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recite in rainy gusts of voice
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the poetry of Robert Lowell
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Kelly Anne Berkell
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kab29@columbia.edu
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-----------
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Connections
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-----------
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That was no miracle, no mere coincidence,
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my friend--you with the raised eyebrows--
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when you answered the telephone and knew
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before a word was spoken;
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who thinks to put a letter in the box,
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to raise the flag, and one is there.
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The mind will muse when no one watches.
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Like Phaedo, we make our case
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with other selves and turn the page
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before they answer--a case that smiles
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with teeth only when it is caught.
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You will swear like a don you were not there,
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or like a witness who was and saw nothing,
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but they will out as surely as a bell sounds
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or a parallel thought is spoken--
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as surely as dreams are found by sunrise.
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Larry Whatley
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larryw@lsid.hp.com
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-----------------
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Pastoral Escapade
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-----------------
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You mutilate language to see how it works,
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if it can still escape your maze.
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You boil it down to poetry, the bones into glue.
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The only proof's a broken-down confession;
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shelter for the night.
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To say that trees are silent is to say that the wind
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whispered to you with her eyes. If it were love,
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she'd hide the broken crockery. Lost for words,
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the sky seeps through cracks in glued porcelain,
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or more simply, dead, brittle elm branches
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that would love to sway in storms
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just one more time but as daylight drains
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away through the swirling moonhole
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they know it's too late. What's left is just an island;
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were it a lakeside, it wouldn't curve away so.
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A swig of blue and suddenly things are back
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the way they were before - abandoned haywains
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of desire, a distant cockerel, then rain delaying dawn -
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but part of the night remains: the black, wrinkles;
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the brown, blood; the pink, whatever you like -
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after all, you paid. Its flowers will hunt you down.
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Tim Love
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tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk
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-----
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Bears
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-----
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She found finally
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that she loved him
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but he was too expensive
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as bears usually are
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to keep around her heart
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he had rough ways which injured
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and his claw-marks on her life damaged and wounded.
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There is this about bears
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a near-sighted obliviousness
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so large they simply do not notice what is in their way
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and they have no familial feeling
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the males
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and no protectiveness neither
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and he went through her life like the ravager he was
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in one end
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tearing through the other.
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She visited a zoo years later
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she recognized that look
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and squeezed the soft hand of the man she had chosen
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and felt sorrowful anger
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towards the large brown form
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alone in the passing cage.
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Ralph Cherubini
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ralph@bga.com
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------------------
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Those are the days
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------------------
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Those where the days
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and my heart belongs to my mamma
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but today
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I need something that I can't understand
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those are the days
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we walk together to our Odysseia.
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Jari Suuronen
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4jari@adpser2.gsf.fi
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------------------
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The Fairytale Game
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------------------
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a thimble and a hatpin
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were all she'd given
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in a trembling whisper
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two common objects
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to act as fodder
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for the fairytale
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our favorite game
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closing eyes
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i saw the forest
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the daughter, the darkman
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and the dying father
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felt the cool thimble
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filled by healing water
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carried down
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the high mountain's
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side
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i felt that poison prick
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biting into skin
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heard the beast howl
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from the shadowed trees
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heard her breathing
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under me
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and let the story flow
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Jody Upshaw
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jupshaw@hfm.com
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---------
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beginning
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---------
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I don't want to think or sing tonight,
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I don't want to do anything but place your face
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into my hands like a gift I could stare at for hours.
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I want to slip you into my fearless arms
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and tell you that I love you until I run out of breath.
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As background clocks whir loudly in this aging night,
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I want to brush your hair softly and study your pupils,
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wet in their overwhelming honesty
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and fuller than the dark we sit in.
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I want to fingertip your sentient lips
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and feel the start of a sigh deep in my belly.
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I want to be as old as I am right now,
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embodying what your eyes say,
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and believing with unflinching certainty
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that the soul exists.
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And though it's nearly summer
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with its towel of heat blanketing us.
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Holding you as our skin forms a human seam
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is as right as the smell of the air before it rains,
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pristine and almost intoxicating.
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Let me hear your voice speak one more time
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before we sleep,
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for the motion of air climbing your langorous neck
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rings like a fragile chorus,
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while seductive and exotic as the shape
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of your eyes.
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You have struck me like a thunderbolt,
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saturated me with life brimming
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and bathed me in the delicate knowledge that petals know
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when they eat the morning dew.
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Today I am wholly breathing this love
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and it fills my lungs
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like my first taste of chocolate.
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ivan garcia
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stersrch@leland.stanford.edu
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-----------------------------------------
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Albumen and the Myth of the Walking Women
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-----------------------------------------
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Your legs stretched so far that you
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recalled the Barberini nude locked
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up as you were
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in that Noho garret in '65
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with the torturous beeping noises
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and mysteriously contracting lenses
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Her breast were a pert template
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for rayon
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make-overs in steel as you
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dropped her hard as cardboard outside
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the Mary Boone praying that death
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would not skulk in the guise of
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a yellow taxi.
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Now she stumbles in straw filled heels
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again past the Royal Bank on Spadina
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with huge Chinese characters
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-a black profile with no armholes
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seething with the remembrance of
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ogling stares.
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Kate Armstrong
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kmarmstr@uoguelph.ca
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------------------------------------
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Mark Antony, from Home, to Cleopatra
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------------------------------------
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Octavia came to me this morning bearing fruit
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from the orchards: sweet pears and persimmons,
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figs thick with the scent of earth
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--for our trees and vines are overflowing now--
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and sat near me while I ate, her look hard to divine.
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Could she know that even now you are in the fruit,
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that the taste of figs is the taste of your tongue
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crossing mine by night, long ago but remembered,
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at dawn, that the scent of orchards swept
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by the wind off the Tiber before the morning rain
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is your sweet musk, and that I cleave
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to this orchard, to this house,
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even to Octavia, because all things are you
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and you are in all things?
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I have grown old, my love, sitting here
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by my wife's orchards, sending my dreams
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outward toward you over the sea.
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You would not know me now.
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I am going gray and too often I feel
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the morning mist seep into my muscles.
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The figs revolt my stomach, the persimmons erupt my bowels,
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but I cannot tell Octavia. I drink too much.
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I fear that if I cross the seas again
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as you have bid me a hundred times,
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come to you again, you will see me
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and cry out to think I am a ghost,
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Julius Caesar, returned.
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I could not endure that.
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We are draped in our ghosts, love,
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we wear them like tatty gowns.
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When they blow aside, lifted by the winds
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that drive us, we are exposed,
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our bared private flesh, held out to aging
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and the scorn we have engendered
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in two worlds at once.
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We are damaged goods, love: tired rags
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that have lost their shape and color, hanging
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on dressmaker's forms in separate rooms.
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We have learned everything except how to dress our lives.
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Octavia, Caesar, a hundred camp followers,
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hang from us in disarray. Their smells overwhelm
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even the redolence of this orchard,
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even the memory of your scent.
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You are the fruit, at last, my love.
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Musk and roses, the taste of persimmons
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on your tongue, your sweetened breath against my ear
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in your cry of passion released.
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That first night long ago, on the barge,
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then there was no Caesar, no Octavia,
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no bought and paid for love,
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only the motion of the Nile
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and the motion of your hips
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as you drank me into you.
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In the morning we stood on the deck and you laughed
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at the pair of hippos copulating on the riverbank.
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"They are vile to everyone but themselves," you said,
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and held my arm. And so they were, and so we are become.
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I will come to you again, with this letter,
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on the next tide, and let the river itself beware.
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Kenneth Wolman
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woldoc@woldoc.jvnc.net
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------------
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come tuesday
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------------
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looking opening up at your star face
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shine as water reflecting my imagination
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wash me into a breaking heartache
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i knew knew knew you were here
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|
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gena ram
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ram@bms.com
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-----------
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sand cranes
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-----------
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|
sand cranes in flight
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|
with fingers of hard teak
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|
touch light
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|
like a steely gentle brush
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|
from a butterfly's wing
|
|
on white sewn skin riding
|
|
a taut high wire
|
|
like an undecided
|
|
marionnette
|
|
|
|
unforgiving gray grains
|
|
flying under take-off
|
|
as sun burns rivers of sweat
|
|
from sand-weathered skin
|
|
sand cranes with butterfly kisses
|
|
and wingtips sending bullets
|
|
through burning summer
|
|
no one no one no one
|
|
point point
|
|
sideout
|
|
|
|
|
|
zita maria evensen
|
|
bu016@kanga.ins.cwru.edu
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
--------
|
|
homesick
|
|
--------
|
|
|
|
home is where
|
|
the heart is
|
|
is where
|
|
you can't go back to.
|
|
is when it is august
|
|
& the days stretch
|
|
like shadows or cats
|
|
& fold in by degrees
|
|
too small to measure out.
|
|
before you realize it,
|
|
(eyes closed, cup to lips,)
|
|
twilight pours into night
|
|
& you are racing
|
|
thru backstreets
|
|
as the crow flies
|
|
the smell of ocean
|
|
breeze & seaweed
|
|
fly away home
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jamie Jamison
|
|
copijmj@mvs.oac.ucla.edu
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
--------
|
|
On Paper
|
|
--------
|
|
|
|
shouldn't it be
|
|
|
|
that that which can't be said
|
|
remains most beautiful?
|
|
|
|
dreams
|
|
shouldn't all be remembered.
|
|
|
|
what we remember,
|
|
the abstraction that sifts through time,
|
|
|
|
waves that chop against the shore now and then
|
|
the wind gets rough,
|
|
|
|
what we remember
|
|
gets locked,
|
|
|
|
distilled and distinct,
|
|
put down on paper.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Erik Asphaug
|
|
asphaug@lpl.arizona.edu
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
--------
|
|
Full Jug
|
|
--------
|
|
|
|
Summer trembles in a breeze
|
|
like Li Po stooping for a hand of white grapes
|
|
and these grapes are white rooms of summertime
|
|
jiggling in the eye.
|
|
|
|
Here is a clue
|
|
to antelope eyes and to my hands anchored
|
|
to this yoke which is my collarbone
|
|
laid brittle and bare.
|
|
|
|
And I see
|
|
a man to his thighs in the current
|
|
scooped at and torn as a secret.
|
|
|
|
This
|
|
fruit is wine and never stagnant,
|
|
it tumbles into gorges like blown silk
|
|
pitched into summer and round.
|
|
|
|
|
|
mike finley
|
|
mfinley@skypoint.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
------
|
|
beauty
|
|
------
|
|
|
|
there are moments
|
|
which make them stop
|
|
speechless and opened
|
|
reminded of something
|
|
long hidden
|
|
something supple and green
|
|
beyond hill or horizon
|
|
beyond reward or retribution
|
|
something lost in frenzied
|
|
avarice or desperation
|
|
something so lithe and yielding
|
|
so whirling, trembling, born of bliss
|
|
lines and light of unfathomable joy
|
|
colors which enfold and resurrect
|
|
their deadened souls
|
|
and make them weep
|
|
|
|
|
|
Judy Powell
|
|
powell@ingres.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
----------
|
|
our bodies
|
|
----------
|
|
|
|
our bodies,
|
|
backs arched,
|
|
are like the petals of a flower.
|
|
a humming bird rises
|
|
burning brighter and brighter.
|
|
the petals wilt
|
|
leaving behind
|
|
the sweet smell of
|
|
decay.
|
|
|
|
|
|
zazu
|
|
daemon@anon.penet.fi
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
----------------
|
|
metallic highway
|
|
----------------
|
|
|
|
barreling down the metallic highway
|
|
streaking a smear of moods and hours
|
|
lithium patient, yes, lithium patient, please
|
|
please don't wander off too far.
|
|
|
|
but the cars, they are turning their wheels towards me
|
|
i know, i saw them do that, the parked
|
|
unoccupied ones.
|
|
|
|
and the people, they are sending thoughts to me,
|
|
and they're reading mine, i know, i can
|
|
tell from their gestures and still backs.
|
|
|
|
nothing is as it seemed. there is more to
|
|
reality than the old reality.
|
|
|
|
this is a little like watching tv
|
|
with the color knob turned up.
|
|
this is a little like putting roses in stainless steel vases.
|
|
this is like no trip i have ever done.
|
|
|
|
barreling down the metallic highway
|
|
i am the shining
|
|
i am the whirling
|
|
i am the connected one.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Marek Lugowski
|
|
marek@mcs.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
-----------------
|
|
a common language
|
|
-----------------
|
|
|
|
every beginning contains it's end
|
|
lacking common language
|
|
we barter w/ words
|
|
a form of exchange
|
|
|
|
he is still able to believe
|
|
in a sense of progression
|
|
of intelligent/rational decisions which lead
|
|
to improved opportunities
|
|
like manifest destiny
|
|
stretching to some distant certain future
|
|
|
|
& I on the other hand
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jamie Jamison
|
|
copijmj@mvs.oac.ucla.edu
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
--------------
|
|
mourning nixon
|
|
--------------
|
|
|
|
so we oh god
|
|
we oh oh godded
|
|
our way through the night. twice.
|
|
|
|
then he said "i always wanted
|
|
to be a gigolo. you know.
|
|
make women happy then go away. though
|
|
it never seems to work out that way."
|
|
|
|
after that the flags were at half-mast.
|
|
it happened weeks after the president's death.
|
|
|
|
|
|
JJHemphill
|
|
jjh54139@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu
|
|
|
|
|