Author: poetryfest

(For Rowena Hill)

I

That dark night
You left them
To their variety

And stepped out
In the rain
Beyond the threshold.

Would they ever guess
What you search for
In this strange hour?

Would they ever know
That forest paths
Grow into nights?

Not for them
The knowledge
Of the wild deer:

Behind the eye
The rending tiger,
The burst of blood.

You called out
But the pitch
Of your voice

Was not for ears
Grown dull with
Casual sounds.

Ah, woman,
The forest listens,
Stops in its walks

And waits…waits
For your approach,
Hesitant, anxious.

Under the first tree
You stand transfixed
As night drips on-

Crystal drop after drop
The sky. The tree,
The path and you.

II

Green upon green
Adumbrate till
Darkness is all.

Strand by strand
Your tresses spread
One with night.

Only the fireflies,
Those mocking stars,
Dare the beast.

The drunken laughter
Echoed behind you
Oblivious to all:

The cry of the stag
Summoning its heard
Away from the prowl,

The shriek of the nightjar
Freezing its victim
Before the kill,

The silent feet
That forever run
Past all that run.

All, all ignored
By hearts that shut
The night out.

The cricket rubs
Its wing again
Softly yet it rains.

The first tree stood
Hesitant on the edge,
Hesitant were your feet.

Beyond the edge,
Deep within,
Resonates the growl.

Fear strikes its
Adze upon the bole,
Nothing else is heard.

III

You are an imprint
Of deep darkness,
A tree of night.

The beast of prey
Crouches on your branch,
Silent walks the eye.

Upon the back
Of a rearing forest
Slither the rain drops.

The salt of blood,
The sweet of flesh,
Wake the fire.

Only a kill,
A smothering leap,
The crunch of teeth,

Breaking the skin
In a gushing red
Can soften the breath.

You crouch there
All sinew and memory,
A placental night.

Beyond the trench,
Within the walls,
Talk the masks;

Safe in their
Assumptions of time,
Of day, of night.

Irreconcilable
As the glacial lips
Of yawning crevasse

They talk of you
Beyond their reach,
Laugh their hatred.

You are that hint
Of deep darkness,
The tree of night.

Two feeds diverged on a blue-lit screen,
And sorry I could not check them both
And be one user, long I leaned
And stared down one as far as seen
To where it spiraled in endless growth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And perhaps with content more enticing;
Because it was trending and full of air,
Though as for that, the views seemed rare
And had me too much time mispricing.

Both that morning equally lay
With likes and shares that none could save.
Oh, I kept the rst for another day!
Yet knowing how clicks lead on to stay,
I doubted if I’d come back and behave.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two feeds diverged in a web, and I—
I took the one with memes to try,
And that has made all the dierence.

In this house, where walls feel close,

I juggle school and chores, barely compose.

Cooking, cleaning—tasks never cease,

While my thirst for knowledge finds no peace.

They say education should light my way,

But my studies are scorned at the end of day.

This life feels like an unexpected cage,

Where joy and growth can’t take center stage.

I’m always afraid: what did I do wrong?

What sparked their anger, made them respond?

They think it’s stress that clouds my mind,

Or am I doomed by traits of my kind?

I’m strong enough to weather this storm,

But for others, I must keep up a form.

To shield them from this life so cold,

While my true self starts to fold.

How can I give what I’ve never known?

A peaceful life, in this house overgrown

With fear, worry, and endless tasks,

Where simple joys are hard to grasp.

This home, a maze of constant dread,

Leaves no room for hope ahead.

I long to break free from these chains,

To find a place where my true self reigns.

Narrated by Val Cole

POEM:

I’m from a Southern backyard —
Magnolia grandiflora sporting huge white blooms
Honeysuckles spilling over the fence
Red roses soaked with the aroma of tea
Hollyhocks springing up yearly into flowering towers.

I’m from a Southern backyard —
Mud pies being made beneath a magnificent pin oak tree
Mint leaves mysteriously exploding with flavor
Milk pods’ white fluid being tasted not knowing it was poisonous.

I’m from a Southern backyard —
Bedroom window we escaped to crawl space door
To meet our coonhound Jethro and to play in the moonlight.
Bedroom window we each escaped on separate occasions
Out into moonlit streets until returned by kind policemen.

I’m from a Southern backyard —
Concrete foundation swirls scarily like a gorilla’s face
Wooden swing where we watched mad Mommy fleeing
Crawl space source of hound’s howls after Daddy’s death.

I’m from a Southern backyard —
From which Mommy returned to hospital after the funeral
From which we left with barely known Northern kinfolk
Into which other families came to live in the bosom of its beauty.

Narrated by Val Cole

POEM: I am an immigrant, nomadic desperate for home,
to hammer myself into existence
out of pain in depths of yearning—
for what it’s too immense to bookend in language,
perhaps only indicted by silence inserting itself
into the form,
the only self-portrait I still trust.

I am a book without pages,
textured with continents of feeling,
narratives adrift,
unlatched from each other,
passersby that do not
even graze gazes.

I a solitude of friction between
antagonist, protagonist.
I am a nest rigged,
unsettled high in the
chokehold of branches.

I am three:
tiny, frosted fingers caked with unbaked dough,
marble blue eyes glinting in flashes of exposures.
My mother’s ear just beyond the camera,
my jean jumper, chilled kitchen tiles
redeeming me back into a body,
inside the thought that I am one at all.

All I am: an isthmus of thick froth, melting chocolate chips
nurturing the sensorium of decadence against tongue,
summer falling like a painting through the back door,
foregrounding my living lore,
the high volume of aliveness.

I am nine in ballet shoes and leotard
inner legs skirting a horse’s mythic rib cage
cantering through campgrounds after dance,
hair flossing the periphery of eyelids,
helmet holstering my head,
codifying my mixed media of kinesthetics,
stretching the kite of romantic light filling
the vista enshrining the fence fencing
wild horses, geese in shocks of gold,
a literature of self-reliance in enacted experience,
hands holding fast to the mane of affirmative hair
roiling in the midday heat.

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I am 20 negating my dear affection for the word
to negotiate the sciences,
left hand wedded to pencil,
numbers screeching through lead onto page after page,
consumed by an excess of equations—
how to balance them,
make all of the atoms content,
as though each molecule had a mouth calling its rage up
from the page—
my upper lip bitten into by lower teeth.
I am my own muzzle,
as though the numbers trapped me there in ember, the pencil erasing me,
the accumulation of the solvable aggregating at the base of the throat,
ghosting me out of being a being
in need of regular snack, bathroom breaks.

I am an experiment
breaking all the rules of
experiments,
the central tenant:
reproducibility.

I take issue with being now, at almost 30, at an impasse
with being those girls,
this one derived from the
ambush of a stroke stoking feeling out of my right interior,
an objectionable experiment running out of control,
out of senses to lose,
out of reproducing any semblance of myself
I know as myself,
out of stock of emotion
dragging me through, into.

I am not even a fiction projected onto a history,
not even a hovering presence.

I am so far away from my nested selves that
I’m outside them now,
an absence vanishing into silences that
generate all of the amplification.

Truth, trust: I need to anchor my weary body,
because I’ve lost my reference, my voice, my rhetoric,
so I’m unzipping structures—
theorems, sonnets, narrative, farewell.

I let myself wane because all I trust now:
these gaps to be my guide, and when they can no longer guide me,
I will step into them so they can swallow me,
so I don’t need to explain the inexplicable,
to remember what I cannot forget.

Narrated by Val Cole

POEM:

The old trees bend protectively around us
as we rest on the park bench in our winter wear
your faltering mind following the course of the river that is close and sure and deep

even now I can still find your younger face and remember the pillowy softness
of your lips when ours first met when we became love desperados

for now we will make our way to the bookstore by the famous church
and I will buy for you a neglected volume of stories
that will carry you into the long nights and when we find a place to take coffee
you will caress the weave of the cover as I serve your cup with an unsteady hand

and I see there is a little less of you this day

should we weight our overcoat pockets with rocks and wade into the waters?
it will seem like the most natural thing we will clutch each other and
let the current spin and dance us as our hats float free
if they find us washed up on some farther bank will our lips be blue like something that
burned pure
and is death just a river that will take us somewhere else?

for tonight though I will read to you to quell your agitations
–words you may still find familiar–
and in not too long a time when I kiss you again
will you think it’s our first?

Narrated by Val Cole

POEM:

i. THE BLACK SHUTTLE IS PASSING OVERHEAD

ii. The Chumash (California) referred to meteors as Alakiwohoch,
which simply meant “shooting star.” They believed a meteor was a
person’s soul on its way to the afterlife.

iii. The black shuttle is passing overhead, sent each month into space to
orbit its cargo over our heads, and then to rest – coffins stacked like
hives, pumped with foam for stability, all with little spring
launchers to push them home (toward earth). An idea of
Amazon.com and Tesla to enter the funeral business and top each
other with the most expensive funeral: quarter million per, after the
Chumash conceit that shooting stars are souls passing to the
afterlife, coffins with carbonite beds, sprung to burn in terrible arcs
across deceased family’s night sky. Burial in the stratosphere: clean,
sudden, awesome, and godlike. Will wait for favorable skies.

Narrated by Val Cole

POEM:

Today is a day both rare and familiar. Tragic months before
another comes around. This will be the past that makes the
future proceed. Only what of the lack of true possession?
What of the decline spotted once again in our ascent, that
we heard in what was said in tired conversation on
sparkling evening? The altitude of pears? These figurations
were things seen by someone else in the branches and
leaves of a neighboring tree. I gave my life to waiting as if
asleep and my time was spent by others, observing me.

Narrated by Val Cole

POEM:

Beauty is what we’re here for.
To utilize our sense of wonder
To create a path of wonder for others.
Be awake in the now and
Find that connection to the universe
To dig deep and discover what is in us
That is moved by the aesthetically pleasing.
Why is that which we call beautiful pleasing to us?
It’s an innate attraction to that which sustains the spirit.
It’s the hope that the world is good.
Growing, caring, sensing meaning.
These are the purposes of being alive.
When we see how it all fits together
We want to help nature and help others
To catalyze the process. Then we can say
We were an active part of it,
We wondered, we connected, we acted.
The moment we say, “Aha!”

Narrated by Val Cole

POEM:

Grass grown tall green slicks drizzle wet,
new planted seedlings shakily take hold,
crumpled mulch retains soil covered mold,

run tongued dogs
checked for ticks
lap water bowls.

And I am left with trowel and rake
to gather weeds in sunlit rain still cold.

How easily

I have

forgotten

where

to start

in nature’s language

to uproot

the untranslatable.