Backbone > Poetica

Eited by Phil Levine

Memoriam For David

I'll never fall in love enough
to falter, leave the unravel
of bootlaces
content. My hands volitive
and dry. Icicles
clawing at windows. The hiss of steam
rising in abandoned
corners of a room eighty
tides later, two states and
the loci of death and time,
a town smaller than us.

Among these worn mountains, odd
constraints, widowed
years and shadows, the lime
green flowerpot, sullen now
with nimble twigs, peruses
snowdrifts. Remembrance
and you
in gagged drawl, breakfast.

Would you remember me in butter
and toast? Coffee mugs?
Would my skin wrinkle in the shower curtain, the final
slide of soap from your nape?

I remember you
in the flicker of mailboxes on a drive,
the constant hum of a highway
at dawn,
and sock knots. The curl of old paper.

—San Juanita Garza

Where Was The Defense Department

When I stood there crying
for hundreds of beech trees
blistered and cankered

by trunk blight, one by one
dropping their shields
of dead bark?

—Will Nixon

Birding in Central Park

The cooper's hawk tugs
rubbery
red gristle

from the pigeon clamped
under its feet.
Feathers

curl down from the hawk's perch
onto the Azalea Pond,
float

without getting wet:
gray and white
petals.

Birders identify the hawk
as juvenile
by its yellow eyes.

After the first winter,
the eyes turn
red.

—Will Nixon

Daffodils

They are selling daffodils at the office, cut into vases,
bulbs betting on tomorrow for continued survival.
I am tired of daffodils, crowded as they are into poems,
herds of them marching rampant across Wordsworth's nostalgia;
gathering above Plath's blessed scissors,
remembering her blades on their former stems;
assembling in my grandmother's yard,
making their way down to the curb, April by April.

One night my father missed our driveway next door
coming home from the Finish Line,
pulled into my grandmother's yard,
plowing through the daffodils,
laughing the laugh that could
shake the buds from a bush,
peel paint from an unsteady ceiling,
could frighten me more than his yell,
the liquid black surrounding his golden head.
I still can't talk back.
Standing, conversing one on one is an act.
I am still terrified he will find out, about the hat,
the candle, a million slings, every eggshell thought,
bright as Easter sunrise in my dark light.

I am tired of daffodils, slumbering away the winters
in their safe pots, dirty beds.
My yard, when the mud comes,
is full of tiger lilies, irises, pale yellow and purple heads
nodding agreeably at Catskill hearsay.
Maybe I'll add daffodils at the edge,
uncontrollable bullies, to choke chicks and hens,
poor cement parting at the cracks,
shouting to the road below at
unhappy motorists aiming for home.

—Cheryl Rice

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send it via snail or e-mail. POETICA.
PO Box 459. New Paltz, NY 12561. info@chronogram.com. Subject: Poetica.