Author: Wayne L. Miller

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 12/27/2016

Arthur Russell

Spit

I

In Jay Meek’s “Walls,” about the imprisoned
poet Chidiock Tichborne, stone and despair
keep close company. Meek says Tichborne
wrote his testament on the wall of his cell,
and laid his head on a cobble to die.

Today, more than half
a million American men live
in solitary confinement, and lacking Tichborne’s
mind, and Jay Meek’s suffrage, they suffer
without landmarks.

They and their jailors are mirrors in despair.
He who minds the forgotten is forgotten himself.

Large prison populations are a luxury item
for an impatient, wealthy society,
purchased like a millionaire
disposing of an automobile
because the tire has gone flat.

II

The singular Tichborne becomes a generation
of young, American men in putty life,
and jailors, whose key rings
shut whole quadrants of their living brains,
twenty-three hours of dark,
seven days of solitude,
fifty-two weeks of disappointment,
365 ankle-chained skeletons in a row
like dried leaves in the sophist wind,
like coked-up crabs crossing brown, deserted paths
to egg-crates inside prisons, dying.

III

Chidiock Tichborne was disemboweled
before he was hanged (something ISIS
never seems to do on YouTube)
and the first Queen Elizabeth, when she
found out, banned the practice,
or we Americans might still be doing it today.

Today, we say that making a man watch
his mind drip like a blood sample
into a velvety vinyl bag
advances the public good.

IV

Tichborne was a busker
when he stuffed his sonnets sideways
in a vase that once held tulips
shipped in by boat from Holland,
and he fried an egg by skillet
and tossed two scallions in it,
and the hotel smelled like beeswax,
as the family below him

lit the candles they had carried
from the homeland they had left in the Levant.

They say he had a mistress,
but it never was that simple.
She would bring him ends of sausage
left over by at the café,
and lick her teeth and watch him
eating slowly at the window
as the crows fought on the cobbles
on the street that she had come from,

over something that no longer looked
like anything a crow would want to eat.

And sometimes they had passion,
and sometimes they had nothing,
but the time they sat there passing,
till she stood and took her handbag
from the chair back at the table
where his work, like shoveled dirt
on sidewalks, lay unwanted,
one rhyme short of making good.

As she went back down the stairway,
she heard children laugh in Hebrew,

and she didn’t really want to,
still, she looked back at the window
when she reached the intersection
at the passage to the subway,
but he wasn’t at the window,
and the light had changed to yellow in the sky.

He’d gone back to the table,
spit on his hands and rubbed them,
whittled down his pencil,
listed words that rhymed with ‘orange,’
made a box around ‘syringe,’
then lost twenty minutes thinking
of the friend who’d died of drugs.

His beard grew while he sat there.

Tichborne was a Catholic; though
he didn’t take the sacrament,
he liked to make confession,
and talk to mourning women,
so he went down to St. Peters,
and sat in Francis’s niche,
and a man who he’d seen before
sat beside him in the twilight,

and said the time had come to
assassinate Elizabeth;

and so, at only twenty-eight,
his stupid, thumping heart
insisted on the impossible
continuation of his life,
while his mind played opposites,
and the rhymes came quickly;
“frost of cares” rhymed “field of tares”
“death” with “womb” rhymed “earth” with “tomb.”

“My glasse is full,” he wrote,
“and now my glasse is runne,
“And now I live, and now my life is done.”

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Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 12/20/2016

Mark F. Fogarty

Sodom or Gomorrah?

Which was it, Sodom or Gomorrah?
The seaside town where the bodies washed up?
That was Sodom, I believe.

The city where the hospitals were bombed
To cure stubborn life by death?
That was Gomorrah, perhaps.

The city where the children’s birthday cake
Ran mud and blood down their stunned faces?
That was Armageddon, certainly.

The city where hope was beheaded
And babies raped before murder?
That city must rule hell.

Who looked on horrified, pretending to be blind,
When asked to take some in?

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Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 12/13/2016

Mark Fogarty

Short Light

I went driving this afternoon in the short light,
The short fading light a week short of the equinox.

I came back after twenty years away
To the town where I grew up,
Tied in knots after leaving my spouse.
It was soothing to me, familiar,
Down to the ghosts that walk the streets
And the unchanged bricks of my high school,
Rocks that once were igneous, now sedimentary.

There’s a looseness to the late light, a clarity.
And I have lived long enough to remember dangerous things.
There are the homes they built on top of an old chemical plant,
The basements ready to burst with acid poltergeists.
And the building where I worked on the local paper,
Where a doctor now cracks bones.
Back then we worked in the basement and could clearly hear
The heavy footsteps from the ghost upstairs where nobody was.
And I was in love with a girl I worked with,
Stupid love, tormenting, worse than colitis.
When she married someone else I took a vow,
Scarlett O’Hara to the barren fields,
That I’d never be jealous again.

And the neglected arts center
Where my poets now meet in the kindergarten room
For the babies of the resident spiritualists.
In the old days it was a movie theater with a chandelier
Whose fat crossbeams were shrugged in cheesecloth,
Haunted by a ghost that turned out to be a cat
Wandered in to the unused back rooms to get out of the cold.
I have a memory of butter melting for the popcorn,
No heat necessary but the hormones of the candy girl
Who thrust her soft belly against my pants to feel what I had.
One night after work she did a striptease
On the old stage above the orchestra pit,
Ended wearing only an usher’s suit jacket and white panties.

That’s the way to do it. Keep them wanting more.
Keep us wanting to hear the orchestra that played the vaudeville bits,
The Marx Brothers there and gone in a flash, too quick to see.
They played there, I’m told, in 1922.
“They called the place the Ravioli,” said Groucho,
“But all I wanted was a decent knish.”

The poet the place is named after would have liked the striptease.
He was still alive when my family moved here. A few days before he died,
He walked the half a block to the library to return his books.
My mother knew him, asked how he was feeling.
“Not very well,” he said.
A tidy life is when you remember to return your library books.

I knew his Catholic bells, I went to school right under them.
But the nuns wouldn’t teach his heathenish stuff.

I worked in the other library, at the university.
If my student came in, I’d let her run for the magazines,
Sit with my feet up, reading the New York Review and Paris Match.
They sold the college to the nuns, who told us
We could believe we were descended from monkeys if we wanted to.

My library is now called an Education Commons.
I doubt they have magazines there now,
No thrilling starlets with their vibrant French tits.

I used to sit in the park by the river, waiting for a body to float by.
One time someone cut up his wife and dropped the bits in the river,
But I never saw anything more than a few icebergs of old tires.
One time my best friend jumped into the river at night,
The police searching for him and his insane buddy,
With the light from their flashlights unspooling on the water.

Good thing we’re below the falls.

Keep wanting more, and maybe you’ll see, as I saw,
A kid dressed up as Gandhi, down to the miniature walking stick.
That was at the Presbyterian church,
At the intersection of Main Street and a postcard from New England.
The father, the son and the mahatma, a good mix.

I used to think this place was a leafy locked room.

Now in the falling light, I listen
For the honk of the firetruck.
I want to hear the coming of the fireman Santa
Who throws candy canes to the equinox.

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