The gifts of September's Verse-Virtual, the online journal that publishes scores of new poems every month, keep calling, showing me new wonders each time I unwrap them. Here are a few of the poems I keep going back to.
Betsy Mars's beautifully phrased praise-poem to canine virtues, "What Is Essential," kept me re-reading to appreciate fully these essentials:
"you know
language is the source of misunderstandings",
Instead, as the poem details the essentials of the dog's understanding:
"You understand the necessity
of keeping the baobabs at bay
and raking out the volcanos –
even the ones that might be extinct.
You dig out roots in the yard
and rake the carpet into submission."
The poem goes on from here to detail the sublimely wordless understanding between person and dog. How can we fail to appreciate a pet that holds trees at bay and keeps carpets from pulling a fast one?
I was drawn into Sean Kelbley's poem "Explanation" right from the beginning when the speaker's "Oma" explains where her home was.
"Batschka,
Oma said, and ran her palms across her face
as if to smooth a map. At the center of the map,
her eyes burned like specific villages."
Those two similes, one for the old woman's gesture --"as if to smooth a map" -- and the second, for her eyes -- "burned like specific villages" -- tell us that the road to an 'explanation' is not going to be all sweetness and light.
September includes two beautifully haunting poems by Jeff Burt. While "Snowflakes" finds reasons for 'angels' everywhere, the poem titled "Flash" intrigues and moves us with explanations for a mysterious light phenomenon:
"Once I thought it was the acrylic panel on my luggage
reflecting the nose light of an airliner about to crash.
Once I thought it was a beacon calling me
to read Hafiz on indulging joy
when knowing God surprises us
by awkward revelations when we least expect them."
The poem convinces me that 'revelations' are likely to be awkward. I'll stop complaining about the noise in the street now. Maybe it's trying to tell me something.
So many of the wonder creatures in September's poems are dogs; a few are angels. The subjects of Irving Feldman's poem “Of, course we would wish“ are compared to angels at one point, but they're really not. They are, as the poet's note tells us," artist George Segal’s plaster casts" viewed at an exhibition. We'd like these plaster casts to appear e 'angelic,' the poem knowingly explains, tells us, but in fact "it's the dead themselves they resemble,..."
This terrible resemblance is so beautifully expressed that we can't pull ourselves away:
"It hurts to see them so decent and poor.
And it does no good to scold them for it,
to shout at these newly impoverished relations
crowding timidly in the narrow hallway,
or recall to them the old extravagance,
or tempt them back with favorite morsels
and the glowing tales that made the hearth warmer."
This poem doesn't simply describe a work of art. It gets inside it (and us too.).
Marjorie Moorhead's "Catching My Eye" begins with these carefully laid out lines, like clues to a mystery:
"Imagine a church pew lady’s glove.
White lacy upturned palm,
cupping bees and butterflies,
swaying gently on long stem,
leaves like feathers of a green bird.
Many tiny blossoms together
in a circle-burst of celebration
decorating hot July fields,..."
At this point I'm betting "Queen Anne's Lace." That turns out to be just one of the contenders in this poem's name game. But all the names and the all imagery the poem offers to make the inward eyes envision this summer marvel are equally winners:
Call it summer time, the poem tells us:
"Heat waving
off pavement. Fields buzzing alive."
I do call it summer time. And this poem nails it.
William Greenway's two intensely realized personal history poems got inside me as well. "Last Rites: Shark Week" alludes with a dark irony to an invitation to the rite of Communion. Of course the poem's darkly ironic invitation , as revealed in the poem's richly language, is offered by a shark:
"[I] never dreamed
back then how quickly things unseen
could rise from down below,
and how you could hear
not get out, now, but
Happy are those who are called
to his supper."
It's a poem well worth rereading in its entirety. Something of the same tone is captured by a second poem, "Spooky Nook Road," that looks forward to the "scabrous scarecrows" and "headless horsemen" of that celebrated autumn holiday.
I don't celebrate the end of summer. I miss it. But September 2020 shows us how much we have to look forward to.
You can find all these poems here:
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