Garden of Verse: "Traveling to Winter" in the Scissortail Quarterly

 

    

The Scissortail Quarterly, a new attractively produced English poetry journal, has three of my poems in its August issue. This is their issue No. 4. Editor Brian Fuchs also published three poems of mine in his previous issue back in March. This is getting to be a habit! 

Because the journal publishes in paper, but not online, I cannot include a link to the poems here. Instead, I am posting one of the poems in the latest issue, "Traveling to Winter," here. It may be a little early to start worrying about winter, but, hey, like everything else it will be here sooner than you think. Here's the poem:

Traveling to Winter

 

So much darkness to contend with

Though lights appear in the lengthening night,

still the winds blow like the trumpet of a distant foe

And the ice makes for a scrabble

Not even the trashcan stands upright

I rescue it in the morning:

A half-drowned swimmer, gasping on its side

Are we all not merely a strong blow away

from some permanent stranding?

 

We watch weak vessels beat out to sea

Familiar figures disappear, like road signs gagged by snow

We look to the hungry ocean

Can we even wave goodbye?

Too late!

“Farewell!” we shout, “Good luck on the further shore!”

but we know they can’t hear us.

We turn about. Count heads. Anyone else missing?

 

We clutch each hour to our breasts

We are made of minutes

We dress in our heaviest apparel

Geer up, check provisions – call ahead

Trace the route on the map

Walk about the sled slowly, checking the tires

Did the roadmen cheat us,

their features oiled by Turner and time

The dogs howl

The clouds make faces

Babies cry behind doors closed to us

I would check for ammunition,

but my firepower is in my mouth

I ask the dentist to pull out all my teeth,

but she is wise to my folly and refuses

 

A lengthy journey cannot be undertaken

without acknowledgment of suffering

Birds will lose a feather or two

No further elders go before me in my father’s line

I watch the smoke signals for rumors of births,

but no announcements come

Take care, mon frere, to remain on the trail

We walk it together, my shadow and I 

To learn more about the Scissortail Quarterly, or purchase an issue, see their website at Scissortail Quarterly

The Garden of Verse: Verse-Virtual's September Shopping Bag Holds Mrs. P's Groceries And Many Other Treats

 

So many fine poems in Verse-Virtual’s September issue. Here are my comments on a few that I particularly enjoyed... 

I have read with admiration previous offerings from the mind of 

Robert Wexelbatt’s worldly, cynical, sharp-eyed Mrs. Podolski. Here 

in “Helping Mrs. Podolski Put Away Her Groceries,” Mrs. P. reflects on the pedestrian appetites of her late husband in a voice as unromantic, perceptive, and real-world as ever: 

He preferred beef to chicken or pork and

spit out my one attempt at tofu. 

Well, in fairness, so did I.  No take-out

but his precious pepperoni pizzas. 

Would you wash off those potatoes, dear—and 

just set them on the drainboard?

From her husband’s throw-back diet, Mrs. P. moves on to universal

considerations, revealing a capacity for suave and learned citations. 

On skin treatments she offers Nietzsche:

The earth has a skin,/ and that skin has diseases; 

one of its/ diseases is called man.

 

Poetic voice is what we admire in Sylvia Cavanaugh’s lovely poem 

“Gift Shoes from Philadelphia,” as in these lines:

As a child I had no idea

shoes even came in green,

or that love could take the form

of gift shoes from Philadelphia.

The implicit nostalgia for an early awakening, invented or not, 

flowers fantastically in the verses to come:

Someday, a left-handed gentleman

may offer you an oyster on the half shell

in the bright afternoon

and you could become Venus…

Read on in this delightfully lyrical fantasy as those ‘gift shoes’ find

other feet.

 

It’s the voice again that attracts me in Arlene Gay Levine’s poem 

“The Journey.” The poem begins with the existential pronouncement 

of a contingent universe: “A day begins; there are no promises.” 

But then we leave the known world behind:

One day we will slip from our bodies

and slide into the Light; this we know.

 Perhaps to rouse from sleep and put aside

the fear that hunts our hearts…

The poem takes off from here to pronounce what else “we know,” continuing 

to treat us to an elegant use of the elevated tone.

 

               Jefferson Carter’s “Hot Tub” flat out makes me laugh, 

from the first lines:

I confess.  We own

a hot tub.  Nothing 

ostentatious,…

               This confession is required, we learn, because the tub’s 

presumed ‘luxury’ consumption of hot water is politically incorrect 

in the opinion of the poet’s “tree-hugger friends.” I hug as many trees 

as the next guy, but I don’t think we have to go after hot tubs until 

we all agree to stop getting on jet airplanes. The poet contemplates 

his friends’ scolds, the poem tells us, until we arrive at this lovely 

and only slightly barbed image: 

as my hands flower open,

as the steam rises like smoke

through the branches

of our invasive olive tree.

 

               The spare, sharp-tooled voice in Jim Lewis’s “gemstone” captivates 

me as well. Its opening lines hammer away, carefully, precisely, 

at the object of the speaker’s terse observations: 

you are hard she said

hard headed

hard hearted

hard won

               The poem strikes me as an object lesson in the uses of 

economy and repetition. Bereft of punctuation and qualifiers, 

its strokes work efficiently toward the second-person speaker’s 

half-surprising conclusion. 

you see yourself

as common stone

but you will be 

the center jewel

in my crown

               There’s a final twist at the end; I won’t spoil it here. 

          Equally enjoyable in a different, conversational vein is David Graham’s

 “Lament for Kmart,” a knowingly tongue-in-cheek encomium for a low-end 

marketer I also confess to missing. How can anyone resist a poem

 that begins: “

How I used to relish wandering those broad glossy aisles/

with Walt Whitman at my side!”

What’s not to embrace under the store’s “dozen fluorescent suns”? 

The down-market big box store was a simple celebration of 

indiscriminate American bounty: 

We grinned at T shirts/ in hefty sizes, work shirts unsullied 

by designer tags.

And it concludes with another glance at Whitman’s universal embrace 

of his country, as rows of unplugged TV monitors reflect the faces 

of passing shoppers who become momentary screen stars:

just American faces leaning and loafing at our ease,

in vain the speeding or shyness as we starred in one

TV program after another, our show brief as a sunbeam

glinting on a passing windshield.

 

So many excellent poems in September’s Verse-Virtual. Find them here: 

https://verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html

The link Verse-Virtual Sept. 2021

 

The Garden of Verse: Wildlife in the Driveway in September's New Poems

I’m offering three occasional poems in the September 2021 issue of Verse-Virtual. The first of these recounts a rare occasion -- at least I hope it proves rare -- of a wildlife visit to our summer cottage in Berkshire County, Mass. 

The two other poems, "When You Are Lost" and "As Times Change" address the sort of things that happen, one way or another on our personal journeys through time and space, rather more often.

Here's the poem about the bear: 

The Bear at the Bottom of the Driveway

Not actually the bottom,
but where the blacktop swerves, 

     almost at a right angle
on its leafy way to Mahkeenac Road,
that pleasant artery named for the people replaced 
     by those who built the road
 
The trashcan belonging to the house

     at the driveway’s bend is empty now,
and perhaps our black bear has failed to make 

     its acquaintance 
in its more fetchingly odorous state,
as no debris is visible,
but the creature, larger now than when last 
     I made his acquaintance
at this very swerve in life’s path,
many moons before,
is snorffling contentedly in a wallow of wild roughage
not far from the hard, man-thing container
 
And wholly visible from the back-end of my car 
which I am about to load with inedibles, clothing,

laundry,

     his and her laptop computers and –

how could I forget? –
some garbage of our own,    
in preparation for imminent departure
 
Well, old man – or, ‘young fellow’ – we meet again!
We exchange a look,
then each goes back to his business,
mine the popping of the trunk 
and the loading of luggage happily not too fragrant
The visitor moves his feeding station a few steps, 
     to the other side of some thinly-leafed brush,
agreeing to disagree with my disaffection 

     for his presence,
but not doing anything truly about it
 
Two minutes later, as I bear a second load 

     for the trunk,
a car rolls up the drive and parks in front 

     of the trashcan house, 
a mere few feet from the bear, still unambiguously 

     present,
the car blocking my view of the scavenger
When the driver emerges, I call what I believe 
     to be a salient observation:
“There’s a bear on the other side of your car.”
He responds, “I know.”
                                                              
Not knowing what else he might know 

     or not know
(is he the house’s owner or a short-term renter?)
I attempt a pitched-voice dialogue 

     at uneasy distance –
the man too far for talking, the bear 

     too close for comfort –
unwilling to take a single step toward to our visitor,
while not entirely clear on the nature 

     of our relations.
To my neighbor I draw attention to the trash can,
implying a preference for its removal.
The other’s replies are brief and unapologetic, 
as if waiting for me to advance a quarrel,
a thing I do not easily do, 

     whether an interested bear 
     is listening or not…
 
Minutes later, the car loaded for the long trip home,
we roll down the drive to the swerve
and glance up as the man, a woman, and a little girl
lean on the railing of the house’s abbreviated deck,
gazing down in wonder at the bear,
in what appears to be the rapture of the innocents,
as if they have utterly no inkling
     that they’re the creatures in our zoo.

 To see the other two September poems, see Verse-Virtual