will you still love me?

LUCKIES

The loop of rusty cable incises
its shadow on the stucco wall.
My father smiles shyly and takes
one of my cigarettes, holding it

awkwardly at first,
as if it were
a dart, while the yard slowly
swings across the wide sill
of daylight.
Then it is a young man’s
quick hand

that rises to his lips, he leans against the wall,
his white shirt open at the throat,
where the skin is weathered, and
he chats and
daydreams,

something he never does.

Smoking his cigarette,
he is even
younger than I am,
a brother who
begins to guess,
amazed, that what
he will do will turn out
to be this.

He recalls the house
he had
when I was born, leaning against it
now after work, the pale stucco
of memory, 1947.

Baby bottles stand near the sink inside.
The new wire of the telephone, dozing
in a coil, waits for the first call.

The years are smoke.

Reginald Gibbons (also born 1947)

“Luckies” from The Ruined Motel. Copyright © 1981 by
Reginald Gibbons. All rights reserved.

what is hidden; what is shown

COUTURE

1. Peony silks,
in wax-light:
that petal-sheen,

gold or apricot or rose
candled into-
what to call it,

lumina, aurora, aureole?
About gowns,
the Old Masters,

were they ever wrong?
This penitent Magdalen's
wrapped in a yellow

so voluptuous
she seems to wear
all she's renounced;

this boy angel
isn't touching the ground,
but his billow

of yardage refers
not to heaven
but to pleasure's

textures, the tactile
sheers and voiles
and tulles

which weren't made
to adorn the soul.
Eternity's plainly nude;

the naked here and now
longs for a little
dressing up. And though

they seem to prefer
the invisible, every saint
in the gallery

flaunts an improbable
tumble of drapery,
a nearly audible liquidity

(bright brass embroidery,
satin's violin-sheen)
raveled around the body's

plain prose; exquisite
(dis?)guises; poetry,
music, clothes.

2. Nothing needs to be this lavish.
Even the words I'd choose
for these leaves;

intricate, stippled, foxed, tortoise, mottled, splotched -jeweled adjectives

for a forest by Fabergé,
all cloisonné and enamel,
a yellow grove golden

in its gleaming couture,
brass buttons tumbling to the floor.

Who's it for?
Who's the audience
for this bravura?

Maybe the world's
just trompe l'oeil,
appearances laid out

to dazzle the eye;
who could see through this
to any world beyond forms?

Maybe the costume's
the whole show,
all of revelation

we'll be offered.
So? Show me what's not
a world of appearances.

Autumn's a grand old drag
in torched and
tumbled chiffon
striking her weary pose.

Talk about your mellow
fruitfulness! Smoky alto,
thou hast thy music,

too; unforgettable,
those October damasks,
the dazzling kimono

worn, dishabille,
uncountable curtain calls
in these footlights'

dusky, flattering rose.
The world's made fabulous
by fabulous clothes.

Mark Doty

From Atlantis by Mark Doty, published by Harper Perennial.
Copyright © 1995 by Mark Doty.

why i don't believe in hell

my father kinda looked like a mixture of mayor bloomberg and alexander nikolaevich yakovlev (photo composit). today would have been his 99th birthday, if he had not died in 1980.

he smoked a pipe, sometimes cigarettes, he had a manhattan every night when he got home from the office. with a cherry. and he played 'fur elise' on the piano. he bought himself an eames chair, and was always the second son, the one least favored.

as a pup, he had done some disc jockeying on the radio, and he was the best dancer i ever met.

when i came home from dates, he would be sitting at the dining room table eating corn flakes and reading the paper.

as i thought about him, new of his talents kept popping into my mind. singing 'scarlet ribbons.' acting in musicals at the jewish center -- 'captain sammy's showboat' (directed by my mother). he could draw middling good, and had wanted to go to art school, but ended up following in his older brother's footsteps to go to medical school at the university of chicago.

a month before he died, my mother's mother died. in the car on the way to the funeral he cracked jokes the whole time.













when i look at him in the tangle of my memory, i can only seem to find a mangled creature, partially melted into himself, some darkened parts that look like they might be from burns.










no, i don't think i'm seeing him now. i thinking i'm finally seeing him with clarity, he who will always be in my memory. how can one believe in hell? a man may spend some kind smiles in his lifetime but if he also places his own pain & fear & terrors onto his children with a scream and the back of a hand, he is being rightly tortured at that time.

A Crown of Autumn Leaves

Our voices press
from us
and twine
around the year's
fermenting wine


Yellow fall roars
Over the ground.
Loud, in the leafy sun that pours
Liquid through doors,
Yellow, the leaves twist down

as the winding
of the vine
pulls our curling
voices—

Glowing in wind and change,
The orange leaf tells

How one more season will alter and range,
Working the strange
Colors of clamor and bells

In the winding
of the vine
our voices press out
from us
to twine

When autumn gathers, the tree
That the leaves sang
Reddens dark slowly, then,
suddenly free,

Turns like a key,
Opening air where they hang

and the winding
of the vine
makes our voices
turn and wind
with the year’s
fermented wine

One of the hanging leaves,
Deeply maroon,
Tightens its final hold, receives,
Finally weaves
Through, and is covered soon

in the winding
of the vine—

Holding past summer's hold,
Open and strong,
One of the leaves in the crown is gold,
Set in the cold
Where the old seasons belong.

Here is my crown
Of winding vine,
Of leaves that dropped,
That fingers twined,
another crown
to yield and shine
with a year’s
fermented wine.

Annie Finch

For Mabon (fall equinox), Sept. 21
copyright Annie Finch 2011

title

i have to go into the hospital tomorrow and i'm scared.

i had a heart attack ten years ago, and apparently the stents need to be replaced.

i have recently been feeling poorly, so they did these big fancy tests on me and that's what they found.

i had this best friend for about 25 years, but a couple of years ago we drifted apart. but amazingly, we just became friends again, and she's going to drive me to and pick me up from the hospital. strange how these things happen.

i have to go in tomorrow, monday, at noon, for a procedure at 2:30pm. they don't put you completely asleep so you're aware of what's going on, and will remember it.

supposedly, if they turn out not to need replacing anything (they won't), i can go home later that same day, tomorrow night. as deeply as i wish to do that, i guess i more hope that they can fix me.

but this is the first night i will not sleep with ruby since we've been together, almost 5 years.

it's no accident that my anniversaries with both ruby and this blog are so close to the same amount of time. some part of my beginning it at about that time was because robert -- my cat before ruby -- had begun to die. and ruby came very shortly after he did.

but the hardest part of ten years ago was being away from home, from my garden, from my cat.

if i come back from this time feeling better,
maybe it will be a healing experience.

yellow silk @ 30

thirty years ago today i came home with cartons and cartons of the first issue of my new magazine, yellow silk. cartons and cartons would be piled into my car then unloaded into the middle of my (fortunately large) second bedroom which served as my office. as would become a habit, we threw a fundraiser to pay the printer; harry the baker made a cake that looked like a magazine cover, and bunches of poets came to read their work from the magazine. since the first issue was all women (they responded to a cal for manuscripts more quickly than the guys did), we had the reading at a local women's bar, the long-gone bacchanal. the place has been called britt-marie's for years now, and they've kept the old 'stained glass' B over the door.

a funny thing happened last night. i was reading over the excerpts from the magazine that i had put online long ago, and an amazing thing happened -- i felt really proud. i hadn't read that poetry for years, i guess, and it was like it was all new to me, and i loved it, and i wanted to share it with you, despite the fact that i saw the million typos for the first time too!

so please enjoy some little bits from the 15 years that it lasted.

there are many stories, ask if you want. i just might answer you.

or go see more. Yellow Silk

by the way, please don't order anything on the website. also, to progress from page to page, the easiest way is to start on any given issue. click on any word that is underlined. this will take you to another page with work from the same issue. on that second page, in eensy tiny letters, it will say, 'go to next issue' (or something like that. if there is no underlined word, the 'go to next issue' will be on that table of contents page.

don't call me rosie!

why are we always flowers? my love is like a red red rose. no she's not. a rose is a rose, and she is a person. she will not wilt within a week. she will not lose her color, turn brown, and dry out. and you know that if she does, max factor will have the solution she's looking for.

but since she is actually a living human, why should she? why is it so important to keep the appearances: colors, glows, silken-like qualities of youth? because why are women here but to reproduce.

no, i don't believe that, even if it's true. it's just that the older i get, the more a biological determinist i seem to get. to not be living your life as a woman whose main goal is to family and reproduce, is to consciously depart from your genes.

and face social retribution when you do. though defining one's self should be everyone's own private prerogative, it simply is not. each individual is a part of a larger social animal, and it is that animal's job to mind the bits and pieces. anyone who might question, or cause another to question, is a "Bad Influence." (maybe even mentally ill)

why must jennifer lopez be seen in a different outfit every week when she judges american idol? even i feel that pressure, even if i'm just going to the store. is it true, as i tell myself, that i just can't stand repetition, or something else, something much darker and inbred?

and we are not allowed to do anything that marks us as uninterested in reproducing. how often will you see an ad on tv telling you that you look beautiful in white hair, why change it? and in fact, where does it say that you needn't be beautiful?

i admit it, i'm
the odd one out. asperger's gives one distance. if you don't "get" the rules, you are more likely to notice their forms. but that does not invalidate my questions. is there a future role for women in which to be called a red, red rose would be an insult?

at one point,
will we be free enough to live without expectations? or are the expectations a necessity if our species is to survive? like sand through an hourglass, an individual life passes along its genes and then moves on. anyone who wants to stop it can must pay the price. and all this goes on beyond our ken and beyond our reach.


until someone reaches out to pluck that flower.