had settled everywhere. She felt it scar
the house the way asbestos fibers scar
the lungs. All dust. All ash. She could explain
his leavings until he left this dust
behind and disappeared out of the mirror
of her life, left rubbish as memorial
of what they had. She mutters Animal
today—not him, but every animal—
and stubs out cigarettes to leave a scar
on desks, buffets and chairs. Memorial
beer bottles and cans sit for days. Explain?
What explanation can satisfy the mirror?
What explanation cuts a path through dust?
She is an animal who can’t explain
new skin, new scars, or how the mirror
weeps in memorial, reflecting dust.
Alucard
In the black and white universe
of 1943, any bad actor could hide
himself just by spelling his name
backward. In this way the son
of Dracula became Count Alucard
and no one was any the wiser.
In brains cursed by the love of
wordplay, a verb like lives becomes
nouns like Elvis or evils.
One of the evils of the Universal plan:
that the undead’s sperm
could vampirize an egg.
The Son of the Man of 1000 Faces,
Lon Chaney, Jr., ill-suited in a tux—
and what kind of vampire
wears a moustache?—tell tale
droplets, a crimson confession.
Black and white logic: we see no blood.
We’ve seen plenty of blood in our day,
Stillbirth. Miscarriage.
Yet Dracula / Alucard . . .
What bride would ever provide
the ovum and the path
to let such palindromic birth proceed?
Late fetal DNA-land—
was it a bat I saw?
Dad,
don’t nod.
Devil never even lived.
Cigar? Toss it in a can. It’s so tragic.
Maybe that other undead son
was in on the joke when he said
The last shall be first and the first shall be last.
What kind of god—what kind of dog indeed—
grants the devil a son and drives stakes
through hearts like these?
On the Battlements
There’s a photo of a young girl and a man
on a fortress top in Old San Juan.
The meek clouds, the placid blue sky
seem like lies in the aftermath of storms—
las tormentas—that rocked them all the night before.
The sea is calm and picture-perfect,
the picture itself a perfect kind of lie.
You see a father and a daughter
on the battlements of the old Spanish fort.
The fort is photogenic, a tranquil postcard ruin
of conquistadores’ might. The father’s pose is casual,
grinning in the shadow of his cap.
The daugher’s face is pinched,
almost smiling in the sun.
What you don’t see is
the woman’s hands trembling on the camera,
the daughter fleeing after the shutter’s click,
screaming I’m scared, Daddy, I’m scared,
the father’s face contorting, shouting
Come back here right now.
You don’t see the blood stains
washed by centuries of storms,
dark clouds in the distance,
las tormentas yet to come.
Frederick L. Shiels
Driving Past the Oliver House
One day late in 1966 in quiet Hattiesburg,
Phillip Oliver, nineteen, shot
his step-mother four times
in the face and chest with a ten-gauge,
Drove what was left of her
in the back of the family’s Ford pick-up
out to an empty lot
on the edge of town,
Unloaded her and emptied
a five gallon can of gasoline
on her and dropped a whole blazing box
of Ohio blue-tip kitchen matches
down on her and
backed away quickly.
He then drove to the police station
downtown and told everything. That’s
how the newspaper reported it, at least,
that’s how I recall it.
Funny thing though,
it was also reported that
friendly Phillip, cutting lawns and
doing odd-jobs, just out of high school,
Said he “didn’t mind the lady,”
they had argued some that particular morning.
“His father had remarried a little quickly,” he thought—“maybe,”
and that was that,
or so, I remember.
In any event, driving by what, for many years,
was the “Oliver Place,” a non-descript brick Ranch
at Adeline Street and Twentieth Avenue,
and not favored by realtors,
was never the same.
Star Birth of the Word ULASSA
Just now, May 23, 2013, I have in my conceit
created a brand new word, Ulassa,
at 8:05 AM. As I write,
Ulassa is like an infant star that burns white hot hydrogen and
joins—who knows—988,000 English words or more,
As a new birthed star joins our known universe of—who knows—
22 septillion other stars,
give or take a few quadrillion,
150 billion galaxies
150 billion stars
Do the math humbly,
Ulassa—
The Oxford English Dictionary will say it means
“the short sense of escape we can experience,
when something really bad has happened”,
like, a childsister has gone missing or
we hear we may lose a foot from frostbite,
so in those short escapes from ongoing pain,
We get will get ulassa,
from meditation or the bottom of
a rum cola—
or the red coals
of a summer campfire,
the molecules of carbon
drinking oxygen.
Ulassa in the dictionaries,
will have no real etymology
for a while,
Having first breathed air only
on this morning of
May 23, 2013,
Ulassa will enter poems
and maybe yoga classes,
will become a cocktail and
an expensive perfume, eventually
a breed of cat, or surely the
name of a racehorse,
even a minor crater on
the surface of the moon,
Ulassa will live for four hundred years.
104 languages, give or take,
will borrow and ingest it,
Before it burns out like a star or “odd bodkin”
from Shakespeare, just remember,
It started Here, on this day.
Morningwriting
8:59 a.m. I know I need a poem’
so, fountain pen and pad at the ready
sitting slantwise view
on our tiny back deck
the morninglit green curve of my tall cinnamon fern
bold, bright, near-yellow the way
the sun insinuates itself on it
weaving through upward layers
of east facing trees
that let light shimmer this frond poised
as if it were a ballerina highlighted onstage
the hanging basket of mauve miniature petunias just above
almost obscure, that sun does not yet favor
them
their moment on the stage will come soon enough.
And now I’m ready to think about that poem.
Dedication
She breathed deeply, then wrote:
“This book
would not have been possible,
without both my slyness
and fortitude,
in evading the distractions of
my husband’s badgering, drinking and
threatened suicide attempts,
and my children’s sweetly
relentless neediness.
Candles and Cathedrals
The many Notre Dames of France blazed
with candle constellations
nine hundred years ago but
that’s just the start of it these
chiseled mountains rose from
Rouen, Chartres, and all over north France
Because candlemakers existed,
construction went into the summer nights
even if the project took two hundred years
Because carters, joiners, stone-masons, glaziers,
had to build, to move
Because butchers and greengrocers
had to feed the builders and movers
Because musicians, singers could not wait the decades out
to send their polyphonies not just up to God, but
to these early hardhats and townsfolk,
dragooned farmers working,
yes even by candlelight, but
That’s just the start of it, we do forget
that string quartets, Erasmus, Luther, Dante,
lacemakers, servants delivering night toddies
and seeing to chamber pots—
this all was not squared away
before the sun went down, so
those slender tallow cylinders
topped by redyellow flames over
tiny halfmoons of blue heat
pushed civilization forward,
Not waiting for gaslights or Edison.
Richard Sime
Berry Eater
He wears a belt around each leg crotch-high,
red hardhat, aviator glasses, chain saw on his hip
as he leaps from branch to branch, lightly
alighting from time to time to adjust his ropes,
when he’ll grab a handful of those berries.
Mulberries—we’ve spent too many summers
slogging through the purple paste that coats
the stone stairs and iron railings of our
Villa Charlotte Bronte, a confection
of buildings linked by walkways and arched
bridges along the Bronx bank of the Hudson.
The berries come from trees, large trees that
grow like weeds, raining sidewalks with fruit
from June until September, but even so
I’ve never tasted so much as one berry.
“Are they all that good?” my neighbor
hollers up to the man as his agitated
husband, who’d just as soon have the tree
cut down, pokes his head out then disappears.
The man pops another berry in his mouth
while he scans the tree for more ripe limbs
to hack off and send crashing to the ground.
Wiping juice from his mouth with the broad
back of his sun-stained hand, he yells down,
“They’re the sweetest when you’re on top, man,”
then pins another victim in his thighs, and saws.
Bitch
His ear is pressed to his Muse’s
breast, but she coughs up nothing—
a few yelps of love from a dog
(his dog, female, a bitch they’d say,
yet gentle), love based on scraps
from the table, a dry place
to sleep, someone to untangle
burrs from her coat, to sit still
as she tongues toes, nose, any limb
unclothed—all just dog data, no
heart. To his Muse he says “Leave,”
then glances down: The dog sits
at his feet, marmoreal, front legs
stiff, back legs askew, belly bare
and hot, just as he remembers.
A full hour he stares. Not one
muscle moves. No, he won’t write.
Opera Night
They’re all like that: Ruse, mystery
morals. I came to, pieces of it still
in mind, Così something or other,
but the rest—the front, the exterior,
the unflappable—they’re all here.
I’d say, Il faut renoncer chaque syllabe
if I spoke French. Why not Prussian?
Why not sub-American? Whatever,
evasion is essence. Nothing matters.
Everything’s inconsequential, but . . .
All in its place. Your underwear’s
in the laundry room. The ensembles
Mediterranean deceit? Turn rightside
out before dying. Lower the boom.
Dog Day
My bed a raft. She’s on it with me and her lamb,
black ears, dead squeaker. I’m resting my
fatigue. Damaged joints, inflammatory.
Used to be, I’d hang off to the floor, her lair
when she was underneath, anchor myself
with one hand, scratch her belly with the other.
Now I grab the lamb and launch it
across the room, out the door,
though she’ll return it. Such gentle jaws.
The bed’s head is elevated, two bricks
prone, a plank across, head
over heels: For my hiatal hernia, when too much
food is stuck inside. Today I’m full
of words, my friend’s words, her folk voice.
“Feelings, bind,” she writes. A wish,
a prayer, an invocation. Her words draw my thoughts
to the floor, the tilt of bed, the smell of stain
and wood down there, the cool, the cheerful shine.
It’s been hot. Close, we used to say,
my room a stale, unventilated
sigh. Even the living room, double-height,
banks of windows on the Hudson.
Down there I saw a dog, my neighbor’s
red and white Brittany, focused, focused
on his ball, panting, pacing, tongue lolling off his teeth
to the ground. She rose and limped to him,
lofted the ball again toward the river.
Mine’s female. (Ah, these females.)
Once she crawled into my lap when I was filled with
I don’t know what. Satan? She there
on my lap with this fury inside. We sat still,
the two of us, a kind of draining. Now her chin rests
on the lamb’s white chest. Only the squeaker’s
dead: The lamb’s alive. Five summers in her jaws,
the quiet chewing, peaceful
and delicate, a song.
Jennifer Popoli
Generations in a wine dark sea
Instead of fresh herbs, what I rub on my skin now
is nettles, I cry out and delight in the dramatic effect
The adolescent is standing before me, is not me,
his eyelashes pretty now he leaves them alone,
He’s moved on to finger cracking. He ought to understand,
the age is right, is it not? to say to him, let’s talk now
about travelling cumulous clouds, moon riding day sky,
hair falling in dust, cats brushing legs like foliage,
tropical night breeze, whirling, spinning maple seeds,
crunchy autumn leaves and one small lone blue feather, reappearing
in unpredictable places, pressed between the pages of books like forgotten
euros, Let’s talk about damp yellow g
rass recently nourished, slumber, lotus-
eaters and opiates, acres of coconut trees, Let’s talk about eyes sharp as a puma’s
and moving limbs more precise in the darkness, a lifted curse, a shattering vase,
a slice of papaya, a still dark brown face, flapping through a sanctimonious night
and memories of many lives, let’s talk about dirty quartz and the smell of
seashells while washing hair, flecked eyes that sparkled with a spice like
pimento, lips wet with fruit, the scythe that hacked the clouds into streaks of
plasma, the plotless story, the sequential paintings, your ticking hand that ruled
time and weather, the world splitting into a series of images, all times and
possibilities, in one unique frame, the ruffling of hair and heart possession that
echoes across the aeons.
Lost fairy
They poisoned the Argentinian trumpet vine
because it got too comfortable, sprouted everywhere
like a weed, and replaced it with some other flowering vine
more white and well-mannered. I suspected them of racism
but it was their house. When I moved here, the flowers seemed
to be in my face like the advertising, although the convolvulus always
tended to remind me of Borges. No more discreet kangaroo paws, subtle
Geraldton wax, bedraggled wattle. Here the bedraggled wattle is me, amongst
those other belles, the saucy snapdragons, self-sufficient succulents, ubiquitous
petunias, spicy nasturtiums, whose population seems to dwindle in every suburb
where we live, along with the European dandelions, washed of residual herbicides and thrown in our soups. We are foragers, tribespeople
with little ones strapped to my front and my back, a stolen cumquat
or rosemary leaf perpetually between my teeth. How did dente di leone
translate to dandelion? The plant has teeth, it’s rough, roughage.
I slurp the nectars, check the parallel lines on the leaves before
chewing native sarsaparilla, tear my sandalled feet to ribbons
in the sparse strips of bush between train stations, teach the kids
to hoist themselves over a tall rock. We run away here when we can’t stand
being at home. I pretend for a moment that I haven’t been domesticated,
pretend for one afternoon, I still have big, purple, feathery wings.
Other lives
A staircase leading to a new continent
The smell of a man’s body, never known
but so vividly imagined
Practising the words “I love you”