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Liz Ahl

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Living in the Shade

 

A mile from here, the peonies 
have already exploded,
but here, their tiny, tight grenades
only hint at pink, have yet to 
blow themselves inside out
though they reach and reach,
bejeweled by shiny black ants,
during the few blazing hours.

A mile down this road,
when it emerges from the lush throat
of maples and poplars and pines,
and onto the painted asphalt lanes,
the vagrant roadside irises 
have already bent and faded,
giving way to succulent spears
of wayward lupine 
thrusting up from the ditch.

Here, ferns are just finishing
their unfurling at the feet
of the trees, and the wild raspberries
send their tardy brambles and blooms
into the stingy slice of high noon.

It's a moody dimness, but survivable—
we who live here must forgive
this slowness, this ever-flagging pace.
We learn a tenderness towards
the moss and fungus, and a special 
reverence for the ephemeral lady slipper,
that eerie orchid, emerging 
from the leaf mulch into 
the deep pools of cool shade,
far from sunlight's unmediated
and murderous extravagance.

 

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After many years of reading and writing poems, and perhaps especially after eighteen months of not much sustained writing at all, I feel less and less confident asserting understandings about poetry, perhaps least of all my own practices and poems. However, I do enjoy reading what other folks write when they describe and/or reflect on their own work, so I’ll try.

 

“Living in the Shade” is an example of my common tendency to make metaphors of the landscapes in which I find myself, seeking meaning in some dynamic between my “self” and the physical properties of flora and fauna. I notice how my metaphorizing gaze turns those physical properties of the "natural" world towards a human-centered metaphysics. William Carlos Williams' notion that there are "no ideas but in things" definitely occupies some of my aesthetic headspace, even as I want to

resist its all-or-nothing certainty (NO ideas, Bill? None at ALL?). 

 

Reflecting on the “we” in this poem I wonder whether I ought to have stuck with "I" instead of generalizing for myself an invented cohort of similarly situated shade-dwellers. I suppose I wanted some company – even imaginary – in this notion of coming to be more appreciably present in what

I thought I was meant to disdain or attempt to escape: the “shade.” A “we” who could join me in

seeing the old sunlight/shade trope differently -- that the sunlight could be "murderous," that the slowness-to-bloom might feel cool and comforting in contrast. 

 

As I write this, November creeps towards solstice. Even though the trees that kept things slow and dark and cool in spring and summer are bare now, the stingy supply of sunlight sifting through isn’t doing much. It’s shade city up here.   

 

—Liz Ahl

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Sara Burant

 

 

feral pigeons over the empty ballfields, fall 2020

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can i say they were of water

& light gathered

up & let go

gathered & let go

can i say they had water's patina

a river’s

eddies in the sky

instead of rain they opened

windows 

i heard wheels

steam-vents & winnowing 

clapping & a crowd i heard

running i heard horses

can i say they were horses

can i say they were the manes of horses

unmaking & remaking

themselves 

restless variations on a theme allegro ma

non troppo an unfinished

unfinishable movement

a face rearranging itself as light

& shadow

shadow & light a note

left by someone

who never comes back

the same house

that can’t be the same house

can i say they entered me as if i were that

 

൪

 

Poetry comes close to spiritual practice. In and through making poems, I learn to listen—or do I

mean hear? For it seems to me that what I do when I work on poetry is a kind of uncovering, not unlike archaeology, sifting through the chatter, layers of memory, circumstance, observation,

sensory experience to uncover the poem as it wants to be expressed. The sifting can take many

drafts, or just a few. Typically I begin with handwritten free writes. Sometimes my hearing is acute; other times I’m practically deaf to what the poem is trying to say and have to write through dozens

of iterations. Maybe some poems are just fickle and like to play hard-to-get. Maybe sometimes—or often!—my mind is distracted, making the poem difficult to hear through the noise. Or maybe I’m meant to learn how to commit to poetry as to a beloved. I leave it, and it finds me. I run towards it, and it vanishes. Or we sleep together and dream the same dreams. I think a lot about form, and

about the relationship of words to things, and how the poem seeks to hold in fruitful tension the abstract and the concrete. 

 

My reading is eclectic, but I return again and again to certain voices—Rilke, Blake, Dickinson, Tranströmer, and Laura Jensen, among others. I’m drawn to the surrealists, especially Paul Éluard

and Joyce Mansour, who trusted the logic of the unconscious. Through each of these poets, as well as the later work of Barbara Guest, and the work of Peter Gizzi, I’m further inspired to leave behind

the narrative impulse that was once so strong in me.

 

—Sara Burant  

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Joanne Durham

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You Can’t Put the Red Sea in a Poem

 

a famous poet warned. If you let it in, your poem is crammed

with two million Israelites clutching babies in arms, 

with satchels of clothes and unleavened bread, 

and you’ve invited in the enormous weight of a God 

who punishes evil by slaying slave owners’ children, 

so here come the Egyptians as God splits open 

that unmentionable sea just in time 

for the migrants to cross and closes it right up 

on the pursuers, and your poem is choking on all those

drowning men, flailing horses and wrecked chariots, 

and next thing you know you have races and nations and power 

and poverty all spilled in the red ink of misery 

and your poem is overwhelmed --

it’s baffled that He (because it’s always he) never sat them all down 

and explained this wasn’t what He had in mind 

those intense seven days he created a world so magnificent 

poets can’t stop trying to describe it, which is what happened 

to me when it snowed at the beach at high tide, not just a dusting 

but a full-on onslaught of snow we hadn’t seen in these parts in years, 

downing telephone wires and snapping tree branches and power out. 

When the snow finally stopped and the tide receded,

it left a wide strip of sand along the shore, snow mounds piled

like crystal dunes on one side and the ocean’s perpetual roar 

on the other, and in between the tiny miracle of a parting 

I passed through, kicking scattered seashells like nothing strange

and beautiful had happened, nothing that needs to mention the Red Sea. 

 

൪

 

One of my mentors, poet Dannye Romine Powell, read a draft of a poem I was writing in which I compared the snow on the beach to the parting of the Red Sea. She remarked that she had once

been told, “You can’t put the Red Sea in a poem – it’s just too big.” As soon as she said it, I knew

that was going to be the inspiration for the revised poem.  

 

I have written poetry since I was a kid, and constantly wove poetry into my classroom as a teacher, but I never seriously studied it or shared it beyond friends and family. When I retired, I decided poetry was going to finally get its due in my life. The pandemic, as tragic as it has been, opened up

so many doors to online workshops and poetry communities. Although I’m one of hundreds in her webinars, Ellen Bass has taught me so much with her specific examples of craft, especially her generous deconstruction of her own writing process. I discovered Naomi Shihab Nye years ago when

I was teaching, and I continue to go to her poetry when I need to recenter in what I find important

in a poem. I think the reason I love poetry is best summed up by the poet Erik Campbell who said, “I read and write poetry to remind myself that I have a soul that needs a periodic tune-up.”

 

—Joanne Durham

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E. Laura Golberg

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Cardinals

 

Feathers fluffed in the cold, two cardinals, a male, and his fair mate,

fly from the yet unpruned branches of my fig tree into the nearby 

hedge and back again. One after another, over and over, one

following the other, a game. Are you and I doing that, 

these days, circling each other in the quotidian

life we lead, “What’s for supper?’’ “When is

our next vaccination?” Should we start

packing up the house, giving away

the china, planning for a future 

in which you are no longer 

you, when the dun mate 

flies by herself?

 

൪

 

I was fortunate to retire from my career in local government in my fifties and have had time to take poetry classes and hone my craft. I’m reading Linda Gregerson and Catherine Barnett and am discovering Ted Kooser through his volume Kindest Regards.

 

I recently had reason to consult, yet again, my fat volume Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence. I read

his work extensively during my adolescence in England, but his New Mexico poetry never made

sense until I emigrated to the U.S. I made a pilgrimage to Taos where I looked around me at the mountains, reread and finally understood these poems.

 

—E. Laura Golberg

Jackson

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Líjiāng Reflections (Li River Reflections)

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平静的漓江里                                                [Píngjìng de Líjiāng lǐ]

有两座山：                                                    [yǒu liǎng zuò shān:]

In the calm Li River

two mountains

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On the bank

a foreigner

beams photographs home

 

 

A lone swimmer makes one broad ripple

 

 

The foreigner writes a line

then has to go

 

 

平静的漓江里

有两座山

 

 

 

5 February 2019, Yángshuò, China

 

൪

 

This poem represents a real place and time. The line about the ripple was written in the moment: I sent it on Messenger, along with some photographs of the scene, to a friend, the inimitable

Australian poet Coral Carter. The rest of the poem was written later when I looked at the photographs.

My knowledge of Chinese is elementary at best. I learnt it recently when I taught English in China

for a year, and bits of it sometimes arise when I write. It has an entirely different beauty to that of English.

I have written poetry since childhood, seeking poems that work whether declaimed loudly or whispered in the mind. I write poetry because I enjoy it, but I bother to refine and publish it only because other people seem to get something from it. The Internet, wonderfully, lets us publish internationally, and I have done so since 2003. More of my work is available at thepoetjackson.com.

 

—Jackson

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Pam Matz

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Little Horse

 

In my dream about Kafka

I know others are dreaming Kafka, too.

My Kafka, all deep-set eyes,

walks through the room 

noticing things. I have an excess of things.

Oats. Buckets. Sponges. Cloths. 

A saddle.

 

I want to tell him I need all this

because I have a little horse.

I need the little horse to be comfortable.

 

The skeletons under our skins

are present in the room also, 

and I want the horse on my side 

 

when the show-down between

flesh and bone

becomes severe. There was

 

a time I thought the horse and I

forgave each other. 

If forgiveness were irreversible,

I tell Kafka, I wouldn’t have to keep at it.

 

൪

 

When I was young, it seemed magic to me, that those small black marks on the pages of books could tell me stories and keep me company and introduce me to complicated feelings. Of course I wanted

to have that power myself. I wanted to become a writer. 

 

As an adult, I kept on writing, but in different ways. I spent most of my working life in an academic library with an extraordinary collection, and I did editorial work for scholarly journals, curated exhibitions about the library’s research resources, and became a research librarian. I started writing for myself again in 2007, when I sat with my mother at the end of her life and realized I was writing

a villanelle in my head about those moments, and I needed to get it down on paper. That villanelle is not a wonderful piece of work, but it reminds me that writing and reading poems can lead to discoveries that are not accessible in other ways.

 

The poems I hold closest are ones I found at times I needed them: Adrienne Rich’s "Diving into the Wreck," Lucie Brock-Broido’s "Moving On in the Dark Like Loaded Boats at Night, Though There is No Course, There is Boundlessness" (a title that comes from a letter of Dickinson’s), and Henri Cole’s "Hens." A few of the other poets whose works are touchstones for me are Ellen Bass, Lucille Clifton, Marie Howe, Carl Phillips, Wisława Szymborska, and C. D. Wright, and there are many younger

poets whose works feel full of new light, such as Ocean Vuong and Franny Choi. 

 

Thank you, Quartet, for inviting this statement.

 

—Pam Matz

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Kristina Moriconi

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At the Center of Something

 

She thinks about striking a match, touching it to the tool shed 
still crammed with his things—spools of string, cigar boxes, 

 

circles drawn on balsa wood around corpses of mice. Inside, 
of what remains, she decides to make art—the potted house 

 

plants, decaying gourds, rusting water pipes—his paintbrushes, 
as he left them, still soaking in old rusted cans. His body, too, 
 

her memory of it skewed, by betrayal first then disease—

how, for her, it takes the form of furniture, harsh lines 
 

of pencil, heavy thrusts of the palette knife, each rendering 
more a shape than a part. She looks around, the house 
 

riddled with him—a pink rose in the eye socket of a horse’s skull, 
O’Keeffe skies on windowsills. Sometimes it’s that simple—
 

how blue finds its way into the hollow, pitch-black into the spaces 
between her bones, and the words without pictures, scattered

 

everywhere, fonts with their heavy feet, half-finished villanelles 
and sonnets, and the Valentines he made for her each year,

 

his last, a shadowbox resting on the mantle: duct tape balled 
like a fist, sticky and hard, cadmium-red pooling in place of a heart.

 

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I search for inspiration in the work of both poets and visual artists. Beside me on my desk or in my travel bag, I keep a small selection of books. I open them each day and let myself disappear into the beauty and rhythm of someone else’s words before I begin writing my own. One book that stays

with me, always, is Myra Shapiro’s I’ll See You Thursday. Her work was my first path into poetry.

Right now, I have added Fleda Brown’s Flying through a Hole in the Storm and two collections by

Darla Himeles: Flesh Enough and Cleave. Darla is a poet whose work completely engages me, but I

am also inspired by her dedication to the process, to showing up at the page as well as encouraging other writers through her Instagram account. If I’m ever feeling like the muse has abandoned me,

that is one place I know I can go. I also make a point to follow, almost exclusively, writers and visual artists, Instagram becoming for me a virtual museum of individually composed and crafted things. These pieces, paired with what I observe closely in the world around me, become ways into and through my own work. Also, practically speaking, I begin each of my writing notebooks by copying this onto the first page: “I know a poem is done when it stops bothering me.” I have turned these words from Mary Ruefle into a kind of philosophy for everything I am in the process of creating. 

 

—Kristina Moriconi 

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Marcella Remund

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REWILDING

 

A hunter’s moon lifts above treeless

bluffs east of the Missouri. A ribbon 

of silver shimmers its way across 

the water to the western bank, where

 

we’re tucked in the river valley. 

The wind is finally dying down.

Tent flaps settle like great primordial

wings. I call on ancestral genes, cell 

 

memory, akashik records, wood sprites—

whatever will help me start this fire

against the October cold. Crumpled 

pages of the Plain Talk ignite, kindling 

 

sparks, flames jump and lick split wood 

I’ve balanced in a pyramid over the 

kindling. Smoke tendrils shift, reach, 

wrap me in their wild perfume. 

 

Where shadows dip and glide in the

western bluffs behind us, coyotes begin

their chorus, call the pack to a kill. 

Here by the dancing flames, we open 

our throats and answer.

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൪

 

I’m a recently retired teacher of college English, and for as long as I can remember, I have been madly in love with language—word signs, word order, the shapes of words, their music, their meanings sometimes plain, direct, and sometimes amorphous and changeable.

 

The poets who’ve influenced me the most as a writer include poets I know personally and whose voices and rhythms I can hear in person, as they read their own work. I’ve also been greatly influenced by the poet Ai, who taught me with her brilliant persona poems that brutality and beauty often can, and sometimes must, coexist. And I always come back to Yeats, to the transcendental nature of some of his work, such as my favorite lines from “Vacillation”: “While on the shop and street I gazed / My body of a sudden blazed; / And twenty minutes more or less / It seemed, so great my happiness, / That I was blessed and could bless.”

 

—Marcella Remund

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Carla Sarett

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Passing by the Giants

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Everyone's in orange 

but me and the unhomed.

In sunshine, a strident shade.  

I trail a couple lumbering ahead

in bright Giants sweatshirts. 

We skirt a pool of mustard, 

and ignore the outstretched cups, 

stained by coffee and dirt.  

 

I don't believe one word you say, 

the woman shouts like a second-

rate actress spitting out her exit. 

Her partner sneaks a glance 

behind. But I'm sporting Ray-Bans, 

he can't see how words hit me.  

A parking ticket, a casual slight-- 

we all lose count of what we've hidden.  

On my return I catch 

the stadium's muted roar.  

It's like everyone inside were winning.

 

൪

 

Poetry's a late-life gift. After my husband died in late 2018, a course of serious meditation led me to writing poetry. I was about to start another short story, and I may yet. But fiction is the natural

home for character, and poetry's the home for experience; and it was the latter I needed to write about. Somehow a short story about grief became a poem, and so it goes. Even ghost stories seem to become poems these days.  

 

On my nightstand, there's Horace, Dickinson, Larkin and recently, I've added Simon Armitage and Philip Levine. I think great lines lead to other lines...just as great stories lead to other stories. I carry many poems in my head. Philip Larkin's "Whitsun Weddings" is one of those. I am in awe of how its meaning emerges from mundane incident. Its final lines stun me: "A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain." In my poem, "Passing by the Giants," I built upon a loud argument I heard before a baseball game. Like Larkin, I was alone, eavesdropping and not quite part of the culture; but I understood something about that fight.   

 

—Carla Sarett

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Harriet Shenkman

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Survival 

               

A small girl, hair newly cut like Buster Brown,

 

feet barely touching the floor, I sat at one of the

little round tables with other children. We slurped

              our milk and spooned potatoes into our mouths.

 

The matrons, Holocaust survivors, hovered, 

Think of the starving children in Europe. One by one, 

the children left the room. I sat alone

 

at the table, staring at my plate night after night. 

The food made me gag. 

I will sit here forever. I saw the radiator 

 

across the room. Tiptoed with a clump of meat, stuffed 

it behind the iron coils. The next night, a cupcake, 

half a banana. Every night I fed the radiator 

 

until my stash gave off a putrid smell. The matrons rail against 

             vermin, but understand despair. I promise not to hide 

food behind the radiator again. I save myself

 

and will save myself over and over, even now.

 

൪

 

For this poem in particular, I tried to think about a personal experience as a child and how it had a lasting effect on me.  It is essentially about learning how to be resilient.  Although, I am happy for

the reader to take away what he or she will.

 

—Harriet Shenkman

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Gerry Wilson

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Landscaping

 

All that fall we argued over stone,

what color, shape, and size would fit the space

we planned, a garden path to take the place

of wasted ground gone to weeds and prone

to wash away with summer storms. But not one

suited us, not Tennessee field or red-faced

rock trucked in from Arizona, a brace

of stone the color of dried blood, the tone

 

too strong for you, too loud, you said, as though

the rock could shout. And so we settled for stone

that’s aged and settled down like us, through

a thousand years of footprints and rain gone

back to earth, to hardest dust: sandstone, limestone,                           

and shale: wind, air, and water’s work well done.         

 

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I grew up in the household with my maternal grandfather, who was an invalid all my young life. He died when I was ten, but I can still see him: propped up in bed, smoking his Lucky Strikes, listening to a baseball game on his radio. Such memories are the heart of story for me, and my poems often tell stories. 

 

For many years, I taught high school English and creative writing and wrote poetry, memoir, and fiction along with my students. I was first drawn to writing poems; writing stories came later. Poetry remains a vital part of my writing life, but I am primarily a fiction writer now. When I’m deep into a fiction project, I read poetry, hoping that the grace of it—sound and image and language condensed to their essential forms—will find its way into my writing. My fiction is at its best when that happens. 

 

I’m currently involved in a project at my church where a few of us take turns emailing poems to other church members. Sharing these poems has been important to all of us during the pandemic, a connection through the love of words we might not otherwise have. I’ve shared some old favorites—everything from Shakespeare to E. E. Cummings—as well as the work of other poets I’ve come to love more recently, like Natasha Trethewey, Danusha Laméris, Barbara Crooker, and Ada Limón, whose Bright Dead Things I’m reading now. When I’m in need of comfort, I return to Mary Oliver, whose ability to convey deep feeling through simple words continues to inspire and move me.

 

—Gerry Wilson

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