Brigit Truex reads at A Starry Night
Lodi, April 2012
—Photo by Katy Brown, Davis
TANNINS
—Jeanine Stevens, Sacramento
I still crave sulfur
the taste of spring water black
from the underground bubbler,
the scent of yellowed planets
and stars twirling
on the ceiling—
“glow in the darks,”
to cheer us during blackouts.
The neighbor boy ate dirt,
my school chum sucked the top
button of his shirt,
and yes, the ones who ate paste
the same tannins
we all crave.
Black coffee tastes
so sweet, creosote works
for coughs, and I prefer
bitter compounds in a bold
“Cougar Hill Zinfandel.”
Now, the drink in my new
stainless steel bottle: cool water,
creosote, astringent, reminiscent.
_________________________
ODE TO SUCKERS
—Jeanine Stevens
Wrapped four to a pack
in white paper dotted
with cherry, raspberry,
grape,
and butterscotch, a rubber band
around your little loopy
“safety” handles, you satisfied.
Shaped like a giant’s
teardrop, huge in our mouths,
a perfume stimulating
salivary glands. Sumptuous
pleasure filled tiny cheeks—
jaws ached exquisitely, syrupy
juice trickled down, soaked my
dress.
The last bliss—sucking
the soggy limp string. Oh!
your clarity when held to the
light,
transparent chips like stained
glass, a jeweled window
guarding the witch’s cottage.
_______________________
PERIGEE
—Taylor Graham, Placerville
This nearest moon casts shadows
in the hall—ghosts of kings, conspirators,
and lovers. Alone they're walking,
room to empty room tonight in a world
they never knew in life. Maybe
they only lived their lives as we remember
in words for a stage. The death
of Caesar, Lady Macbeth's mad mind.
Outside, somewhere a dog barks
at that supermoon that won't come
so close to us again. A meteor
has flashed above us, fallen, scattered
itself in fragments. A distant
siren. Silence. Inside, imagined voices
fade down the hall, trailing lines
composed by someone centuries gone.
I know no more of him
than the man in the moon; and yet
they say he taught kings how to speak
and act kingly. A cloud across
the moon. Down on the main road,
a motorcycle takes the curve;
brief
flash of headlight, and it's gone.
Taylor Graham reads at A Starry Night
—Photo by Katy Brown
_________________________
LOVEPLACE
for N.
—Tom Goff, Carmichael
Sometimes you are the river,
flowing and fresh
with egrets, tule stalks,
blue herons, cormorants:
and wild are the ways you
break apart, break against,
rock with snowmelt,
scattering frantic fish.
At other times, you become
the spiral ascent
toward giant sequoias, or
through moss-clad pines
to a droplet of alpine lake
clear as white wine,
where sky-folds gather in one
teeth-chattering tent
above marsh-wet meadows where
innocent humans
goad bears to absconding on
their terrified fours;
you’re that same small
silvery lake where the only pinafores
worn are dragonfly wings. O
shimmering woman,
you are my compass rose, more
graceful than Point de Gaze
lace:
lace:
my all-points directional
guide, in the shape of a lovely face.
____________________________
WEED
—Tom Goff
He wishes he could be of use.
From another room,
her laughter sounds: practice
room door
closed on a trumpet,
straight-mute sardonic.
He thinks of Vincent Millay’s
line: Your laughter
pelts my skin with small
delicious blows.
No, he corrects: Your laughter
ricochets deep inside me,
pool table,
side cushion kissed off,
thunder in the corner pocket.
And your
little striped ball, pealing
its joy
clicks like a stopped small
bell,
falls into unreachable
recesses
of the table.
He is desperate for metaphor,
and it shows in this poem.
His heart
is weed. Not the far Northern
California Weed, which nears
Oregon,
sustains cattle and horses,
seeds its
grasses in the coitus of the
rain.
The red pulse-making organ
one tall
sword of weed, and he wishes
you would come, O most
fruit-sweet
lady with your song of
Solomon mouth
pink as the ripe insides of
the wild fig,
come to him with one
relieving snick
of your garden shears…
____________________________
AURORA
—Tom Goff
The only sight that matters:
you, spirit, your soft facial
curves
framed in the flow of
never-do-you-
cut-it hair. If for a day you
hide
tresses and forehead under a
cap,
perhaps it is a San Francisco
Giants
cap, so that all I see of you
is
the steady brave gaze of
brown
from under visor cover,
forest
cover. The amazing full smile
and the SF logo in
branding-iron
orange, burning you into me.
Must my muse also be the dawn
goddess?
And with that SF I remember
that slightly acrid flavor
sassafras.
The synesthesia
of touch, scalding touch,
sight,
painful sight, and bitter
taste
bodying forth your sweet
aura, your aura, your aurora.
I can sniff your perfume,
the delicately grainy scent
of your lipstick, your
eyeshadow:
strange, for you wear
precisely
none of these. Yet the
minglement
of odors, fragrances, makes
my ears and temples pound,
and I reel dizzily though
rooted
in place. All the world comes
to me,
poverty, starving skeletal
children
and dogs, cesspools and
overflowing
sewers, magical palaces, jam
pots
spiked with ink, all the
world
through my flooding senses,
simply
because you stand here, and I
here.
I heed all of this chaos, and
none of it.
We live Mexicos and Irelands
apart.
Oh, immortal, we stand
aches and ages away from
touching
and loving.
__________________________
SHAKESPEARE’S OTHER MOTORCYCLE
(an amicable rejoinder to Katy Brown)
—Tom Goff
Yes, we can agree Shakespeare
had a bike, a bike kinda like
the one Fred Seidel wheelies
around the town. It must’ve been
a nice Italian racing bike, racy
curves, commedia dell’arte
carburetor. Just to idle it
puffed the exhaust of privilege
into the faces, into the minds
of five thousand spectators
the blank verses, the quatrain-
and-couplet sonnets, smothering
them in Juliet thoughts, Romeo
bladethrusts. The very rumble
of his fifth gear, ermine making
like burlap. When that silver
exhaust trumpet squirts his sennets
of squid escape ink, he becomes
Anonymous, Ignoto, Master
Apis Lapis, Sweet Shepherd Willy,
ribboning the Stratford (London,
not Warwickshire) road along
the Avon (not by the sacred
fake Birthplace, but Bilton
manor). Oh, he peels his road and flings it
lording his whirl into heaven’s riches,
Will Shake-Speare, invented name
alongside Pessoa’s, world’s
grandest, noisiest of skylarks
busting the great gate into rolling pearls…
_____________________________
Today's LittleNip:
Each day I live in a glass room unless I break it
with the thrusting of my senses and pass through the splintered walls to
the great landscape.
—Mervyn Peake
_____________________________
—Medusa
Hatch Graham reads at A Starry Night
—Photo by Katy Brown
