Key of Love

Sex.

Not for Sell

“Love.”

Not to Practice

Crime.

Between Shanghai Gardens and the Shear Magic Salon,
I found Dave’s Monuments and imagined Dave like others
I’d met in the business, sharp-featured and bloodless.
I was wrong. He rounded the corner of the house, his shock
of blond hair, moustache to match, cheeks flushed. Carhartt
jacket and Timberland boots looked more Northwest Territories
than northeast funereal. Dave took off a work glove, held
out his hand, it was warm. I followed him through stacked
slabs of granite to a shed, where we sat on folding chairs
in front of an easel with newsprint tacked to a board. Both
quiet, not much to say. With a dark pencil he traced the sweep
of a curve, top of the headstone, its straight sides, then gave it
three dimensions. He scribbled grass around its base. I imagined
him an artist, a sculptor maybe, who needed a steady paycheck,
couldn’t stomach working for someone else. I pictured us side
by side in a life drawing class, both lost in the curves of a body.
Dave offered me water, filled a glass from a pitcher. What else
would you like? He said, and for a moment, I wondered –
but he meant on the stone. In caps, he wrote my last name,
then below, my husband’s first and middle, his dates of birth
and death. What about him would you like to call out? Maybe
his high-pitched laugh when he was surprised. Could you
capture that in stone? Or the energy he could contain until just
the right moment. How do you translate that to rock, my
monument maker? I leafed through his book of designs –
hearts, birds, a sailboat, masks of comedy and tragedy.
He was a publisher, I said, how about a book and a pen?
And a fish? He loved the outdoors. Dave hummed while
he sketched an open book, pen laying across the page.
Pine boughs at the corners. Artistic license. He used to light
the menorah with our son. Dave tucked a menorah into the
boughs, added a Star of David. I wanted to rest my head on
this man’s shoulder. He reminded me of other places:
the West, my younger self, my father at his easel. We did
not finish, so I’d come back to see him again. Maybe it was
the jacket, the boots, the stone, the cold.

When in flight, geese are called a skein.
At rest, a gaggle. When they fly in a V,
they’re a wedge. Not cheese, and not a flock.

A group of owls is a parliament, whose eyes
tell us this makes sense, unlike those crows perched
and cawing above the compost called a murder.

I hear skein and think of my mother asking me
to hold my hands up like the surgeon she wished
I’d grow up to become, not a wordsmith weaving

skeins of phrases. She wound wool into balls
to be knitted into sweaters with sturdy twisting cables.
The Brooklyn gangs were not elks, nor were

unemployed mobs filled with kangaroos.
Right here in Virginia, you’ll see scurries
of squirrels more often than a skein of Canada geese.

Oh, but the frisson at their barking, as if
encouraging each other through winter skies,
wings rowing across the high deep blue,
shouting secrets both profound and true.

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361 362 363 364 365 One year.

April 25, 2024 Day 793

Сімсот дев’яносто три (Ukrainian)

Семьсот Девяносто Три (Russian)

Ukrainian nonprofit Mizhvukhamy has archived 500 inscriptions left by Russian soldiers.

Sorry for the mess, but it’s okay, Americans will help you clean up.

1 Hyperallergic.com

Quotes from a NYT video published 2.12.24

I watch the video again and again, the girl’s face
unsmiling as she speaks, eyes open wide, her lashes
exclamation points.

I heard my name. So I woke up.
And then I heard someone say
that her entire family was killed.
And I said “Me?”
Hands fly to her chest.

“Yes, that’s you.”
She shakes her head.
“No, my parents didn’t die.
They’re still here.”

>Her hands are quiet now.
Her voice trembles, pleading.
I said “You’re liars. You’re lying to me.
They weren’t killed. They’re alive.”

The video cuts to mountains of rubble after a missile attack,
to a hospital where she lies in a coma, and back
to the living room where she sits in her wheelchair.

I was in a coma for fifteen days.
I couldn’t remember anything that happened to me.
I couldn’t remember my name or anything else.
I only remembered that maybe I saw my dad in front of me
before he was killed.

Everyone in the house was killed

Eyes on her interviewer, she names the dead – her mother,
her father, her little brother, all her grandparents, all her uncles
on her father’s side and their wives and children, all her uncles
on her mother’s side and their wives and children – as their smiling
photos fill my screen.

There were many children.
The house was full.
They were all killed.

She sighs deeply, looks down.

Hands in her lap, eyes red, she’s crying
as she interrogates her interviewer.

She’s interrogating me.

Why aren’t we like the other children?
I would really like to understand.
I would really like to understand why they do this to us.
Because people can’t live without their parents.

Night, cliffside knoll. I watch the tide controlled
by moon’s invisible tether. Catch a wish I toss
on the tide’s behalf, that it could move

of its own volition. How fucked. How dumb. What
desire am I projecting, the world unleashed? Gossamer
everything, decisions cut clean. I am opaque. I am

sad. I say so out loud, finger the tiny word, a sphere
I expect to snap in half. It dissolves like lavender
bath-bombed beneath a faucet. With two sharp stones

I make a blade, empty myself: funeral effigy carved
from a single piece of skin. I take care to paint myself lifelike:
crushed hydrangea, dried astilbe. Astilbe means

I’ll wait for you. I fill my whittled body with it,
pestle apologies in the mortar of my skull.

Half a large array of his Craftsman tools;

Four neckties for all occasions;

One first edition of his anxiety;

One battered, incomplete birdwatcher’s life list;

Five worn-out Louis Armstrong albums;

Uncountable hours in the family car
Driving to Saturday errands;

The beneficiary yield
On a five-year investment in psychotherapy;

One copy of the Collected Poems of Robert Service
Wrapped in clear cellophane by my librarian mother;

A solid understanding that it’s better to play sports than watch them
Although watching sports can be fun, too;

Two sturdy, well-used chessboards
The bigger board being the one
He made with his large array of Craftsman tools;

One serviceable pair of binoculars
For watching undisturbed birds;

One innated sense of stability
With a life-time guarantee;

One tattered copy of his wit;

One reliable Pre-Kennedy Assassination Parker fountain pen
That creates my Post-Truth lines;

Three lucid hours of conversation
Before cancer ended his life;

An established method of wrapping your arms around your wife
While she cooks
Pressing your belly against her back
And smelling her hair;

An undying understanding that this life is worth your enthusiasm.

for D

Beacon Street made way
for us walking this evening

to the bookstore. Inside we
take our seats in the crowd

spaced for social distance.
The venerable poet steps

to the podium. Her new poems
grab and weave through

Paris streets, into smoky
Beirut cafés of exiles

and refugees, past Shawarma,
Jambon-beurre, cups of Haleeb

Ma’ Hal. But the afterwarmth
of you is fading. My hand

wants your fingers, the warmth
of your lower back curving,

curving against me.

through dense rose-blanketed briar, under fogged canopy of Life-Kings breathing out your name,

splashing
across the Agapao River.

Dark Forest, what is the meaning of love?

Look, the condor soars, stretches out love’s size for you.

Dark Forest, how does love grow?

See, fiddleheads unfold love’s beauty to you.

A coastal beauty, what is that?

A bridge
suspended in time
that connects love’s span

over hairpin-carved creek
over sky-yellow sorrel, coltsfoot
over unseeable distance

and then climbing up the Earth’s face
before dinner at the Post Ranch Inn.

So much is determined by timing,
by when you begin, and with whom,
the season, the phase of the moon.

So much rides on one roll of the dice,
a spin of the wheel, on who
marked the cards and who deals.

Your future can change in an instant,
redirected by something as small as
the scent of her hair, the color of her eyes.

The face you choose to hold in the
diamond of your mind is the fulcrum
upon which you balance yourself,

so, choose wisely, and never
underestimate the importance
of how well your hand fits inside another’s.

Without O,
there is no joy,
but also no loss.
No atonement,
but no remorse.

Keep at it, beetle in that plush bed,
laying waste to love.

His arms, my deep chats

The cupid’s spade is sharpened

to dig up my grave

& kissed with the arrogance of thieves, dipped our feet in the circling
minnows. We dove off the edge to the rocky bottom, dove into each other

as the last carload left the parking lot; your skin tasted like melon
& the air after rain. You sucked the knob of my shoulder

& the breath from my lungs – when your hands touched my thighs,
I could have walked on water. As the sun slid behind the houses

on the opposite shore, we watched the sky turn the shade
of blackberries & the blue smoke of barbecues.

We laughed & swore to love, to forever,
swore to keep swimming straight into fall,

right through the deep end – choosing to ignore
any dangers ahead and the cold ache of dusk.

fag

/fag/ noun

ancient fires fueled by heretical bodies
his half-smoked pack of american spirit on the nightstand
public obscenity trials
moment to moment trending on snapchat
he was a professional cremator before stonewall
come away from the window  can we talk
he had the shakes he just needed a smoke
old circus mentality
minds and bodies at the witches’ feet
it’s been an unseasonably warm summer for this part of the state
would you mind  i ask for a lighter  my head is pounding
who started the fires in the rainforest        ?
his fierce voice
who detonated the bombs over palestine       ?
from the old english      meaning “a man on fire”

yields a second more. Yes, there’s no found calm in this permission
though here I am unfolding myself being unfolded garment-by-garment;
there you are turning onto your stomach here, this way. Your child surrendered,

your marriage opened, for a time your quiet, wild mouth, your natural grief,
 finds a home here.

isn’t divorce / a tincture for the scald
of blame / and rebuff?

isn’t detachment / an unruly couplet / scythed?

after sorrow slackens / shred the brackish
covenant / compose a solitary line –

a lone sparrow………

Past inspirations decorate wooden beams
in black magic marker. “Stay golden, Ponyboy.”
“Fail! Fail better!”

Bodies bump backstage.
Then fists pumping to some disco tune,
we dance onto the stage. Like an interrogation
from a film noir, bright lights hide
the audience in darkness. A Zen master
would face this with mind a dustless mirror,
but the Kentuckian samurai I imagine obsesses me.

Fear is in the waiting, not the doing.
They laughed at me at the university
but from this lump of inanimate flesh
I have created Martha Stewart!”
We play with living scenery, sweep edits,
scene crashes, and call backs; get a few laughs.
“Look, I taught this squid to read braille!”

At the after party, Marco’s laughter echoes
from courtyard walls while Rachel strikes poses
in a pantsuit with shoulder pads. For me
only the bones of reality –
lonely subway ride, parking garage,
gray cement under artificial lights.

Out of nowhere, love
swells in my chest, love
for the lawyers returning from a banquet, love
for the woman arguing about Gouda over a cell phone, love
for the janitor sweeping a deserted platform

If I need to drive to the mountains to escape
 a heat wave, you don’t want to.

If I yearn to fly some place we’ve never seen
 to enlarge our view of the world,
 you say, Go by yourself.

Walk the same paths and streets,
 walk the same streets and paths.

Shop, as always, at Trader Joe’s.
 Broil salmon, as per usual.

Only seasonal fruit – brief
cherries and peaches –
 perk me up.

Fun, too, when I think about it –
 my legs in Bermudas. Swimming
 in the backyard pool.

Drinking an Arnold Palmer
 under a sun umbrella,
 the smell of SPF 70,

the hat that makes me look
 like Lawrence of Arabia.
 Giddy pink lipstick.

And our garden, darling,
 blooming like cancer
 in the longest light.

Halted, where she looks at the prairie grass,
long dry, fallow dry. One way, as I see it,
a self makes an allegory of the land: isn’t
she like that, only a husk, having before
poured herself out,

fully, to-the-last measure, that kind of pouring.

Above her, the sun blares unprophetically, making
this one more day to get through, she thinks. There’s
pain that’s imposed

upon us. There’s pain
that comes from inside, from what we did,
what we failed to do. She stands at roadside
for what seems like forever, lost in a name
she can’t forget, that winnows its way
to the core, as if the memory of it was all it took
>to further hollow her out, it’s that kind of name.

The oil man – his name is Carl! Says he bleeds oil
and also? He’s just being honest:
our tank’s rusting out. It’s not leaking. Yet.

Only the bobcat is news.

He shows me his wife in the video,
standing even closer to the bobcat!

He’s filmed them both from behind,
their backs to the camera.

What does he want me to see? Is he flirting?
Or do my eye bags and tired hair just cry out,
please fix my furnace, and also, tell me a story? 

Carl gathers his bucket and sack cloth
but lingers in the doorway. Were I a six foot four,
tattoo-sleeved man, he’d have left an hour ago.

But no. It’s as if the soft-compact of me needs
his looking after. He doesn’t know
I’m also a mother, a feral energy.

– inspired by The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda

Do you not know that the sea
is a silken scarf
that we walk this desert
on blooms of ancient coral
bleached fingers
beneath our feet?

Lover, do you know
the spider’s silk will stop
a bullet, heal a wound? In Madagascar
seventy people toiled years
collecting spiders
from telephone poles, golden
filament to wrap the apples
of your breasts.

Yes, the female
wasp dies within
the fig, the blossom
dies within
the apple, you eat
their souls, spit the seeds
into your cupped hands.

We pictured a factory farm of krill underneath the hull.
Desperate sonic whistles calling them from across the sea.

Impossible to believe
in all the vastness of the ocean,
they would choose us.

They were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen &
yet I longed to be drunk.

Cynthia is dying.
Jonathan is getting married for the second time.
Heather has put the black dress back on
after all these years.

Whales breathe in a foreign language.
Spouts lifting out of the water in a sonic boom.

How can I tell them we were put on this Earth to destroy it?

That urge to put the antlers over the fireplace,
to rub a lightning bug’s skin against your own,

so that for one second
you can glow.

Marble Dust is Gary Metras’s twenty-third book. As Harris Gardner explains, “it is a travelogue in four parts. [   ] a paean to geography, actual, spiritual, historical, mythological as well as a special place in our collective hearts.”

Metras leads the reader along streets in Milan, Florence, and Assisi as well as other cities in other countries, sometimes leaning too completely on the history of places. Several of the longer poems get swamped with facts and a prosiness that washes out the potential for music and/or the image under observation. However, that changes as we move further east through Vienna and on, to Sarajevo and later, back to the English Channel and deep into the 19th Century. 

The magic begins with “Swimming With The Swans.” What might have been a standard swans- on-pond scene is upended by the appearance of a swimmer who has slipped into the water and joined the great white birds in their paddling. The image is wonderfully unexpected and the shape of the poem on the page matches its subject. In the first part of the poem, the coupled lines pivot quickly, steering much as the indifferent swans in their approach and rejection of fans along the shore. The shift to more even lines in the second part evokes the swimmer as he strokes evenly and quietly among the birds before ‘He paddles back/to shore, stands in dry air…/. The poems that follow from this point are more deftly crafted than the earlier travelogue poems. Here we ride a cable car up a mountain only to catch sight of the place we’d rather be. Metras offers us a meditation on ‘The Economics of Rain’ from war-ravaged Sarajevo where cold rain creates ‘One cold more the world expectorates’ and a mother ‘…hums to barter with night.’

Returning to Vienna, we watch the deaf and increasingly decrepit hulk of Beethoven navigate rainy streets, his iconic profile in that hat that could not ‘corral that large head and surf of hair about to crash.’ Unlike the poems of Assisi and Florence where we are told what we are likely to already know about St. Francis and Michelangelo, Metras gives us Beethoven and Vienna as mirrors of one another in a dark winter rain. And as we make our way west again, we see “A Full Moon In Switzerland” “I wonder” the speaker muses “how deep into the deep lake/ the moon’s light knifes..” that last verb bringing the reader up short, in a good way. 

We go on to find Oscar Wilde at his wife’s grave, Wordsworth sleeping in Stone Henge, and a flight of fancy in which the English Channel has been drained and one can simply walk to France (though being cautious of sea birds “who may be so confused they drop/ at your feet no longer capable of flight.” Metras summons the unexpected image and moment in these poems and offers them with music and momentum. “When I Saw The Wild Rabbit” is the most unexpected, rich juxtaposition of title and verse in the collection. We don’t know from the title, where we’ll be taken, and the short, intensely sensuous lyric drives the reader back to the title with a bit of an electric shock, to sort out the title’s contribution. It’s a pleasure to do that sorting.

In her second book length collection of poetry, Jinx and Heavenly Calling, Kelly DuMar poaches words and phrases from her own mother’s love letters to her father and uses them to create a masterpiece of erasure poetry. Taking from letters written during her parent’s courtship and the early weeks of their marriage DuMar creates a compelling collection which explores themes of love and commitment in an original and intimate way.

As DuMar explains in the “Notes on Form” section at the back of the book, each poem is taken from a single letter and the words and punctuation appear in the same order as in the source material. The visual background of each poem consists of images of the original letter or envelope, giving a partial glimpse into the original context and making clear the connection between the source material and DuMar’s poems. The effect is at first jarring as it is unclear whether the poem is meant to include the original writing that appears or not, but as the reader delves further into the poems it becomes clear that that they can be read both ways, giving multiple meanings to poems depending on how the reader chooses to view them.

The book is split into four sections titled “Under a spell”, “go a blizzard”, “sneak a better anywhere”, and “Gamble” each of which represents a different phase in a relationship. Starting with “Under a spell” DuMar explores the passion and turbulence of a new relationship. Poems such as “in a bad way” and “dress rehearsal” investigate the joy and fear that comes with falling in love. From the anxiety of “sticking neck out / heart tricked” (“in a bad way”) to the joy of “week-ends / worth the head cold” (“dress rehearsal”) the ups and downs of an early relationship are clearly displayed.

The next section, “go a blizzard”, examines the next phase in a relationship in which there is more confidence in the partnership. Now engaged, gone are the anxieties of the early relationship, the fear that the other does not feel the same way or that they will leave. Now there is trust, as seen in “spree” where it is okay to “come too early / be too much”. The thought of the future is ever-present in this section with poems such as “to get married” visualizing a future that would come to pass.

Thoughts of the future continue in “sneak a better anywhere” as the revelation of a pregnancy brings the future into more concrete reality. There is excitement and fear evident in poems like “worry” and “ours” as the uncertainties of the future expand to include a child.

The final section of the book “Gamble” is the shortest section but perhaps the most poignant as it explores the intimacies and intricacies of new marriage. In poems such as “husband” the marvel of being a newlywed is “hard to get / used to” making clear the transition that comes with becoming husband and wife.

As a whole, DuMar’s Jinx and Heavenly Calling is a masterfully crafted exploration of the joys and difficulties of love and marriage. It is visually appealing and the images and words together evoke a sense of intimacy, making the reader feel as though they are intruding on private thoughts and in doing so delving deeper into the relationship on display than an outsider is typically allowed.