XI: Pressed Words with Cream
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Poem / Robert Klein Engler
( Chicago, Illinois )
Art / Greg Stant
( Ocean View, Virginia )
A Journey to the Aspen Writers Conference by Train:
A Journey of 100 Lines
In my beginning is my end.
T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”
Naperville
Dolomite and lightning, mountain lakes bright
as a Sufi's mirror of the heart, golf courses
and deserted shopping malls; it is not the place
but what we haul along that genders gravity.
Everywhere men make plans; one goes to school,
another opens a glittering store and sells his soul.
The same twin rails of wounds unite them all.
What is poetry to them, dirty with the dust of money?
They go home mumbling matters to themselves.
It rains. Traffic stalls. Ash congeals to mud.
Excel Energy, Ft. Morgan, Colorado
Fort Morgan
Dew diamonds the south pasture.
Sheets of orange sunlight flash off
a checkerboard of windowpanes.
A herd of black cows, silhouettes
of patience, bend toward the grass
and hold their nibbling worship of the earth.
The incessant drama of local days
rolls on with all its passengers.
Is there a cure for our wide-eyed desires,
or just a fattening up, and then the butcher?
Denver
I am having a literary argument with a man
I never me— he could pass me on the street
and never know I reject his book of curses.
My proof is the Mexican woman cleaning rooms.
The beauty in her work is alien to those yuppies
on rafts, the downhill skiers, boys on Rollerblades.
Speed allows them to stop the tick-tock of thought,
to merge awareness with the motion of the world.
(But how to heal the sore that is myself?)
That is the question trailing in parentheses.
Glenwood Springs
Wind blows the down of thistle seeds
every which way— sunlight
on the aspen leaves makes them dance
like a scattering of dimes.
I wonder, could there be another baptism
in the Colorado River rushing over rocks?
In my dream, we eat Kosher food; borscht,
lox, matzo, it is a covenant of sweet water.
The house of thorns we left is dark and closed.
He wears a purple stripe like the senator of knives.
Cap Hill, Denver
By the Jerome Hotel
A brotherhood of workmen patch the street.
The day is hot and the tar adheres like sin.
They swing the black muck of dinosaurs
into potholes, silver shovels singing.
Later, a line of clouds comes over the mountain.
There is thunder, then pebbles of rain.
Rain taps the broad leaves of cowslip outside
my window, tickles the Queen Anne's lace.
Beads of rain repeat their tap against the tar,
like pearls spit upon our bed of slate.
Ajax Mountain
Alpine primrose, cosmos, shafts of columbine,
the distant slopes rusting, then a sawtooth line
where mountains end against the blue-black sky.
Above me, an airplane drones higher and higher.
Flies hum a harmony with the far-off chattering birds.
I imagine some of these rocks were once
at the bottom of the sea; a plodding, slow grace
sublimates their dumb determination.
It took courage for me to ride up here alone—
to speak the truth about love is still a triumph.
Explore Bookstore
Black coffee in a French press, a lemon tart,
linen tablecloths, and the memory of him
walking in, sitting down, taking my hand in his.
”How glad I am to see you here,” he says.
If I pressed my words together with cream
could I get close to that reality again?
Don't get me wrong, I have praised love too—
regret is a cello tuning in the moonlight,
an acquired taste, like Chinese sweet and sour,
or youth: if you eat veal, you know.
Mercury Cafe, Denver
Mill and Bleeker Streets
My heart is ruined— toppled by recollection.
Do you think the rotten wood of its hollows
will become the home for small animals,
a mystery to men musty from their wives?
On this pleasant night in late July, cool,
after an alkaline day, I walk the streets of Aspen.
I sing melodies to myself, then I stop
to rub my hands across the wrinkled bark
of an old cottonwood— please, don't fall
to boards where couples carve their names.
Maroon Bells
One poet says that the lyric poem is about
nothing— a rose is about nothing, a stone
is nothing, and mountains, so many stones,
are nothing upon nothing upon nothing.
I thought the lyric was about love's pain and joy.
Paolo and Francesca, blistering in hell, still wish
their nothing would be like a pool of ice,
or a glacial kiss on their wounds, instead of keen
water racing in sunlight, polishing the stairs
of their descent— nothing threaded with knives.
Aspen
I dream of him again and the way it was.
He walks to me, hard and expectant.
I mouth him, remembering my mother.
Pearl by pearl, like melting mountain snow.
I drink the tears of our long separateness
below the battlements of silver and snow.
Do you suppose the rich feel safe in this valley?
I feel closed in, unable to see for miles.
Fuck it! Let's go away like gay eagles,
thrashing out the silence with our wings.
Next - XII: Passage / Ioanna Warwick - Fariel Shafee
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