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The Driftwood Review Issue Five
October 2009
Editors:
Terry Allen & Dennis Barton
Cover Image by: Peter Schwartz
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Poetry
6 The Pigeon’s Analysis by Heather Macpherson
7 First Sign by John Grey
8 Still Life by Sergio Ortiz
9 Breakfast by Kim Lock
10 Rust and Metal Handles by Sergio Ortiz
12-13 Sending my Daughter by Laura Sobbott Ross
to Borrow an Egg
14 Timing by Kim Lock
15 Drop by J.R. Pearson
16 The Woman who Became by Linda Ann Strang
a Prayer Flag
17 Stand by George Moore
18 Contemplating by Joseph Anthony Vega
19 Grand Coda by Heather Macpherson
20-21 The Boys at the Roller Rink by Laura Sobbott Ross
22-23 Grass Lake Sibilants by Michael Lauchlan
24 Grand River Avenue, by Ken Meisel
Detroit Riots, 1967
26 Lubricating Failed Social by Richard Fein
Interactions
27 Boy Reading to me at by Ken Meisel
the Runaway Shelter
29 At the Buffet by Karen Kelsay
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30 Boson by Kim Lock
31 Aftermath by J.R. Pearson
32 Snow by Michael Lauchlan
33 The City is a Woman by Ken Meisel
34 Dark Seas by Janet Butler
36 Library Terminal by Jerry Kraft
37 A Day After the Surrealists by by George Moore
38 Thirst by J.R. Pearson
39 For the Dead by Heather Macpherson
40 Waterfront Anniversary by Jerry Kraft
42-43 45 RPMs by Nancy Williams
Art/Photography
Cover Sockets II by Peter Schwartz
11 B&W Subway Stairs by Joseph Anthony Vega
25 Bridge by Dennis Barton
28 Birds by Dennis Barton
35 Street Woman by Joseph Anthony Vega
41 Pines by Dennis Barton
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Heather Macpherson
The Pigeon’s Analysis
The way earth worms
wash into the street
exposed, dank and glint
too aloof to swerve
on-coming treads.
They laze the paved
topography – a lexicon
of firma and pleasantries
unlike grubs and maggots,
those bitchy tattletales
you’d never invite to tea.
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John Grey
First Sign
No walking two-foot track pattern this morning,
no raccoons, no opossums. Nor the two-print
trotting gait of fox, coyote. Nothing says
nothingness as much as blank snow,
the ground so smooth and white, so free
of gallop, lope, there never was a living thing.
Landscapes know no better than to tell the truth.
And here it is recounted by a night of falling flakes,
a morning of first cracks in gray, a distant harmless sun.
Who’ll be the first to recall all of their experiences,
reclaim their instincts from the drug of sleep,
respond to need, forgo their fear. Terrain waits
like a writers blank page, willing the story along.
A squirrel perhaps, leaping like a flurry frog. A deer
nibbling through ice. Or even I, first steps of another day,
this time with clear rent perforations, cold and windy,
chilled beyond bone, more evidence than sense.
The world is not the world until the living things take traction.
A blue bird fakes it. A crow doesn’t try. A hare it is. A hare
by a hair. A plop. A push. A pad. A claw. A mark. An indent.
A cavity. Just how the beginning likes it.
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Sergio Ortiz
Still Life
She was a still-life painter, but her spectacular flowers dried and dropped their petals. She picked up the most delicate and repainted the corollas. We thought her compositions would depreciate after she passed, so we watched the bouquets, waited for the wind to blow.
winter sleet
honey bees and rue
in her pocket
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Kim Lock
Breakfast
I tell myself that if I cook the egg without breaking the yolk, everything will be fine, and
my quaking legs and knotted gut will become still. I pour you a cup of coffee, knowing
that what I have to tell you will not pour out of me as smoothly as the dark liquid, that no
amount of cream or sugar will mask the bitterness of my awful truth, that what I did will
break your heart. I pass you the coffee. You pull me close and gently kiss my lips. It’s a
kiss sweeter than you’ve ever given. I slide the egg onto the buttered toast, my insides
caving in. The yolk quivers, then splits.
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Sergio Ortiz
Rust and Metal Handles I live in a death house. Root rot between sugar maple and dogwood burns my toes. But I'm not sad or thirsty, I've got the wind and a little piece of sky. When it thunders I stick my bones out, wait for rain, and smile.
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Laura Sobbott Ross
Sending my Daughter to Borrow an Egg
I had stopped stirring, tapped
the wooden spoon to the rim,
flour tumbled with cinnamon,
the oven set on purr. Through
the pasture, she carried home
a single egg like a glass pearl.
Whole in smooth opaqueness,
the neighbors had plucked it
from a foam cradle of a dozen,
rows now missing at least one,
like the teeth she thanked them
through before heading back,
wary of nettles and fire ants,
the silent cows, the early moon
being passed alongside her
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from oak to oak to oak.
Through the same window
I’d watched her carry home
phlox and jewel beetles,
lemons from orchards, icicles
snapped off pine fence rails.
And once, a garden mole, the pink pads
of its tiny human palms turned up—
a praise for every fragile thing tended
with awe, the providence of girlhood—
egg-balanced, like tunneled light
meant to break open in the end.
At the door, her small hands
hold the egg like a wick cupped
in wind. The moon loosening
from the grasp of those high, dark branches.
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Kim Lock
Timing
Five delicate, pale-blue orbs surreptitiously deposited by a mother duck nestle on dried grass and felted fluff in the midst of the delphiniums next to the front porch. I thought she had abandoned them, deciding that such proximity to dogs, cats, cars, humans, and lawn mowers carried too great a risk. I imagine the cool yolks floating in protective albumen, their DNA suspended in time, waiting for the change in temperature that sparks life and action. This morning there was an early-morning freeze. I step outside to check the eggs, fearing the worst. Suddenly, mother duck shoots out of the delphiniums, flapping, quack-ing, up, up, up toward the rising sun.
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J.R. Pearson
Drop
a song forged from the bare
rhythm of the night
& you'll hear petals fall from her voice.
Follow the sound of sweat
to the roar of her breath
in your mouth. She hums
your name with her pulse lost in the dark
& a magma bleed from a Milkyway
of holes in your chest.
Hours after Geronimo walks the skyline,
silent tongue-tips feather stones
in a held breath before an Apache tracker's sunrise.
Eight legs of daybreak climb forearms
& drink a bead of sweat from wet hair
horned by your bad collar.
Cygnus opens its last luminous wing
across the sky's black mouth
& she winks at the dead air
in an eavesdropper's lust for padded vice grips.
You recite the underground alphabet
tattooed on the back of your eyelids
& think of the last honeydew
that sings in the summer sun.
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Linda Ann Strang
The Woman Who Became a Prayer Flag
Man and oxygen,
you are the purest atmosphere,
twisting through valleys, holding handfuls
of fabric, hair and fervent prayer.
The earth is made of cotton:
you can fly the Himalayas like a kite,
rolling the sun
on the tip of your tongue.
Even when you settle against me,
like a low cloud, for the night,
my gown whispers the ecstasy of aviation,
through frills, into your forehead;
your hand relaxes as you fall asleep,
releasing a supplication.
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George Moore
Stand
In the beginning you think nothing will ever come of this
lingering anticipation, the wait for what is real, the meaning,
if the word still holds some truth, of this living thing.
Like life were a plaque above the door of where you’ve come
or where you’re going, somehow the inside of the house
indistinguishable from the great outside,
and you want to know, simply know, what the plan is
behind the million machinations of the world, evil and good,
self-created and conflicted with your self, and one day
all this will sort itself out, become the woman or man
who was meant to be. Perhaps it already has.
Under the place you mark your name there is an invisible line
running out to the edge of the darkness, and it radiates
like a beam of light, which has no meaning and only tries
to illuminate, touching the things it encounters on its way.
This is not wisdom, nor insight, but the suspension of those.
Nothing stands in the way if one way is to stand, one move,
the one simple process of you, neither enfolding or unfolding.
But I can’t say this outright. You look past me into the night
where we have met again for coffee, a brief word, the turning
toward that you so desire. There is only your next move.
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Joseph Anthony Vega
Contemplating
He lifted the glass to his lips
contemplating tomorrow,
while today was growing fainter;
he lowered the empty glass
to the bar.
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Heather Macpherson
Grand Coda
What you do to your body:
demonstrate the perfect clavicle,
hide pricks between fingers
and toes. Infected, you sing orchid
songs, beg for money and sell skin
and bones; neglect bicuspids weak
and septic. You were legs –rhythmic
credulity, gestures
and movements. Now une jolie fille,
you are ersatz smile and grey iris
decayed.
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Laura Sobbott Ross
The Boys at the Roller Rink
The boys at the roller rink
came from the wrong side of town.
They swallowed the oval floor
in strides that never wavered
or sent them spinning
with outstretched fingers
slippery from their own oily scalps,
body odor at least a length or two behind.
Wind in billowy polyester shirttails,
they were often called out for skating too fast,
although the wheels of their rented skates
could be readily stilled in the rim
of rubber matting. It was grace—
theirs, not ours, which made us hide
in the girls’ bathroom once an hour
when free skate became couples only.
A sweaty palmed proclamation
that stirred the mirrored ball
in the ceiling, dizzying sequins
shed across the dimmed room.
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We were afraid that the boys
at the roller rink might ask us
to join them, link their pale fingers
into ours and wing us
across their roadmap of shadows,
the relentless gravity of hard surfaces,
leaving an ache beyond
any Three Dog Night song
played back to back.
Maybe we were afraid
they wouldn’t ask us anything at all.
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Michael Lauchlan
Grass Lake Sibilants
A breath soughs through sedge and grass
cattail and reed. Something with hands
tousles hair, fluffs a shirt, would puff
linens and sails if lines hung over docks,
if boats plied the soft waves. None do.
I catch a bit of this hush and pull it
into lungs, into blood cells that roil
toward brain, toward muscles at rest—
a breath of listening, a lifetime making.
What if I only wait, crane-
still, breathing sound with air.
The hush which floats over the waves
makes a place of no place, a voice
of sound seeping from a hole. Always,
building comes after, building a case,
building buildings, building as music
rises toward an end. But what moves
over the reeds has no end, comes
from somewhere in Alberta (and before?)
and empties over flat Ontario farms
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of tomatoes, beans, and wheat.
I take a small sip from that ocean of air,
hear a few notes of reedy opera. Once,
I heard a political argument in Persian,
missing some details (who were
the infidels, the heroes?) but I got
that it coiled through dust, blood,
and rhetoric to Detroit, to three men
shouting at one who answered in soft
bursts—the rapid counterpoint
rising in spittled pitch and
breaking finally in exhaustion.
What moves over Grass Lake has
a cadence, a pace, a few sibilant notes.
It offers its own suasion—stay, stay,
wait through sunset as I unlace
your knotted chest, poor bound one.
Breath calling breath, it names
no infidels, but pulls and sways
toward undulation without end.
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Ken Meisel
Grand River Avenue, Detroit Riots, 1967
Sometimes in a young mind there are rabbits sniffing pine cones
and wet grass in the morning. The world is an aural landscape
of meditative beauty. In my young mind I’m driving with my father.
I’m not sure where in the hell we’re going. It is July, 1967.
And there is smoke billowing out of roof tops. Army vehicles,
which look like big violent bugs, churn forward down the streets.
I’m told to duck down in the station wagon. I’m told there could be
sniper fire. My young head could be blown apart like milkweed.
So I grip the back of the seat with my strong arms like I’m hugging
the side of a wall for protection. My stomach, which is full of acid
and stones, tightens. My father looks ahead as if sniffing down
a long corridor to a doorway, something golden and light.
I’m guessing he’s looking straight into Heaven, for I am Catholic,
and I can’t guess ahead to anything else. Nothing but white light.
And there are angels, big weeping winged things caressing
the burning cars exploded down along the side streets. Some angels
genuflect. Some blow saxophones or trumpets and they throw
them down on the street loudly. And it sounds like wailing or crying,
as if all of Heaven’s gate had fallen like glass over us. Then I peek up,
see the black men running away. Man, some of them run into store
fronts with no glass remaining. And their faces are terrified ripped pieces
of rubber. And the police cars race forward after them. Fire trucks
roar down the road and blow hoses full of water all over them.
Someone calls them devils but it sure isn’t my father, for his heart
is as wobbly as a bowl of milk and he loves them. And the angels,
which are large insects with beating wings and wailing faces that resemble
sun flowers bursting apart, race and swoop down on us. And one
of them cradles the window of the car like a blanket, a large bursting mouth
of howling. And he yells at me you will be named John one day
and you will tell of the apocalypse here. And every story you tell will
be true. And bewildering. For you fear all this and it breaks your heart.
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Richard Fein
LUBRICATING FAILED SOCIAL INTERACTIONS
It happens with either banal banter or soul searching conversations,
or anything in between.
It follows the demise of dialogue, those words not spoken after
the end of a love affair, friendship, business partnership,
or chitchat between two passing strangers.
It’s like Novocaine weighing down the tongue with all the gravity of a black hole.
It’s those tortured moments of nothing more to say,
when eye-to-eye discourse devolves into restless fidgets
and distracted eyes are desperate to gaze anywhere but face-to-face.
It’s when I’m bored-to-tears-with-you is euphemized as
I’ll-be-seeing-you-soon
and each knows the other is politely lying.
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Ken Meisel
Boy, Reading to Me at the Runaway Shelter
Rain, falling across the street and a squad car
heavily thundering through it, lights lit,
sirens squealing loudly as we practice ducking
down again to dodge the bullets known to fly
around here, like rabid pieces of darkness
cut loose from the section of the city known
as Crack town, corpse town, the 5th precinct.
We’re sitting together at a table, reading.
He looks up at me, eyes small and bright,
like little birds trying to fly above the tall trees.
His thumb and his fingers carry a page
over to another one, simply, like a little wind
gently lift-nudging stuck things forward,
and he looks down again, traces his eyes
over the pictures, the words, all the news
of the world that’s given over to print. Now,
because there is an angel hovering over his
left shoulder, something alive and special
like a medicine name, or a fairy god mother,
he mouths one of the words on the page,
something that calls his vast future to him.
He tries it on his tongue again, tastes it,
forms his mouth around it, like a gold coin.
He whispers it to me, says it out loud again,
college.
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Karen Kelsay
At the Buffet
Two upper teeth protrude when he smiles. His receding hair is turning gray, the color of his almond-shaped eyes. Only the shrillest sound enters his ears, clunky eye glasses slide down his nose. He unfolds his napkin the way he was taught as a child, slowly and methodically. Over utensils, hands pause politely by the plate, his grin broadens; teeth dart out. This is his time to choose the food he eats and how many helpings fill the dish, escaping into a merry world of lemon pudding, roast beef and ice cream. There is no conversation-- only an occasional thumbs up between bites.
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Kim Lock
Boson
Earlier this year, particle physicists hoped to find the hypothetical Higg’s boson under the
border between France and Switzerland in a circular, seventeen-mile-long, multi-million-
Euro tunnel filled with enormous cylindrical magnets. Detectors witnessed particles
smashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. And in that moment, Higg’s
boson—referred to by some as the god particle—would reveal itself for a millionth of a
billionth of a billionth of a second. Evidence for the boson would be found in telltale
spirals and streaks left in the detectors.
Guys, I hate to tell you this, but I could have saved you a lot of time and money; I found
the god particle this morning in a slice of kiwi fruit I held up to the light.
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J.R. Pearson Aftermath Nothing holds you like an open tomb snowing tulips over your dead brother. Hair a frozen blaze. Your sister speaks and you think: Now there's a voice that's been kicked in the chest. Later, when you're gunshot broke in a trigger-lit wake his face falls thru you like opened vein's wish on a perfect blade. You wonder why everyday the desert pulls heat thru bleached ribs; sun twists life from the sand & why his eyes always looked like a tipped over eight. He said once he had a voodoo double- helix written in a wave of bone. Said he'd burn himself down just to watch the faces rise thru flames. In a waking dream he tells you the sky is a tear in La Brea tar so blow a sideways kiss to infinity & fly into everlasting ice like a crossed up skin bird.
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Michael Lauchlan
Snow
What creature flails like an old man?
You find Moceri struggling, lost
in a drifted alley and bring him home
while the blizzard blows. Small, frail,
good humored but soft on details
and documents, he has no ID
and no idea where he lives. After soup
and dry socks, the story spills out.
Daughters grown, a son in jail,
he lives in a downtown flop.
We start into the white, silent city.
―This depression,‖ he tells me,
as I swerve through rutted streets,
―is tougher than the last. Then
you could get help. We were all
in the same crappy boat.‖ Ice tears
at my muffler as I bounce across lanes.
When he is delivered to a sour room
behind a well-chewed door, I emerge
to blow steam into the bright gloom
and compose a story for you—
of Moceri warm and safe at home.
I'll skip the way the street curls its lip
as he passes, the way the glass shakes
in his one window as the wind
slides in. But you know already
the thin fabric of our skin,
the threadbare coat we clutch
against every winter to come.
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Ken Meisel
The City is a Woman
Said the man on Forest Avenue.
He was holding his brown bag
Of fortune & his eyes were salt.
Do you know she loves the body
Of a man even though he’s beat
Her? All this as the gulls rose up
Over the black chimney towers
And the trucks stomped & rolled
Into the Eastern Market district.
To love a woman, I think, is to
Try out for size what it is to be
A swollen watermelon. The heart
Is full of redness and dark seeds.
There are stories & dark truths.
Murder and mayhem and a laughter
That is really a strange card game.
We take our chances when we
Love someone until the end of it.
The heart of a city, this one, is full
Of coughing & dead radiators,
And men whose time is a lottery.
The women in it grow dark & mute
And hum songs to hanging laundry
That is never fully cleaned off.
The children in it are leaving it.
We must remember that the city
Is a woman, he said.
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Janet Butler
Dark seas
The sound is faint, but grows
with silence.
A swish of silk as waters
froth and ruffle moon bleached shores,
white sands that hem a sea heavy with summer.
Its warm waters cool to a late night freshness
black skies another sea washing distant shores
that wait us.
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Jerry Kraft
Library Terminal
In the library, at the keyboard next to mine,
he typed intensely. Beneath his desk, a boy
of four or five crawled, clearly bored.
In an idle moment, I glanced at his screen.
His email began: I’m married, too.
Would love to meet. Adventurous. Can we
find a time? You seem to understand.
And I looked away, embarrassed at my
intrusion. Now hearing only the tap of keys,
the child pleaded, ―Can we go now, Daddy?‖
More unheard sentences were sent to the screen,
the whole creation a furrowed brow,
then less insistent tapping, while the voices
in my own head would not be quieted.
They whispered of another day,
of need and sorrow and shame,
having known his place, having
written such words, having risked
too much, and with every step
a downward spiral to catastrophe,
all to that tapping of keys, passion
and need, and as I felt myself being
swallowed again by the hungry screen
he signed off, stood, and took the boy’s hand,
perhaps off to some Little League game,
and then dinner at home, mundane chat.
The blank screen a dilated iris, staring
back into my silence. He quickly left,
but I stayed there. Hum of the machine.
Remembering and repeating
never again. Never again.
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George Moore
A Day After the Surrealists
There is so much the world could have been
if only the words might have jumped off the page
and become someone, a girl with long braids,
a man with one leg, a woman interested
only in her children.
But the last was not surreal in the sense
that even today this is possible,
like seeing the things science will make ahead of time
through the mad visions of the marginalized,
whose children are their wildest dream.
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J.R. Pearson
Thirst
Granddad always said Indian kids don't sing for fear of cobras & your mom sure ain't got no venom till that unquenchable thirst holds her hostage for a deeper shade of burn. Jack whiskey & shots of two X sheepdip don't got no handle on that; said he'd seen her turn night satin side out then put a blind eye in the bottom of a bottle, watching stars warp & shiggle. Told myself the man was commode hug & tore up inside, didn't know up from no down even after a contusion of aspens drank his blood and a vacant sky evaporated thoughts like state-fair fireworks. Swear I seen him go. Two years later she pulled dusk down like a midnight shade over a golden-haired confession. Day sloughed a skin moon. Her eyes all chipped ruby. Shattered pearls rolled over cheekbones, she looked at me like a sunflower waffled reverse in a convex mirror, sliced & bigger by the second. Swore she held a bead of dew or the whites of my eyes in her hair, looked in her face & saw me: boy with straw locks & no heartbeat. She spoke with the smell of fresh cut leaves bleeding from a liquid sieve under her tongue; another attempt to kill autumn footprints from her forehead once and for all-- Then, someone took the words out of her mouth & put them in the voice of a jackal, she says: thirst don't take no for no answer. Where'd you put my drink.
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Heather Macpherson
For the dead
who settle open-eyed
with winsome smiles
who yield to the constraint
of air; gossips through bygone
specks of sand and muck, un-
aware of pebbles between
fingers and toes or tree roots
teasing the femur;
who creep and crawl
under floorboards,
eavesdrop on moths
flittering near halogen
bulbs, chat of enigmas
revealing rudimentary truth
about kick the can and flashlight murder.
There is something I need to tell you:
wake up wake up wake up!
The moon is out it’s time to sing,
time to play; nourish your hunger
with backyard rituals and stray
from ordinary games.
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Jerry Kraft
WATERFRONT ANNIVERSARY
Taste of hot clam nectar, thrush of wings,
gulls stealing tourist-tossed French fries.
Metal tables along the wall provide space
for young couples who can barely afford
their shared fish and chips. We are older
now, watch the slow-moving ferry ply
its regular way across the Sound, sigh
to one other, recalling our last time here,
weighted by solemn freight, a slow wake
spreading wide from that passage. We
return to mark a simple sentence finally said,
―I'm still in love with you.‖ Even after years
of separation, even then we heard the splash.
Now years later, we’ve seen how the world spins
on such a simple declaration; how love so long
unsaid becomes an ocean's voice, tide and current.
We mark another year of our being; we sip the broth,
these smells and sounds, our private tidings to savor;
taste how long time is, how briefly on the tongue;
how a ripple of love becomes the fathomless deep.
Our hands entwined, we see the distant horizon,
one true thing said, and how the waves never still.
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Nancy Williams
45 RPMs
New kids, from Philadelphia, intrude.
We summer lakers, Detroiters, form
a clique around the needle that grazes
the black hills of the latest Motown
rock and roll. We’re in the groove.
Phonographs, records, are us.
We dance our plush green lawn
into a floor of stomped twirls. Strolls
and twists blast into chicken flaps.
Monkeys, jerks, and hand jives.
Dance craze, at the hop. Show-offs,
us. Arrogant, them, these new kids
who hug the water’s edge like imaginary
gymnasium walls. As if they know it all.
But their eyes, glued wide, betray them.
Hah! So we thought. One sculls away
then back on slapped waves of music,
a Pennsylvania beat of 45s.
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Stacks of mashed potatoes and raves,
dancing in the streets. A trove, this
rock and roll, an equalizer. It spins, lifts
and spins, mixing east coast and west
into the Midwest, night into day, dark
into the hands of light, as we all dance.
Heads droop, eyes shut. The sun finally
wearies of its watch. Some day-birds
have already trilled themselves to sleep,
others, even night-birds, loudly object
to our racket or fly off. Remorse has
yet to spin in its own deep groove.