Aram Saroyan

LYRIC

I'm a cardboard poet.
I eat rice.


* * * * *


a cartoon
of
energy


* * * * *


my knees are in my knees
my eyes are in my eyes


* * * * *


black salad

Joan Houlihan

Stark, North of Gainsboro

His body follows its shrunken pattern
and specification: he is placed in the final chair; 
he is clapped with heat along the landscape 
of his skin. Each carpal of his wrist 
quickly cracks to tinder-sticks. 

All that we can do, is done:
the strapping and jolting, the ceremonial 
drubbing; even mummery and finger-play 
behind his volted head. We hose him 
as we would a tree, wrinkled and run deep 

with char. The body, pinned and porous, shivers, 
briefly sways, as if a damaged wall is lightly pushed.
Empty-handed and incarnate, he is taken like a pet
and carried with his head cupped from behind.
Look on him. He is always ours, and cold. 

 

Joan Houlihan

 

A crush of oily plant and treated white

A crush of oily plant and treated white, wrapt and reached by root, sky-touched and still, a bud in leaf: make of me a body. Oil me, hand and foot, bind me tight and scented green: this is my dressing, done. Ay lived and spoke to what ay was. No matter if you answer. On hand and foot an oil and scent. Across my forehead fingers sweep a clay. Remember what ay was and am. Kind horse, lie down beside.

Notes:
The Us is a formally fractured poetic sequence spoken by a chronically nomadic people. A member of the group (Ay) dramatizes the coming to self-consciousness of an individual in the group.

Jean Houlihan

 

“I am a fugitive from a chain gang”

 

Blinded by freedom and without morals,
unable to follow orders, family
a partially digested memory,
I have left the problem known as people.

 

The past comes on as illness—
how we twisted together, clanked ankles
and smelled like heat. Depraved, rubbing
sand in the palms of our hands, from above
our line writhed like De Havilland’s snake pit.

 

Now I have become my own prisoner,
drinking from a bowl of river water,
playing with the head of an axe.
Where does kindness come from? Not here.

 

 

Angie Estes

The Present State of My Spirit

A Proust Questionnaire Sequence

Angie Estes

 

Sometime during 1889 or 1890, Marcel Proust responded to a
questionnaire that was popular in France at the time. Proust titled
his responses, “Marcel Proust par lui-même” [Marcel Proust by
himself]. Some of the topics he responded to are also the titles of
the following poems:

 

État present de mon esprit: The present state of my spirit
Ma devise: My motto
Le principal trait de mon caractère: The principal trait of my
character
Le don de la nature que je voudrais avoir: The natural talent I
would like to have
Ce que je voudrais être: What I would like to be
Comment j’aimerais mourir: How I would like to die
La fleur que j’aime: The flower I love
Mon occupation préférée: My favorite occupation
Le pays où je désirerais vivre: The country where I would like to live

Angie Estes

 

La fleur que j’aime:

They must have been Molly Bloom’s

favorites since she remembered

how the sun shines for you he said

the day we were lying among the

rhododendrons on Howth head yes,

and Virginia Woolf wrote

in late winter/early spring in

one of her last diary entries

L is doing the rhododendrons. Maybe Leonard

was planning a trip to Rhodes, island

of Rhodos, roses, or just removing

compost, bark or straw mulch,

some burlap, snow or wind screen

from around the shrubs. Perhaps he stood

out in the garden, secateurs

in hand, deadheading the most

far-reaching blossom inflorescences,

their frayed ends dangling as if

they had exploded

like firecrackers. From a distance,

it must have looked like a Greek

dance, one leg crossed over

the other, someone holding a bouquet

of air at the end of each outstretched

arm, praising what comes back

each spring, or doesn’t.

 

 

Angie Estes

 

principal trait de mon caractère:

desire to see the back
side of things since

the back is the only part
of our body that we can

barely see or touch,
to taste the difference

between Burgundy wines
grown au-dessus or au-dessous. Even

in the Scuola Grande di
San Rocco in Venice, we walked

holding mirrors
in order to better see

Tintoretto’s paintings
on the ceiling. Think of how

the trunk of the paperbark
maple bursts into flames

when the sun sneaks up
behind it. Tall stones are known

as menhir in Welsh, hir
meaning long as in

hiraeth, nostalgia or longing
for home. But the backside

of nostalgia—nostos, return,
and the desire to return—

also bears algos, pain, the im-
possibility of returning. When I was

a child, I wanted to find a way
to take the blue-, pink-, and

yellow-dyed rabbits’ feet
hanging from belt loops or rear-view

mirrors and give them back
to the hopping rabbits.

And I loved the Biblical story
of the many loves

of bread, although in hindsight
I see they must have been

loaves. Remember the moment
in Le grand blond avec une chaussure

noire when Mireille Darc
greets her paramour at midnight

in a high-necked silk, black
velvet dress and then pivots

to walk away, revealing
that the dress has

no back? The moon, too,
sometimes goes black

just before slipping out
of its eclipse. In front of

the homestead where my
family lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains,

beyond trees and thickets,
an occasional upright

stone, a row of jonquils
blooms each spring. Sometimes

we cut them early and
arrange them in a vase: you love

to count the hours it takes
them to open. Now, at this

moment, when everything is
still possible, I remember you

as you will be.

Angie Estes

  

Mon occupation préférée:

“I have taken delicious voyages
embarked on a word,” Balzac wrote. So I say
millefeuille, Givenchy, trois fois

de rien, while trees fly
their kite tails, the chickadee keeps
practicing its song, and I wait

at the edge of the woods like the young
brown deer in October still
remembering when it was branded

by stars because words can open
like oysters and Sometimes, very
rarely, a saying pearls forth

from their nacreous throats: we get
to decorate ourselves.*

* Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses: l’huître

Angie Estes

History 

Mallarmé said that Loie Fuller, with the wing
                                    of her skirt, created space
like the new convertible
                        brought home by the neighbors
            on our block: at first a question mark
in the sky, then rising above them
                                    half a parenthesis until only
a comma was left behind, the shape
                        of their hands as they waved
            down the street. “We ought to say a feeling
of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of
                                    but, and a feeling of by,” William James
claimed, “quite as readily as we say
                        a feeling of blue or a feeling
            of cold,” but Leonardo’s double-helix
staircase at Château Chambord wraps
                                    its arms around its own quiet
center, makes sure that the person going
                        up and the one coming down
            never meet. The empty spaces, Conrad
said of maps, are the most interesting
                                    places because they are
what will change. So was it he
                        who invented pinto horses, taught
            the mockingbird to keep not one
but two blank patches beneath
                                    its wings? We could hear
the car radio as they drove
                        away, Elvis insisting I’ll be yours
            through all the years, ‘til the end of
time. From Latin cor,
                                    for heart, to remember
in Spanish, recordar, means to pass
                        once more through the heart
            the way the blood keeps coming
back for another tour, another
                                    spin around the block. The yellow-
orange sash flapping past the window
                        was memorable, a memorial, so much
            like an oriole or the scarf that keeps
circling the past’s held
                                    note: parked by the curb, the wisteria
was all ears, a hysteria of listening.

Tom Picard

 

After a row

A lapwing somersaults spring

flips over winter and back.

After a fast walk up long hills, my limbs

the engine of  thought, where burn

bubbles into beck and clough to gill,

beneath a sandstone cliff  balanced on a bed of shale

and held from hurtling by Scots pine

that brush a scrubby sky with cloud snow scutters,

I found a place to sit

                 by snapping watta smacking rocks

and wondered — how would it be for you?

And so, alone,

                  un-alone even, in my anger,

bring you here.

Angie Estes

Deep Field

                                    Photographed over ten days in December 1995 by the                                    Hubble Space Telescope, showing the 'deepest-ever'                                    view of the universe.                                     He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth themall by their names: tutti-frutti, Cimabue, bracelets                                    of Cartier, chock full o'Giotto spilled                                                 onto a black sky like Jujubes                        during a matinee. Anna-Eva Bergmanpainted Earth Seen from the Moon                                    and then painted the moon—Grand rond gong in vinylique and metal leaf—as if it were                                    the mirror she used for viewing                                                  her own paintings. In the cosmos                        of Dante, everyone enters deathbackwards, their past still                                    before them, just as in some funeralprocessions there walks a saddled horse                                     without a rider, boots reversedin the stirrups.                                    If speech,                                               as George Eliot claims, is but broken light                        upon the depth of the unspoken, then all musicplayed on the terraces of the audiences of                                    the moon streams from the violino, the most prized salami in Lombardy—made from the haunches                                    and shoulders of goat, deer, or chamois—shaped                                               like a musical instrument and carved                        as a violin would be played: the paw graspedwith the left hand, the leg held firm                                    beneath the chin, while in the right handa knife slides like a rosined bow. Traditionally                                     accompanied by a Valtellina Superiore, Infernoriserva, it is eaten with a bit of Bitto cheese                                    from the Celtic bitu, eternal, which can be kept                                               for a very long time.                        The telescope showed us galaxiesso far away that their light                                    has been traveling toward us for most of the history of the universe, even though                                    the galaxies keep moving away, just as                                                 Augustine explained: So I can be far from                        glad in remembering myselfto have been glad, and far                                    from sad when I recall my pastsadness, as in the descent                                     into descant or chant, the Latincanere: to sing. Even now I see us                                    on the boat leaving Venice—you facing                                                 forward, me looking back. You did not move                        toward me yet remained in view: your facecentered, in focus, with all of Venice                                    receding behind you.

Angie Estes

• Hom

 

Revision


When the pasta is badly broken, we eat
maltagliati, and once we think
the risotto is done, we must still 
make it creamy, mantecare. Because it was
never finished, Proust kept writing
in the margins of his drafts, and when
they were full, pasted small pieces of paper,
paperoles unfurling from the page as if

it had wings, could be released on parole
with a promise of words. The past, he claimed, 
is hidden in some material object of which 
we have no inkling, just as scientists maintain
that because a memory is altered each time
it’s recalled, the original memory is the one

we can’t know. In Michelangelo’s crosshatching

and chiseling, the two-dimensional slowly 
becomes three by the same math used
in the sentence The royal We lives
in Synecdoche, New York. But since when
is a sentence ever innocent? Phoebes
still wag from the wires like words we meant

to say, and Michelangelo’s Prisoners 
remain locked in stone because 
we can’t remember that they were
ever free. But if we have to misremember
in order to recall, what must we do
to forget? At the end of June, cabbage leaves begin
curving in toward one another. Soon they will
bury their head in their many hands.
 

Angie Estes

 

Cache

 

Here lies a hectic site, la Cité

tête-à-tête with the Seine

while Notre-Dame goes on rising

like the heel of God’s boot.

Ancient Roman isle, river

 

flung around it like a lavender

orchid lei around a neck: here lies

the new moon with the old moon

 

                              in her arms. Voici the sheer

leers of else, ready for hire.

We filled the room

with stargazer lilies, the scent

of a sentence when it’s ready

 

to speak. Relevant: the nuns folding

from relevé to grand-plié

as they touch the stones

 

in Saint Gervais then kiss

the tips of their fingers

while worshippers lift

their arms, saguaro cacti

lost in the dark

 

or longhorn cattle swaying

in the nave. Here lies

cash, lire, a sachet of sighs: pay

 

to the account of I’ll: yesterday,

here, hier and ici, the icy ache

of ich. You taught me

tart grammar, how to keep

thin slices of apple on edge

 

in crème pâtissière the way words

remain en pointe in a poem. Write

to me here: Dante@Kimosabe