| Poetic Matrix periodic letteR Archives |
Poetry from the Year 2000 Chapbook Series
This issue of Poetic Matrix presents selections from some of the poetry
manuscripts submitted to our Chapbook Series including pieces from the two
manuscripts chosen to be published; Jeff Mann's MOUNTAIN FIREFLIES
and Grace Marie Grafton's ZERO. Nothing definitive accounts for the
varieties of poetry written except the variety of the individual poets and the
lives that they live. These poems, as all the poetry submitted, reflect these
lives providing those precise glimpses for which poetry is the perfect medium.
Poetic Matrix Chapbook Series
Selection in the Previously Published Category
MOUNTAIN FIREFLIES
Jeff Mann
LEMON CAKE
(for my mother)
Young. So young
that patina of sheet lightning
danced over bus rides, interstate
median strips. An autoharp
drew shivers, a pasture-roaming
collie respect, lemon cake
devotion. I gripped you then,
moraine of Victoriana, deaf
guardian of a favorite niece's
child. Of that generation of doilies
and hairnets, the oppressive crimson
of velvet drapes, elderly homes
where I drew to the bone,
beneath thought, that old lady love
free of men's conditions, father-criticisms.
Where I lured rabbits to propped
boxes with sugared carrots,
where I learned to speak slowly
and feast Southern-well, rocking on
firefly porches, with water hand-pumped
splashingly from the gifting ground.
You dissolved like sugar-crystal,
one last wave from the window
of a rest home in Fairlea.
Today, Great-aunt Grace, I am home.
My mother, your niece, who claims
to be no cook, presents this
lemon cake, icing almost imperceptibly
pink, a rippling genealogy
of recipe. One bite, and
a score of summers lapses away,
humming and purling with
sugar and citrus, a creek smoothing
pebbles, a hand proffering fireflies.
See how you sweeten us yet.
MAPLE SYRUP
1
The masking tape on the jarlid says
1973. Heaviest snow in my memory--
about the house the heap of two feet,
exhausting the flexible spruce,
so we mix buttermilk into buckwheat flour
and from a cellar cupboard after twenty years
retrieve this long-forgotten jar.
At fourteen maple syrup was nothing special,
something everyone else must be accustomed to,
and too much work. Wearisome, lugging zinc
buckets of sugar water down the wintry
hills, gathering wood for the fire.
And so little yield--from forty gallons
of dripped sap one meager gallon's syrup
I expected more sweetness from the world,
bliss uncoaxed, not distilled with long effort
and one's own roughened hands. I knew
worth would accrue results, honorable love
in all justice would be returned.
It was a relief to shut down the sugar house:
I had easier things to do.
Amidst the crystalline ruins of winter,
one West Virginia manhood, I pour
what I recognize now as costly, as precious,
a few tablespoons from that small jar,
that last jar, onto a pile of gritty, sad
buckwheat cakes. I bite into this history:
those mornings split between winter and spring,
when sun against the maple flanks conjures up
the sap's ascent. All that charcoal-gray silence
in the sugar grove, a flicker rapping remotely.
About me the tiny plink plink plink.
Siphoned up roots from the mountains' rocky flesh,
the rain and ground water some alchemy in maples
makes sweet. Dripping from spiles of elderberry
in summer broken and carved, freed of pith. Each drop
ignited by early sun trembling pendant on the spile-
lip before the silver shudder and fall. Zinc buckets
propped on sandstone stoops my great-grandfather set,
the bark pocked with vague scars he drilled
in the Februaries of another century.
We stayed up late, simmering the great oblong pan,
skimming off the scummy froth, sitting long
on banks of windfall limbs, searching
for the Pleiades, between which branches they nested,
searching out certainties in the North Star,
stretching chill-stiff palms as if in hope of
lasting blessing towards the fire. Even the air was sweet.
2
I lick the last drops of maple syrup from my mustache,
knowing again a mouth moist with manna beneath mine,
ecstasies after which so much is merely wait.
A face still vague with sleep is dwindling
in the seconds between doorjamb and door.
Matched mysteries, eyes meet. On mumbled goodbyes
the door closes with a switchblade snick.
Years lost, a bliss too brief to be jarred and sealed.
I finger-scrape the last sweet crumbs from the plate,
taste a body memory as finalized as Michelangelo
did marble, as my great-grandfather's memory
held some women's body long loved.
The long evaporations, the patience, years
of simmering off, the distillation of decades.
Some syrup is consumed in a season. We are left
with sticky fingers and lips, satisfied with nothing
less, knowing how paltry all attempts
to preserve so intense a sweet.
Poetic Matrix Chapbook Series
Selection in the Previously Unpublished Category
ZERO
Grace Marie Grafton
Each step thick as cotton
So much of the circus is balance.
Traveling around the globe,
continually it is
how to trust the animal.
People pay to see that.
Not such a glamorous life,
the performers dwell
in their instincts and trailers.
Hot spotlights, a lot of illusion.
But the practicing
on short winter afternoons
in desert air when light
becomes clear red
matches the glycerine-thick jell
suspended in the belly,
drops below the heart
to the ball where,
with prehensile toes, you could balance
in a present that holds the past
and knows the future
as though it were an infant’s fist
uncurling.
The unfreezing
Some say, “Thaw.” Gold light
buckles into the shoulder socket.
Some say, “Wings.” Personal desire
ricochets through the world.
Some say, “One man’s meat,
another man’s poison.”
The oak tree’s limb
knocks on the fir tree’s bark.
This tree is not falling, but there is
a sound in the forest
we’re there to hear.
To the Chinese Buddhist, the word for sound
is the same as for suffering.
To accept and comfort suffering,
make a joyful noise.
Yellow jonquils, or lotus
with the plate-like leaf.
The Chinese philosopher says it is better
to be water, yielding.
In its journey to the sky, do you hear it whisper,
“Can’t catch me”?
Desire follows after the rain.
Jonquil petals
yellow mouths saying, “Kiss, kiss.
The last light hides in the cedar fronds.
Some say, “Time to go in.”
Some say, “Dusk is like bread between the teeth.”
Stars are escaped rain into the July night.
Our wishes come true
“a recent...theory hold that
the energy that pulled the universe
into being...was consciousness”
-David Ponedel
We sit on the blue couch in the meadow.
The line of light stretches longer than
the tops of our heads, invisible as spiderweb.
The waterfall at Cedar Grove,
the several slow-moving waters at Sinkyone,
smooth before reaching the ocean,
where lupine-bush bloom in satisfactory rectitude.
Stream, a quiet word.
Water lilies – gold globes or pink –
multi-petaled tinged longing.
The curvature of space creates redwoods
and cacti we see only in non-dream.
A space-cousin someone named chain fern,
or brown creeper – that small bird
rustles up the redwood bark, it’s
hopping up its perception of the tree.
It is November, we lie and
look at clouds leading into January,
pull July’s quilt up to our
chins. Someone was born then, a set of
perceptions, desired kin.
from INHALE DEEPLY
by Johanna Snow
REMEMBER MY PORCH
My porch invited us
like a childless
woman’s waiting arms,
extending itself
for our midnight pleasures
when the sky was the color
of Kahlua
and the moon held out
its quivering radiance
like the last melting
ice cube in my glass.
In the word game -
indubitably, inevitably,
irrevocably, undeniably –
you declared me the
winner. “You always win,”
you said.
My front steps drew us
out and drew us together while
we drank in the liquid darkness
and became drunk
on our own relief and
relaxation.
My porch remembers
your name
and sings me
your sweet laughter
while I sit there alone
these nights.
Our ice cube moon
has almost completely
melted.
OUR OWN LIFE
Bring me oxygen.
Then bring me my scarlet lipstick.
To you this may never happen again.
Come. Come aboard my pleasure ship.
Bring me a shaggy soft bear rug.
Bring me bubbly wine.
Bring me my anklet with tiny brass bells
and then dance with me over the line
you drew. Dance with me over the line.
Bring me a feather and fig leaf.
Feed me caviar and seedless red grapes.
Help me design this exotic motif
where we fingerpaint this bold, wild landscape.
Bring me Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,”
Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,”
then tell me your most secret dreams, my dear,
and I’ll love you, come what may
ha ha. I’ll love you, come what may.
Bring me oxygen and my lipstick.
Do not be afraid.
It’s only within us, what we see outside us.
It’s only our own life we’ve made.
from The Muse's Darkroom
by Lisa Haviland
Flashbulb Realities
Summer has aged me this year.
As if in a trance, I sit numbly among the thespians
Rehearsing the latest twist in the epic plot.
I'm tired of callous dealings and fraudulent feelings
Of terms and conditions on the fun I'm allowed to have with you -
when Boyfriend's not busy towing the line.
Ah, 90s love
Daily smotherings and duty-bound sentiments
Constructing the perfect made for TV pairings while love is left in pieces on the cutting
room floor.
Click! With uncandid cameras you can be anything to each other and, better yet, to
everyone else.
Beyond
Dusky desert dream
Awaits me in the mist
Aztec longings, tribal warrior dances, fireside moon, mountain top rituals
The circle of life that remains unbroken.
Faded Snapshots of an Old Friend
I have no photos or little mementos of her.
She lives only in my head.
The image: Cigarette dangling from behind a wary smile, trusty plaid flannel knotted
around a lean torso, long coal hair carelessly thrown through a rubberband or billowing
like drapes around a naked, honest face.
Her world: The unabating scent of incense that filtered from her room into mine, the
incense stick precariously protruding from an old Coke can. The wails and moans of
Robert Plant that echoed off her walls, the fuzzy suede Pumas that littered her bare closet
(bare except for the flannel), the imposing black trunk that contained life’s necessities:
cotton balls and extra soft Puffs.
Our times together: Trudging through the grassy fields at the edge of campus on
late-night pilgrimages to Dunkin’ Donuts; watching MTV in closed captioning while lying
on the floor; downing wine coolers to the point of dizzy giddiness; lounging on the steps
outside our tower complex, where the warm, left-over summer breezes would blow away
our cobwebs.
from VANISHING POINT
by Gayle Elen Harvey
AMONG ALL INSTRUMENTS
In some other life, perhaps, you were an oboe, cor anglaise,
transposing instrument, and I, Sumarian lyre, plucked
bare-fingered, just as now, tonight,
clasped taut against your belly, your hands are transposing me,
my breasts, my guarded thighs strummed lentamente,
to arpeggios of wanting.
Dolce--- Dolcemente, you bring both of us to perfect pitch.
Among all instruments you were, perhaps, a contra bass,
flesh polished rose-wood in this votive light,
your potent, thrumming curves a skyline, harbored
like Marseilles or Istanbul at night-fall, mosqued
and sonorous with its muezzin.
In this life I have come to you, impaired, debauched
with sorrow, but you keep time, play rubato, lingering,
tenendo, giving, taking
until I become wind instrument, recorder,
swart interior receiving you, your carillon of grace notes
filling me until, felice, svegliando,
I can’t make a sound.
AFTER ELGAR’S “Cello Concerto”
(“---maybe true music is linked to silence---“)
Tout les Matins du Mondes
She thinks of a river with its own way of slipping
beyond silence, how it reshapes itself in a November black dress,
reinventing stones which love no one---
Mercy is not in the cards. While the world unravels, she thinks
of silence like freshly turned earth at the cornfield’s edge,
death’s lament so blinding, it requires its own kind of music,
as if grieving, itself, were privilege,
not merely text crescendoing softly---
Silence has nowhere else to go. The river is taking her
memories, too,
in their brass winding-sheets.
She thinks of tonight’s moon, luminous as bonemeal and thin ice,
realize how much music can be held
in the empty hand.
BALLOONING, ASPEN, COLORADO
Just past daybreak, the balloons lift
soundlessly, well-up like
tears---
Beneath an ornament as large as Christmas,
I am going up without you over wordless green,
dissolving timber-line.
We blame extremes of altitude,
the only reason we don’t sweat things out---
These mountains know their place.
They skim the sky’s thin membrane, pane-less air, distinctive,
as your face turns thumbprint, disappears
beneath this wicker basket.
I float above vacations, lakes that gleam like wedding crystal
or moon-rinsed backs of horses.
Cars turn miniature, they disappear.
Remote and landlocked, you are someone
I don’t recognize.
Another man adjusts the flame between us---
I trust his world of ropes,
indifferent weather, heated air less heavy now
than sleep.
Dyed indigo, the sky will not cloud over for another week.
The wind shifts.
I must trust this small space.
This issue of Poetic Matrix presents selections from some of the poetry
manuscripts submitted to our Chapbook Series including pieces from the two
manuscripts chosen to be published; Jeff Mann's MOUNTAIN FIREFLIES
and Grace Marie Grafton's ZERO. Nothing definitive accounts for the
varieties of poetry written except the variety of the individual poets and the
lives that they live. These poems, as all the poetry submitted, reflect these
lives providing those precise glimpses for which poetry is the perfect medium.
Poetic Matrix Chapbook Series
Selection in the Previously Published Category
MOUNTAIN FIREFLIES
Jeff Mann
LEMON CAKE
(for my mother)
Young. So young
that patina of sheet lightning
danced over bus rides, interstate
median strips. An autoharp
drew shivers, a pasture-roaming
collie respect, lemon cake
devotion. I gripped you then,
moraine of Victoriana, deaf
guardian of a favorite niece's
child. Of that generation of doilies
and hairnets, the oppressive crimson
of velvet drapes, elderly homes
where I drew to the bone,
beneath thought, that old lady love
free of men's conditions, father-criticisms.
Where I lured rabbits to propped
boxes with sugared carrots,
where I learned to speak slowly
and feast Southern-well, rocking on
firefly porches, with water hand-pumped
splashingly from the gifting ground.
You dissolved like sugar-crystal,
one last wave from the window
of a rest home in Fairlea.
Today, Great-aunt Grace, I am home.
My mother, your niece, who claims
to be no cook, presents this
lemon cake, icing almost imperceptibly
pink, a rippling genealogy
of recipe. One bite, and
a score of summers lapses away,
humming and purling with
sugar and citrus, a creek smoothing
pebbles, a hand proffering fireflies.
See how you sweeten us yet.
MAPLE SYRUP
1
The masking tape on the jarlid says
1973. Heaviest snow in my memory--
about the house the heap of two feet,
exhausting the flexible spruce,
so we mix buttermilk into buckwheat flour
and from a cellar cupboard after twenty years
retrieve this long-forgotten jar.
At fourteen maple syrup was nothing special,
something everyone else must be accustomed to,
and too much work. Wearisome, lugging zinc
buckets of sugar water down the wintry
hills, gathering wood for the fire.
And so little yield--from forty gallons
of dripped sap one meager gallon's syrup
I expected more sweetness from the world,
bliss uncoaxed, not distilled with long effort
and one's own roughened hands. I knew
worth would accrue results, honorable love
in all justice would be returned.
It was a relief to shut down the sugar house:
I had easier things to do.
Amidst the crystalline ruins of winter,
one West Virginia manhood, I pour
what I recognize now as costly, as precious,
a few tablespoons from that small jar,
that last jar, onto a pile of gritty, sad
buckwheat cakes. I bite into this history:
those mornings split between winter and spring,
when sun against the maple flanks conjures up
the sap's ascent. All that charcoal-gray silence
in the sugar grove, a flicker rapping remotely.
About me the tiny plink plink plink.
Siphoned up roots from the mountains' rocky flesh,
the rain and ground water some alchemy in maples
makes sweet. Dripping from spiles of elderberry
in summer broken and carved, freed of pith. Each drop
ignited by early sun trembling pendant on the spile-
lip before the silver shudder and fall. Zinc buckets
propped on sandstone stoops my great-grandfather set,
the bark pocked with vague scars he drilled
in the Februaries of another century.
We stayed up late, simmering the great oblong pan,
skimming off the scummy froth, sitting long
on banks of windfall limbs, searching
for the Pleiades, between which branches they nested,
searching out certainties in the North Star,
stretching chill-stiff palms as if in hope of
lasting blessing towards the fire. Even the air was sweet.
2
I lick the last drops of maple syrup from my mustache,
knowing again a mouth moist with manna beneath mine,
ecstasies after which so much is merely wait.
A face still vague with sleep is dwindling
in the seconds between doorjamb and door.
Matched mysteries, eyes meet. On mumbled goodbyes
the door closes with a switchblade snick.
Years lost, a bliss too brief to be jarred and sealed.
I finger-scrape the last sweet crumbs from the plate,
taste a body memory as finalized as Michelangelo
did marble, as my great-grandfather's memory
held some women's body long loved.
The long evaporations, the patience, years
of simmering off, the distillation of decades.
Some syrup is consumed in a season. We are left
with sticky fingers and lips, satisfied with nothing
less, knowing how paltry all attempts
to preserve so intense a sweet.
Poetic Matrix Chapbook Series
Selection in the Previously Unpublished Category
ZERO
Grace Marie Grafton
Each step thick as cotton
So much of the circus is balance.
Traveling around the globe,
continually it is
how to trust the animal.
People pay to see that.
Not such a glamorous life,
the performers dwell
in their instincts and trailers.
Hot spotlights, a lot of illusion.
But the practicing
on short winter afternoons
in desert air when light
becomes clear red
matches the glycerine-thick jell
suspended in the belly,
drops below the heart
to the ball where,
with prehensile toes, you could balance
in a present that holds the past
and knows the future
as though it were an infant’s fist
uncurling.
The unfreezing
Some say, “Thaw.” Gold light
buckles into the shoulder socket.
Some say, “Wings.” Personal desire
ricochets through the world.
Some say, “One man’s meat,
another man’s poison.”
The oak tree’s limb
knocks on the fir tree’s bark.
This tree is not falling, but there is
a sound in the forest
we’re there to hear.
To the Chinese Buddhist, the word for sound
is the same as for suffering.
To accept and comfort suffering,
make a joyful noise.
Yellow jonquils, or lotus
with the plate-like leaf.
The Chinese philosopher says it is better
to be water, yielding.
In its journey to the sky, do you hear it whisper,
“Can’t catch me”?
Desire follows after the rain.
Jonquil petals
yellow mouths saying, “Kiss, kiss.
The last light hides in the cedar fronds.
Some say, “Time to go in.”
Some say, “Dusk is like bread between the teeth.”
Stars are escaped rain into the July night.
Our wishes come true
“a recent...theory hold that
the energy that pulled the universe
into being...was consciousness”
-David Ponedel
We sit on the blue couch in the meadow.
The line of light stretches longer than
the tops of our heads, invisible as spiderweb.
The waterfall at Cedar Grove,
the several slow-moving waters at Sinkyone,
smooth before reaching the ocean,
where lupine-bush bloom in satisfactory rectitude.
Stream, a quiet word.
Water lilies – gold globes or pink –
multi-petaled tinged longing.
The curvature of space creates redwoods
and cacti we see only in non-dream.
A space-cousin someone named chain fern,
or brown creeper – that small bird
rustles up the redwood bark, it’s
hopping up its perception of the tree.
It is November, we lie and
look at clouds leading into January,
pull July’s quilt up to our
chins. Someone was born then, a set of
perceptions, desired kin.
from INHALE DEEPLY
by Johanna Snow
REMEMBER MY PORCH
My porch invited us
like a childless
woman’s waiting arms,
extending itself
for our midnight pleasures
when the sky was the color
of Kahlua
and the moon held out
its quivering radiance
like the last melting
ice cube in my glass.
In the word game -
indubitably, inevitably,
irrevocably, undeniably –
you declared me the
winner. “You always win,”
you said.
My front steps drew us
out and drew us together while
we drank in the liquid darkness
and became drunk
on our own relief and
relaxation.
My porch remembers
your name
and sings me
your sweet laughter
while I sit there alone
these nights.
Our ice cube moon
has almost completely
melted.
OUR OWN LIFE
Bring me oxygen.
Then bring me my scarlet lipstick.
To you this may never happen again.
Come. Come aboard my pleasure ship.
Bring me a shaggy soft bear rug.
Bring me bubbly wine.
Bring me my anklet with tiny brass bells
and then dance with me over the line
you drew. Dance with me over the line.
Bring me a feather and fig leaf.
Feed me caviar and seedless red grapes.
Help me design this exotic motif
where we fingerpaint this bold, wild landscape.
Bring me Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,”
Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,”
then tell me your most secret dreams, my dear,
and I’ll love you, come what may
ha ha. I’ll love you, come what may.
Bring me oxygen and my lipstick.
Do not be afraid.
It’s only within us, what we see outside us.
It’s only our own life we’ve made.
from The Muse's Darkroom
by Lisa Haviland
Flashbulb Realities
Summer has aged me this year.
As if in a trance, I sit numbly among the thespians
Rehearsing the latest twist in the epic plot.
I'm tired of callous dealings and fraudulent feelings
Of terms and conditions on the fun I'm allowed to have with you -
when Boyfriend's not busy towing the line.
Ah, 90s love
Daily smotherings and duty-bound sentiments
Constructing the perfect made for TV pairings while love is left in pieces on the cutting
room floor.
Click! With uncandid cameras you can be anything to each other and, better yet, to
everyone else.
Beyond
Dusky desert dream
Awaits me in the mist
Aztec longings, tribal warrior dances, fireside moon, mountain top rituals
The circle of life that remains unbroken.
Faded Snapshots of an Old Friend
I have no photos or little mementos of her.
She lives only in my head.
The image: Cigarette dangling from behind a wary smile, trusty plaid flannel knotted
around a lean torso, long coal hair carelessly thrown through a rubberband or billowing
like drapes around a naked, honest face.
Her world: The unabating scent of incense that filtered from her room into mine, the
incense stick precariously protruding from an old Coke can. The wails and moans of
Robert Plant that echoed off her walls, the fuzzy suede Pumas that littered her bare closet
(bare except for the flannel), the imposing black trunk that contained life’s necessities:
cotton balls and extra soft Puffs.
Our times together: Trudging through the grassy fields at the edge of campus on
late-night pilgrimages to Dunkin’ Donuts; watching MTV in closed captioning while lying
on the floor; downing wine coolers to the point of dizzy giddiness; lounging on the steps
outside our tower complex, where the warm, left-over summer breezes would blow away
our cobwebs.
from VANISHING POINT
by Gayle Elen Harvey
AMONG ALL INSTRUMENTS
In some other life, perhaps, you were an oboe, cor anglaise,
transposing instrument, and I, Sumarian lyre, plucked
bare-fingered, just as now, tonight,
clasped taut against your belly, your hands are transposing me,
my breasts, my guarded thighs strummed lentamente,
to arpeggios of wanting.
Dolce--- Dolcemente, you bring both of us to perfect pitch.
Among all instruments you were, perhaps, a contra bass,
flesh polished rose-wood in this votive light,
your potent, thrumming curves a skyline, harbored
like Marseilles or Istanbul at night-fall, mosqued
and sonorous with its muezzin.
In this life I have come to you, impaired, debauched
with sorrow, but you keep time, play rubato, lingering,
tenendo, giving, taking
until I become wind instrument, recorder,
swart interior receiving you, your carillon of grace notes
filling me until, felice, svegliando,
I can’t make a sound.
AFTER ELGAR’S “Cello Concerto”
(“---maybe true music is linked to silence---“)
Tout les Matins du Mondes
She thinks of a river with its own way of slipping
beyond silence, how it reshapes itself in a November black dress,
reinventing stones which love no one---
Mercy is not in the cards. While the world unravels, she thinks
of silence like freshly turned earth at the cornfield’s edge,
death’s lament so blinding, it requires its own kind of music,
as if grieving, itself, were privilege,
not merely text crescendoing softly---
Silence has nowhere else to go. The river is taking her
memories, too,
in their brass winding-sheets.
She thinks of tonight’s moon, luminous as bonemeal and thin ice,
realize how much music can be held
in the empty hand.
BALLOONING, ASPEN, COLORADO
Just past daybreak, the balloons lift
soundlessly, well-up like
tears---
Beneath an ornament as large as Christmas,
I am going up without you over wordless green,
dissolving timber-line.
We blame extremes of altitude,
the only reason we don’t sweat things out---
These mountains know their place.
They skim the sky’s thin membrane, pane-less air, distinctive,
as your face turns thumbprint, disappears
beneath this wicker basket.
I float above vacations, lakes that gleam like wedding crystal
or moon-rinsed backs of horses.
Cars turn miniature, they disappear.
Remote and landlocked, you are someone
I don’t recognize.
Another man adjusts the flame between us---
I trust his world of ropes,
indifferent weather, heated air less heavy now
than sleep.
Dyed indigo, the sky will not cloud over for another week.
The wind shifts.
I must trust this small space.
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