People
CAROLINE
She wore
her coming death
as gracefully
as if it were a coat
she’d learned to sew.
When it grew cold enough
she’d simply button it
and go.
CLIFF COBB
Social Studies Teacher
He held the great weight
of his head
heavily
between thumb and forefinger
as if the knowledge it contained
would seep out
without his support.
Linda Pastan
Carl Coleman
GRANDFATHER
EX-BASKETBALL PLAYER
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps-Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all--more of a football type.
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ‘46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.
Off work, he hangs around Mae’s luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.
John Updike
You slept evenly, hardly rumpling the sheet.
Later, I thought of places in Tennessee. The green
leapt off those hills, you said, explaining
your apple-core eyes.
A white field rumpled your jaw at night,
growing its own winter
carefully, without waste of time.
Sometimes you counted acres
you never owned, over and over, on fingers
handcuffed with age; you squinted
hospital fern into trees. How could
I know your sorrow? It was so private,
locked behind your fine, half-Cherokee skull,
and almost over, your face
tangled as the map of a civilized country.
Maura Stanton
THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
MARSHALL
THE NUN ON THE TRAIN
It occurred to Marshall
that if he were a vegetable, he’d
be a bean. Not
one of your thin, stringy
green beans, or your
Riding on the train
through summer banks of stitchwort
and forget-me-not
forget-me-not
forget-me-not
a nun nods in the heat.
She cannot loosen her heavy black dress
or tight white chinstrap
so her cheeks turn pink.
What does she think,
behind softly moving lips,
of those thighs of miniskirted girls
flirting with the Italians across the aisle?
What does she think
of the woman glimpsed in a bikini
painting window frames?
And what does she thing of
Roderick Random in my lap
and even of my new red shoes?
dry, marbly
Burlotti beans. No, he’d be
a broad bean,
a rich nutritious,
meaningful bean,
alert for advantages,
inquisitive with potatoes,
mixing with every kind
and condition of vegetable,
and a good friend
to meat and lager. Yes, he’d
leap from his huge
rough pod with a loud
popping sound
into the pot; always
in hot water
and out of it with a soft
heart inside
his horny carapace. He’d
carry the whole
world’s hunger on
his broad shoulders, green
with his butter
or brown with gravy. And if
some starving Indian saw his
flesh bleeding
when the gas was turned on
or the knife went in
he’d accept the homage and prayers,
and become a god, and die like a man,
which, as things were, wasn’t so easy.
George MacBeth
Judy Ray
REFLECTION TO COURTNEY
Obscured,
behind the shadows
I watch…
You lie sprawled
On the serene carpet
Your gossamer curls caress
Your small face, with wispy tendrils
Eyes intense…
With delicate hands you
sculpt…
a masterpiece, a captured moment
of imagination
bleeding red crayon
into careful lines on the ivory page.
I wish I could
hold
this uninterrupted moment
preserved
in my
hands,
Shatter the clock and keep you
four
Forever
Cyndi Jones
PHOTOGRAPH,
BEFORE HE WAS MY FATHER
Dad, you’re out of focus
23 and skinny.
Your mouth splits wide
under a black moustache
over a black motorcycle.
The building at your back
has rats. Your feel them
only at night.
Two quarters keep each other warm
in your pocket. The streetlights
are about to stutter on.
Your motorcycle can take you
anywhere, fast.
Roger Fanning
ELEGY FOR JANE
My Student, Thrown by a Horse
I remember the neck curls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables
leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into
such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no right in this matter,
Neither father nor lever.
Theodore Roethke
IT’S THAT WAY WITH ME
Fleets! They too flow to port.
A train likewise speeds to a station.
And I, even more, am pulled and tugged
towards you—
for I love.
Pushkins’ covetous knight
visits his cellar to rummage and gloat.
In the same way,
my beloved,
I return to you,
This is my heart,
and I marvel at it,
People gladly go home
and scrape off their dirt,
washing and shaving.
In the same way
I return to you—
for in going towards you,
am I not returning home?!
Man of earth in earth is laid.
We return to our destination.
Thus steadily
I am dawn back
toward you
as soon as we part or
or stop seeing each other.
Gladimir Mayakovsky
ONCE A LONG TIME AGO
LETTING GO
Once a long time ago, you remember
we were living in the basement of our parent’s house
we two brothers, the girls sharing a room upstairs
It was dark in the basement, dark and hard to move around
and our sister charged her friends a dime
to visit, calling it the Spook House.
I would look up from my book
sometimes and see a line of ten year olds
in pink shorts
climbing down the trap door steps.
What are you doing here? I asked calmly
never realizing I was the spookiest part of all
The little girls giggled and ran for help
Maybe you don’t remember that
you were too busy looking for a job
Whoever
upon reading these words
might think
of me,
of the summers
that were like unfolding flowers
when we spoke
carelessly
of life or happiness
and how to attain it.
of the times we tried
to reach the stars
barehanded
and, upon falling,
looked at the sky with laughter,
without the fear of now;
when you remember me
(if you remember me),
don’t dwell on the times we
cried and dried
each other’s tears.
Love should be kept
for years,
not lost in a summer’s rain.
My memory of you today
is infinite,
my love for you yesterday
was too.
Maybe you remember how we slept together
next to the oil burner
on an old double mattress, getting along,
two friends, never complaining about privacy
until one afternoon around four-thirty
I came across you, my older brother, older
and ashamed to be living under his mother’s roof,
your legs hanging out of a green, sour-smelling topsheet,
your black hair mussed, your stallion’s eyes desperate
like horses trapped in a flaming barn.
You wouldn’t look at me.
I asked you what was wrong
you remember? But instead of answering your whole body
shrunk
and when I got into bed beside you
you started to cry you started to cry but no sound came out
and I was wondering if you were faking
or if there was so much that wanted to come out
that you had to hold a pillow over it
and smother it
I never told you this but Esquire Magazine was lying
on the floor face up, the new issue, and I wondered
if something you had seen there had made you unhappy
like the disgusting bourbon ads, or the dense novelettes
that left me slightly nauseous like cups of warm water
I also wished I could look at the new issue
I had time for many thoughts because you took a while
crying
and I couldn’t think of anything to do except hold you
and keep asking what was wrong
I felt confident in the end you would tell me
and this is perhaps what you could never forgive me
My conqueror’s believe in the absolute power of sympathy
because you never did tell me
and I saw that you didn’t trust me enough
and I still don’t know to this day
what was wrong
because all you said was
“Leave me alone, just leave me alone for two minutes.”
Phillip Lopate
Kim Kohli