Summer Festival, Calamity Cafe
Young woman,
her face a porcelain Japanese mask,
sells turquoise earrings for a dollar.
Behind her
through a glass door
two bearded men sit playing silence in songs
they fret on electric guitars unplugged.
Stars overhead waver,
hazy, & smell like cigarette smoke
mixed with hair oil & patchouli.
Terre tests her performance art on the corner.
Men & women dance
between cars, through traffic,
each a saint like Augustine not yet,
not yet. The door opens,
selling dirty sounds,
white noise & live guitars.
Someone enters; someone leaves.
Someone is heard swearing
I love you! to a dead man.
One old drunk shouts, “Hey
buddy, will you play 'The Twist?'”
Roy, Speedy, Annie & Mike inside
merge with the carnival bodies.
They wear costumes
to hide their faces
without surrendering spectacle
like the poems of a revolutionary.
Outside, I keep asking, “Will it rain?”
Letters to Jennifer Hall on the Value of Writing Poems
1.
Thanks for the river that wasn’t a river,
the pink clouds
neither clouds nor pink,
the bridge that wasn’t a bridge
to anywhere . . .
2.
Now you are writing a poem;
now you feel serene;
now you warm;
now I don’t need to say, “Smile,
damn it!” because you are smiling.
3.
Smiling opens a window to
that part of the self most divine.
4.
The literary, the erotic . . .
5.
You can say to the page
things you can’t say to anyone.
6.
. . . delirious with fever, mad
on cough syrup, writing poems.
Letters to Mollie Riddle
1.
In a crowd . . . silence.
2.
You’ve been a victim in the past.
3.
I counter making
a spectacle of myself.
4.
When a man comes with nothing &
a woman receives him with nothing,
each instant is an exploration.
5.
I’d probably explain it better over drinks.
6.
I’d probably have to sacrifice part of myself.
7.
You are a small-g god
in your private universe.
8.
Describe your universe to me.
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Current Issue - Winter 2003
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