Saturday, June 28, 2014

Peter Marin:

THE DAYS



The days become windows,

gliding along the low coast of plenty

nearing old age. The silence

is vivid, the colors intense,

the flesh somehow cleansed

by desire. This is its home:

this morning, this world, this space

I have lived in, not unlike

my grand-father, lost among laws

for almost a life-time, charting

the unknown, lacking a map,

taking the world as it comes.

I am once again in wild transit --

as I was on the freights,  passing

lover to lover as if among planets

 deep forests, wild falls, creatures

nesting among stones, naked

in their newness, in a new world...

Who can dismiss those left behind, dead

on the roadside, or lost to the fires

still burning bright in the mind?

Their faces, hung from the tree of life

glow now, like sephiroths, from inside,

each preserving a self like a world.

The deserts, the rattle of cars,

God heavy in a box we never put down,

our fingers near-broken by seeking --

what was it  called to us, willing us on?

And as solitude becomes a dazzlement,

as words are left behind, as time

curls back on itself, undoing the tenses,

befuddling the senses, what remains

to be said? Or what can be seen,

looking outside, at the garden Monet

still sits in, waiting for light? I

smoke a stale cigar, alone on a porch,

crossing the last bridge of sighs,

hearing the songs of the world.

In the painting, "The Man With a Hoe,"

the fields once broken from stones

shine, golden at noon, behind him.

Who is it who brings in the harvest?

Who lives in the chimney-smoke houses?

Those on the edge must keep going,

aware only of the yet still to come,

drawn on by the morning of light.

Theirs is the season of harvests,

the grain as it bends in the wind, 

a gratitude sung to existence

when winter comes close to its end.




 PRACTICE

Readying myself

for life, for death, I practice

the art of aging. Not

what we deserve, but

what we are given: what is allowed us

after the taking, whatever

falls from the tree, all that

can be gleaned, marking

a way in the brightening dusk

alone or with others, at

home or, inside, on the road.

 I light a cigar and watch

darkness fall over the wood

learning to think: it is good.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Steve Belasco:


Five Odd Reflections on Memory
On time
And Death


1.
At the end of them
Thirty years compact
In that black hole
Where gravity depraved
De-sequences 
Their time
When time is all they are.
Nothing escapes
Black hole time -
It has its own; and
Lusts to own it all.
It will,
And at the end of them
Thirty years will
Effervesce
Be timeless
Be nothing
Be only
The memory you make of them
In that black hole
Where you would
Pick up pieces of them
If there were some.

2.
Years get counted
At the end:
The incomplete
Get no credit.
Obituaries never
Note the months, the days:
Don’t number the last hours.
The time you last
Will be an integer.
Halfway, most,
Notions for poems
Do not count.

In the insignificance
Of months,
Of days, of hours, minutes
Of efforts and attempts
Of all the almost done
We find uncounted
Coins too few
To matter much
Like small remainders
In results of long division:
Unsatisfactory but there.

3.
I store moments
In a glass jar
Like collected coins
And have them
Where I can see them
Even reach in
And feel how many there are
And how surprisingly
Similar they feel
Their faces
The inscriptions
The raised edges
Wearing away
With each touch
Sounding
Like water
Lapping gravel
The moments
Smoothed past recognition
And past
Distinction.

4.
Intermittently at night
The dead email
Me brief
Apologies
About mistakes
They made attaching
Photographs
Of stuff that never happened.
Muscleless they can’t
Shampoo the mud
They tracked on carpet
That I’ve since replaced;
They write instead
With typos and want
Understanding or
To blame the pet.
Face down flat
Blindly they reach back
As best the dirt load
Lets them
And even after they’ve been eaten
Past the fingers
Their message lingers.
I won’t reply.
I won’t disturb
The misery that binds us.
No forgiveness
Better than forgetting. 
And soon enough
They will stop writing.

5.
May is a good month for lawns
On my block.  They’re spread
Out like dry goods at market
And tempt you to lift the edge
And feel them between your fingers.

They are made right here,
The techniques passed down,
Though these days there’s power
Instead of push
And few are handmade.

Old timers will tell you on weekends
You could hear blades shuttle
Rising and falling
All over the neighborhood
Like orchestrated looms

And sniff the leakage from slit grass
Its heavy tang where fumes
Now rise off the motor boat beat
Of one-pistoned four wheelers
Wrangled by masked Mexicanos.

These days the edges
Trim quick and rectilinear
Where once it took
Hand clippers and snips
To correct grass that went too far.

And it’s every day of the week
Now neighborhood samurai
No longer reach into the folds of garages
And Saturdays unleash curved blades
On lawns and by noon

Have left only traces
Of green stain and severed
Fingers of motionless grass
Littered about for honor,
The dignity of order
And the neighborhood.




Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Andrew Peterson: Selections from occasional landscapes

Andrew K. Peterson:



Selections from occasional landscapes

“ 3o ”

what does the second half of life bring? More
love? More grief? More fate through liberation in insufferable
suffering and life, yes, more life. paralysis of thought
on edge  descending
wood in some Grand Canyon State. Rails, tracks, grown-in
wild flowers? Cool
courage for the swerves, great task of immunity
from system’s forbidden occurrences,
accruals  & decay


*

noting traveling apostrophizes
Amygdala’s
diamond glitter wedge

externalizing focus ® drawn from trauma ¬
grown in externalized object
            (Vegetation delimits speeding sign)

Kind of Blue: a rind
as in, sort of, or
                        certain type

Curious struggle: gnat against my heart-pocket ,  broken-winged terror of
never-ending world of a = unknowable alliances
Open field awareness = S P L I C E

                        projective image for the beyond
                        with happiness, in tandem:

*

I could be in love with a friend’s shadow walking with someone that
feels natural talking seeing shadows together on sidewalks
clean, trailing ahead –  insular
“theory comes in later   a frame”
an upside down flame

            If I don’t say
I forget what it is –

sweet, feel it’s safer –
crying outside emergency

rooms lonelier , rawer with awe

than ever before  ‘Nor direction
            O direction to go’  

*

together  everyone achieves  mythology
 – Ayrella, age 6

tell the wolf it’s a human universe

bloody
burning wheel one never spoke of

no renunciation
so the hungry ghost goes

*
"I accept my human condition" —Jorge Guillen
        vision of public gesture
                as great revealing intimacy
impossible to separate
the grammar's in the music
lights move in rhythm to the imagined
scores of forms passed over , though
spurs
in the sonic gland mind
         : a bubbled gum
                  olive branches       & heat stones
*

keep your memories...

a crown
levitating
feet above your
head
rendered
flame-like
fingerprint

permanently
autonomous..

...but keep your powder dry too…

whether it pits the notion of devastation against
nation, morality without such recognition’s maybe
dangerous look to those aggressive birds,
(i.e. change in light status, mismatched address)

singing songs & making a racket

in front of their composite lord or the greedy
flies.  flood of terrestrial battle
fields. Better to weep
than not to weep    
              ???



Andrew K. Peterson is the author of two full-length poetry collections: some deer left the yard moving day and Museum of Thrown Objects (both published by BlazeVox Books). His chapbook bonjour Meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile Press, 2011) appeared in an exhibition on poets’ maps the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. He edits summer stock, an online poetry journal, and lives in the Boston area.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Bill Pearlman:


FIELDWORK

The field always opening
the multiplicities because no vision
occluded, but continues forward
against the odds. Mind
mattering excessively as ever
coming up short.
            Old friend with dementia
can’t recall his stomach illness,
has lost its content… Better?
Yet we prize memory,
what you said that mattered.

But time for loss,
upending desire, deleterious
the gamble of soul at odds
with time & decay

Live with it, confused
but synched with change
the engine returned to idle

          2.

But how else make sense
when all’s moving so much
when all this here & now becomes
the insufferably vanishing
          so quickly
and we are left unrepaired—

Something must arise in us,
spending these instances of energy
in the waking dream of continuum

mindless at times, running
like a swirling clock hand
across aeons, beings striving
to know more, feel the news
of our ongoing interests, the world
just enough with us,
catching our fleeting joys
and the passings, the sorrows,
the conquests, the births
the inner expanses of living
just as they’re given


         3.

But memory, what of it?
The silent and potent movement
immediately there in time
   sitting across from a warrior-poet
whose work is juxtaposition
     or angling to receive
a sign of significant form

requisite diligence that matters
making a crossed referential
or mild shaping of figure
making sense, rising
to the occasion—
And comic or tragic, getting down
the truthful components, the drive
to form the intense cohesion
elemental, embodied & right
on the particulars



Friday, June 13, 2014

Wayne Frank:


     

          Remembering Old Mac

                   Prologue:
Old Mac used to come into my Uncle’s
tavern on Sundays when I tended bar
He’d get to the bar before noon for a
free Sunday Morning drink. After three
wines, invariably Old Mac would start
to reminisce about the great adventure
he had in Copenhagen, getting laid in
Copenhagen at age 62. Of course getting
laid in Copenhagen wasn’t free; that’s
not the point. But now, Old Mac is long
dead and I’m long past 62 




( W. Frank is a produced playwright and published poet.
His 2nd play was nominated “Best Play” by the American
Theatre Critics Assoc and his 3rd play was the adaptation of
The Sun Also Rises, the only adaptation ever approved by the
Hemingway Foundation. As a poet, he has had over 30 poems
published in the U.S., Scotland and England. A Milwaukee
resident, he currently winters in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.) 

Monday, June 2, 2014

May 25 ritual
                         Alison Minet



Standing in the shower crying over you

Saying the words 

I free you, love. I free you

Living as a ghost in my heart

These almost forty years

Chained to me by promises

It's about time you

had the chance of freedom

It's time you 

had a new life

Or eternal rest 

At your choice.

Love, I free  you. Love I free you

Walking in moonlight

Next to moonlight 

Moonlight reflected in ocean

Saying the words 

Lover's final ritual

I free you, love, I free you.

Driving down the Pacific Ocean

Saying the words

34 years slide beachward

Mixing with memories

Where  we were together

Big Sur 

Boston Common

Huntington Beach

Martha's Vineyard

Walking with each other

And disappearing into fog

You showed me love

Love unbound by time

I free you love I free you

Standing on the dunes in Marina

Saying the words 

Crying with pride At my daughter's graduation

(she could have been ours)

Singing with our granddaughter in my arms

In our son's house

Places you never were

Places I feel your love

Invisible arms around me

Saying the words

I free you love I free you
From every twist of my nerves

From the secrets in my mind

From every hallow in my heart

From the dreams and heartbreak

I free you, love, I free you




 This is not banishment

You are not required to go

I have not stopped

Loving you


 But I had locked you in

From any new turn of your wheel

Bound you to me 

With chains of longing

And so for love

Out of love

I say the words 

And free you

Love

I free you.




 C 2013 Alison Minet

Sunday, June 1, 2014

from JAMES CERVANTES:


Learning


Here comes the ferrocarril,
announcing itself with a rude trumpet,

the iron horse and its iron carriage
weighing on rails, the earth, and the body.

But that is not what is out there a few
hundred yards away, in Mexico,

and seventy years removed
from the image in a small head

and a small body that feels the weight
rumbling a stone's throw from the house.

We must have been close by the rail yard
because the heaviness stills and a soft

coupling of cars begins. A magnolia
couples with the face of mother,

two halves of a house with a steel ball
that rolls down its central hallway, curtains

blowing outward and a tin roof
alive with rain, gravel with rock with rail

until ghost cars couple silently
beyond the vanishing point where

the train disappeared and the engine
will come into view again.


--James Cervantes
This is Bill Pearlman, your June editor, roaming the world, currently in New York.

Call for Work: Looking for poetry, prose based around the subjects of Time, Memory and Ageing.
Will take a look at other work as well, but would like these essential subjects of the human process to be the principal aim. I realize these are broad subjects, but they allow a breadth of concerns that are apparent to many of us as we deal with our own mortality and the ways in which time enters our lives--sometimes as fondness, sometimes as hurtful contingency, sometimes carrying us to  the heart of what being alive can mean.
Please send work to my email: b2pearl@gmail.com....

Truck's new driver/editor for June

Please welcome Bill Pearlman, who will be at the wheel throughout the pleasant month of June.

Hail and farewell to Glenn Bach for his yeoman service during May. Many thanks!

Truck's drivers/editors past, present and future, as of June 1, 2014



Present


Bill Pearlman


Future


July 2014 -- Edgar Gabriel Silex
Aug. 2014 -- Jerry McGuire
Sept. 2014 -- Karri Kokko
Oct. 2014 -- Márton Koppány
Nov. 2014 -- Burt Kimmelman
Dec. 2014 -- Chris Lott

Past


Apr. 2011 -- Kate Schapira

May 2011 -- Wendy Battin
June 2011 -- Frank Parker
July 2011 --  Skip Fox
Aug. 2011 -- Ken Wolman
Sept. 2011 -- Michael Tod Edgerton
Oct. 2011 -- Kelly Cherry
Nov. 2011 -- Andrew Burke
Dec. 2011 -- Lewis LaCook

Jan. 2012 --  Larissa Shmailo

Feb. 2012 -- Gerald Schwartz
Mar. 2012 -- Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Apr. 2012 -- Lynda Schor
May 2012 -- David Graham
June 2012 -- Lars Palm
July 2012 --  Elizabeth Switaj
Aug. 2012 --  rob mclennan
Sept. 2012 -- Georgios Tsangaris
Oct. 2012 -- Douglas Barbour
Nov. 2012 -- Dirk Vekemans 
Dec. 2012 -- Erik Rzepka

Jan. 2013 -- Alan Britt
Feb. 2013 -- Mark Weiss
Mar. 2013-- Mary Kasimor
Apr. 2013-- John M. Bennett
May 2013--Orchid Tierney
June 2013--Victoria Marinelli
July 2013 -- Volodymyr Bilyk
Aug. 2013 -- David Howard
Sept. 2013 -- Philip Meersman
Oct. 2013 -- Chris Lott
Nov. 2013 -- Alexander Cigale
Dec. 2013 -- Catherine Daly

Jan. 2014 -- Maria Damon
Feb. 2014 -- John Oughton
Mar. 2014 -- Colin Morton and MaryLee Bragg
Apr. 2014 -- Alan Sondheim
May 2014 -- Glenn Bach