December 2009

VOL XVII, Issue 12, Number 200

Editor: Klaus J. Gerken

Production Editor: Heather Ferguson

European Editor: Mois Benarroch

Contributing Editors: Michael Collings; Jack R. Wesdorp; Oswald Le Winter

Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena

ISSN 1480-6401

INTRODUCTION

W. Jude Aher  
   dare to dance

CONTENTS

W. Jude Aher 
   water jazz 
   calls of the shadow
   autumn light lost

Richard Fein 
   FLICKERING JOYS 
   LEG CRAMP GENEALOGY 
   BROKEN IDOLS, FALLEN GODS
   OPEN POETRY READING 
   MY BLACKMAIL NOTE TO ALL OF YOU 
   THE BODY HUMAN, 

William Doreski
   The News Today
   That Primal Sensation 
   Thermopylae
   This Way to History

POST SCRIPTUM

William Doreski
   The Fire You Started in the Closet

W. Jude Aher  
 
 
dare to dance

do i remember
so young
i danced
upon
lamp lit streets
and their dark retreats
upon long earth carved highways
where the wind screamed
so silent
so free
before tomorrow
do i remember
when suddenly
who broke upon the mirror
so silent
so alone
and now
before yesterday
do i
remember
as i dare to dance
in the silence
of my dreams

W. Jude Aher  


water jazz

salt green ocean sky
ice mirror lies
on a sudden bleed
before you die
speak
whisper and sigh
a soft dusk
blood upon my lips
sips
try…



calls of the shadow

deep
within a dream
deeper
within a lost dance
a woman
falls a shadow
as water
beyond inside
silence
calls to the willow
reasons upon
an autumn light
morning 
cold
evening
whispers
they come alive
deep
within the night
dancing in her dreams
a woman and silver light
daring to believe
daring to concede
calls of the shadow
dancing
between
morning and night



autumn light lost

if in the dark
you still believe
as you bleed
in truth and time
autumn light lost
where shadows
call
will you walk your name
dance
in a dream-time refrain
where before tomorrow
does hide
sweet mountain snow
sorrow
held deep
wind on hard worn skin
always just before
in the dark
if you still believe
- jude
sings the silence
silent, silent
deep
in a dark
behind the night
lost my soul
lost my light
no breath
no tears
no walking
no fears
just for a moment
for
i dared
to ignore my death
and sip
from
the blood of truth
and just for a moment
i heard
from where whales sing



*i heard his refrain when the signal changed he was playing real good, for free.
joni mitchell



Richard Fein 

 
FLICKERING JOYS 

Not Alzheimer’s but ministrokes each rupturing yet more capillaries,
like a skyscraper after hours when one by one the lights go out,
till finally late, late in a calendar day 
stands a dim silhouette of a building against waning moonlight.
Or maybe a flickering fireplace smothering within its own paling ash.
But sparks do fly from dying fires, and occasionally a midnight office neon turns on again. 
Her grandchildren assembled.
And in her ancient eyes one of us would randomly come out of the shadow.
A face bright in her sight as the glow returned to her eyes,
proud to know she was blessed with yet another 
as if the grandchild were just born.
She discovered and rediscovered us. We lost count
But there were many flickering joys,
her eyes bright like a comet at each brand new introduction. 



LEG CRAMP GENEALOGY 

From atop my dresser over my bed,
the whole colorful crew stares down at me in black and white,
all gathered in front of a well-worn 1926 Model T.
And in the next photo smiles a young grandma Katherine,
in a neck-to-ankle, make-a-Puritan-proud dress.
But she was never a Puritan.
Before she died decades ago, Katherine told me legends about my ancestors.
Her horse-and-buggy father knew how to finger the reins of fillies. 
But he was also well suited for Model Ts, for she claimed he was the first to discover 
the now infamous use of an automobile backseat.
And this knowledge must have been in the genes, an instinct passed from father to daughter,
for she was born knowing the secrets of backseat contortion
without getting cramps in her legs or sticking them out the window.
And once my dowager grandma whispered to me that her daughter carried on the tradition.
Mommy, my own mommy.
I was part of a venerable line of auto-erotic acrobats and so was biblically begat in a Buick.
I should get wallet-size miniatures of these photos 
and dangle them from the front mirror of my new Toyota 
instead of the rubber dice and St. Christopher.
We all must be proud of having driven this far forward through the generations.
But frankly with the new ecofriendly politically correct compact cars
a bed is more comfy than a backseat. 



BROKEN IDOLS, FALLEN GODS
 
In the resoundingly large museum hall he told us to bow our heads and chant along with him.
But he prayed to his ancient Mayan deities in a language none of us understood,
yet we babbled along with him as best we could.
He sat cross-legged like a Yoga master as he summoned phantom Mesoamerica
in the once mysterious Maya, a language perhaps as ancient as Hindi.
Shamans and priests seem to always beckon their gods in little-known tongues.
And in Mayan the shaman invoked a fairytale of she wolves nursing orphaned lambs. 

For then In English, he lectured that Mayan cities had no walls and so no wars.
Peace was granted by beneficent gods.
But a decade after, deeper archeological digs uncovered
the ash of ancient wooden barricades and butchered human bones.
And finally the inscrutable hieroglyphs surrendered their dark secrets
of Smoking Frog and his bloody conquest of rival kings. 
But on that guileless day before the bad tidings of truth 
were resurrected from jungle humus,
the shaman spoke with childlike wonder
and sung his nursery rhymes to a faith-hungry congregation.
Ignorant shaman and naive audience chanting in harmonized innocence,
while in that echoing hall our prayers for peace recoiled from bloodthirsty gods. 



OPEN POETRY READING 

If it were held in Hollywood
a Julia Roberts lookalike would be at the next table.
After my reading, thoroughly seduced, she’d come over to me.
Later she’d come during our hot sex.
But then I’d leave her for the sake of my art. 
If it were held in Bollywood
ten maidens in saris would dance on the tables
and a high-pitched female Hindi vocalist would sing my praises.
I’d even get to kiss one of the maidens
though it would scandalize half of India. 
If it were held in Moscow–If it were held in Moscow.
Forget Moscow!
There they scrounge for kopecks.
They’d shoot my performance with used film,
which would be an improvement
for in the old days they’d have just shot me. 
If it were held—If it were held . . ..
But this is Brooklyn,
flat beer, dim lighting, and an almost empty room.
And my only feedback is the screeching mike, except for a Julia Child lookalike.
And she’ll come, surely she’ll come, oh god she’ll surely come,
over to-ask me if I read already, 
she being too busy with her own scribbling to notice. 



MY BLACKMAIL NOTE TO ALL OF YOU 

I bought one for 45 bucks, a plain, planar lens,
but with a tattletale opening on the side of the lens tube, 
and inside a privacy-piercing mirror placed at the proper right angle 
to reflect all you oblivious peripheral subjects straight into my sharp focus.
Sometimes my camera points at garbage cans for it isn’t beauty I seek, 
but your faux pas beauts committed when you think no one is looking.
With my make-believe-forward-facing lens all your venial embarrassments center in my vision.
I’m the candid camera of public parks unabashedly pointing my peeping Tom lens at all of you—
nose pickers, crotch scratchers, earwax scoopers, bellybutton lint pickers, navel ponderers,
bra adjusters, food dribblers, sweaty underarm raisers, and egregious expectorating phlegm throwers.
I also frame what holy zealots regard as mortal sins,
lovers unzipping flies—girl and boy of course,
but also male and male for a double uncoupling of zippered teeth.
And even clearer naked truths are uncovered by my tabloid lens, 
bearded Moslems eyeing Orthodox Jewish girls draped in long denim skirts,
and Chassids eyeing every blond shiksa passing by.
(Mortal sin or not, maybe, just maybe hush-hush hankering might someday bring Holy Land peace.)
A menagerie of piggish improprieties of the purportedly priggish 
played out at the perimeter of my perception all fall perpendicular 
to my presumed but pseudoline of sight and are then pivoted precisely to my picture-taking peepers.
Listen, I’ve got all your gotcha moments ensconced on my memory card,
perturbing pixels primed for planetary propagation via a grand upload to the worldwide web.
Of course extortion is prohibited, but it’s permissible, constitutionally protected to photograph 
people’s private peccadillos performed in public places,
and I’m not asking for even a penny from anyone. 
No, I’m asking for so much more from everyone. 



THE BODY HUMAN, 

mostly seawater, as salty as the ancient oceans.
Sometimes seawater is also called a body, a body of water.
It has many phases,
at times steamy chaos, at times frozen stillness,
but usually liquid flowing in between.
Water feigns freedom of movement,
seemingly active but actually reactive,
an otherwise stagnant broth,
a soup stirred by distant gravities—
the sun, the moon, 
the mere presence of all other bodies.
The lower depths are turbid,
an opaqueness roused by deep currents
and unseen leviathans stirring the sediments.
Mostly seawater, the body human. 



William Doreski


The News Today

In my closet lies a suicide,
a man who sneaked into my room
to shoot himself while I was out.
Police examined the scene
but refused to remove the body
until the coroner returns
from his third Bermuda honeymoon.
The hotel’s too full to shift me
to another room, so I lie
as flat as possible, light on,
and try to sleep despite the stink
of gunpowder, blood, and despair.
I doze and dream that the corpse
has opened its eyes to assess me.
The air hums as the steam heat
trills the pipes. I awaken flat
on the closet floor. A man
with my features rises from bed
and smiles that awkward smile I’ve caught
in public restroom mirrors
after evenings of pointless desire.
I knew this would happen. I knew
I’d exchange personalities
with the corpse. He who was me
staggers to the bathroom and coughs
the ordinary morning cough.
Be patient. This sensation
will pass. I can feel the bullet
snugged in my brain. It hurts
like an ideology. The blood
that no longer flows has clotted
so densely it has fossilized
every dream I’ve ever dreamed.
He who was me has showered and dressed
and now has gone to meet her 
for breakfast. They aren’t lovers
except at their fingertips 
so she won’t recognize the death
in his expression. But maybe
this chiasmus will pass before
breakfast concludes, and maybe
I’ll replace myself with myself
before I get used to the hole
in my head, though which who knows
what identities might escape.



That Primal Sensation 

When I toted your groceries home
to your apartment off Mount Auburn
and you slathered me with beer
and scattered our clothes on the floor
you meant nothing as personal
as the atomic bomb, nothing
as subjective as the rumble
of red line trains in the tunnel.
These stock metaphors opened
like your grandfather’s war wounds
and exposed a mass of dead tissue,
a failure to heal. Did you lust
so criminally because you slit
your wrists on every birthday?
Did you pummel me with breasts
as cruel as cantaloupe because
your father had insisted no one
would marry so wicked a witch?
My head hurt for days. My friends
insisted that I report you
to the Freudians of the world
but I wanted to honor the dust
adrift in the sunlight sloping
over your flat little body,
the beer-smell gone stale in your hair.
Besides, you repented. The next time,
you waited for dusk to temper
your two large rooms, then tied me
to the bed with flimsy twine
a child could have snapped. We savored
the illusion. Later we lay 
as still as trout in a stream
and let orange streetlight wheezing
through uncurtained windows expose
our bodies to themselves. You cried 
because we couldn’t remember
each other’s name, but agreed
that primal sensation rendered
the personal touch redundant.
By now you’re someone’s grandma
but that creepy old apartment
still whispers stale beer whispers
to lovers as casual as we were
and the sizzle of traffic outside
still censures the pubic dark.



Thermopylae

A highway scythes the battlefields.
A frozen bronze Leonidas 
maintains his theatrical spear-thrust 
above our picnic of crackers,
retsina, and rubbery cheese.
Stratis looks up at the Spartan,
a hulking metal thug, and agrees
his ancestors weren’t as firmly
planted on both feet. Better
to farm the islands, savor grapes,
encourage the sexual prowess
of one’s favorite goats and sheep. 
We doze in lackluster winter glare,
the roar of trucks headed north
easeful as sermons. I’d dream
of those who died so famously
but a clutch of images occurs—
concrete pipes, a rush of river
stumbling down sandstone ledges,
children splashing in the shallows.
We wake with a jolt of chill.
The day’s collapsing around us.
The scabby hills look uneasy,
and far to our right the bay slops
like an overfilled tub. While we pack
the picnic things, Stratis describes 
a dream of pure Attic marble,
an erasure as perfect
as the blizzard of ’78. 
Leonidas points his spear
at our hearts to encourage us
to leave. His stance refuses us
the very ground we stand upon. 
The highway grumbles like digestion.
So much traffic between Istanbul
and Athens. Learning of this link
between Asia and Europe
Xerxes would smile that absolute smile 
otherwise saved for his brother’s wife. 
We hustle to the car and agree 
to drive into Macedonia
before stopping for the night
in some village obscure enough
to allow historical dreaming
without mistaking the landscape
for the insistence of the id.



This Way to History

After Christmas break my office
has turned its back on yours, the door
opening into a corridor
sloping up to the roof. No wonder
you shied away with eyes opaque as ore 
and mouth a vampire’s slobber.
Everything inside has deranged
itself as well, the computer
scrolling obscenities in green
and purple italics, a cat
snoozing in my favorite plant,
boxes of ancient National
Geographics cluttering the rug,
crack vials smashed in the ashtray,
cookbooks crowding the shelves once
occupied by Eliot, Whitman,
Emerson, Thoreau, and Henry James.
You meet me on neutral ground
and try to slip your arm around
my waist but find me too fat
so shy away again, this time
with a sneer edged like swordgrass.
I slam myself in my office
and toss the cookbooks out the window
and discover behind the shelves
a trapdoor labeled “This Way
to History.” I pry it open
and crawl down a dusty angle
and cough myself up a ladder
to emerge in my old office
where you’re lifting a silver cup
of vodka and smiling the old smile,
the one that hurts a little less. 
Now you can reach around my waist
and my computer screen is blank
and expectant, and my volumes
of Eliot and Whitman grimace
that familiar dusty grimace—
but even as we sip our vodka
the walls collapse and the air
sickens that ugly gray sick
and the corridors writhe and choke
and you laugh that snake-headed laugh
I love to suffer and love.

William Doreski


The Fire You Started in the Closet

The fire you started in the closet
has burned for days without spreading.
It has consumed the Christmas gifts
we hid ten Christmases ago,
scorched the stairway to the attic 
where Grandpa’s bones tarnish like brass
and blackened the family name 
kept in a box we thought fireproof. 
For days we taste that carbon slur 
and smell pouty blue curls of smoke
and expect the fire to burst
into the conscious parts of the house
and destroy our book-club library
and Chippendale coffee table
and collection of pornographic
woodcarvings from Guatemala.
Why did you ignite this blaze?
Because I deflated the plastic
Santa you placed on the lawn?
Because I fed cookies and milk
to the friendly Mormons who claimed
their god demands I marry
Janet, Nikki, Gloria, and Nan
as well as you again and again?
Because your favorite TV show
rewrote its scripts and became
a comic cop show burdened
with expensive Polish jokes?
You set that fire because cries
and whispers from that closet
have caused blood clots and hernias
in people who listen too closely
to the voices in their heads. 
I attack with the extinguisher
and stifle the lonely blue flame. 
Not much damage. The Christmas gifts
had gone unloved for a decade,
the family name’s a Polish joke,
Grandpa’s bones hardly rattle,
and the scorched attic stairway,
which we almost never ascend,
needs only a fresh coat of paint.

All poems copyrighted by their respective authors. Any reproduction of
these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is
prohibited.

YGDRASIL: A Journal of the Poetic Arts - Copyright (c) 1993 - 2009 by 
Klaus J. Gerken.

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World-Wide Web site http://users.synapse.net/~kgerken.  No other 
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