Minks
Barely dawn, I bring my sleepless weight
to the lake, but not even the tannic
fresh of balsam can toss it from me.
Then a few feet away a snout
pokes out from a pocket of roots.
She pulls free with three more
trailing in a velvet line.
They funnel into the sheep laurel, drowsy
with blossoms that barely tremble
from the slip of their skins,
sable so radiant, deep as mercy.
And as if that were not enough,
seeing four at once,
the last and smallest and most curious
stops, all still paws and twitching tail,
to get his fill of me until a chittering
calls him to dive into the laurel,
a gasp of musk in his wake.
I knew when you returned, my shadow mood.
You arrived weeks ago and unpacked with creeping deliberation
your dark luggage, thought by sinking thought, while I
minced about on sock toes in demanding silence.
But now I see—yours is thankless work,
delivering what’s needed.
Me, for one, to the gaze of creature kin
where I might throw off this dense, dull mat of distance
between me and splendor.
Sylvia Karman’s work has appeared in Delmarva Review, Blueline, and Writing the Land, among others. She lives in the Adirondack mountains of New York and in central Maryland where she hikes and writes for the love of the journey. You can visit her at www.sylviakarman.com .
Jack Gilbert’s Sacred Juxtapositions: A Review of The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992. Alfred A. Knopf; Reprint edition (13 Feb. 1996). By Jonathan Cooper.
Jack Gilbert is almost as famous for the poems he didn’t write as for those he did. His first collection, Views of Jeopardy, appeared in 1962, to both critical and commercial success.
Two decades then elapsed before the arrival of his second book, Monolithos. A further twelve years later, In 1994, Gilbert published his third volume, The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992.
Gilbert said of his poetry that he aimed to accomplish ‘a lot with the least means possible’, and certainly The Great Fires embodies this sense of economy and restraint. The poems rely on spare, direct language, with the majority presenting in single block stanzas with no line breaks. Notwithstanding this simplicity of style, Gilbert’s powerful use of imagery, and his predilection for switching between perspectives, timeframes, and topics—all in a few short phrases—dispel any notion of superficiality. Take, for example, this excerpt from the poem ‘To See if Something Comes Next’:
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity.
From a contemplation of the morning sun on a valley, Gilbert moves to a visceral engagement with mortality—life and death, side by side. The poem concludes with a reference to a Japanese theatrical device, Noh, whereby the actor can be deemed to be simultaneously dancing and standing still. As this poem underscores, while the language and structure may be uncomplicated, the verse in The Great Fires stubbornly refuses to remain on a single plain. Amongst other things, this points to Gilbert’s understanding of spirituality and sacredness, the exploration of which is an overarching theme of the collection.
Gilbert addresses metaphysical considerations in a way that seems overtly—even jarringly—juxtapositional. In one short sentence, he takes us from the sound of a rooster in the valley to the dead woman in his kitchen. However, as the reader moves through The Great Fires, the economical style and compact structure reveal a perspective on the physical and metaphysical that is fundamentally integrative as opposed to dualistic.
In ‘On Stone’, Gilbert employs multiple sacred juxtapositions, which act in concert to imply a deeper sense of wholeness: the austere ‘scraped life’ of monks in a mountain-side monastery with the sickly-sweet cakes the abbot serves to visitors; the stone-bound monastic silence with the noise of the ‘mind and its fierceness’ and with the dynamic power of the sun, ‘hammering this earth into pomegranates’. The sacred is not confined to the monastery; rather, it contemplates it as something which permeates both the natural world and the portable dialogue of mind and heart.
The consideration of the sacred, use of juxtaposition, and Gilbert’s spare, direct style come together with particular forcefulness in the poem ‘Adulterated’. Arrayed in one stanza of 20 lines, the piece starts in the ‘back streets of Livorno’, with an animated negotiation between a sex worker and a potential client. After considering the graceful stubbornness of an aging boxing champion, the poem observes that ‘birds sing sometimes without purpose’. Beginning at line 14, ‘Adulterated’ takes a Christological turn. It insists on the universality of a metaphysical goodness—’The Lord sees everything, and sees that it is good despite everything’—before ending with the most perturbingly beautiful lines in the entire collection:
...The manger
was filthy. The women at Dachau knew they were about
to be gassed when they pushed back the Nazi guard
who wanted to die with them, saying he must live.
And sang for a little while after the doors closed.
With a directness bordering on irreverence, Gilbert defies any Hallmark-card sentimentality and in four words conjures animal droppings and straw wallowing in the dirt around the Bethlehem creche. Then, as the doors close on the gas chamber, ‘Adulterated’ affirms the possibilities of life, of beauty, even when hemmed in by death. With a childlike clarity, the Nazi guard simply cannot any longer abide the killing of the innocent; however, to affirm the importance of this moral recognition, the women compel him to live, even as they must die. The evil of the concentration camp is, in a sense, ‘Adulterated’ by the goodness of the interaction between the victims and the guard. In this poem—and in The Great Fires in general—sacredness will not be safe or precious. In a way that is at once vital, human, and supernatural, it interweaves with both the depraved and the aspirational, finding a moment of beauty in the dark centre of a death camp.
For a collection that so readily changes perspectives and embraces contrast, inevitably some images and phrases seem haphazardly thrown together. In ‘Explicating the Twilight’, Gilbert offers a joyfully imagistic rendering of a rat—its ‘throat an elegant grey’—striving for a mulberry on a precariously thin branch. However, jammed in the middle of this short poem is a clumsy and unhelpful reference to 18th century poet Christopher Smart and Prospero, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For the most part, Gilbert’s use of contrast and topical transitions prompt the reader to ponder deeper elements of interrelation; in a few cases, he simply doesn’t pull it off.
Still, on balance, the collection is compelling and important. The writer James Dickey said of Gilbert that he was ‘a necessary poet, who teaches not only how to live but to die creatively’. Indeed, long after one closes The Great Fires, Gilbert’s juxtapositions prod the mind and the heart, inviting us to be more sensitive to the sacred in all its manifestations.
Jonathan Cooper’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications including Thin Air, New Plains Review, Poetry Pacific, Tower Journal, and The Charleston Anvil. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Haruspex
See
A robed man
Sitting on a ragged
Throne, wondering
Why the Whispering World
Won’t start bleating before
He’s sat down to rest.
He rises to follow
The interminable hum
Like he follows his forbearers
And their stringent sagecraft
Into foretold uncertainties.
The sound leads him towards
A mournful glade where
He kneels down to grope
The blistered ground.
Where the dirt is torn
He reaches down to run
His hand along the gut.
It reads like braille,
Like a palimpsest pressed
Deep into the heaving soil.
It says little at first, knowing
His creed, its bloodshed not
Forgotten by the earth.
Finally sensing some flocks
Might need a guide and
This one might not stray,
The dirt spells out
‘Flood.’
He runs back to his sanctuary
To consult the written and
The dead through rites
Left for him to keep and
Pass down; well-worn ways
Strain to survive these rapidly
Transforming times. The days
Snigger at whatever vainly
Resists the relentless turning.
He wanders out to where
He can see the skies only
To hear the tides growling
At the base of his hill,
Enclosing. He wonders how
Much time is left to turn
His temple into an ark.
Tuur Verheyde is a twenty-four year old Belgian poet. His work endeavours to capture the weirdness of the 21st century; its globalised art, culture, politics and problems. Tuur’s poetry seeks to further cultural, spiritual, political and emotional connectivity on an international level. His work is personal and outward looking.
Stargazer
In the centre of the frame
There sits a woman,
Wreathed in cobalt,
Her body like a wind chime
Following the rippling air,
Bending to the music
Of the greater Whole.
Unlike her Majesty
She does not
Seek to master mystery,
Her magick is symbiosis;
Her story weaves like a wiggle
In a wondrous tapestry of clouds;
The Great Goddess is the wind
That guides her course;
Her craft, the rain and light that
Falls upon the soil of
Immovable minds and
Draws forth bloom.
She sits sheltered in a room
Like an altar and a web,
Each piece of art, of tech, of space,
A thread to lead her towards
The pregnant lands that expect
Her spring. She is Ariadne
Of the many mirrored maze,
Following a multitude
Of pulsing strands,
Ever on her way to find
The Goddess at their ends,
Or from absence
Bring Her forth.
Tuur Verheyde is a twenty-four year old Belgian poet. His work endeavours to capture the weirdness of the 21st century; its globalised art, culture, politics and problems. Tuur’s poetry seeks to further cultural, spiritual, political and emotional connectivity on an international level. His work is personal and outward looking.
Ruach
the wood sighs for us
we walk the sandy path
unaware
of its green breath.
the wood sighs
even on a day
while all is still
as if
the trees have ceased
breathing
the wood sighs
to be known
for us to touch
and smell
listen
to its fragile dawn
receive its darkness
the holly bush burns
with light
the grey oak
a sacrament of leaves
sighs out
its breath for us
as God sighs to be known in us
Quotation: Ibn al-Arabi, Sufi mystic, 1165 — 1240
Ruach — Hebrew for breath/wind/spirit
Noli Me Tangere
I know why she ran to tell her friends you’d arrived.
She must have felt it in the belly, too,
the rush of understanding
when the face of a stranger becomes one beloved,
the moment you said her name—
and in an instant, in the blink of an eye,
everything was changed.
She loved you enough not to touch you,
though I know, too, how she longed
to embrace you as she had before,
to bury her face into your shoulder,
to find whether the oils she’d poured upon you
had settled into your skin or been washed away
by days of darkness and blinding, terrible light.
And she loved you enough to fade
into the corners of the rooms where she’d sat at your knee,
loved you enough to stand silent and astonished
as the clouds swallowed you up,
to go home, perhaps, and feed them,
though she ached to sit beside you again,
to touch you, and while the others slept,
she wept at the thought.
I know why she ran,
for to love you and not to tell of it
was too much to bear,
and in the silence she carried to death
she suffered the greatest of them all.
Kathryn Muensterman is a native of Indiana and is currently pursuing a BA in English Literature at Washington and Lee University. She is the winner of a 2020 Academy of American Poets University Prize for her poem “Eschatology” (https://poets.org/2020-eschatology), and her poetry also appears in Washington and Lee’s literary magazine, Ampersand.
Trelawney is a food campaigner, environmentalist and new poet living in London, drawing on a past spent as an archaeologist, musician and Cornishman. He has been published in 192 poetry magazine. Twitter: @BenTrelawney
My Neighbour’s Sideways Complaint
He peers across my wall on the pretext
of admiring a rose, but is quick to make
snide reference to the dandelions
that busily consort with thyme and daisies.
(Why does no-one like the dandelion, I wonder:
they’re as yellow as the daffodil
and so, so easy to grow!)
I tell him I am trying to breed a blue one,
that gardens one day might be filled with them
as woods in spring are full of bluebells.
Everyone wants a bit of Heaven, I say,
though no-one dares to get too close to the sun.
Gill McEvoy won the 2015 Michael Marks Award for The First Telling (Happenstance Press). She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her recent collection is Are You Listening? (Hedgehog Press 2020) and a “Selected” is forthcoming from Hedgehog Press in 2022.
The Rising
I wait on the mountaintop,
hearing the symphony of wind
in leafless trees, lifting my hair,
rising from unseen streams,
canyons of air, the sound
like ocean surf, rising,
falling, rising again.
A few white clouds
sail the sky’s blue sea.
Two eagles rise over me,
wheeling infinity symbols
around each other.
I wait as the gentle,
unburning, low sun
goldens the weary grass,
the scattered fallen leaves.
I wait, but hear only the empty wind,
growing louder, echoing
the emptiness inside me,
rising to meet
the nothing I was seeking.
Laura Foley is the author of seven poetry collections. Why I Never Finished My Dissertation received a starred Kirkus Review and was among their top poetry books of 2019. Her collection It’s This is forthcoming from Salmon Press. Laura lives with her wife among the hills of Vermont.
Faith and Fever
Dengue fever floats along the river.
Capuchin monkeys and clouds alternate domination
in the canopy.
A caiman
opens wide his jaw to release
the spirits of the jacanas, basilisks, and anhinga
he has eaten. They drift across the water
and mingle on the far bank
with the Morphos
blue as fragments of the sky
carried down by rain
that nails the forest to the earth
and drums
upon the heights the quetzal occupies
with green fire streaming from his back. His breast
is red as the mosquito’s swollen abdomen
in the green, green world where conquerors
cut paths
through lianas, steam and epiphytes
finding it impossible among such foliage
to tell which leaf is God.
David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix, who has grown into the desert climate and likes it. Visits to Costa Rica and the rainforest made a significant and vastly contrasting impression on him compared to his usual dry surroundings.
Amethyst Review 