Amethyst Review

Bhutan—Notes from a Journey

5th day, 4th temple
We slip off shoes     leave them on stone steps
pull aside the fiercely colored cloth curtaining the doorway
step over     not on     the 7th century threshold
onto burnished wood     worn     polished
a patina from thousands of bare feet.
Color bursts from exuberant textiles
incense     strong but not sweet
the smell of butter from the butter lamps.

6th day, 11th temple
Our daughter and the two monks traveling with us
make their prostrations.  Offering of money in hand
we touch it to our foreheads     lay it on an altar filled
with flowers     fruits     food     flanked by two elephant tusks.
The caretaker monk lifts an elegant vessel
the thinnest of spouts     peacock feather adorning its lid
pours a small puddle of sacred water into my cupped hand.
I take a small sip     spread the rest on my head.
One of the monks begins to explain the stacked images
of gods     painted on every inch of wall.

Deities	     myriad reincarnations of deities     a multitude
of manifestations     some benevolent     some angry
multiple gurus     arhats [what are arhats?]
the Bodhisattvas [spelling?]
countless forms of Padmasambhava,
more variations than the arms of Chenresig—
that deity sometimes seen with eleven heads
a thousand arms     an eye in every palm.
Our guide called him Avalokiteshvara.
I finally learned how to say that—and it rolls off the tongue
rather nicely, doesn’t it?  A-va-lo-ki-tesh-va-ra.
And I figured out that Padmasambhava—
the one who brought Buddhism to Bhutan—
is the one they’re calling Guru Rinpoché      “precious teacher”
and I remember that Milarepa is a poet
but I’ve lost track—who is Pema Lingpa?


7th day, 17th temple
Always move clockwise	
always     behind each altar     golden statues
always     three important ones     different in every temple
sometimes Sakyamuni     the Buddha
								Bhutan—Notes from a Journey, p.2
and I know he’s here     I see the coiled hair.
I’ve learned to recognize the next one, too
founder of Bhutan     Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal
the third one?     I’ve no idea.
Surrounding them     a semi-circle of more statues
every detail significant     how each body is positioned
their garments     what they’re sitting on
their mudra     or hand gesture.  Once again
walls packed with paintings     the storytelling begins.

Gods     more gods     demigods     demons
depictions of local protective deities, too—
trying to make sense     I sink in this lake of—

It’s all too much for me     this complex pantheon.

8th day, 18th temple
Punakha     every surface coated in gold.  Today our monks—
by now our friends—are wearing their finest
sweeping red robes     generous drape of orange scarf
and on their chests     bright sparks of the royal yellow
signify their high ranking.

The stories continue     miracles     bigger than life
stories that require putting aside doubt     suspending disbelief.	

8th day, 21st temple
—the weight of it all—
still I bend my head to his quiet voice
try to listen     to follow     pull something out 
something to grasp     perhaps words that form stepping stones
so I can make my way to temple after temple
without drowning     in the detail.

Then     as he speaks     from the heart
of Buddhist thought     three pillars rise
the first one gratitude     to all who help along the way
and then     loving-kindness
to those whose paths intersect with mine
the third     compassion     the eyes to see another’s pain.

As I step outside of yet one more temple
I slip one foot     into the shoe of gratitude.

Melissa Huff feeds her poetry from the power and mystery of the natural world and the ways in which body, nature and spirit intertwine.  An advocate of the power of poetry presented out loud, she twice won awards in the BlackBerry Peach Prizes for Poetry: Spoken and Heard, sponsored by the (U.S.) National Federation of State Poetry Societies.  Recent publishing credits include Gyroscope Review, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, Persimmon Tree, Blue Heron Review, andAmethyst Review.  Melissa has been frequently sighted making her way between Illinois and Colorado.

House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life by Laurie Klein, 114 pp, Poiema Poetry Series, Cascade Books, 2024 

If you frequented church in the last decades of the 20^th century you may well have sung “I Love You, Lord”. The song was a worship staple through my own childhood, and as I grew into adult faith I internalized its words as a kind of prayer. In the personal introduction to her website, Laurie Klein notes that she wrote the song “weary and bone-lonely…while our first child slept” (“About Laurie Klein, Scribe”, lauriekleinscribe.com). Now, decades later, Klein is a contemplative poet, and a remarkable one at that. In 2015 her first book of poetry, Where the Sky Opens: A Partial Cosmography, was published in D.S. Martin’s Poiema Poetry Series. In March, this series published her powerful second work of poetry, House of 49 Doors.

Appearing nearly ten years after her first collection, House has evidently grown from the kind of deep soul work that characterizes Klein. In email communication with me, Klein noted that her recent work has often emerged from “praying and writing in the wee hours”, when her writing was able to “bypass distractions and…insecurities” to “shak[e] loose imagery and candor”. It also sees something of a return to the childlike simplicity of “I Love You, Lord” after the more somber, adult reflections of Where the Sky Opens, no doubt because the work takes Klein back to childhood memories, moving between two perspectives, “Larkin”, her child self, and the mature “Eldergirl”, a polyphonic device that merges maturity and simplicity with pathos and delight.

This interplay of childlike faith with “hard-won” wisdom is ever-present when speaking with Klein.  Though returning to her childhood, Klein has chosen a period of her life that, while containing much sweetness, also reveals “festering pain”. “Letting two voices process,” Klein observed in our recent correspondence, “helped me squarely face feelings long-buried”. The child brought with her a “quirky innocence” that disarmed the adult, while “Eldergirl” could convey “the hard-won lessons and gifts of hindsight”, “pointing toward the patient, redemptive interventions of God, over time”.

Joy in Klein’s work is indeed hard-won. Both her books take as their focus gritty and painful subjects, while delicately unveiling grace with them. For Klein, poetry is especially adept at this, capturing the “beautifully incalculable” alongside the “dismaying”. Indeed, pain first brought Klein to poetry, with her father’s death in 1996. “Stratified grief and numbing stage 4 depression steamrolled me,” she explained. Haunted by “images from [her] past”, she turned to poetry for help and has not left it. “Writing is my favorite way to debrief, arm-wrestle doubts, clothe my fears so that I can see their shape, shake out the wrinkles, expose the stains.”

Poetry also dovetails with contemplative practice. “The year my dad died,” Klein wrote, “I signed up to learn a medieval calligraphy font. I hoped a focused return to the ABCs, stroke by stroke, might reanimate my curiosity, coax me beyond depression”, the formation of her letters gradually “feeling akin to prayer. An alphabet of presence.”

From calligraphy she moved towards creating a Book of Hours, and from there to “other early church disciplines, like Lectio Divina” and centering prayer. Like returning to the ABCs, this practice of prayer reflects a desire to recover the basics of faith and living, like learning to breathe aright.

Out of this rich spirituality emerges a delightfully earthy, grounded mysticism. Klein’s poetry captures, as her first book’s title suggests, both the cosmic and the intimate, though she is characteristically self-deprecating when I asked how she achieves this balance: “Oh my. Not there. Not yet.” Of that book’s subtitle, “A Partial Cosmography”, she says, “I did so want to be taken seriously.” Yet it does not strike me as pretense. The idea of a “partial cosmography” suggests the ways that we see only, as St Paul puts it, “in part”, “as in a mirror” (1 Corinthians 13:12): we cannot possibly take in the whole of the cosmos and all it signifies. Yet the “sky opens” in small places where we can imperfectly see God at work in all things.

And Klein’s eyes are constantly being opened, sometimes through pain. The central story behind her first book is the “radical faith shift” that her husband experienced “after three decades of shared worship ministry”. “The outcome of this,” she says, “upended many areas of our lives.” This “upending” is captured in the remarkable and deeply moving “Dreamer and Bean” poems woven throughout the collection, capturing moments where our experience teeters on the edge of our faith’s comprehension, while hinting at how it reconfigures on the other side.

A similar urge to reconfigure was the starting point for House: “Amid the relentless brokenness of today’s world, I was itching to resurrect the almost magical house I grew up in,” wanting, she says, “to hear from creatures…who once kept me company,” to “re-glimpse a firefly’s wink inside a rolled leaf”, indeed, “to chase delight.”

Delight is evident on almost every page of House, albeit tinged with grief. Emerging through the book is the story of her beloved “uncle Dunkel”, returned from the Korean War with PTSD, ultimately taking his own life. Klein’s child self is urged by her father to never speak of how her uncle’s body was found. Significantly, it was never Klein’s “plan to address the hushed-up death”. “But Kid Larkin had other ideas.” Praise God for Larkin’s instincts. Klein could very easily have chosen to remain in the “magical house” without opening treacherous doors; or she could have let grief cast darkness over all its illuminated moments. She does neither. Fireflies sparkle while adored uncles die; and in the book’s postscript, beloved grandchildren can stand with us as we revisit the past’s agony and beauty.

Though Klein has “weathered” almost five decades since “I Love You, Lord”, its simple faith is never far away. “The song’s final line—surely, my life’s greatest request—haunts me…It challenges me to continually receive, then express, the God-given sweetness of Love amid days that are fractious, heartwrenching, sullied and worn.”

Klein’s poetry is the fruit of this daily prayer, echoing the sweetness of God found in the long-haul. House of 49 Doors sparkles with unexpected grace.

Unattributed quotes are from personal email correspondence between Laurie Klein and Matthew Pullar.

Matthew Pullar is a poet and teacher based in Melbourne, Australia. In 2013, he received the Young Australian Christian Writer of the Year Award for his unpublished manuscript Imperceptible Arms: A Memoir in Poems. He has published three books of poetry, including The Swelling Year: Poems for Holy and Ordinary Days, and has had poetry published in Soul Tread, Proost Poets and Poems for Ephesians.

The Orpheus Vase
	Émile Gallé, verre parlante, 1888-1889

The broken world now grit beneath his feet,
he spins another planet from the flames
twists the pedestal base, a frozen river,
adds soot to darken the greens, then gold
for bands of insect wing. He casts the lovers
in amber and with a wheel engraves a verse
about the cursed obsidian chambers of the heart,
a haunting song that hastens its own unraveling.
Barefoot over folding lava and pitch,
the bright cup of the world whispers to a love
something about flowers again, and rain.
Traveling toward the cold lip on the cup of spring
her eyes have turned to whirlpool galaxies.
He reaches out, she’s nothing he can hold.

Kelly Houle’s poems have been published in Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Radar Poetry, Red Rock Review, Sequestrum, and others. She is also a painter. 

Living with Afib

At home between walls
I have to catch my breaths
as they come like blown bubbles
to control them, make sure
they do not overtake
my mind and body, and throw
me as a heap into a darkness
of no return.  

By the sea, I sit on a bench
to steady myself,
so the ocean and I breathe
together, in and out,
in constant rhythm,
each supporting the other
until I find myself
in the throws of my imagination
swimming out to join
the waves reaching out
to welcome me.

Janet Krauss, after retirement from teaching 39 years of English at Fairfield University, continues to mentor students,  lead a poetry discussion at the Wilton Library, participate in a CT. Poetry Society Workshop, and one other plus two poetry groups. She co–leads the Poetry Program of the Black Rock Art Guild. She has two books of poetry : Borrowed Scenery (Yuganta Press) and Through the Trees of Autumn (Spartina Press).  Many of her poems have been published in Amethyst Review, and her haiku in Cold Moon Journal.

Distancing

I hear a bird’s call into evening,
but I cannot see it. It is close,
perhaps on a branch, a window ledge. 
The air is cool, and I need to rest, 
retreat into the dark, 
disassociate from myself. 
There is a reason we cannot see at night. 
The bird’s voice rings, bells fading, 
then quietens; 
it is as if today has fallen into mist.  
This morning I felt different, 
full of plans, epilogues.
I listen intently for the bird, 
now distant, as it drifts away
into its own sound – a relic of itself.

Ion Corcos was born in Sydney, Australia in 1969. He has been published in Cordite, Meanjin, Westerly, Plumwood Mountain, Southword, Wild Court, riddlebird, and other journals. Ion is a nature lover and a supporter of animal rights. He is the author of A Spoon of Honey (Flutter Press, 2018).

Inside of any side 
 
Inside, the indefinite twirls in shapes, – 
once we size a mutter, we hear the sky echoing 
a good gorgeous solid emptiness. 
Outside, a heart a whirring coaster, 
riddling, riddling, a riddling efficiency. 
All lyrics showing their mettle with serenity, 
a huge shout-out given –        the world 
favouring itself and a helix hovering 
all night over the adobe globe; 
people seemingly at the windows about to ask: 
is love the only real normal? – or its 
symmetrical quotient available, too? 
A wish or just a kind of it, looking almost 
like a teacup, a straight slightly slanted-bodied 
miniature mountain upside down, 
liquids slipped or slopped over. 
The indefinite is always that, too fast, or deferred, 
the price for the price itself.
 
What’s definite, then, which we never can
           pay for – what we only need to 
           pray for?
 

Jayanta Bhaumik is from Kolkata, India, from the field of esoteric studies and counselling. His past works can be found in Poetry Superhighway, Juked, Madswirl, Vita Brevis Press, Blue Lake Review, Pif magazine, Acropolis Journal, Streetcake Magazine, and elsewhere. He is available @BhaumikJayanta

Skylines and Horizons 
 
Outside of city limits, earth
Meets waning sky, becoming one
Long linea nigra. A birth.
All that the eye sees when the sun
Sets low is boundary, yet none
 
Of this – what’s visible – contains
All that there is. Beyond all sight,
All silence, parameters, and planes,
I sense that there is something right
Along the edge that’s made of light.
 
Each time I’m on the highway driving
Back, there’s that moment when we turn
Around a bend. Not yet arriving,
Inside of me, I feel a burn.
A longing, a longing to return –
 
But not to the familiar blocks,
The taxis or the greasy spoon.
Instead, I want an equinox.
I want the sun to cross the moon,
To signal something coming soon.
 
Against the sun-less stretch of sky,                                                    
The towers reach above. What man
Has made, seen from the ground, seems high –
Seems higher than the eye can scan,
But from this distance, fades again.
 
Horizons give me wider views:
Yet still, they aren’t the whole frame.
The city skylines start to lose
Their novelty and seem the same.
They’re not the home from which I came.
 
 

Mary Grace Mangano is a poet, writer, and professor. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and her poetry, essays, and reviews appear in Church Life Journal, The Windhover, Orchards Poetry Journal, The North American Anglican, Fare Forward, Ekstasis, and others.  She teaches at Seton Hall University and lives in New Jersey. 

Drinking Gin in a Kayak on a Still Lake in June 


The world above 
The trees even to the crisping of leaves at the edges.
The tall grasses along the shore. The large silvery rocks.
The empty Adirondack chairs. 
Docks, sleeping boats. Clouds. 
Blue sky with streaks of soft pink.
Even the arc of a bird in flight, the race of a dog along the bank, 
My own foot over the side of the kayak.
All twinned in the perfect mirror of the lake.
An inverted universe, an exact upended replica.
 
Then a fish jumps,
or my hand falls into the water
or the kayak rocks as I bring the glass to my mouth
and the world below trembles,
suddenly warps and wavers in
fluid abstraction - swirls of color and shapes
still head over heels 
but incomprehensible chaos

Is it too much to hope that it will be so,
at the hour of, the moment of -
an instant of perfect stillness, pristine clarity
Then soft, a sudden hallucinatory dissolve 
into a world without
edges, as I flow into the prismatic mystery. 

Dorothy Cantwell has worked as an educator, actress, and playwright, Her work has been published in the Long Island Literary Journal, Brownstone Poets Anthology, Constellate Literary Journal, Flash Boulevard, Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters, River and South Review, Poetrybay, and Angel City Review, among other print and online journals. She has been featured at various venues in NYC where she lives and works. She studies poetry with Sister Fran McManus in the St Francis of Assisi Poetry Workshop.

Balance.							      



Burned fields.  other devices.  the tops of trees.  the even welds.  traces of roots on the roadside.  what we will do in the wake when the leaves dry.  we stood at the back window.  our child stood at the back window.  the trees top to the circled trunks swayed.  bending.  the wind comes from the ocean behind the dunes from the cove swaggering through to the mountains broadly backed.  silent.  we stood at the back windows we watched the storm close around.  a glare of white clouds.  thoughts to drive on the coastal marking miles in forests.  a spine of the bridges the bays.  loose footed rocks.  strewn waves dodging balance.  thankful along its crest.

Michael Ricketti was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lenapehoking.  He lives in Nicosia, Cyprus where he works as a university lecturer and serves at Kuruçeşme Projekt – a community yoga, meditation, education, and art initiative founded with Sevdiye Ricketti. His work has been published with Welcomat, Vallum, Enclave, Bluepepper, New Note Poetry, Instant Noodles, and Bodega. His novella ‘Yayla’ was shortlisted for the First Series Award by Mid-List Press.

River Mouth
Henley Beach  South Australia 


The pelicans disappeared overnight.
In the still of yesterday afternoon
they stood sentinel, balanced
on the cross pipe up stream
from the weir that gargles this city’s
river life into the sea.
The morning moon wanes. Horses still graze
corralled by soft banks and timber rails 
bordering freedom, captivity.
At sunrise ripples spread through reeds
the first five pelicans emerge, lift beaks
rise sure footed to yesterday’s perch
as though to deliver this new
shining fish of a day.

Ann Nadge lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Her career as an Educator involved teaching and consulting in Sydney and Adelaide, in secondary and tertiary settings and briefly as a Research Associate in the School of Education, University of Cambridge. Ann has published five books of poems and edited two for Australia’s Ginninderra Poets. Her work has been included in several anthologies. Although she cannot read or play music, Ann has collaborated with composers in Adelaide and Amsterdam to create new works, including several hymns. She currently enjoys semi-retirement and is active in the Anglican Diocese of Adelaide.