mennonite poet

      








                    The Lamentations)                                        








The oracles were false, misleading

The crown has fallen from our heads

Baby, I got the hard time killing floor blues
My sins have been bound into a yoke;
they have come upon my neck

                            ____________

In iron lung, and skull balloon, oxygen, like sorrow,

in the brain of the willing villain, of the reluctant hero,

death whispers, come-go little sorrows, come-go little joys,
when comes the Glad Day, golden girls and boys,

the zillion vanities of vanities, blown to zero!

golden dreams like lies, bad air and history,
how fares the world good people? Our prophets, too pissed to pee,

angels, are ye somewhere standing in the majestic mystery?

Chattering on helium, forgetting to breathe, I beg, bugger, borrow,

and still the wind's whistling lilli bul lero

don't know how it goes, what it means, don't know what I think,
whatever Revolution my head had — a little wind, a mighty stink.








                                            Larry Nightingale














....

surrender sweet and give and take

             










               BESIDE THE SEASIDE


  You wouldn't say that she "submitted." No,
  whatever prompted her was something new
  and docile not at all. Perhaps it had to do
  with the short turf, the white cliff edge, the slow
  cloud promenade, the surge and thud below

  as each fresh wave broke down. So, anyway,
  touch, tremor, nakedness all made good sense
  to her, quite suddenly, and down she lay
  and smiled, and helped him to forget the tense
  first panic, meeting not the least defense.

  And afterwards, she begged a cigarette,
  lazed on her back, and beamed back at the blue
  sky, blameless. He was dumb. More vehement yet
  the sea beat up against the cliffs, and threw
  its whopping slogs into a cave that drew

  the sinewed swell out of a foaming sleeve
  and sucked it in, to—like one heaving block
  of quartz—explode: boom hollowly; and leave
  in skittery files licksplittling through the rocks,
  till the next wave recruited them, and shocked

  itself to spume, finding passivity
  exceeded penetration. He watched (while she
  lay with her skirt around her hips, and smiled
  as at a dutiful, obliging child)
  and felt the strangest pity for the sea.








                     William Dunlop












.....

agua remembered

                                                    










                                                    A river flowing this way

a river flowing this way

here and there and back again

songs and memories

beneath the rise and fall of waves

songs and memories

shelter them and shelter them and shelter them

in your water-laden arms,

in your birth water

shelter them and shelter them and shelter them

upon your shores.

   Al Hunter

of man and place

THE SCREWBALL








There’s my guy
on patrol, janglin keys, chains
rings upon all his fingers
studs scattered like imps
Bellbottoms (Feb. 1996)
He’s not pierced
yet he might as well be.


He stoops to conquer
a vagrant piece of trash
blown in from a franchise
on Federal. He ushers it
toward the skow
holding the thing
like it was positive
at arms length.


Then prances across the ice
glancing back at his patch
and into his shelter
among the recovering


Ø Lay the binoculars
on the desk. Time
transits the Highlands
The Shining Mountains
cut their mighty silhouette
The Sun
appalled by tedium
decides to go down






                   Ed Dorn   (+  1999 )






















///

the sound sacrament of struggle and beauty

                                         

                                         Daniel         

                                              by

                                    Jean Marie Roest

They might be carved from the same tree

Fused into one instrument,

My son and his guitar

Thrumming out music in the sunlight.

He holds his treasure intimately,

Braced against chest inside of right thigh,

Top of left thigh, and inside right elbow;

They might be carved of the same tree.

His hands pluck, stroke, press

Strings worthy of Segovia.

Profound absorption cloak the two,

Fused into one instrument.

Bent into the struggle to perfect a faulty phrase,

The golden curls hide his eyes 

Lost in a world defined by music,

My son and his guitar.

I hear, all down the years, from the beginning,

His lesser instruments and painful hours

A little boy with aching fingers

Thrumming out music in the sunlight.

                        written by a guitarist's mother

....

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg                                                              

         

                 by Richard Hugo

jjjjjj

You might come here Sunday on a whim.

Say your life broke down.  The last good kiss

you had was years ago.  You walk these streets

laid out by the insane, past hotels

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

hhhh

Only churches are kept up. The jail

turned 70 this year.  The only prisoner

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now

is rage.  Hatred of the various grays

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

who leave each year for Butte. One good

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

or two stacks high above the town,

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

jjjj

Isn’t this your life?  That ancient kiss

still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

so accurate, the church bell simply seems

a pure announcement:  ring and no one comes?

Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium

and scorn sufficient to support a town,

not just Philipsburg, but towns

of towering blondes, good jazz and booze

the world will never let you have

until the town you came from dies inside?

jjjjj

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse. Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.

The car that brought you here still runs.

The money you buy lunch with,

no matter where it’s mined, is silver

and the girl who serves your food

is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

.....

a dream of whitman paraphrased, recognized and made more vivid by renoir

Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore
Or near the bank of a woodland lake
Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely
Worthy of Mack Sennett's camera and Florenz Ziegfield's
Foolish Follies.






They splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness
Of their youth and beauty
In the full spontaneity and summer of the fetishes of
awareness
Heightened, intensified and softened
By the soft and the silk of the waters
Blooded made ready by the energy set afire by the
nakedness of the body,


Electrified: deified: undenied.




A young man of thirty years beholds them from a distance.
He lives in the dungeon of ten million dollars.
He is rich, handsome and empty standing behind the linen curtains
Beholding them.
Which girl does he think most desirable, most beautiful?
They are all equally beautiful and desirable from the gold distance.
For if poverty darkens discrimination and makes
perception too vivid,
The gold of wealth is also a form of blindness.
For has not a Frenchman said, Although this is America...

What he has said is not entirely relevant,
That a naked woman is a proof of the existence of God.






Where is he going?
Is he going to be among them to splash and to laugh with them?
They did not see him although he saw them and was there among them.
He saw them as he would not have seen them had they been conscious
Of him or conscious of men in complete depravation:
This is his enchantment and impoverishment
As he possesses them in gaze only.


. . .He felt the wood secrecy, he knew the June softness
The warmth surrounding him crackled
Held in by the mansard roof mansion
He glimpsed the shadowy light on last year's brittle leaves fallen,
Looked over and overlooked, glimpsed by the fall of death,
Winter's mourning and the May's renewal.




                      
                                 

   by    Delmore Schwartz






















































.

so you know old abe

As familiar to all
as the general appearance of the eagle is,
it may, nevertheless, be proper to insert here
a description of Old Abe before going farther,
written by a close observer while the bird was living:






His weight is ten and a half pounds.
 His breast is full and heavy,
trembling with ardent emotions.


His head is large, and well developed in front,
towering up in moral aspect,
 and flattened a little toward the neck, where it is the widest.
 His beak, measuring two and three-quarter inches,
bends in a semi-circle over the mandible,
having its edges cut sharp clear to the point,
where it is as hard as steel and of a beautiful flint color,
but changing gradually toward the base into a sparkling saffron.


The neck is short and thick,
 the body large and symmetrical;
the wings are long and tail rounded;
the legs a bright yellow, the tarsus three inches long,
 bare for the lower two-thirds, and covered with hard, tough scales;
the foot short and full; the toes free, tuberculous beneath ;
the four curved talons on each foot have sharp ends,
and look like grappling steels;
 the thighs are remarkably thick, strong and muscular,
covered with  long feathers pointing backwards;
the conformation of the wings is admirably adapted
 for the support of so large a bird, measuring,
from tip to tip, six feet and a half; length of one, two feet on the greater quills;
 the longest primaries- twenty inches and upwards
 of one inch in circumference where they enter the skin;
 the scapulars are very large and broad,
 spreading from the back to the wing to prevent the air from passing through .

The plumage is compact and imbricated;
the feathers on the breast, back and top of the wings
are a dark brown with a changeable gloss;
those on the head, neck and breast are narrow and pointed;
the other parts more rounded.


The general color of the plumage is brown
with a golden tinge; the head and greater part of the
neck and coverts are a fine snowy* white;
 the tail is also white, and spotted black on the upper feathers
for about half their length;
 the quills are brownish black with lighter shafts.

The eyes are clear and round,
encircled with yellow papillary linings,
fringed on their inside with thin, elastic, black bands or plates, like concentric rings;
 the iris is a brilliant straw color, and appears like the sky,
changing in luster just as his moods change;
the pupil is large, intensely black and piercing,
 contracting and expanding with microscopic and telescopic action
at every light and shade.


When looking backward,
his head appears in a position as natural as when looking forward.


 The expression of his eye is most fascinating:
when inspired with ambition
 it is a burst of sunlight
through a white cloud;
when angry, every feather in ruffled rage,
it is the lightning amidst the storm,
and at all times it burns and glitters like fire.




                              Thomas McEiean   (  McCann  )








OLD ABE  was an eagle given by an irish Wisconsin farmer
to the Wisconsin   8th  division       circa.  1865


I READ
 THIS PROSE DESCRIPTION
OF THE BIRD
AS POETRY












....