heteroglossia: [poems] by Lindsay Illich

heteroglossia: [poems]

by Lindsay Illich

Baton Rouge: Anchor & Plume, 2016

ISBN 9780990685692

Reviewed by David P. Miller

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines heteroglossia as “a diversity of voices, styles of discourse, or points of view in a literary work and especially a novel.” This chapbook by Lindsay Illich makes it clear that, although a novel may be the expected setting, a collection of poems or even a single poem will do as well. Illich’s poetry is conversational, erudite, slangy, elegant: often accessible right on the level of music, sometimes asking a pause to look up definitions (or a note-to-self to look them up later). This review will hint at some of the voices and stories brought together, with a closer reading of the title poem. All titles are given in lower case in the book.

“apologia for mountaineering” begins simply enough, with a reference to Stevie Nicks’ song “Landslide,” then begins again, introducing a term strange to most of us, made clear in context and moving right into psychologically complex territory:

I climbed the mountain because Stevie Nicks

made it sound so nonchalant.

I climbed the mountain because I knew the word

krummholz referred to the trees

penultimate to treeline,

leafless and arithmetic, barely able to sustain

love at that height.

We might have to come back later to consider the arithmetic-ness of bare trees, because the climb down the page continues toward “you” and “our // topos was radiant.” Topos: “a traditional or conventional literary or rhetorical theme or topic” according to M-W online. And there’s a pun buried as well, as a “topo” is a diagram of a mountain including details of routes to the top. We might assume that the “you” in “I climbed the thing / to be interesting, to say I did you” is human and the “did” is sexual, but perhaps it’s the mountain? Or both: the topos (traditional theme) of human attraction, is as radiant as the map allowing the mountain to be “done.”

The couplets of “december 30” address a loved one, and the bafflement of relationship via a sequence of remarkable analogies. “I sometimes think of us as forgetful  / & only remembering each other // like claustrophobes wanting the dense / space of football fields”. This may very well resonate with anyone needing more personal space, but how much more interestingly said. And immediately countered with “Or deep / in the night’s sorrow, when you hear me // breathing, we are one / continent.” As a single instance of Illich’s attentive awareness of line and stanza breaks, see how the almost expected “breathing, we are one” is flipped to a massive image simply by saving “continent” for the next line.

By the time we’re well into “broken down west texas”, it’s easy to forget that almost all of it is an extended metaphor following from the second line of the opening:

To love someone in spite of yourself

is driving down the same road

every day without knowing

where you’re going.

The poem evokes the hazards of day-long desert driving in an unsound vehicle: “The truck chuckles at your / nervousness. The gas gauge / falls asleep” … “The sun / doesn’t go down / so much as the mesa / sucks it out of the sky.” So a reader like me, picturing the scene and glad that it’s someone else’s reality, might be temporarily puzzled by “the truck a skin / you can’t climb out of” near the end, before remembering that this is about loving wrongly as like a vehicle.  It really can be that risky.

Here are a couple of brief examples of the poet’s mutable diction. In “cleaning house” we read:

[…] Sister,

we’ve grown into each other

like the limbs of those

trees and from here I don’t

know whose branch this

or nest that.

The last phrase is without an expected “is” following “this” and “that”: “whose branch this is, whose nest that is.” But as “branch” and “nest” are also verbs, the grammatical turn after “whose” means a simile for the identification of sisters swoops into activities of branching and nesting.

The opening of “what he did with the moon tonight” couples casual diction with an atypical outcome: “What he did with the moon / tonight was he / pressed her through a sieve”. The conversational “was” is grammatically odd but serves almost as a conjunction, compressing the possible, much wordier “This is what he did with the moon / tonight. He / pressed her” etc. The flow of “what he did was he” sweeps us into the image. And in heteroglossic manner, not long after this we learn  of “the stars / coupling, their penurious / leaning into each other’s / gravity” – elegant and multisyllabic. Some readers may want poets to maintain a unified voice, at least within a given poem. This reader does not understand that to be a necessary virtue.

The title poem, two pages of couplets (mostly), is an elegy for someone with the initials T.H.M. Its multiple types of diction evoke heteroglossia itself, and again evoke the question: why must a poem speak in one voice only? Or rather, why speak using only diction that’ assumed to continue as it’s begun? Let’s begin with the first couplet:

The birds have woken me before dawn,

in the left margin of June without you:

In the first line we are set, not in a specific location, but at a time of day and in a place that we can understand – a place where there are sufficient birds to wake the speaker. But the second line begins immediately to shift the tone. We understand that there is a “you” that the speaker misses, and that we are in the month of June. But “the left margin” suggests the visual image of a calendar, so we participate in a leap from aural to visual image. Or it might be the left margin of a piece of paper in June, as the next couplet is

some loves are textual, coming paratactically,

Alexandrine, getting smoked like a Cuban.

We need to know the meaning of “paratactic.” One definition is “The juxtaposition of clauses or phrases without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions, as It was cold; the snows came.” There’s now the suggestion that we readers are facing a sheet of paper with a paratactic juxtaposition of phrases and quasi-Alexandrine lines. Which we are. This digression into process is interrupted by stanza breaks before and after the almost-simple single line:

And you, caesuredly.

The framing caesuras make the poem actually do what it says it’s doing – evoking the absent addressee, who stands between two silences.

This heady wrenching-away from the initial place and time comes back, now in a tone with a hint of ironic distance:

So the morning is about to do her rise

thing, the lupines, the vireos, and I’m back

There’s a hesitation to fully give over to rosy-fingered dawn, emphasized by the line break, but after that sight and sound place us a little more surely among flora and fauna. The speaker has apparently returned, but where?

in the rivers we waded in, floated down,

discussed abstractly and mythologically

So, not back in an exact moment, but rather into memory and metaphor. The poem is beginning to seem like a river itself, creating its own bed and landscape as it flows, as compared with poems which are more like canals, constructed to end in anticipatable destinations.

A few lines later, we veer back to the loss, which now seems a death, though soon backed away from:

Nothing has kept you on the globe

where I learned the word gypsum

yesterday. How boring is the

heaven-is-a-mansion thing, esp. since

how much better would a river be

where you and me are alive

and always alive with moving.

The near-explicit statement of death is allowed to stand before the stanza break. But immediately following, “the globe” is pivoted, from the home of the missing person to the setting of a personal anecdote not otherwise explained. This is followed by a dismissive reference to conventional means of comfort, including the abrupt “esp.”, as if the speaker could hardly spare time for the linkage to a wish for “you and me” together again in an actual place.

We’ve followed through something less than half of the title poem. I’ll leave the rest for your contemplation, except to add a couple of examples of wordplay. The phrase “the bird derries, the beautiful derrières / on the ferry” is an instance where the sound creates the world, and vice-versa, simultaneously. (“Derry”: a meaningless phrase used in a song, as in “derry-down.”) And the curious final word, “ceasuredly.” Spell-check doesn’t know where to go with this, a pun on the already-invented “caesuredly,” stemming perhaps from “cease.”

Poems to take your time with, to read multiply, for their heart and carnality as well as their intelligence. It’s worth nothing that a full-length collection, rile & heave (everything reminds me of you), will be published by Texas Review Press this winter.

The Hastings Room Reading Series Welcomes Cambridge’s Poets Populist Payack, Joachim, Bee and Gallucio on Tuesday February 7th

Lo Galluccio

Jean Dany Joachim

Toni Bee

Peter Payack

At 7pm on Tuesday February 7th, at First Church Cambridge, 11 Garden Street, the Hastings Room Reading Series will be holding a special event to celebrate and remember the Cambridge Poet Populist program, which supported a “Poet Populist” designated to engage the community with the art of poetry. From 2007 to 2015 four Cambridge poets held the honored position: Peter Payack (2007-2009), Jean-Dany Joachim (2009-2011), Toni “Bee” Brooks (2011-2013) and Lo Galluccio (2013-2015).

The program, modeled in part on Seattle Washington’s Poet Populist project, was initiated by City Councilor Brian Murphy in 2007 and launched in the same year. The “Populist” idea differed from other cities’ Poet Laureate programs in that the poet was not appointed by the City but rather voted in by the community. The Poetry Populist program was streamlined by Cambridge Arts in 2015 into the Poetry Ambassador program, which promotes seasonal poetry events curated by different poets.

While the Ambassador program continues to engage the public with the art through public readings organized by talented area poets, the Poet Populist program will be remembered for bringing Cambridge residents in on the election and promotion of the four exceptional poets mentioned above. These poets have been invited to the Hastings Room Reading Series at First Church to read from their poetry and to remember highlights of their tenure as the city’s leading voices in poetry.

The Hastings Room Reading Series, established in 2014 by Steven Brown and Michael Steffen, has hosted many of the area’s leading poets, including Martha Collins, David Ferry, Fred Marchant, Joan Houlihan, Daniel Tobin, Marc Vincenz, David Blair, Doug Holder, Gloria Mindock and Pulitzer Prize poet Franz Wright. The readings are free and open to the public.

Please come join us. Here are our readers, with a little information about them.

Toni “Bee” Brooks is a writer, poet & photographer. Poet Populist of Cambridge from 2011-2013, and a Board Member at Cambridge Community Television, she is a public speaker, event host, and a Teaching Artist specializing in poetry workshops for teenagers and adults.

Lo Galluccio, Poet Populist from 2013 to 2015, is also a memoirist and vocalist. Her published work includes a chapbook, Hot Rain (2004) from Ibbetson Street Press, a prose-poem memoir, Sarasota VII (2010) published by Cervena Barva Press and available at the Grolier bookstore. A second chapbook, Terrible Baubles (2012) was released by Cervena Barva with a CD of the same title – a collaboration with pianist Eric Zinman and cellist Jane Wang. Galluccio is a graduate of Harvard, and has studied at the Goodman School of Drama and the Berklee School of Music.

Jean Dany Joachim, Cambridge Poet Populist from 2009 to 2011, and the current Poet in Residence at First Church in Cambridge, is also an author of short stories and plays. He created the Many Voices Project, a series of readings and follow-up poetry workshops, inspiring conversations about race and equality. He has three published collection of poetry, Crossroads / Chimenkwaze (2013), Avec des Mots (2014), and Quartier (2016). He is the director of City Night Readings, a series featuring diverse poetic talents, writers and artists. Jean Dany teaches at Bunker Hill Community College.

Peter Payack was the first Poet Populist of Cambridge from 2007 to 2009. He has been published widely, including in The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Payack is also an inventor, notably of the world-renowned Stonehenge Watch™, an infinitesimal replica of the megaliths at Stonehenge inside of an old-fashioned pocket watch. He has taught at The Berklee College of Music, University of Massachusetts Lowell and UMass Online.

The Sunday Poet: Steven Scher

Steven Scher

 
A native of Brooklyn who now lives in Jerusalem, Steven Sher is the author of 15 books including the forthcoming (2016) Uncharted Waters (Feral Press). Two recent poetry titles are The House of Washing Hands (Pecan Grove Press, 2014) and Grazing on Stars: Selected Poems (Presa Press, 2012). Since the 1970s, his poetry and prose have appeared in hundreds of journals worldwide; he has worked as an editor, media consultant and journalist; and he has taught at many universities (first at Brooklyn College, where he worked with John Ashbery during his MFA) and writing workshops. He continues to lead workshops (for organizations such as Poets House in NYC) and lecture on writing.

                                   


                                       RETIREMENT                      
 

He had retired to Florida in part to savor

mornings, trading coat and tie

for a life of socializing, golf and cards.

Yet he needed to build stamina for such a life,

another of the northern newcomers

who flocked like migrating birds

to the paved mile lap around the lake

past pastel-painted condos and stately palms

that stretched and bent as if preparing to walk

along beside him. Each morning

when he stepped outside, an orange sun

like a weak heart hung above the horizon.

By the time he was done, the light would burst

across the sky. His silence matched his stride.

Sweat soon pinched his tee-shirt to his skin.

High gray clouds like gauze had come unwound.

My father’s face paled at the fast pace,

but he refused to slow, irrefutable proof

that he was fine. Now their building was in sight.

Hands resting on his hips like an emptied pitcher,

my father slowed to a stroll. Having drawn

from his reserve, he would need to replenish it.

On his return, my mother at once would hover

over him with questions and then food.

Later he would fall asleep in his chair

on the screened porch, a practice he had

only recently begun, and wake relieved

from his dark thoughts hearing his name repeated.

“Twentieth Century Women” – a film review by William Falcetano

“Twentieth Century Women” – a film review by William Falcetano

“Twentieth-Century Women” is a coming-of-age period piece set in Santa Barbara, California in 1979.  The story is not just about the central character Dorothea, played with uncanny appeal by the incomparable Annette Bening, but also about a small circle of women who are a part of Dorothea’s life at this confusing, transitional moment in American history.  The confusion is mainly over gender roles and love-expectations but it applies to the much larger question of life itself and how it should be, could be, or might be lived.  

We find Dorothea facing her beloved Ford Galaxy as it decides to combust spontaneously into flames – a searing metaphor for the decade that brought us disco and punk rock, Watergate and impeachment, oil shortages and shag haircuts.  Her son, Jamie, played with dark-eyed good looks by Lucas Jade Zumann, is a sensitive kid who, like his mother, is struggling to find his way in a confusing world.  He and his mother dance a pas de deux around each other with many missteps. It’s not a pretty picture; but it’s full of real moments and nuggets of wisdom.  When Jamie, an avid skate boarder, decides to play a stupid, dangerous game and almost dies, the audience is pulled into his mother’s world in a way that seals our interest in this little family.  They inhabit one of those large ramshackle houses that were laying around everywhere in 1979 just waiting to be scooped up and renovated in the next decade by armies of young urban professionals, the loathed “yuppies” of the 1980s.  This house, full of badly painted cabinets and chipping mill work, is the mise en scène for an ensemble of quirky yet believable characters – think Armisted Maupin or The Royal Tennenbaums.  Abbie, played by Greta Gerwig, lives in the house; she’s that art school punk rocker we all fell in love with in the 70s and 80s.  Another border in the big house is an ex-hippie named William, played with craggy sex appeal by Bill Crudup.  He’s always trying to fix things – “that’s what men do”, Dorothea says to her teenage son, “but they just need to be there, which seems so hard for them.”  Then there’s Julie, played by Elle Fanning – she’s Jamie’s childhood friend, who sneaks into his bedroom window at night to talk things out with him but she doesn’t allow him to have sex with her – “it would change things” she says ever so correctly.  But childhood is giving way to adulthood and hormones are raging – in fact everybody’s hormones are busy at work leading them to dates, to bed, and to more missteps as each character tries to sort out love and attachment in a world full of miscues, wrong choices, and “inappropriate men”.  

The central question – Can you raise a boy to be a man without a father? – is answered by Dorothea with an unequivocal “yes” as she enlists Julie and Abbie to help her connect with her wan, sulky son.  This leads to more comic situations which the director, Mike Mills, milks for all they’re worth, as the film quotes the feminist literature of the day in a flood of nostalgia for an era before computer screens stole our minds, when people made cassette tapes of their favorite bands for their best friends, earnestly read philosophical books, struggling to think about life in new ways by asking the ever disruptive question: Why?  The film is an homage to that era – before Reagan arrived and everything changed – when President Carter lectured the country about spiritual values, the loss of collective purpose, and warned against the dead-end of runaway materialism.  How times have changed!  Change is one of the key themes of this very interesting and deeply moving film, which reaches back in snippets to the 1920s when Dorothea was born into the Jazz Age, and keeps us listening to Louis Armstrong and the old song book of her era, while it mixes that soundtrack with the new wave sound of the “Art Fags” who dance in crazy movements and jerky steps to the fast tunes of the Ramones and the Talking Heads.  

It would have been clear to anyone who had attended the March for Women’s Rights in Boston recently that these fabulous 20^th century women raised a lot of terrific 20^th century boys who grew up to be 21^st century men, and who, somehow, know the difference between standing up to a bully and being one.  Funny how a generation of art fags learned how to become real men while the Mad Men generation of the 1950s, recycled in the brassy, tabloid, “Bonfire of the Vanities” 1980s, seemed to have come back from the dead and marched like zombies straight into the highest echelons of power!  What’s happening now in 21^st Century America has made this movie about 20^th Century women not only more interesting but also more relevant than ever. See it you’ll wonder how the life of our country should, could, and might still be, different – and better – than it is. 

Newton Free Library Poetry Series Starts Feb. 14 7PM

(Click on picture to enlarge)  For more information go to:  http://newtonfreelibrarypoetryseries.blogspot.com 
The series has been directed by Doug Holder since 2002. It was founded by Robert K. Johnson

The Sunday Poet: Christopher Reilley

Christopher Reilley

Christopher Reilley is the current poet laureate for Dedham, MA. He is also a Pushcart nominee, contributing editor for Acoustic Ink, and a board member of the Newton Writing & Publishing Center. He is the author of Grief Tattoos and Breathing for Clouds, both with Big Table Publishing. His poems have appeared in mumerous collections, journals, and anthologies, including Word Salad, Boston Literary Magazine, and Compass of Conception.

ADVICE TO A TRAVELER

Old friends – people that I've known for years
style themselves as monsters
as watches and clocks twitch with silent laughter.
The mind refuses to hold discourse
so I am forced to hold conversations
with my feet, walking away from irony.

The best counsel is to turn out the pockets of your life,
stuff your backpack with extra nothing
and carry on. Lighten your load. Hit the road.
Doors will slam, they have no choice.
Houses will bare their window-teeth
as they smile you a good-bye.

The trail you make is healthier
than the one you follow, until you lose your way.
But you must walk until you find
where the horizon meets the sky,
Walk as if there is no greater destination
than the footsteps you just left behind.

Roberto Carlos Garcia Interview by Susan Tepper

Roberto Carlos Garcia’s new full length poetry book, Melancolia, has been published by Cervena Barva Press. His chapbook amores gitanos (‘gypsy love’) was published by the same press a few years ago. Poems and prose by Garcia appear or will soon appear in The New Engagement, Public Pool, Stillwater Review, Gawker, Barrelhouse, Tuesday; An Art Project, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket and more. He is the founding editor of GET FRESH BOOKS, LLC, a cooperative publishing press. A native New Yorker, Garcia holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. http://www.robertocarlosgarcia.com/

Roberto Carlos Garcia Interview by Susan Tepper

Susan Tepper: You’re a painter as well as a poet, and your new collection titled Melancolía wears a cover of your own design.  Was this book cover painted for these poems, specifically, or did the image come before the manuscript?

Roberto Carlos Garcia: I went to the canvas and to my paints with the explicit intention of painting the cover. For a long time I couldn’t decide how to express the melancolía of the poems for the cover. I was afraid I would end up with a cover I hated. I had asked some artist friends to help me out but nothing really came of that, so I decided the cover would come from my hands.

ST: Excellent. Because the vision of the work came out of you. I think it’s really great when a press allows the author to participate in the choice of cover.

RCG: At first I envisioned a man running through the rain into a disappearing vantage point. Then I thought it would be cool if, instead of rain, roses were falling from the sky. By the time I painted the sky I knew there would be no man running in the painting. I was surprised by how “moody” or somber the image of roses falling from the sky was. I took that a step further with the puddles on the ground, “the mélange of colors,” as one observer wrote. Many of the poems include bright colors, roses, and rain, so I feel like that is represented well in the cover art.

ST: It’s a fantastic cover for these poems and the puddles first struck me as blood searing the earth. What makes you bleed as a poet?

RCG: Raw emotion. So often, or for me at least, being an artist is like living as an open wound or gateway. The intensity of emotion ultimately finds release as art because you have to share it, you have to, good or bad. The blood coming out of the wound, the emotions rushing through the gate, once you give this thing some thought, real contemplation, it becomes a poem, an essay, a short story, a painting, photos, whatever it is. The deep contemplation of each raw emotion, the thought, the worry, also makes me bleed as a poet. It’s like that quote by Amiri Baraka: “Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.”

The triggers are everywhere and I believe this book, Melancolía, explores them. From the smallest of concerns, watching the moon or the seasons change through a window, to state sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies, and women. Maybe it’s akin to Wordsworth’s cheesy line “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of feelings.” And it’s also Amiri Baraka’s critically important idea that “The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it.”

ST: I couldn’t agree more. Art is so hard. Especially here in America where it is often disdained and pushed aside for the most mindless forms of entertainment. What makes you bleed as a man?

RCG: The world’s lack of empathy. Everything that is wrong in the world could be changed if everyone wanted to change it. It’s that simple and it’s that complicated. Not only does this make me bleed, it depresses me, makes me despair, and I have to fight really hard to stay engaged with everyone and everything that I love. I know so many people, the majority of them writers, struggling with the same thing.

And yet, even showing love can bleed you dry. Sometimes you feel like you have enough empathy and love for the whole world and you hemorrhage, and you hurt yourself, your spirit. I believe that surviving as an Afro-Latino in America, one that is preoccupied with social justice for all, makes me bleed heavy.

ST: How personal are these poems to your own life?

RCG: The majority of these poems were written during a tough period in my life that I don’t want to get into here. I was looking for the joy and digging through the fat for something to sustain me emotionally. The bones of the book were made during a 30/30 writing challenge. I poured all of my searching, thinking, feeling, interrogating, and seeing into these poems. They are very personal, but also accessible because these are mostly universal concerns. Now more than ever the human being needs to understand that our concerns are universal.

ST: Some of these poems are after the works of poets Lorca, Milosz, Percy Bysshe Shelley and writers such as James Baldwin. Were they a direct influence on the particular poem? In other words, what is the tie-in?

RCG: These are just a few of my favorite writers. Many times I’ll be contemplating some line, quote, poem, or image from / or either of these artists and it will find its way into a poem. Mostly, I’m trying to have a conversation with these folks. Aren’t writers great conversationalists?

ST: I think they are. Sometimes a little too much!

RCG: I believe subconsciously I’m trying to get that writer in a room with a glass of wine, or a cup of coffee, to try solving the world’s problems.

ST: I would give anything to sit down and have a conversation with Baldwin. So what can we expect from you in your future writings? Any new books on the horizon?

RCG: I’m working on a novel, a collection of essays, a collection of short stories, and the next poetry collection. Hopefully, you’ll hear some news soon!

ST: That’s a lot of writing! I’m sure they will be equally dramatic and compelling as this stunning book. 

Susan Tepper
 Susan Tepper, an award-winning writer, has been at it for twenty years. Six books of her fiction and poetry have been published, with a seventh book, a novella, forthcoming in the fall of 2017. FIZZ her reading series at KGB Bar, NYC, is sporadically ongoing these past nine years. www.susantepper.com

 

The Sunday Poet: Llyn Clague

Llyn Clague is a poet based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  His poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, and other magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.  Visit www.llynclague.com

Hunger In A New Yorker Poem

Visual, sensual, genteel,

the poem “Quahogs” in this upscale

mag jogs forward in a tide-steady

rhythm, measured, controlled,

describing clamming by the sea.

Auditory, olfactory, tactile,

in verbal as well as physical

markers, the verse progresses

from tidal flats to rake tines

to the character and color

of the shells: “Opal or pearl …,

their whorls and purple stains.”

Compact, concrete, picturesque:

it’s a best-of-friends evening

scene, with the “sky blazing,

its sinking orange fire.”

With even “the air in savor,”

delightful “precious butter”

drips on “the succulent

of the freezing dark sea.”

Sandily gritty, precisely

specific, grandiosely

the poem raises its sights

from one night’s appetite

for clams and friends by the sea

to the notion of a durable,

universal human hunger,

a “domain immeasurable.”

Delicately, tastily, prettily

worded, its private hankerings

lead to yearning for meaning,

universal, noble, eternal.

To the hunger, very measurable,

of people not clamming by the sea,

this verse avoids allusion,

artfully, assuredly, gently.

Poet Laureate of Somerville Gloria Mindock in The Somerville Times

The new Poet Laureate of Somerville, Gloria Mindock writes, " I will serve the Somerville community with regular office hours, hosting a poetry round table open to all writers, workshops and readings for the elderly, poetry with puppets for children, readings and an informative talk about El Salvador’s civil war and the Salvadoran writing today in our community, and the giving away of free books throughout Somerville as part of Read America Read. I look forward to representing the city of Somerville for the next two years.

The Sunday Poet: Zachary Bos

Poet Zachary Bos

"Zachary Bos studied poetry in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University. He is editor of nerobooks.org. 'Conscious Explanations' by Mark Schorr was the first book published by his Pen & Anvil Press."

Lascaux Massachusetts

                i.m. Mark Schorr

Now look with me away from this screen where

I have just read my friend this morning died.

Let us look through this window, through the air

that carries the scent of marsh mud and salt

as it combs across the marsh at low tide.

We are high here, and on an upper floor,

and down away from us the rows of hills

melt into the distance, becoming more

soft and gray the farther away they are.

Fog softens them too, removes their features.

The winter rain rubs them smooth. All nature

winds itself down as it moves. Years of rain

wash the gilding from the grooves of the names

carved into the stone of our monuments.

What we leave out gets lost, erodes away

and decays. What does remains are stories.

Their gold is renewed with each retelling.

They are kept safe in the confines of all

we sing or say with sincere meaning. They

are beyond the reach of rust, just as safe

as the dancing aurochsen breathed upon

the caverock walls by those ancient painters

who knew we must keep inside what we want

to save from weather and oblivion.

                                                [ January 3, 2017 ]