Three Poems by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

Themes and Variations

for Eric Malone

Something keeps sneaking in
between the clarinet and the guitar
In the corner of my eye a blur, a streak,
something red. In the corner of my ear
scurries, little feet, paws, antlers rubbing
against the wall, perhaps a tail dragging
across the floor. And that
shrill wail? It’s certainly not an
accordion, not a violin.
Could it be an organ grinder
with a trained monkey?

Something keeps sneaking in
underneath the clarinet.
I think it’s hiding
in the canebrake
or just beyond. But I more than sense,
in that non-sense
sense, in the downward sweep,
the upward plunge,
the tintabulant tin tin tin
at the OK chorale
a hurricane stalking the reeds.

Something keeps sneaking in
between the radio and the clarinet.
It has bison horns
and cloven feet and
huge black eyes
and ears that waggle
in the prairie wind.
It refuses to announce itself,
just stands there, arms akimbo,
as if to say my presence
is your absence.

Something keeps sneaking in
encircling the sampler and the clarinet.
Which is the way it is these days
as the dark grows longer
than Pinocchio’s nose
and the light only stands still
for a brief moment before
giving itself up for dead.
Down by the river the horizon grows.
And I think I see a muskrat
foraging in the brown skunk cabbage.
Something keeps sneaking in
playing foosball with the clarinet.
“Cleared out of the clear.”
Or something akin. Something larger
than the “s” in snake, serpent, stupendous.
surprise, serendipity. It’s there.
Hunkered in the bunker
with an old Gene Autry 45
(record, not revolver). Yet on approach
it disappears, only to reappear above us
dancing in the cold clear light.

 

Magic Music

for Gerrit Lansing, word musician/magician

The Chinese gong is tuned
in accordance with the cymbals,
and in the large hushed room
rhapsodic  intervals

swell an embellished scale.
A few crane their ears,
divine a hidden madrigal,
a lucent score that soars,

whirls, dances on tiptoes,
whispers for a moment, then
descends like hailstones
chasing summer rain

 

Valentine’s Poem

for Patricia

Depth now
+++++++and perhaps time
+++++++++++++but surely depth

Not the harsh wind
+++++++++++++blowing the snow across the path
+++++++but the sun melting
+++++++++++++the whirling flakes in mid flight.

We collect without collecting
+++++++++++++hold precious
+++++++what some would think fool’s gold.

We utter each other’s words and thoughts,
+++++++anticipate movement,
++++++++++++++++++++uncover desire in a glance
+++++++++++++or your arm in mine.

We know that time does not make poems,
+++++++that feeling truly is first
++++++++++++++++++++and that struggle becomes a gift.

And we know at the last hour
+++++++we will hop a rumbling freight train,
++++++++++++++++++++share an orange,
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++on a San Francisco hill.

Three Poems by David Bartone

Valentine

sitting warmly over a window
where six dark-eyed juncos
play in the upper branches,
probably doing something beautiful
to keep alive—too dizzy aphorism
otherwise meant to be found

 

Song: Pink Fray of the Spray Mum

Across western horizon to be here.
You, Nebraska-coated and uprooted to be east
with me.

Long natured satin scripture.

How you love bring me flowers
at our pennilessness.
Eileen, thank you.

Talking the spray mum, talking ripening
beyond to its end.

First farmers experimenting, dropping
pink droplets on the petals, hands
coated in boron lush soil, men

with strong hats/straw hands/
strong hats. Aches and aches
of acres.

 

Quixote in the Bedroom

The sixteenth century collapsed into one bronze Don Quixote around the corner.

He so immersed himself in those romances that he spent whole days and nights over his books.

Permit me be bold in these ways. Permit me some knight-errantry. Permit me harvest eyes like two folding moons.

I want to make classic beauty, to elope into it.

Elope from the sixteenth century French, abscond, run away. But before that from the Norman Anglican, to leap.

I want to elope from where there is no tradition into a tradition and then out again, the sweaty grip of tradition.

There is no wandering in search of chivalrous adventures for me.

There is the dim lit home collapsing all space between two people like two folding moons sitting in opposite chairs like two opposite rooms.

…

Is all.

…

I have never been very good at describing the ways my lover touches me.

There seems no act that more exaggerates the insufficiencies of both lyricism and realism.

I have tried to narrate her motion her eyes her face, but searching, I find alone snapshots that are alone and by the way and in third person.

The gross move that occurs in literature, the desperate default of third person.

I finally said it.

…

She brings one knee up to her chest. A little.

I bill and coo.

 

June 30: David Bartone and Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

on Monday, June 30, 2014

at The Deja Brew Cafe & Pub, Wendell, MA

Doors open at 7:00 p.m.

Open mic starts at 7:30 p.m.

Sliding scale admission: $1 – $5

Read poems by David Bartone and Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno on the ASC blog.

David Bartone is the author of Practice on Mountains, selected for the 2013 Sawtooth Poetry Prize at Ahsahta Press. He is also the author of Spring Logic, a chapbook with H_NGM_N. His poems and translations have appeared at Colorado Review,Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Mountain Gazette,Handsome, Volt, and others. He is faculty at University Without Walls at UMass Amherst. He lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno is the author of more than a half-dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles and E.E. Cummings, and a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960, The Continual Pilgrimage. He is also well-known as a translator and poet. His new book of poems,Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany, is a meditation on time, place, and space. Until his retirement in 2006, he taught writing at MIT for nearly a quarter-century. He lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, where he edits The Montague Reporter.

April 28: Howard Faerstein and Mark Hart

on Monday, April 28, 2014

at The Deja Brew Cafe & Pub, Wendell, MA

Doors open at 7:00 p.m.

Open mic starts at 7:30 p.m.

Sliding scale admission: $1 – $5

Howard Faerstein’s full-length book of poetry, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, a selection of the Silver Concho Poetry Series, was published in 2013 by Press 53. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals; publications include Great River Review, Nimrod (finalist in the Pablo Neruda Poetry Contest), CutThroat (featured as Discovery Poet), The Comstock Review, Off the Coast, Mudfish, and on-line in Gris-Gris, The Pedestal, Connotation Press, and The November 3rd Club. He lives in Florence, Massachusetts, and teaches American Literature at Westfield State University.

Mark Hart’s first collection, Boy Singing to Cattle, won the 2011 Pearl Poetry Prize and is a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award. His poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, RATTLE, The Evansville Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. Raised on a wheat farm in the Palouse region of eastern Washington State, he now lives in an apple orchard in western Massachusetts. He works as a psychotherapist, a Buddhist teacher, and a religious advisor at Amherst College.

Three Poems by Michelle Valois

Lives of the Dead

At 16, Confucius was a corn inspector.
His job required neither wisdom nor self-scrutiny,
only a keen eye for rot and the ability to hold
large numbers in his head.

Albert Einstein, also good with numbers,
could not speak fluently until he was eleven years old.

Emperor Louis Napoleon could speak five languages
and was praised for his ability to keep silent in all of them.

I know only two languages and can’t seem to keep
my mouth shut in either, except for that time
when I couldn’t speak at all,
but we won’t talk about that today.

Today we will talk about Thomas Edison,
who was afraid of the dark.

 

Orbital

I will paper your invitation
to the sky; universe your logic
and purple my memory of lost
satellites. Once, I broke

the sound barrier; now I sand
time and wrinkle lost space. Drip
the hourglass down, and smooth
the chutes of contradicting

galaxies. How many light years
have spectrumed my appetite?
I could eat consonants
whole, like M or B, swallow

the hues of my found vocabulary
and deliver unto you an uncertain
interpretation of Einstein’s
cosmological constant. Complexion

me and blush to know: Here I am.
Orbiting. Never having left. Conceding
gravitas. Come away. Gone never.
Have I and were we and where.

 

Loose Limbs

Let me tattoo the small of your back
with the book of lost hours,
as the beaver outside our bedroom
whispers its willingness to die for love
to the collapsed tree, felled
by last year’s freak storm, which the boys
propped up against the shed and which we
have tried to remove.

Persistence is a thing of joy,
cried the lilac, who petitioned the bones
of Saint Jude for a prayer
on our behalf. Let them climb,
the relics counseled, and let the beaver build
and the boys squander good summer days—
shabby celebrants all, finding
possibility in the debris.

Three Poems by David Abel

[untitled]

the sun sets into the sea
goes to that other sky
to renew the names

the rocks settle
so slowly
we take them for the ground

darkness
pours down into the trees

filling them, a wind
moves our limbs
and whispers

the moon
candles
in a death’s-head

brighter, whiter, warmer
for the wind

DEFINING ACT

+++++for Paul Blackburn

Eyes wide,
I stare out the bedroom window:

Spruce
+++++++++branches
+++++whip
+++++++++++++in the wind

Red alders
++sway discreetly

I must be better off
in the dream world,
I fight so
not to wake to this one

I don’t remember,
just open my eyes
and this world
returns
+++++like a song
I can’t get out of my head

SIGHT’S END

the sun will blind me
if the rain don’t shine

light pours down
in a clatter on the rooves

clouds brighten the wave-
body, blue’s

in my eye, it’s gone,
here
+++++comes the storm again

March 31: David Abel and Michelle Valois

on Monday, March 31, 2014

at The Deja Brew Cafe & Pub, Wendell, MA

Doors open at 7:00 p.m.

Open mic starts at 7:30 p.m.

Sliding scale admission: $1 – $5

Photo by Alan Bernheimer David Abel is a poet, artist, editor, and teacher, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop. Three new books were released in the summer of 2012: Float, a collection of collage texts spanning twenty-five years (Chax Press); Tether, a chapbook of poems (Barebone books); and Carrier, a hypergraphic visual sequence (c_L Books). Other recent publications include the collaborative artist’s books While You Were In and Let Us Repair (disposable books, with Leo & Anna Daedalus). With Sam Lohmann, he publishes the Airfoil chapbook series, and from 2002–12 he published twenty-four issues of the free broadside series Envelope. He has devised more than thirty performance, film, theater, and intermedia projects in the past decade, both solo and with a wide range of collaborators. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its thirteenth year, he also teaches writing, most recently at the Multnomah Arts Center, where from 2009–12 he was the coordinator of the Literary Arts program. An inaugural Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art, and a founding member of 13 Hats, a collective of visual artists and writers, he recently curated the exhibitions Chax Press: Publishing Poetics for PNCA and Object Poems for 23 Sandy Gallery. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Michelle Valois lives in Florence, Massachusetts with her partner Katharine; their three children, Noah, Ari, and Esther; and a cat named Moxie.  Her writing has appeared in Tri-Quartlery, The Massachusetts Review, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Baltimore Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slipstream, Map Literary, The North American Review, and others.  She earned an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has received writing grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.  She teaches writing and humanities at Mount Wachusett Community College.

Maps

1

Heirs to a secret order
The trajectory from boulevard
to the towers poised on a hill
over the mall in Los Samanes

The white statue of Teresa de la Parra
in parque Los Caobos has a black
graffiti tag on its neck, tattoo curls

The city is a cubic puzzle
seen from the varying angles
of the imaginary mountain

Whose words intone or roam
The wind still associates itself
with ancient verbs that sound now

The bus loaded with passengers
slows up the hill in low gears

*

The image of the towers was being drawn on the sea.

*

In the Callejón de la Puñalada in Sabana Grande, there is a mural painted with an image
of Victor Valera Mora, and one with a verse by Ramón Palomares written huge across the
wall. Walking in Bellas Artes, the abandoned Viasa skyscraper with its boarded-up doors.

*

Rain open mind this evening of sound
Repetition of noises, taps the leaves

2

How to write a poem
A walk in the old (coastal) city
The sky-blue painted arches
on the tomb partly shaded
by the tree beside it,
dried leaves and flowers

Short bedside verses or maps
the page of clouds the day

  — Guillermo Parra

Poem

     Don't know a word
of their anthem but who really
cares, running full force down the stairs
and then tripping over the rug     balmy, scenic
refresher under lane five, unself critical
unfolded laundry, grass     like wet whiskey
and perspiration.
     Combing the swingset with my nephew
while looking out     over the dark a little
shaky at the top of the ladder
undeclared, take it all for granted
scared sacred, navigating fewer and fewer
social situations like a teenager choking
on the plastic bag of longing     got to be something
starting a cigarette for other peoples' people
in an elevator.
     Jerome, at the haunted hamburger spot
calling all that is good in everyone
said what, knows, feet in the dirt, sun in the clouds
Old Mill Avenue over the discount boot warehouse
climbing up the walls with a tray of cokes.
     Personal growth     around exposed pipes, a tornado under
young tee shirt, song for suffering singers
performing dangerous but not     unlawful rituals
in professional arcade night watching.   An empty office
at six in the fall, easily shamed and often forgot, the jurors
off courts, drunk in Home Depot, walk it off
braid within a braid within a pressure trust circle
in a darkened stadium wearing an Olympia hat,
soft as sirens     to sleep to.

          — Laura Henriksen

Kid A

You will not write the honest
version of your life
So, the rain makes concert
after crickets and frogs
Among the double-loops
of time worn through
The arches of what boulevards
disintegrate hereafter
Kid A on the bus speakers
This sunlight, antique
Twenty seconds, a verse
Across the breadth of
what ill images held
My resort to symbolism
The mere sound of this
I walk alone for what
months and days merged
Those same streets
in downtown Caracas
that Ramos Sucre covered
at night to divert insomnia
In black on benches
or naming the corners
Translating and editing
the subway afternoon
A quick digest of what
flower minds my love
Be such sorrow as only I
know how to feed or draw
These situations exist
beside average forms
Magic dust debriefed
This night makes choral ice

          — Guillermo Parra