Lewd Descending a Staircase by Melissa Hintz

 

 

Does being here make you feel like you’re in an Italian porn film?

 

                                                                 I have never been asked this question before.

Much less by a stranger

at a writers’ workshop

on a bucolic college campus

walking down the sweeping marble staircase

to the basement Rathskellar for open mic.

 

Truth to tell, I would not know the difference

 between an Italian porn film and one from, say, Australia,

although perhaps the latter might have more koalas and kangaroos.

 

I am stumped. 

Unlike my halcyon college days, forty years ago, 

when I had a ready answer to do you believe in free love?

and I’d toss off it's worth what it costs, 

I ponder the question.

 

What is it that evokes this image for you?

Do you see cleavage in the verdant rolling hills?

Do you see masculine celebration

in the white columns that adorn every red-brick building?

Or the lampposts—

sturdy ten-foot black poles topped with white oval globes?

 

White wicker rockers on long covered porches 

might work for a kiss, but hardly a tryst.

 

Venetian blinds everywhere here, not Venetian blondes.

No minx in minks

nor naked nubile nymphs 

grace this campus,

though the founding father’s statue stands erect—

stern, whiskered, in top hat and great coat.

Hardly studly.

 

Somehow Signor, 

I do not see your role in this film,

with your plaid shirt, slight paunch, and scruffy beard.

Your sandaled feet would not sweep a maiden off hers, even if you shed the socks.

 

We have reached the bottom step.

Italian porn film?

I think not.

Perhaps, 

though, 

                                                                                     Goodbye Mr. Chips.

IN THE BEGINNING by Jessica Jacobs

 IN THE BEGINNING

 

light needed creating—darkness

was already here.  Commingled,

that first light looked

like a sandstorm

       maybe: everything

               at once: quavering and resonant

                    as a plucked string

                         until God commenced the ceremony

                            of separations—light

                              from dark, terebinths

                               from touch-me-nots, Florida

                                from the Gulf and sea, Adam

 

                             from Adamah/earth, Adam

                              from Chava, mother

                             of us all, asps

                           and whistle pigs

                        and hellbenders

                     from them both.  God, 

                  who in this beginning

               was Elohim, God of Judgement, knew

        when there is nothing but light, nothing

        can be seen.  So now there’s nothing

        unmet by shadow.  Knew

                                that to say I am

              is to be strengthened

 

        but also severed

        from all not you.

 

       Just as Brazil was spooned

       by Cameroon before the continents

       began their drift, as each of us—so

       long ago—was powerless, snug,

       and cradled through the air, Creation

       is still in and of its Creator as we are each

       out mother’s child.  But who can remember

       such union?  With all things separate

       and their selves, what wonders.

       Yet how each body longs

       for connection.  

Note from the poet, Jessica Jacobs:

“The 50^th Anniversary issue of the Mississippi Review just arrived and I’m honored to be there in such illustrious company with a poem based on the Kabbalistic concept and image of tzimtzum: a contraction of God into God’s self in order to make space for the world—a founding act of great generosity but also of separation and the creation of new boundaries.  

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

The Year by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be said in New-Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

Thomas Mann by Wislawa Szymborska

Dear mermaids, it was bound to happen.
Beloved fauns and honourable angels,
evolution has emphatically cast you out.
Not that it lacks imagination, but
you with your Devonian tail fins and alluvial breasts,
your fingered hands and cloven feet,
your arms alongside, not instead of, wings,
your, heaven help us, horns sprouted out of spite,
illegitimate beaks, this morphogenetic potpourri, those
finned or furry frills and furbelows, the couplets
pairing human/heron with such cunning
that their offspring knows all, is immortal, and can fly,
you must admit that it would be a nasty joke,
excessive, everlasting, and no end of bother,
one that mother nature wouldn't like and won't allow.

And after all she does permit a fish to fly,
deft and defiant.  Each such ascent
consoles our rule-bound world, reprieves it
from necessity's confines--more
than enough for the world to be a world.

And after all she does permit us baroque gems
like this: a platypus that feeds its chicks on milk.
She might have said no--and which one of us would know
that we'd been robbed?

                    But the best is that
she somehow missed the moment when a mammal turned up
with its hand miraculously feathered by a fountain pen.

Returning Birds by Wislawa Zsymborska

This spring the birds came back again too early.

Rejoice, O reason: instinct can err, too.

It gathers wool, it dozes off -- and down they fall

into the snow, into a foolish fate, a death

that doesn't suit their well-wrought throats and splendid claws,

their honest cartilage and conscientious webbing,

the heart's sensible sluice, the entrails' maze,

the nave of ribs, the vertebrae in stunning enfilades,

feathers deserving their own wing in any crafts museum,

the Benedictine patience of the beak.

This is not a dirge -- no, it's only indignation.

An angel made of earthbound protein,

a living kite with glands straight from the Song of Songs,

singular in air, without number in the hand,

its tissues tied into a common knot

of place and time, as in an Aristotelian drama

unfolding to the wings' applause,

falls down and lies beside a stone,

which in its own archaic, simpleminded way

sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

On Death, Without Exaggeration by Wislawa Szymborska

It can't take a joke, 
find a star, make a bridge. 
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming, 
building ships, or baking cakes.
In our planning for tomorrow, 
it has the final word, 
which is always beside the point.

It can't even get the things done 
that are part of its trade: 
dig a grave, 
make a coffin, 
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing, 
it does the job awkwardly, 

without system or skill. 
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs, 
but look at its countless defeats, 
missed blows, 
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn't strong enough 
to swat a fly from the air. 
Many are the caterpillars 
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods, 
tentacles, fins, tracheae, 
nuptial plumage, and winter fur 
show that it has fallen behind 
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won't help 
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat 
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs. 
Babies' skeletons grow. 
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves 
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it's omnipotent 
is himself living proof 
that it's not.

There's no life 
that couldn't be immortal 
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob 
of the invisible door. 
As far as you've come 
can't be undone.