Poetry

Stump Talk

pain not clear-cut
before legs like two Live Oaks
biceps my best feature now
do stumps speak of Man amputating?
word equals world

Richard Kaderli 10/22/06

NANCY CHERRY
The Hammer

There is a hammer lying on the floor of my bedroom
I want to pick it up but I don’t pick it up because
that would be a digression.

If I pick up the hammer,
it will leave an impression, hammer-shaped, in the rug because
it is heavy and has lain there all night.
it will look as if the hammer is still there
even after I have walked out of the room and put it
away in the toolbox.

The carpet will not let go of its hammer-shape; it is not grass
that will gradually lift itself after a night of heavy sleep.
It will only stand up if I run my fingers through the fibers
or vacuum; and if I vacuum, I will not stop
with the foot-square shape of hammer, but will run through the house
vacuuming carpets and no one will remember
there was a hammer.

Last night I brought the hammer into the bedroom
to unstick the window swollen with winter
because I was beginning to suffocate as the barometer dropped
toward rain.

Even now, though I am in the kitchen and it is raining at last,
I am thinking about the hammer and what it is doing alone
in the bedroom pressing carpet fibers to the floor.
It presses silently and does not move in any direction
except down. It does not inch toward home but plows
through my thoughts with the claw end made for prying
and getting things unstuck.

And what will I discover inside but another toolbox
full of anxious hardware: the screwdrivers, the pliers and directress
and an empty space at the back
for the hammer.

The Hammer appeared in Poets On: Forgetting , Vol. 18, Summer, 1994.

Nancy lives in Sebastipol, CA and has been a poet most of her life. I knew her before she was famous back in 8th grade. Eventually she will be world famous and now you can say you have read her before that time.

Here is another exceedingly wonderful poem which she wrote about an area not far from Point Reyes. Kinda makes you wanna go see it, I think.

Lagunitas Trail, End of Spring

Thinking about pain and lupine,
and the patched grass cut
to make a trail to the sea.
Horsetail
wild beside the plowing. Dark
vermouth of the earth exposed—
river of what was. The giving
nature of sand coming down.
For weeks, I forget who my
friends are.
Names called out along the path,
stray hawk kree sailing the
salt air,
and the ocean close, dashing
itself
against the land’s base where
we began.
Layers of vegetation arc beneath
what wears away. How many times
have I? Ribbons of loam at my
shoulder,
fossilized shell, and the
summer to come.
Redwing song anchored in this
afternoon.
How many times? re-crossing my
own path.

And here is another one of mine about being an amputee.

Order of The Dear

Aching a good thing, show’s me there’s life.

I am oh so tired, I am throwing away my life.

It’s day / night, can’t tell–the incandescent light

Shines above the valise. It’s always cold inside.

You’re going to shake and shiver, beg me for a drug,

Says Nurse through her ire and fallen arches.

I, consumed by inspiration and expiration try to abide

To rules of no screaming, no cursing–

Wind blows linden and larches.

Breath must out, must draw like cracked mud dried

Like the catheter inside my prick it’s dug.

Nurse, so right yet I’ve my drip of morphine

Through Intravenous, secure clocked feeder to my blood.

Condescending wizened smile she knows her junkie.

I’ll come apart, beg, promise anything to get the labored breath

To muffle pain, to have a shot or pill and monkey kill

Or if not then take it off my back without my own death.

Relaxing neck, back, ribs and chest, I ease, I rest

With my sleep she clocksout at the dais of the Order of the Dear.

8-11-01 RLK

Foreword

I am looking for a revolution salvation
in a frozen hotel in Winnipeg in winter
My Bishop has summoned me here
to learn and grow in the Holy Spirit
to ponder and practice baptismal ministry
He deputizes everyone to go and pray
to go and pray together and listen
to go and pray lay deacon priest bishop
From this let the Holy Spirit speak, grow
Flickering flames of a revitalized church
hearken the spirit of the original church

A balmy ten below not much snow
looking for prime rib and beer with my bishop
Colorado boy amused by cold weather fears
He wants a feel for the streets downtown
walks frosty to dinner and back eschews limo
A balmy ten below not much snow
looking for prime rib and local beer

Bishop

Fourteen years of chipping away at the mountain
like some crazy coot in the desert who heard
the commanding voice of his Lord,
To build a kinder more compassionate church,
by giving it back to the congregation, the laity.
This church is like Mount Rushmore, only better;
this mountain moves in faith, but slowly

Quell your mortality, your uncertainties
The stern hand of the Captain is at the helm
he has guided us through perilous waters
led us to the fabled lands of our dreams

He has fashioned something so incredibly finer,
more beautiful, infinitely more precious
than any mortal hand can hope.
Working shoulder to shoulder with his Lord
he has created fine souls, congregations thriving,
congregations to be proud of,
walking closely in the footsteps of our Lord.
He reduced moutainous abdurate obstinacy
to loving instruments of grace and devotion
that cannot be taken away from him ever

In his remaining years (may they be many)
he can turn at any moment and touch
the perfection of his work his diocese.
An honest and willing agent of his Lord
Some develop better ways to grow food
Jerry has found a better way to grow faith

William Bruneau – January 12th, 2007 at 3:48 am

by the Nile by the Tigris
under the pomegranate tree
you were my sigh.
cool lips red-stained, soft arms
my medicine.
a smoke of distant pyres
rose only to give sweeter meaning
to the perfume
of your thighs.

by the Indus by the Tiber
in the ruined temples where the songbirds
sang and made their nests
you were my refuge.
cups we drained of wine
and laughter as the smoke of burning cities
rose to give a desperate meaning
to the perfume
of your breasts.

by the Rhine by the Mississippi
in our hiding place
among the holy trees
you were the sorrow of a sweet goodbye
before they came for us with guns,
with money, with the cross,
to separate the earth from sky,
flesh from spirit,
you from me.

1/6/07

Frank Stauf | FStauf@urology.ucsf.edu | IP: 67.150.244.24

I spank your ass
to purify my love
until all saints
bow down

let me forget
my name
I have no use for it
where I live now

love take me
where sad children wise and solemn
peel my skin
to make a sail

let me forget
my pain
I have no name for it
where I live now

12/14/06 (or 12/19?)

Jan 12, 12:35 PM — [ Edit | Delete | Unapprove | Approve | Spam | View Post ]

Frank Stauf | FStauf@urology.ucsf.edu | IP: 67.150.252.20

Revenge of the Sea Witch

Three times between the granite cliffs
where the cleft-carving stream pours out
into the sea, there in the glitter of the sun
on dancing water she appeared to him
across the sand, and took his hand
and led him to her cave.
Three times the love she made
to him was like a storm of shipwreck and yet
like a dream of peace.
He counted with her the imaginary jewels
embedded in the ceiling of her grotto; let her
show him shells and skulls and claws
and dead men’s bones she had collected from the sea
- things she had never shown, she said, to anyone before.
She garlanded her sable hair with seaweed, and her salt-
streaked skin he kissed until
the tide began to rise, then it was time,
she said, for him to go back to his village.

In the village there were other men with whom
she’d been, now drinking in the tavern trading boasts
of how they’d used the simpleton.
He held his tongue. The women of the village
too despised her, called her whore. He held his tongue.
He loved her with a tenderness and a desire that inflamed the world inside his eyes,
his heart, his body, kindling a fierceness that would guard her cave
from harm while at the same time he possessed her. No one
in the village knew such passion; he alone, he told himself,
with her had touched the soul of storm and ocean; and at night
he lay in bed imagining she felt
the same. Four is the number
of completion and containment, and the fourth
tryst would be like a wedding between love and lust, hope and desire,
sea and fire – just as sea and sky are joined eternally at the horizon
where the crude boats of the village do not go.

Between the granite cliffs where the cleft-carving stream
pours out into the sea, there in the glitter of the setting
sun on dancing water he appeared to her
across the sand. She took his hand
and led him to her cave. Pale naked body
in his arms so cool and soft, her nighted hair
smelling of brine…it was the beating of the salt-blood
through his veins, the beating of his heart
that kept the time, so that he hardly noticed
darkness falling or the waves approaching
or the water rising steadily around her seaweed bed
until it was borne up and floated toward the ceiling
of her grotto where the jewels embedded in the rock
shone with a light that showed no opening
and no way out. “Don’t be afraid,”
she laughed, and pulled him down and tumbled
with him deep into the water that now filled
the cave, and showed him shells and skulls
and claws, and dead men’s bones she had collected
from the sea. His arms reached out for her:
she was a fish, cold scales of silver, slippery.
He tried again: she was a crab, all carapace
and thorny legs. Even the memory of hope would not allow
itself to be embraced as finally the water choked his lungs
while in the village tavern, laughing men shared boasts
of how they’d used the simpleton.

1/2/07

More Poems from Nancy Cherry

Counting

yesterday my mother stomped
one hundred & eighty-two snails
while my father fished at topaz lake.
every year he takes the trailer
& her applecake to the mountains
and she gardens. then she calls
to report the numbers-today
it’s 25 for her, 10 for my father.
her garden counters with more
snails as she battles ivy, oxalis,
four o’clocks & arthritis in her knee.
but it’s the northern scottish pine
i’ve named their ’sticky-wicket’.
planted in a barrel, my father’s
pushed it into prominence beneath
the kitchen window. my mother
doesn’t want it there but she can’t
move it. maybe these will be the stories
my nephew tells his future children-
how we wrestled with our natures
and someone won.

I am not going to the moon after all

I am not going because, at 79, my mother says no.
She assures me that at 80, she will still say no.
She’s afraid I’ll fall out of the sky. I tell her
there is no sky on the moon, no blue atmosphere
circling, & nothing to fall out of along the way.
I tell her that in space, it’s like putting a rock
on a table, I’ll just stay there. But she won’t have it.
Besides, she says, there’s going to be war in space.
The headlines say ‘it’s inevitable’. So, for now,
I’ll have to stay here on this table
with the telephone, the computer, and all
these fine point Zebra pens.