The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
Publishing the best poetry and fiction from emerging and established voices since 1966
The Courtney Holley Literary Award BIG MOON OVER THE NEIGHBORHOOD
The herd is strong in me. It steers me when I think.
I feel it grunting in my stomach when I sleep.
I walk with my herd invisibly around me.
All my confusions are forms of loneliness.
But you keep your distance as if it were money
and smile on all roofs with superficial light.
Remote therefore happy, you swing
above the neighborhood’s dust, rumble, and gas.
Anyone looking up admires you.
And how we do look up, all together.
Our guts and throats silent as scared crickets,
we cease for a long moment our chewing.
The Amon Liner Poetry Award SEPTEMBER
A tropical storm grows in the Atlantic with your name.
We listen to warnings on the radio as we drive to the shore,
passing boarded-up houses and closed storefronts.
The tourists head west, crowding the highways out of town,
and we move through the empty streets faster than
we have all summer, arriving at an abandoned beach.
I watch you smoke a cigarette without using your hands,
your lips holding it in the corner of your mouth, the same way
your father smokes. You wait for what the storm brings in,
schools of baitfish and the bigger fish that eat them,
while I walk the tide line looking for unbroken shells.
When I stop and look back, I’ve wandered so far away from you
that I wonder if you have noticed. I am so far away
that it looks like the waves will eat you before I can get back,
but with each step you are still there, your hair tangled with sand.
The heron we feed returns, but the hermit who lived
in the army bunker back in the estuaries is dead, killed
by a group of drunks. We can see his boat from here,
tied to the dock, resting in the bay. I don’t know if anyone
will bring it in before the winds come. The same hounds
always ghost on my corner, but I can’t tell the difference
between instinct and anxiety. I find salvation in these mornings,
waking with you on threadbare sheets, returning to the water,
but we drift away from each other. I think it is a problem.
ARRIVING
What do they say about the land of the dead?
About the ceremony of the body?
About women in long dresses?
What do they say about the innocence of the flesh?
What about the endeavor in nature
at ease with the dance and music?
Long ago, beyond graves, are worlds in state.
The cities still there in ruin. The neck of the ibex.
Walled gardens surrounded by desert.
Imagined lions guarding the gate.
All as it was before.
Worlds out of time still exist.
Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering
just as the poem lasts.
In the concert of being present.
I have lost my lover and my youth.
I want to praise the meadow, the horse
rolling over in the river with me
as a girl underneath it. Surviving to see
the ferns in the woods, sunlight on blond hills.
And the aged apple trees
in a valley where there used to be a cabin.
Where someone lived. And where small inedible apples
grow. That the deer will eat.
DETOUR AHEAD
for Evie Shockley
One week alone on campus
spoiled us to everything real in the world
but a heightened camaraderie
quick to reach fever pitch: writers
at conference. We stopped only to eat
(on scheduled beat) and to sleep,
restless skiffs in the boathouse of dreams.
Huddling in clusters, we chatted
into the night about everything
process. (How could so much fun
be so exhausting?) I’ve left it now,
thank god: a few hours out of Raleigh,
mind unspooling the truth-serum
pontification a workshop tends to extract
from its leader. About to fall asleep
inside this numb corridor of I-95—
what the hell—I turn down
the potholed off-ramp
into the trough of Philadelphia.
Just my luck: the Phillies are at home
and I’m stalled, dead center,
inside this stadium parking crush,
bumping forward inch by maddening inch.
The radio announces that if they lose,
the Phils will have accrued 10,000 losses,
some fan’s punched gut of a stat.
I don’t care, wanting only the traffic
to open up—which, when Broad parts
its tributary mouth to kiss the wooden teeth
of this old city, it eventually does.
I’ve got Evans’ Explorations on the deck,
LaFaro’s groove pulse carrying me
through the afternoon: murals and store-
fronts and center-lane parked cars; one
homeless soul pushing the world’s shopping cart
brimming with crushed cans. Two blocks
and I’m in the land of Starbucks and sky-
scrapers. Men in suits, women in pairs
walking fast. There’s enough coffee
in my system to stun-gun an elephant.
There’s a square, a wrong turn and, for a few
lost minutes, one-way streets send me
around in circles. The route looked straight
enough on the map, a simple drive up
into pastoral green; I was hoping
Highway 611 would escort me
up its urban spine into the river-lined,
wheaty heart of rural America.
Rolling down my window to ask
an elderly couple, Am I still on Broad?
Will it take me out of the city?
the man throws me a look that says,
You know where you’re headed, white boy?
Then he nods: Just keep going straight.
I want to tell him that the same year
LaFaro recorded “Detour Ahead,”
with Evans and Motian on drums,
possibly the most synchronized trio ever,
he also played on Ornette’s Free Jazz,
that ultimate firework of an album,
before wrapping his young man’s Firebird
around a tree six months later
on New York State Route 20 outside Geneva,
which is like orchestrating
a game-ending double play
then preparing the five-star meal
that night at some hot new bistro,
sauce pans exploding into mini bonfires
of applause, then, tented by a box
of cardboard, marinated in piss and dirt,
sleeping on a grate passersby agree
to overlook. A friend’s first night in Philly,
he’s driving down Broad in a rental truck,
worried by the conspicuous absence of street-
lights, rundown buildings leaning in
like field oaks, when he comes upon a car
on fire. No one around, no police.
Windows rolled down, he takes in
the burning rubber, the crackling heat
off the pyre. Me, I’m the only white face
in a square mile, a white boy bubbled
by cool jazz, wide awake now, thank you,
absorbing as much as I can, open
to the heat, the city’s talk squabbling
with the music. Then, when the road bends,
I’m in the suburbs, just like that: the long
snake of sprawl, pod mall after pod mall.
First one township then another. Up
in the country now, a green chant
of trees, river dancing in and out of sight,
small bridges popping brief drum solos
under my tires. Pretty soon I’m in
the long, cool embrace of the Delaware Gap,
breeze washing my face, heading
northeast to 84, Evans’ “My Foolish Heart”
subsumed in light: rush of wind; tires whirring
inside a brushed snare; the day suddenly mine,
body resurrected inside moments
framed by the windshield, catching them like fish
in its porous net.
The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem I HAVE A THEORY ABOUT REFLECTION
I cannot put my mother in the freezer and neither can I store her
in the attic nor in the bank box nor in the canister of sugar In
fact she is calling me now she is ringing in my kitchen in both
bedrooms in the upstairs office I am wearing her like a too-big
coat The coat is made of wire I shoo her away I flap my hands:
go away go away I am a match and every time we speak—and
sometimes when we do not—she strikes me Even in the bend of a
spoon I can see her reaching
The Courtney Holley Literary Award FATHER AS DISTANT BOAT
Far across the lake, on the other shore, the family
takes off their hats, loosens their neckties, unbraids
their hair. There is a man and woman,
a girl and small dog with floppy ears. They board you
through the mist and stink of weeds. You pitch wildly.
Not until the shore’s too far gone will they realize
the wood underfoot is rotten soft. Delicately,
like a slowly flooding room, it will dawn
on them: no one ever survives you. At sunset
they’ll leap from your edges like flames.
The Amon Liner Poetry Award EXHALE
I watched the sky and waited. The storm
will come as it comes. Trees in the wind threw
their branches at the evening. Despite the lack
of human voices, or perhaps because of it,
I catalogued noises—
crickets, wind, traffic, drops of water hitting a sink,
hum of appliances, click of the well pump.
Air inside the house stilled during the storm,
though wind continued to strike the hillside
and rain washed down the side of the house.
When the full force of the storm finally hit,
and lights flickered once, then died, the stillness
of the house sounded like the rest
between heartbeats, the sudden quiet
when the morning alarm is shut off pre-dawn.
The house still creaked.
It seemed the logs would tear themselves apart.
After the storm, I waded through the heavy wet grass
to the center of the field. There wasn’t a rainbow,
though far-spaced raindrops sliced through sunshine.
The field’s middle depression was filled with water,
thick in mud and heat. Mosquitoes will be born there,
will nest in the deep puddles and swarm up in summer air.
The house settled at night, air expanding and contracting,
plaster pulling between logs with each breath.
All night, small noises—just the house, the weather, I thought.
In the morning I find the trophy my cat left—
a small creature—a mouse or mole
almost neatly dissected on the rug in front of the cast-iron stove:
body, then head, then organs clustered like whitewashed pebbles.
NOTHING ABOUT YOUR LIFE
Let’s say you’re visiting an old friend at a beach.
It’s October, and excluding the standard update,
your friend knows nothing about your life
(this is your vacation). Let’s say beachcombers,
wearing light jackets and shorts, are watching you:
wading at first, you let the cold
water splash, holding your skirt
higher. At the next wave, you duck under.
Visible now: the bra beneath your shirt.
You are the picture of willingness to brave
change, the temperature that shocks. Another wave
hits. You are inside, where drowning is possible,
the gray sea crashing around you,
fish you can’t see brushing your legs
(nobody’s the wiser). From the shore,
you hear your friend’s daughters
shouting your name like the name of a new crush.
Everybody likes the person who just heads in.
Let’s say they’re cheering as you exit the surf
still too far away for them to see
you shivering in the wind-chilled weight of your clothes.
The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem THE WHALE
There is still a spotlight aimed at a paper moon.
There is still a young woman reading the classics
out loud in a downtown park—
though the park lights are out
and the whale is pulled through the streets in the evening
by ten groaning oxen. We are all being swallowed.
Night by night, the avenues empty,
the whale hollows, its gut expands.
But it is warm in here. There’s plenty to eat.
We’re burning the blubber for light
by which to sew tents. In the tail,
someone is stirring a soup, someone is baking bread.