Philthy Conversations with Artists

White Beard

Tonight I am the old man’s white beard
wizened and grizzled in deep lined cuts
resigned to the slope and bend of flesh
gravity pulled furrows over ashen dust

It was the clink of glasses that started this
taking small potent steps down the hall
inching closer to her hated breath
the weight of her, heavy, lurking,

creaking the same wood boards
Can one grow into a giant overnight
when the yearning stops and the
becoming is

knowing one’s art is revealed, suddenly
unearthed by one massive heave
of black earth

To know a person for so long
and see their face go colorless
foul scents utter unrecognizable clods
of rancid words and clouded tongue

Should I take on hatred and this dark
into me, onto me, held and sacred
like the vows now melted away by
the lightest heat from palest sun

Something disappears from me tonight
A piece I can never reclaim or repair
a note held deep in my heart
now scratched thin out of a rusty flute
aching for its rounded wonder
spitting tin and teeth and nails
It was the clink of glasses that started this
a dark celebration and bitter turn
a collapse and fold and deep line cut
of the old man’s white beard

-Rick Wright

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

-W. B. Yeats

Rain Upon the Gossip Tree

The window frames the Gossip tree tonight
Dark brick below
A clean gray blue above
It rained for over an hour
The air cooled
I thought of you
The birds sung
My room felt like a rain forest

I think of what I would say to you
I scratch my arm
There are many songs I could sing
Lullabyes and ballads
Sung a thousand times
They are so deep, like ruts
So easy to flow into
They tell a story you would like to be a part of

But I cannot imagine how I have come here
And that is what interests me
The question of being
How I came to be in this body
In this city

What of my past?
-1999
-the room I lived in during grad school
-the
Pacific Ocean
in its particular composition
of molecules
and vectors
in February 2000.

Where are the hours I thought
I would be in so much trouble
If I didn’t finish a paper, or read
Another chapter, or get to class on time

In what way have I escaped?
I look around me.
I am 29 years old, I live in
Philadelphia. I work.

You are 42. You are getting divorced. There is
A house involved. I live in an apartment. You
Have a studio. We sketch on Thursday nights.

I am me. The me who slipped, who wanted to die.
I am me, whose skin burned with self-consciousness,
Who saw pathos in bracelets and ponytails, who
Couldn’t befriend people she wanted to be.

I am her, but I am not her anymore. I am easy,
I make many words, and have a sure voice. I don’t
Ask.

But I don’t write my poems
Like I used to.
The need to confirm
That I have an interior.

My eyes had not adjusted to dreams or light,
Now, they suffuse all, and involve themselves in all.
I spare no personal expense
In entering.
But I spend nothing I do not wish to spend.

And yet, and yet,
Who is this
With arms that wave
With fingers that fly
Who I will not be
In a moment
Or day

Who is in this body
Who will remain in this body
But who will be left behind
In this Sunday evening, May 2007.

-Nina Alvarez 

In Every Direction

As if you actually died in that dream
and woke up dead. Shadows of untangling vines
tumble toward the ceiling. A delicate
lizard sits on your shoulder, its eyes
blinking in every direction.

And when you lean forward and present your
hands to the basin of water, and glimpse the glass face
that is reflected there, it seems perfectly at home
beneath the surface, about as unnatural
as nature forcing everyone to face the music
with so much left to do, with everything
that could be done better tomorrow, to dance
the slow shuffle of decay.

Only one season becoming another,
continents traveling the skyway, the grass
breathing. And townspeople, victims, murderers,
the gold-colored straw and barbed-wire hair of the world
wafting over the furrows, the slashed roads
to the door of your office or into the living room.

The towel is warm and cool, soft to the touch,
but in another dream altogether
a screen door creaks open, slams shut,
and across the valley a car’s headlights swing up
and over. And maybe you are the driver
with both hands on the wheel, humming a tune
nobody’s ever heard before,

or maybe the woman on the edge of the porch,
grown quiet from fleeing,
tough as nails.

-Ralph Angel

Danse Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,-

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

-William Carlos Williams

Giving Up

Sometimes
It is good to be
Not good enough

To not know where the line breaks should go
To get angry at a fussy computer
To spill hot chocolate on it
To dislike Sunday evenings as the sun is going down
And you have to work all week
But don’t have money
For coffee

Sometimes
It is okay
To look through the hall of the century
Through your shoddy lens
And feel wistful for the Parisian twenties
To imagine that Gertrude Stein
Knew something you don’t

In all my words I kept planting a song
A hopeful victory song
Of a metal-chested knight,
His fist to his heart
I kept saying
I have something to say

But sometimes
It is just what it is
Here, in this moment
Not knowing what to say
Or where to put the line breaks
Just sliding down on someone
Else’s convention
Rushing through a poem
Without hope
Of answering
The vibration
That knaws
To know

-Nina Alvarez

Caged Bird

Some believe there’s somewhere in the brain
that senses minor fluctuations in the Earth’s
magnetic field and uses a sort of memory
of that to travel the same route year after year
over thousands of miles, over open ocean
on moonless, clouded nights, and a built-in clock
that, save for weather’s influence, tells
when it’s time to go. But they utter nothing
of thwarted dreams in birds’ brains, how
a few cubic feet near the ground, however
well-kept and lighted, however large it seems
around a small bright bird, is like a fist
closed tight on feather and bone, how, certain times
of year, the bird’s heart races as if to power flight.

-Matthew J. Spireng

The Unicorn

The Unicorn stood, like a king in a dream,
On the bank of a dark Senegambian stream;
And flaming flamingoes flew over his head,
As the African sun rose in purple and red.

Who knows what the thoughts of a unicorn are
When he shines on the world like a rising star;
When he comes from the magical pages of story
In the pride of his horn and a halo of glory?

He followed the paths where the jungle beasts go,
And he walked with a step that was stately and slow;
But he threw not a shadow and made not a sound,
And his foot was as light as the wind on the ground.

The lion looked up with his terrible eyes,
And growled like the thunder to hide his surprise.
He thought for a while, with a paw in the air;
Then tucked up his tail and turned into his lair.

The gentle giraffe ran away to relate
The news to his tawny and elegant mate,
While the snake slid aside with a venomous hiss,
And the little birds piped: ‘There is something amiss!’

But the Unicorn strode with his head in a cloud
And uttered his innocent fancies aloud.
‘What a wonderful world!’ he was heard to exclaim;
‘It is better than books: it is sweeter than fame!’

And he gazed at himself, with a thrill and a quiver,
Reflected in white by the slow-flowing river:
‘O speak to me, dark Senegambian stream,
And prove that my beauty is more than a dream!’

He had paused for a word in the midst of his pride,
When a whisper came down through the leaves at his side
From a spying, malevolent imp of an ape
With a twist in his tail and a villainous shape:

‘He was made by the stroke of a fanciful pen;
He was wholly invented by ignorant men.
One word in his ear, and one puff of the truth-
And a unicorn fades in the flower of his youth,’

The Unicorn heard, and the demon of doubt
Crept into his heart, and the sun was put out.
He looked in the water, but saw not a gleam
In the slow-flowing deep Senegambian stream.

He turned to the woods, and his shadowy form
Was seen through the trees like the moon in a storm.
And the darkness fell down on the Gambian plain;
And the stars of the Senegal sought him in vain.

He had come like a beautiful melody heard
When the strings of the fiddle are tunefully stirred;
And he passed where the splendours of melody go
When the hand of the fiddler surrenders the bow.

-E. V. Rieu

In the Old Days a Poet Once Said

In the old days a poet once said
our nation is destroyed
yet the mountains and rivers survive

Today’s poet says
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
yet our nation survives

Tomorrow’s poet will say
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
our nation is destroyed and Alas!
you and I are completely destroyed

-by Ko Un

Just for today

if it swims in front of you,
you must grab it.

If it pinches you
you must pinch it back.

If it is soft against you,
you must forget it.
And then remember it right
before sleep.

-Nina Alvarez