Poetry – The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly

Moving Stone

above: Marguerite Lawler, “Mossy”, 24″x24″, oil, 2017

Submitted by Gary Lawless

Introduction by Betsy Sholl

Gary Lawless has been a presence and force in Maine poetry for many years. He grew up here and runs with his wife Gulf of Maine Books. But he is also a world traveler, or I should say an “earth traveler,” having residencies in national parks, studying with Gary Snyder in the Pacific Northwest, and, he writes, heading off for a residency in Venice this fall. His work also includes making room for others–teaching poetry workshops for immigrants, translating, bringing to our community the voices of those we haven’t heard before. My sense is that Gary is very grounded in place, but it is an expansive place, because he honors the fact that every living soul also has a place. It’s as if he makes no distinction between “here” and “there.” After all, our stones have already been fire and vegetation and sand, have been under the earth and high above.

Moving Stone

The stone is “full of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have” Ursula LeGuin

Birds skim the surface

Just above, just below

Layers of light

Stone below the

Surface, many surfaces

What is revealed and

What is hidden

Inside the stone

Up in the woods,

In the circle among the beech trees,

Last winter one of the lumber horses split a stone

Horizontally, with a clip of his big steel shoe.

It had seemed to be a plain gray stone,

But when it was opened a black wall appeared,

Rusty at the edges, flecked with pale checks

Like unknown constellations, and over all

Floated wisps of blue-grey, trailing feathers of clouds.

I brush away the fallen leaves

And stare into the distance inside the stone.

If one could become a bird –

If one could fly into that night-

If one could enter the light of those stars –

And then the woods become very still,

The beech leaves blur at the edge of my vision,

I find I am bending lower and lower.

Kate Barnes

The Stone

I don’t know if they bleed, the stones.

Or if they scream, if they howl under

The wheel & the mace, or if the knife’s

Blade wounds them, deep in their flesh,

Slicing through them.

I know that the loam that sometimes

Runs from them, no matter how red, is

Not blood.

And I’ll say nothing of their

Tenderness, from stone to stone, from

Water to air.

But what I know is that our blood

Comes from the stone. And our flesh

Comes from nowhere else, come from

Stone we are stone, we are dust and

Wind’s smoke.

That our blood is blood of stone,

And our heat is of the sun, and our wail

The howl of the stone, through which

Our soul passes full-bodied, that we are

The soul of the stone – but tell me, the

Stone, who is the stone – where does

She come from?

Marcela Delpastre

Translated from the Occitan

By Nicole Peyrafitte and Pierre Joris

Driving home from Belfast, into the crescent moon

(for Dudey Zopp)

I hear the granite singing,

And it is alive.

I want to tell you

That granite is a migratory species

(think plate tectonics, continental

Drift, glacial erratic)

But you can read the flow lines

From when granite was

Liquid, and moving, quickly –

I want to tell you

That lichen is

A language of granite,

That granite speaks

With air

And water and light –

We might never know

What stories it holds

Deep within the rock.

Gary Lawless

Remembering a Poet—Through her words

Poetry

by Kathy Weinberg

“I was more interested in daily life, less melodramatic human interactions, poems of place, and glimpses of transcendence through ordinary things,” Karie Friedman said of her writing. Waldo County Poet, translator, editor, and founder of a poetry workshop group The Poets’ Table, Karie Friedman died of a sudden illness last week. Along with her two daughters and many friends, we pay our respects and honor her words. Work is in progress to publish her most recent collection of poems.

“Yes, the thought of poems that never got written, that I might have produced when my neurons were moving faster and my passions hotter, does sadden me. What a dope I was not to assert myself, etc. On the other hand, my peripatetic life, with its personal ups and downs and varied roles as a motorcycle tourist, back-to-the-lander, mother, faculty wife, truck dispatcher, landlady, and editor, plus a few others I haven’t mentioned, have fed my writing and continue to do so. Now that I’m underway, coming up on the age of Amy Clampitt when she published The Kingfisher, I’m making a run for it.” Karie Friedman

Catch
N. C. Wyeth, Dark Harbor Fishermen, 1945.

Swamped by silver herring,
the dory is so full
it should be sinking,
but there’s no water-
line, no glint or splash
around its hull or those
of other boats nearby.
Fish-shaped themselves,
they float in a black
space that might
be wet or not.
All eyes of men and gulls
focus on the catch,
more luminous than coins.
It is a dreamlike haul
and we’re the dreamers,
hovering above, with a gull’s
eye view, drawn not by hunger
but by the allure of shine,
the amazing prospect
of wading knee-deep in light,
scooping it in a net.
Karie Friedman, 2016

To read more of Karie’s poems, and biography: https://kariefriedman.com/home/

Poetry Feature

Poetry

In Rachel Contreni Flynn’s poems the stories exist on several levels. There is what the speaker experiences, all those complexities of mistrust, fear and tenderness, and her inner conflicts. Then there are the larger moral issues the writer raises by telling these stories. Just by putting “America” in the title, she is asking us to examine our own view of the world. And in “When I open the door a boy stands there,” we feel again the complication, how sympathy for one boy might endanger another, and vice versa–how protecting one will in some way betray the other. Beyond that there is the suggestion that moral decisions are never clearcut and perhaps always haunt us with untaken choices. Another great gift of stories is that we get to enter them with all their tensions and possibilities, so the poems aren’t about an experience; they are an experience.

Betsy Sholl

Rachel Contreni Flynn

America, February

The world shudders on, wintering in its enormity. A bobber’s stuck

in the brambles creek side, and I’ve mistaken so many things, but here

it is: dangling brightly, splitting in the cold. Last night I refused the help

of a man in coveralls to pull me from a ditch, refused a man I imagined.

The ditch was icy and deep, precipitous, and I was front-down in it

when he pulled up in a muscular pick-up, sturdy chains coiled in the flat bed,

but I wouldn’t take any chances and waved him past, emphatic, as if content

to dangle dialing numbers in my ass-up minivan. So it’s come to this in a world

where we’re in trouble and pain. And imagining. The man drove away,

and I stayed another hour in the ditch. A bobber, dangling. I keep tabs on it

on my morning walks. How it remains, split between the red and white,

a tiny thing faded by winter sun blasting through the blue.

First published in the Florida Review, 2016

When I open the door a boy stands there

not a large boy but larger than me and he’s destroyed face puffed red and wet he smells of

sweat and rotten shoes and faintly of pot and stale shit and he falls toward my chest and

that’s my chest holding up a stranger a boy my breasts on his face which is wet and he says

I can’t I can’t and I push up his shoulders a light shaking then soft shouting Are you hurt?

What hurts? and then Where is your mother? which seems the only thing to ask in trouble

and he pulls from his back pocket a good-

sized knife by which I mean it could cut a cantaloupe but not a watermelon that’s what I

think of the wood-handled knife shiny he produces from his floppy jeans and so I take it

from him simply as if I might turn to cube melon for snack and he stares at me considering

the knife and the boy says Mr. Flynn and I can’t figure what my husband’s father in Illinois

could do with this knife or this almost-large boy destroyed on my porch in Maine and the

boy says I came to make him pay by which he means my husband his principal and the sky

is very white it’s very blank and my shirt is creased wet just at the left breast and the boy

says But I can’t and I don’t ask again but lead him easy now

to the chair-and-a-half in the tv room that’s covered by a ragged cat blanket and the boy

breathes ragged then easy now folds his pale body into the chair covers himself with the

cat blanket he doesn’t know any better and that’s where the two state cops very large find

him asleep still smelling of shoes and shit and now cat of course I had to call because our

son very young will be home soon off the bus with a backpack full of bright folders and he

is small and I must not be destroyed now or ever I must prepare snack because I’m here

and safe and his mother

First published by Booth, 2015

Rachel Contreni Flynn has published several collections of poetry, and is co-editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. She combines a life of poetry and law, and lives with her family in Gorham, ME.

Poetry: Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

Features and Essays, Poetry

Introduction by Betsy Sholl; MAJ Poetry Editor

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Poet Laureate of Portland. He is acting director of SPACE Gallery and was for several years director of The Telling Room. His first book of poems is Death of a Ventriloquist, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize. “Wing and a Prayer” was first published in Slice Magazine. All three of these poems are about looking, about looking long and hard, looking in such a way that we experience a little self-forgetfulness, and thus can see the world and each other in new ways, and in the process be surprised by wonder, despite all the darkness around us, which of course we also have to see.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

A Preponderance of Evidence

Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change. ― Jim Wallis

My country ‘tis of thee

and your habeas corpus: we have the body

of a parolee who knows he’ll sin again.

Fill all hundred trillion

synapses, overload the circuits

and trip the charge to all the outlets.

A prosecution of hammers and clips.

A jury of intercontinental urns.

You’ve seen an infant’s eye,

yes? Felt tiny fingers curl

around your long uninnocent index?

And the hue of that eye matters less

if darker? And the hair? And the skin

of a plump bundle heavy in your arms?

A crapulence of spatter.

A conviction of condolences.

Sit at an actual table with plates

of fingerprinted latkes, fufu, cous-cous,

squid; this table can’t happen

in your head. Wooden and long,

a rash of speckled crumbs—the place

we make a gentler evidence, a new kind.

Wing and a Prayer

Hook me up to a current I felt

once: birdsong so quiet it seemed

an echo of birdsong

or a creek made of air

the same temperature as a body—

a silent humming I walked through.

I’m supposed to let whatever

what is is be what I want

but I still want, I want, I want

my brother’s cells to stop their war

on each other. I want a poet

I missed too much when here.

I want the body of a woman

down the block to come back

so she can see her kids grow up

and they are seen. I know deep

in my shallow root system

all of this is so far beyond

my small tangle of electric streets

where one raindrop pushed to one side

of one honey locust leaf can mean

somewhere someone dies of thirst

and somewhere else thunder becomes

a god again. I always want rest,

oh you godless godhead, positron,

annihilation, ether or stream—

bottomless, unnameable—but I will

sit here as long as it takes and watch

for any drip, flutter, or tick

that could be your approving nod.

Gropius Forest, Ed McCartan, acrylic on canvas, 48″X48″

Turn Strange

After Duncan Hewitt

A single fork tine’s particular curve,

dent in the old metal fire grate,

bicycle tube, limp on a nail,

or little ramp at the end of her nose:

look long enough for the electrons’

course change; for cattails to be flags

of a marsh nation you enter if

you stop and take in its dank musk.

Look long enough for your son’s eyes

to green then become a black

planet with a brown ring inside

a hue you never name. Look

long enough for a blade’s letter

on thick pond ice to melt at your touch,

lost path to bliss. Look long enough

for your brother to know whenever

if ever he goes you go any

distance any stretch of road

or trip across a dark river

he carries you you carry him.

Look long enough for sight to become

work then keep that shovel as piston

as a load bearing arm until liquid

salt breaks over you like laughter’s

pure verb of lungs and blood and rhythm

not one of us can explain but damn

it’s easy. We can look long enough

for all infinitesimal tremors

in all our small cell walls to beatbox

together a one two a one two.

Poetry: Betsy Sholl

Features and Essays, Poetry

Betsy Sholl

IT WAS

a squirrel flicking its tail, it was the woodpecker’s

red head, a sparrow wing flaring in light, it was

an angel, a message, bayberries on bare twigs,

it was Love Supreme in a car stopped at the light,

don’t stop me from believing it was a message,

it was a moment held, a pebble in the mouth,

a bubble blown then caught on the wand’s rim,

it was a bare tree like earth-wires sparking

in the light, it was two old women arm in arm,

their droopy bosoms, mouths full of teeth, laughing,

their heads thrown back, it was the world breaking

its grim hold, it was the green light saying

Go, and all the cars not going so a dog

like a small god could weave among them.

Poetry: Mark Melnicove

Features and Essays, Poetry

Mark Melnicove

Ed McCartan, “Embrace”, acrylic on paper, 52×40″

You can hear more than the ocean

You can hear more than the ocean in a seashell.

You can hear the grit on the window grinding in farther.

You can hear fear sweat black tar.

You can hear regimented genes spit seeds at sunshine.

You can hear plastic bags yearn to be liquid, to be oil again.

You can hear a concave order shapeshift into a convex mess.

You can hear feverish rosebuds break out in a rash on your cheeks.

You can hear diaries abort their periods.

You can hear ants wobble and fall on their way home after carousing.

You can hear greedy giants emerge from pebbles.

You can hear insincere confessions rattle the chains that hold them.

You can hear the prisoner mark his day on the wall.

You can hear the long, hard haul to mercy marching.

You can hear a bell ringing.

Who will answer it?

I started to draw

I started to draw a face.

I got as far as the nose and mouth.

Then, high-speed lies, news frequencies, burst onto the scene.

I lost control of my drawing hand.

I wanted to fashion something else for the face—a beard out of lines.

But I lost my grip, and the whiskers scattered like pick-up sticks.

I did not feel like playing.

All I wanted was to scratch my pen in peace.

But a whirlwind the size of continents spun me in the air.

It had breathing chunks of skin lodged in it.

Launched into space, I looked back at my creation.

I saw the page and innocent face there.

It was hairless, smiling, optimistic for the future.

I could not understand why.