Words That Burn

The Violet, by Jane Taylor (1783-1824)

The Age of Unlimited Possibility, by Kate Gleason (1956-)

My sister and I, being girls,

wasted the better part

of our childhoods

practicing to be women.

Every fall, our lawn swelled

with the colors of singed orange,

crayon yellow, maroon,

the brilliant ruin we raked

into the floor plans of leaf houses,

elaborate ranches with dream kitchens,

conversation areas, sunken living rooms.

It was the ’50s. The shelf life

of lunch meats had been extended

to an unheard-of two months.

There was no end to the possibilities.

Test pilots had broken the sound barrier,

filling the sky with a synthetic thunder

we could feel as much as hear,

like an explosion underwater.

Housewives in smart A-line dresses

happily vacuumed with their new uprights,

rearranged their sectional furniture,

and invented creative mingling

between Jell-O and miniature marshmallows.

World War II was behind us,

the legion of evil ones again stymied,

forced to retreat, like a glacier,

but leaving in its wake

a mawkish and exaggerated innocence.

It was the ’50s and I’d just learned

that a girl could not so much as hope

to become president, owing to the fact

that women had their time of the month

when they might do something unthinking.

It was the ’50s.

“the age of unlimited possibilities,”

just as World War I had been

“the war to end all wars,”

and like a lot of families back then,

we’d hunkered in

behind our white picket fence,

trying to still believe

that what words said

was what they meant.

Day Time Sequence/November, by Dalene Stowe (1946-)

The wind has no voice, really.

The obstacles have voices.

Going up hill

This crow time of year

The cartilage cracks,

The wind announces:

November is the month of cartilage.

Small bones

All over your body applaud.

But the wind has no voice, really.

It is the obstacles that have announced it.

Once in life

Something like November happens in the body:

The joints are exposed.

Twigs grinding in upon themselves

Produce the voices you thought were the breath.

The crow is blood, this time,

Covering your nakedness

with a harsh name.  Obstacles.

Like light jarring off a coin

Winter approaches your spinal column.

The small bones in your wrists and ankles

Are no longer intricate maps,

Ready to take you anywhere.

A Storm, by Amroziy Metlinsky (1814-1870)

The savage tempest howls and whines;
In clouds the livid lightning flashes;
A mighty uproar rends the pines
As once again the thunder crashes;
But now, coal-black the midnight stood,
And now it reddens, fierce as blood.

The Dnieper wails amid these shocks
And shakes its mane, a mass of grey;
It roars, and leaps upon the rocks,
And gnaws the crumbling stone away…
The thunder smites with fierceness dire
And from the forest bursts a fire.

The sky now blazes, now is black;
The tempest’s uproar cries out shrill;
The rain comes down in fierce attack
Across dark forest, field, and hill.
As, thundering down, the cloudburst pours,
Between its banks the Dnieper roars.

(Trans.   C. H. Andrushyshen and Watson Kirkconnell)

Fishermen, by Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

Mesh cast for mackerel

by guess and the sheen’s tremor —

imperceptible if you haven’t the knack —

a difficult job;

hazardous and seasonal:

many shoals all of a sudden,

it would tax the Apostles to take the lot;

then drowse for months,

nets on the shingle,

a pint in the tap.

Likewise the pilchards come unexpectedly,

startle the man on the cliff.

“Remember us to the teashop girls.

Say we have seen no better legs than theirs,

we have the sea to stare at —

its treason, copiousness, and tedium.”

St. Paul Street Seasonal, by Kathy Mangan (1950-)

Not the crocuses, sporadic
purple and yellow stars in row house
yards, not the ice-cream wrappers
stuck to the sidewalks,

but the syringe —
someone’s discarded joy —
nestled in the green
new shoots of our ivy

trumpets the Baltimore spring.
Dusks, the halfway house
spills its wounded, who shuffle
and spout soliloquies

while their keepers shepherd them
towards the deli for sugared coffee
and crullers.  The sex-chatter
of the university students, sprung

at midnight from the library
and formulas and anatomy, wafts
through our second-story screen,
spicing our sleep.  In the slant

of 10am sun, the scarecrow man —
all folded slats and angles — now daily
stations his wheelchair outside
the newsstand and opens his hand

like a time-lapse tulip
for my quarter, the palm
of his fingerless glove so grimy
it shines.

Bedtime Story, by Wanda Coleman (1946-)

bed calls. i sit in the dark in the living room 
trying to ignore them

in the morning, especially Sunday mornings 
it will not let me up. you must sleep 
longer, it says

facing south
the bed makes me lay heavenward on my back 
while i prefer a westerly fetal position 
facing the wall

the bed sucks me sideways into it when i  
sit down on it to put on my shoes. this
persistence on its part forces me to dress in 
the bathroom where things are less subversive

the bed lumps up in anger springs popping out to
scratch my dusky thighs

my little office sits in the alcove adjacent to 
the bed. it makes strange little sighs
which distract me from my work 
sadistically i pull back the covers 
put my typewriter on the sheet and turn it on

the bed complains that i'm difficult duty 
its slats are collapsing. it bitches when i 
blanket it with books and papers. it tells me
it's made for blood and bone

lately spiders ants and roaches
have invaded it searching for food

Notes For My Son, by Alex Comfort (1920-2000)

Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom 
Look carefully see who it is that they want you to butcher. 

Remember, when you say that the old trick would not have 

fooled you for a moment 

That every time it is the trick which seems new.

Remember that you will have to put in irons 
Your better nature, if it will desert to them. 

Remember, remember their faces watch them carefully: 
For every step you take is on somebody's body 

And every cherry you plant for them is a gibbet 
And every furrow you turn for them is a grave 

Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you 
If they persuade you that it will thaw the world 

Beware. The blood of a child does not smell so bitter 
If you have shed it with a high moral purpose. 

So that because the woodcutter disobeyed 
they will not burn her today or any day 

So that for lack of a joiner's obedience 
The crucifixion will not now take place 

So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption 
You will gather the spit of your chest 
And plant it in their faces.

Note For The Reader:  Alex Comfort is also famous for being the author of The Joy of Sex, published in 1972.

The Redbreast, by Charlotte Richardson (1775-1825)

Joplinesque -- of or pertaining to Janis Joplin

Self-Portrait at Eighty with Twelve-String, by Kate Sontag (1952-)

Out of the corner of her good eye she recognizes it

tonight on television: there it is, she’s sure of it,

her old Martin dazzling as a dozen wild yellow lilies

opening on stage in a younger woman’s arms — this guitar

home once to a spider crawling out of the center

hole, the fiberglass case unlatched after a long winter

to reveal the plush lining, this guitar that slept under

shooting stars, that arose over white water — a woman young

enough (she thinks though she never had any children)

to be her great-granddaughter with peacock feather

earrings and Joplinesque hair, who puts 5,000 miles

on her car in a week driving from Boston

up to Prince Edward Island and back in search of America —

this guitar of bald tires and all-nighters with fast

friends at the wheel, of ferryboat queues and camping out

on fragrant deserted beaches — a woman still

a girl recklessly singing in Canada at sunrise, her sleeping

bag wet from the flood time, feeling again the raw

action of silk and steel cutting octave lines

into her fingertips and the heat of a handrolled

joint being passed, the orange ashes falling too fast

on the angelic rosewood face whose black scar

the size of a seed pearl just inches below the neck

suddenly burns in the blue light of the screen.