The Poetry Porch presents

the sonnet scroll xi

Two Thousand Page Suicide Note
By Diana Der-Hovanessian

In Monday’s Boston Globe, a reporter* describes
close to two thousand pages left on the desk
of Mitchell Heisman to explain his suicide:
calling his life, and all life, meaningless.

“Handsome, 35 years old, erudite” he bled
on Harvard Yard’s Memorial Church’s steps
where he put a bullet through his head
after quoting Nietzsche two hundred times,
“Every word, thought, emotion is meaningless.”

Ah, Mr. Heisman, why did you not hear
those standing nearer, who tried to intervene,
saying Mr. Nietzche might have taught
life is meaningless. . . .but wait, it is our lot,
to pretend it means, or try to make it mean.

* David Abel
Copyright © 2011 by Diana Der-Hovanessian

Don Juan and the Stone Guest
By Diana Der-Hovanessian

Don Juan chose badly beginning with
a married beauty only sixteen,
Donna Julia, not exactly a great wit.
And Don himself a twit and green

at that. With this inauspicious start,
his chosen and long term role
pursuing affairs of the heart
began its toll on flesh and soul.

Still he thought what he pursued
was the ideal, the perfect other half.
But what he found each time was rude
fate having the last laugh.

At the end, crushed by Donna Anna’s ex,
he regretted being hard pressed for sex.

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
By Kim Bridgford

Sometimes we wish a thing, and it comes true:
Guy wants his fame, and his Ann Morton too.
And Miriam’s resistance is what angers;
And it all disappears in Bruno’s fingers,

While something is picked up, the A to G
That lights a pathway scattered with the guilt
That comes from living out a fantasy.
Love makes a bed along death’s crooked fault.

Crisscross. And Bruno passes through the film,
A wish so old we do not recognize it,
A wish so old we don’t have to disguise it.
What we live out in dreams can overwhelm—
A boy who has been smothered, learns to smother,
Who wants his father dead to live with Mother.

REAR WINDOW
By Kim Bridgford

He plays out what it means to be voyeur—
The sex, the loneliness, the art, and murder.
If all that you can do is watch, you will,
And then, once you have crossed the windowsill,

They’re not just people, but images you’ve made.
You want to know what’s happened, but, afraid
To know the truth, you dawdle there, fill in
With broadest strokes: a love or a villain.

It’s more exciting to take hyperbole
And make a drama in community.
A dog, a song, a plant—humdrum and plain,
Until the murderer knows you. You pine
For everything to happen except this,
A world that keeps its mind on its own business.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST
By Kim Bridgford

This compass mark is not a literal fact;
So many things are misidentified,
The wrong man’s kidnapped, and an auction’s wrecked,
While crops—and Roger—take on pesticide.

And Eve is used to tempt and also save,
A woman who can conjure the idyllic,
Yet in her constant riding on the train,
She cannot help connection with the phallic.

Ah, well. Film does that, with a drop of voice,
Along with Rushmore rearing up its heads,
Disguising the transferal of the beds.
There is an aura underlying choice.

It’s why Hitchcock made movies: to blur the line
Between what’s good and evil, by design.

HITCHCOCK’S VISION
By Kim Bridgford

It was the way he crossed reality
And vision: the daily texture of familiar
Experience—a music store, a shower—
With the maneuvered world of fantasy.

Silk stockings, two birds, a merry-go-round:
What was so ordinary spun around.
He wanted to seduce though building action
So that you couldn’t tell the fact from fiction.

Not only did he know the point of view
Of characters, he knew the way to you,
Sitting with your disbelief suspended.
Then, once the Alfred Hitchcock movie ended,
The world was not the same; you wore the glasses
Of someone who sees horror in what passes.

Active and Contemplative
By Luann Landon

The marble fountain, famously from Rome,
pours out its silver music on the crowd,
sojourners who have made this lobby home
that welcomes both the quiet and the loud.
One woman near the basin stands alone
amid the cheerful crush, a place she fills,
looks to the very top, the water’s cone
bursting to downward flood that purls and stills.
Flat shoes, plain dress, brown hair—she gazes long,
obsessed with falling water finely caught.
Beside her, a woman glittery and young
checks in her mirror earrings lately bought,
runs off with her young man, always to dance.
The older woman gives them just a glance.

Chasing the Muse
By Rimas Uzgiris

I need to write some tight blank verse tonight.
If only iambs flew from me like time,
then I would climb the heights of poetry
to take my place among the cloudy peaks
of fame where icy storms keep down the meek
who think cheap tricks and popular appeal
will win them lasting praise.
I know better.
I’ve felt when quiet nights are filled with pain,
when fortune turns her grinning wheel, and sleep
won’t rhyme with hope. More voices cry inside
my bony head than reason can direct
in linear thought and speech. Forced into song
at least they fall in step, somewhat, like rain
precipitated from the fleeting clouds.

Catholic Education
By Rimas Uzgiris

Far too long I tried to fly in sterile clouds.
I built up catapults; I expelled fuel.
It was as if the earth were in a shroud
and Reason’s palace were the only rule.

Then, at a dinner party, murky with wine,
I met a South American painter—
a sultry Jewess with a friendly mien.
My only thought, I feared, was to lay her.

Better than Virgil, better than my dreams,
she guided me through a happy, new hell.
I tumbled like timber down a rocky stream.
Suddenly, the earth was there to taste and smell.

Still—this garden needed love to sweetly give
the fruit whose eating we ask none to forgive.

On Gravitational Effects
in the Expanding Field of Poetry
By Rimas Uzgiris

The rock falls with gravity’s take on fate
that generates weight by mass times acceleration,
like the poet whose mass produces weight
under a sometimes startling acceleration
towards death, or fame, or just some groans. . .
All to escape obscurity—even with a sonnet.
Sticks and stones may break our bones
but the soaring speech of the poet,
lacking wingèd grace or sweet intelligence,
will fall flat like ham from a greasy pan,
and when it hits the floor it is not out
of gravity, but the familiar force of indifference
that acts on all bodies—some more than
others—weighting them down to hell,
or thereabouts.

Kick Line for the Night of Divas
By Kelley Jean White

Miss Diagnosis
Miss Adventure
Miss Management

Miss Behavior
Miss Begotten
Miss Carriage

Miss Alignment
Miss Spoke
Miss Taken

Miss Chief
Miss Judge
Miss Trial

Now you design the costumes
You set the stage

Ice Age
By David W. Landrum

In Michigan, ten thousand years ago,
giant sloths and wooly mammoths roamed the same
cold landscapes humans beings did. Below
the water, beavers fifty feet long framed
their lodges. Ice age man shared environments
with creatures now extinct. The mastodon
and ice-age wolf and tiger left their prints
deep in the mud of a world forever gone.

Today the place is safer, warm and more
habitable—but safety has its price,
and comfort settles an exacting score
for living here so long after the ice.
The danger gone, the lumbering creatures lost,
we understand: dullness is safety’s cost.

Eros Silentium
By David W. Landrum

How is it that when love is done we lie
in silence? Easy, dreamy, satisfied,
we do not talk-murmur, perhaps, or sigh,
but do not speak-and sense that if we tried
it would be something inappropriate:
a blasphemy against the things we feel.
Praises and paeans fill our hearts, and yet
we’re quiet. Over our lips we set a seal.

God spoke and it was so. The God of Love
is not so voluble; he gives his law
without thunder and the descending dove;
he interdicts our words with pleasure’s awe.

Lovers inherit the earth. They do not speak-
the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the meek.

An Etiology
By David W. Landrum

Not drama, we are told, and not anguish
or dark insight compelled Vincent Van Gogh
to take his life; Dickenson not to show
her face in public; or Gauguin to wish
himself dead after painting the triptych,
From where, who are we, to what do we go?
Artists, we thought, perish because they know
disturbing truths, and visions that are hellish.

No. Experts say Van Gogh had a disease
so painful he committed suicide;
and Dickinson some mild epilepsy
that made her a recluse; Gauguin was seized
by clinical depression—so they died
or lived their lives pushed over to one side.

Sonnets from Rock and Roll, #5
By David W. Landrum

“Are we human, or are we dancers?” —The Killers

We danced down corridors, marionettes,
our strings pulled, twisted and tugged by the forces
set over us—our triumphs and regrets
their doing; their deft hands, their strings the sources

of our delight or of misery. Our dreams
were scripted and we were ruled by tugs
from on high, from the cords on wooden beams
grasped in the hands of the celestial thugs

who run the show. We think that we can step
down off the stage, and, like Pinocchio,
walk on our way with no strings, without help,
without restraint—lift up our legs and go.

Strings are secure. The step toward the abyss
might be salvation or the Devil’s kiss.

Real Estate
By Patricia Callan

Stability is prime where schools are good.
Make an offer; buy this neighborhood.
You see the Virgin in a common place,
the garden plot, a shrine beneath a wall.
Sometimes her paint is faded or a ball
has nicked her veil or stained her molded face.
Her plaster hands point out each well-kept lawn
clipped off at the edges like amens.
Here, grapes are pressed, then vines are gone
every season when the harvest ends.
The old-world art is nothing you should fear;
its meaning would be easy to misread.
Where people sacrificed to get the deed—
I can see our children living here.

From the Piano
By Patricia Callan

I see the smoke bush planted three years past.
Angry winter gone, it stands alone.
Dormant twigs shiver, split and clone
buds, like hands on branches tightly clasped.
A bird seeks what time and duty cast—
the future, in her cyclical chipping tone.
As nestlings wait, all mouths, all skin and bone,
she twists the buds, plucks their gift at last.

I search the keys, circling like the bird,
for early pieces learned, the Bach Inventions.
Played in study and that now sustain
me as I listen for the gifts conferred
from this life of keyboard ascensions
deferred to the world, the birds outside my pane.

Atalanta
By Joan A. W. Kimball

When buses bring the runners to the track,
friends and parents line the fence to greet
them, take their sweats and bottles—stash till needed—
and obliquely check for energy (or lack).
Her group is called to jockey, toes aligned,
her body angled forward like a trap
wound, ready, sprung at the gun and snapped
to a measured lope while parents cheer the line.

A handful, bunched together, lead the race.
The others strewn behind: staunch figures flung
along the oval of the park—dispersed.
With three laps done, one runner flouts the pace.
Along the fence, she outstrips one by one
till past the painted mark she dashes first.

Emerson Hospital or Her Full Knee Replacement
By Joan A. W. Kimball

My sister’s drugged in a wind-up bed—her leg
recrafted at the knee with cobalt-crested bone.
I leave some lilies, start the homeward trek.
Bare walls, glazed eyes confirm that I’m alone.
The front door auto-slides. Above the walk
a dripping roof provides a taut percussion,
as if a rain cloud from the gods had thought
to lodge above the clinic door, its mission
to drain roof snow and generate a pool
that shivers my reflection at the curbside.
My nose is filled with March’s molecules
that peddle scents of yew and yellow loosestrife.
Sun and the dissipating snow begin
the season’s birth. Her knee must spring again.

Natalie, at Four
By Tracey Gratch

She asks why the wind is invisible,
if the sun goes in a box when it’s night.
I give her the answers, invincible;
I explain earth’s rotation, daylight.
Then I tell her about revolution—
how earth circles the sun once a year.
In her mind, she has drawn a conclusion—
she says: The sun must get dizzy up there.

Enchanted, disarmed, by her innocence,
though I know well such virtue can’t last,
in time, I will lose my omnipotence—
I predict slamming doors, great impasse.
One day, she'll say: Mom, you are horrible.
I’ll think of her—four, and adorable.

THE LABORER
By Richard Aston

With the turn of the crank, it misses and spits
until it settles and runs a bit.
The concrete mixer chugging along
gives its beat to the bricklayer’s song.
The laborer fills it with a shovel,
adding cement, some sand and gravel.

When Pa was young they mixed on a board
before the engine was wrought by Ford,
an engine you’d think would have stopped the sweat
but that clearly hasn’t happened yet.

The cause is the bricklayer, foreman, and boss.
If the laborer doesn’t move, they count him a loss.
So now he must keep up with a machine,
an industrial giant, turned into a fiend.

TIDAL POOL
By Lee Evans

We gazed into a pool of crystal tide,
Crouching together close enough to see,
Apart enough to share the mystery.
Our dim reflections trembled with the sky,
Where periwinkles crept before our eyes
Beneath the liquid weight of their clear world,
And tiny creatures hurried in the whirl
Of their routines, against the flow of time.

We held each other though we crouched apart,
As through the miles we hold each other still,
United in the prophecies of the heart
Which after death, seers say, reveal the wills
That were in life disguised by flesh and bone—
Then we will know ourselves as truth is known.

The Poetry Porch presents

the sonnet scroll xi

Two Thousand Page Suicide Note By Diana Der-Hovanessian

Don Juan and the Stone Guest By Diana Der-Hovanessian

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN By Kim Bridgford

REAR WINDOW By Kim Bridgford

NORTH BY NORTHWEST By Kim Bridgford

HITCHCOCK’S VISION By Kim Bridgford

Active and Contemplative By Luann Landon

Chasing the Muse By Rimas Uzgiris

Catholic Education By Rimas Uzgiris

On Gravitational Effects in the Expanding Field of Poetry By Rimas Uzgiris

Kick Line for the Night of Divas By Kelley Jean White

Ice Age By David W. Landrum

Eros Silentium By David W. Landrum

An Etiology By David W. Landrum

Sonnets from Rock and Roll, #5 By David W. Landrum

Real Estate By Patricia Callan

From the Piano By Patricia Callan

Atalanta By Joan A. W. Kimball

Emerson Hospital or Her Full Knee Replacement By Joan A. W. Kimball

Natalie, at Four By Tracey Gratch

THE LABORER By Richard Aston

TIDAL POOL By Lee Evans