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 UNSERE WINTERREISE

OUR WINTER JOURNEY

A DANSE MACABRE POETIC COLLABORATION

Gute Nacht

Good Night

I wanted to write "stay"
on your sides, surround
your bed with oceans
of salt.

I hope he folds you
into a fox, loves you
like a splintered arrow,
brandishes the kill
of your lips.

May the bouquet
of your hips wither.
May the wolves
forget your name.

J. Bradley

~

Silent along the line of chimneys, they
reminded me of your eyes after their day-
glow and moonshine when the wind lifts
and the threadends of your hours leave you
alone with my thoughts on a winter's night.

satnrose

~

Emotion is suffering: I close my eyes, I open

to the same dream. Nothing is quite real,

and nothing else is quite the same –

Someone I once had tender feelings for

said to me, when what is human

in us

speaks, a door opens –

Henceforth the soul learns

the nature of what it has to bear.

              It is with this in mind I chose to speak.              

It is the silence and the absence of my words

by which you, patient one, will learn to hear

in my voice the nature of its longing, and speak.

Zhuang Yusa

Die Wetterfahne

The Weathervane

 Meteorological haiku

A rainfall so small
the fine mist prickles the skin.
Like TV static.

Like glass ground into
the cement sidewalk in sunlight
the glitter of a light snowfall.

A flurry so small
the multitudinous flakes
never seem to fall.

A thousand white mice
take up nests in barren trees.
First snow of winter.

River green with snow envy.
The tracks of small animals.
A path packed by human feet.

Alex Cigale

~

I can make you out with difficulty.
What tricks the water has played all around!
We've been parted by the ice.
Now we are on different sides.

The houses and woods have grown gaunt.
A maple sways pale, emaciated.
After settling on the water, our voices
will move quietly on, with the water.

The ice floe groans and sinks in the struggle,
and you are slender, like a piece of ice far away,
and carried toward you in the river current
is a scrap of the pathway.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

 Gefror'ne Tränen

Frozen Tears

Remembrance

In the wintry city of words
the things visited me
without criteria
they came to judge

without warning
they appeared
in the sound of my footsteps
crunching frost

they tracked me
across my yard
across the sea of gray grass nettles
they left no tracts in the snow

they flew to the roofline
perched on the gutters
broke off the icicles
and hurled them at my heart

just when I thought
my fiery, cold love
was in its grave
these things took me back

to an ice sculpture on a table
bitter arctic winds
the cracking sound
of a temporary art

and a temporary love
shattered on icy ground

E. Smith Sleigh

Numbness

He appears
within a group of mutual friends
all milling around. The room
with white floor has no walls.
Her husband and son stand nearby.
He walks right up to her,
broad-faced, bright and sweet-
smiling as ever, beard neatly trimmed,
teeth white as snow's hope.
With no explanation of why
he’s suddenly returned from the dead,
he opens his arms, his eyes speak clearly
before his voice follows with,
“I love you,” and he embraces her.
Her startled arms encircle
his shoulders as she answers, “I love you,”
wondering how he’d managed the journey
and what others are thinking of
his inexplicable resurrection.
The simplicity of it.
She doesn’t have time to ask if he cared
about the poem she’d written – the one
about his disappearance into death.
As soon as they let go, he falls back
into the winter crowd, lost ever again
behind faces still living. Her husband,
her son – at left, at right.
One hand holding her hand,
one hand gently pressing her
shoulder. Eyes, deepest frozen lakes.
She bathes in their gazes as murmurs
envelope, her thoughts left to flounder
on snow-covered fields of waking.

Susan M. Botich

~

this way the graveyard stop here all I want is to turn in the wreaths be
a sign of welcome to cool the hot traveler the cells are full up but I’m
ready to drop and have taken the mortal cut o pitiless fleabag have you
no rooms to let? still miles and miles to go with thee my walking stick!

satnrose 

Der Lindenbaum

The Linden Tree

The Blue Hour

The old man says: my angel, come

and stroll a while on my arm, the way you like to do;

you alone quiet the empty evening,

and understand the verdict of the linden tree,

its old conspiracy! Bloated lamps blur the last faces

in blue; your face alone shines through.

The books are dead, the world falls from its poles;

yet holding the dark flood together,

the clasp in your hair stands apart.

A draft blows through my house, an unstoppable train,

a moon whistle -– then between stations,

love, shut off from memory, leaps out.   

The young man asks: will you always. . . too?

Swear it by the shadows in my room,

and is the linden’s verdict both dark and true?

Tell it here with blossoms, and loosen your hair

and the pulse of the night, which are longing to spill.

A signal from the moon and the wind stands still.

The lamps are sociable in the blue light,

up to the space where the vague hours break;

under soft bites your mouth comes home

to my mouth, until pain teaches you:

It’s a living word that wins the world,

plays out, loses, and then love begins. 

The girl keeps silent until the spindle turns.

Silver falls from the stars.  Time in the roses fades:

Gentlemen, put the sword in my hand,

and Joan of Arc will save the Fatherland.

People, we bring the ship through the ice,

I’ll keep to the course that no one else knows.

Buy anemones!  three wishes a bunch,

then breathe, and a wish will close in your mouth.

From the high trapeze in the circus tent,

I leap through the flaming hoop of the world

I put myself in the hand of my master,

and he graciously gives me the evening star. 

Ingeborg Bachmann

translation by Joan Harvey

~

Unter der linden
an der heide,
dâ unser zweier bette was,
dâ mugt ir vinden
schône beide
gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
vor dem wald in einem tal,
tandaradei,
schône sanc diu nahtegal.

Under the lime tree
on the open field,
where we two had our bed,
you still can see
lovely both
broken flowers and grass.
On the edge of the woods in a vale,
tandaradei,
sweetly sang the nightingale.

Walther von der Vogelweide

Wasserflut

Flood Water

It is not enough to get lost in the snow
and not see the road
Nothing is enough   white-out or explanation
wind-up toy or the tin woodsman   Nothing
reduces so much as denial.
Lies   a shame
but not so fine as failure

I have been waiting for the snow-plow
to come and get me out.
I drink coffee from a thermos
and wonder about the numbness descending
after anger.   I am becoming time-lapse
without definition   Zone Ten.
There are so many ways to lose one another,
who is to say which is worst?

She sat on a bench in the sun talking to a friend:
I will not love that way again. Ever.
Her anger. Face up, hard against the wind.
It gets back here third hand.

Bill Mayer

~

In the creaking pines along the river,
a doe nuzzles her spotted fawn
and grunts softly into the frozen air.
She knows the limits of language.

As you carve your name on the river
with a sharp stone, you spot antlers
sprouting downstream, as if the waters
had suddenly hardened
between the gasps of a drowning buck.
Kneeling before the rack of points,
you swipe away the snow
and see his open eyes above the ice, fixed
quick in wild panic.

His ghost stands in the tall grass of a summer field,
raising its head to hear the bleats of a lost fawn
over the distant thunder of an unnamed river:
how lonely the living must be.

Taylor Collier

Auf dem Fluße

On the River

A past you are afraid to re-enter

Avoiding the neighborhood where she lived
our friends   who were hers primarily
that's the easy part   not so easy though
to avoid what we loved mutually
what we made ours   that country   Greece
where she has gone   I further north
past and future

we cannot wait for one another
can only hope to be there
when she arrives
or the reverse   if she wants to
if we have not changed too much
You don't learn not to love
but what do you learn what is left
at the bottom of the glass

One cannot look and cannot turn away 

Bill Mayer

~

 The River on a pyre 

Eyeing the Brahmaputra flowing with its whale-body

and the faraway banks smoking

she thought death stood quiet

quietly performing the ritual

of mouth-fire for her own,

the bodies that once talked

laughed and spread guile.

Eyeing the strong-arm river’s sweep of red ripples

carrying unsuspecting dolphins

and last night’s smoky limbs

from the pyres she watched

across her verandah over the

winter’s damp dribble.

She searched out the smell –

ashes in the wind stuck like the stunned river’s pride

the look of a living face smoke-screened in the twilight.

Nabina Das

Rückblick

A Look Backward

No one is seeding on the flats;
the path stopped growing,
the farmer whispers, beating the wheat
mold down with his hat.

Marriages are less, the walking
down to mere waves
from the rise of the hill.
We lost the road to the village,

we lost the will,
the words, the language
of a common dance. The mind
pulls only a single thread.

The road has nowhere to go
but through the narrowness
of needled grass
burnt to wisps of wilder.

Daily we stalk the corn,
and seeing loss, have found
the randomness of order
that stone breathes into land.

The field rolls over
to the ridge of its spine. It's easier
not to worry about creation,
to give up faith, than understand

indirection that drives a brother
lost in this hatred or that.
The farmer bows, weeding a road up
with his hands.

James Ragan

~

Loretta

{my 1st cousin, epileptic who drowned at age 14}

So small, this world could not

hold her in its absent arms,

held now, like a shadow

cradled by a crescent moon.

She died, unlike Christ, behind walls,

on a morphine drip, letting go

her nail-polished-pink imploded destiny.

She loved, and was loved,

opening like a rose

to all her knew her;

and I think of her

when a whipporwill sings,

remembering a beautiful girl

from a less beautiful world.

D.L.W. Pesavento

Irrlicht

Will o' the Wisp

The soft snow falls on tundra soil
where dropped the leaves from the linden trees
and there on hillsides small children
rush with sleds through the Advent breeze.

Nearby others skate on hard glass ponds
laughing loudly as they tumble to and fro;
friends frolick in December's most innocent hours
pretending to be unconscious angels in the snow.

But some of us grew much too wise, apart
to chuckle and waste away our annointed time
So we moved far away from the frost of places,
beyond the mountains to a warmer valley clime

So here everyday we can toil long hours away
forever forgetting foolish moments of a past
Yet misty green eyes I find dwell in my mind
What's this image, this thought, that's been cast?

Is it me that I see with a girl hand in hand?
Is it tomorrow or days gone so far ago?
Am I remembering or make-believing of heaven;
are you real or just another angel in the snow?

William N. Thompson

~

If this were illusion
The devil must be envious of what we have
to take it all away
As though nothing happened
A chunk fallen into the sea this
the sign says   was where History was
Dutiful and instructed   A dying fall
In my garden I am hunting for shards
the three fine pieces of Parian marble
she found wedged in the old stone wall
Not Archaeology   Under the yellow oxalis
I know I do not want to sleep with you
That I remember
the fierce self-concentrated face as she spoke
If it were illusion
Of not being wanted for years
Whether Romantic love was but a destructive fantasy
I would not want it so
Holding and tearing apart
A decision or just acceptance
Go to sleep then

go to sleep

you can't

Bill Mayer

Rast

Rest

There are mountains, ask any believer,
where to wake suddenly is to risk
your life, where the spirit cold and fevered
would burn like rope in the body's fist,
so when I woke under the winter sky
last night, startled by the copper bell
of a goat above me, the way its eye
met mine I took it for a man or angel
or some such frightened thing. Like me it
darted backwards, tightening the thread
of sight between us. And so I slipped
a little farther out of sleep, my head
aching, my father mumbling where he lay,
one wakeful star above us like a blade.

Bruce Bond

Frühlingstraum

Dream of Spring

Winter Rhapsody

For Ilarion

Einsamkeit

Solitude

~

Deus Ex Machina

Flickering like bedside votive candles,

the parents wait for divine intervention

to their unanswered prayers

on this Christmas Eve, after the auto accident,

finally, giving surgeons permission to proceed

with harvesting the heart, held up

like a chalice,

gently placed in ice, and

delivered by helicopter

to another who waits,

receiving its blessing.

D.L.W. Pesavento

Die Post

The Post

Wondering strays on highways,
Our heroins pose among thorns,
Little cling-ons.

Wash them off at the Esso
Where, like snowfall, what's
Mine is hers.

This post debriefing itches still.
What rang so true then?
Mine still hurts.

Noon dies in the post coming state,
Lies lies discontented lies,
My heart's afterstamp itches.

If this whole animal scene
Under fragments of white goes dormant,
Remind her.

M. Rose Hill 
 

Der greise Kopf

The Old-Man's Head

Going Gray

I saw the white that follows black

Must soon come to exist

And so I went into the snow

And slit my other wrist.

Frozen blood congealed round

My floating dream-white hair

But too much life remained within

The colors spilling there.

You came and took the blackest ink

From raven and from crow

And strand by strand you re-covered

Your pale black widow.

Joan Harvey

~

Comes the Gray

Some say

From stress it comes

Others claim

From age it grows

The Book expresses wisdom its source

Still, no one really knows

Change it does

As the days themselves do

Almost indiscernibly

Without rhythm

rhyme or clue

We may say

we feel the same

perhaps a bit tired or worn,

but the truth shines

eventually through

from the first day we are born

From the moment of breath first taken

the process begins unabated

From the alpha to the omega

its life having been prior slated

Through both the long

and the short of it

The answer, few can say

Why

Why

Why,

Why we continue to gray?

From none

to salt and pepper,

fading to smudging gray

Next silver

Now white

Transforming its wearer

metamorphosis,

seemingly overnight

From shockingly brilliant

and flowing locks

to thinning hair

as age doth knock

upon the door

so tightly held closed,

Why we gray

no one knows.

Branch Isole

~

sensual sightings

red-brown cows grazing
a sloping green meadow
long horns glinting in sunlight
insects the whipping-boys of swishing tails
hooves a more serious threat
to what crawls and creeps through
the grassy forests of valley meadows
cows are heavier than air
they do not float about where there
is cud to be chewed (and chewed again)
they trample without malice or discrimination
grubs insects mites and worms
(annelid or otherwise)

grey hairs glinting on the backs of my
moderately hairy hands first time
noticed so that soon I must suppose
when I rest my head in my hands
their backs will be indistinguishable
from the silvery grey at my temples
the roots of intra-cranial growths
sticking up from where cerebral grey
cattle are grazing the hollow meadows
of my skull

autumn is here
winter on the way

Levi Wagenmaker

Die Krähe

The Crow

Bruises

I want you for myself,

Yet you won’t come. 

I surge down to meet you,

To convince you that I love you.

Your hair swings with grains of snow,

Bruises curve the bottoms of your eyes. 

Haven’t I proved my faithfulness?

I’ve guarded you since I first saw you.

I watch as every rope of tears

Spins from your eyes,

And as each braid of scars winds

Itself over your skin. 

She has abandoned you,

But I never will.

Esté  Yarmosh 
 

~

 Shake Rattle and roll

the sound made by hazelnuts
dropping from the modest height
of branches (of hazel of course)
onto granite-ridden soil compacted
into paths of tracks through
hazel-ridden woodland
that sound is almost indistinguishable
from that of skeletal fingers' joints
collected from nearby shallow graves
or elsewhere by gatherers of such
items or other bits and pieces
and dropped by them from the dark
perches of branches overhanging
the chosen path of one out for a walk
alone or followed about by what
rustles in the undergrowth beside
the trodden tracks and so familiar to
connoisseurs of hazelnuts and
similarly sounding dropped objects
of desire of that old shake rattle
and roll

Levi Wagenmaker

~

CONVERSATION

Ravens talking in earnest is wondrous

The way they don’t want to share food

And are hyperbolic about their flights

Across fallow farmlands, brown fields

Of spent ammonia, and gassy old bogs.

They have compass heads, curt motions

When they talk, ignoring the mauve sky

Of the thunder-bound clouds over a lawn.

Ravens like a drink or two with a peck

Here and there while the light dances

On their twisty heads, darkening against

A screen of sunset silk with no outlets

For ravens to fly out. So they just spar over

How many worms each of them clinched

Or how long then can keep me company

The ravens talk through my unvoiced gaze.

A familiar sight, but who’ll question them

About melting as silhouettes on our eves –

Not a good thing confronting those beaks.

Ravens herald guests. So for my granny’s sake

I have to wait and watch, although all I see

Them dropping from their mouth’s corners

Is rotten stuff in their callous cawing prose.

Nabina Das 

Letzte Hoffnung

Last Hope

The Last Leaf

At the wind a last leaf flails!
This tiny flag of hope still prevails!
A promise that spring’s blossoms will return
As will the lark’s song after a brief sojourn.
 
Perhaps then my love will find me again
To occupy her daily thoughts and sights.
For now in the wind her heart’s vane spins
Like this leaf fluttering yet holding tight.
 
As long as this leaf doesn’t touch the ground!
As long as my love’s hand stays unbound!
There’s hope for me! There’s hope for me!
As long as this leaf clings to its bough.
 
Here in the wind, as hope’s flag waves,
My fluttering heart remains brave.
But if this leaf falls to the ground,
In my love’s eyes another’s found. 
 

Roxanne Hoffman, Hoboken NJ,  October 24 2009

Im Dorfe

In the Village

 We crunched through a winter noon.
He carried the baby in his back pack;
I held three year old Andi’s hand,
as our snow shoes ruffled Earth
Mother’s wind-scoured coat.
We gloried in mountain lion’s tracks,
no deer in sight. Winded, we sat.
He squinted out across the lake.
The New Year ice is far too thin.
I snuggled Andi’s small neck
as she perched on my lap,
the baby faded away. So different
now. Once, we couldn’t come
to this height before July.
As we hiked down, scratchy drops
blurred my eyes. I’ve passed
this sign many eerie times, as
into the dusk I speed. The talus
slants beneath my boots. My eyes
scan over poor seared edelweiss.
No water tempts its roots; cells
sense the effort would prove nil.
This unmelted valley cowers,
a mountain-swathed chimera, hiding
out from ravens’ directionless eyes.
Yet those obsidian-dark orbs take
in the next suspended sight---old
phone poles, lines gone, waver on
across the snow-encrusted flat,
flag this encounter’s endless march
to any town that might feed our chill.

Elizabeth I. Riseden

Der stürmische Morgen

 The Stormy Morning

storm at dawn

This morning, from my balcony, I spied
The absence of those mountains ringed about
Our plain and valley. And the sea's arm, found
To south of us, went missing too. My eyes
Questioned their function, then resigned and swept
Wide boulevards that run off, thin cross-streets,
The space that serves them.  All that I could see
Had thickened, shifted greyward.  What was left
Of sculpted details seemed half-focused hints--
Houses showed edges compromised, lines torn;
Trees bulked, misdimensioned, lights showed their scorn
By donning wintery overrobes; sad glints
Where sun rays; I missed fine-inked straight-line rims
Of towers, autos, palms that should arise.
The atmosphere had turned lake, where air had been.
And soon, with darker motions, robed in black,
A storm asserted. Even the fog shrank in,
Hiding itself by huddling, as who'd sin
Masks up in smallness (his dimension lacked);
Its coming on assaulted that space in mind
Which harbors hope, overcloaking the Earth,
My zone of hopeful thought, the wish for mirth--
The unresigned and unrepentent might
That drives man from the depths of his despair
Toward some far longed-for dawn. Like some lone bard,
Composer, artist, seeker in climes untrod
I breathed the sulphurous torment of the air,
Baring myself to darkness, to tragic themes,
To potent change; and then I bowed my head,
Awaiting one spark--rapt in a fevered dream...

Robert Michael

Täuschung

Illusion

A Parable by E.T.A. Hoffmann 

You must surely know that on this season, Christmas and New Year’s, even though it’s so fine and pleasant for all of you, I am always driven out of my peaceful cell onto a raging, lashing sea. Christmas! Holidays that have a rosy glow for me. I can hardly wait for it, I look forward to it so much. I am a better, finer man than the rest of the year, and there isn’t a single gloomy, misanthropic thought in my mind. Once again I am a boy, shouting with joy. The faces of the angels laugh to me from the gilded fretwork decorations in the shops decorated for Christmas … But after the holidays everything becomes colorless again, and the glow dies away and disappears into drab darkness.

Every year more and more flowers drop away withered, their buds eternally sealed; there is no spring sun that can bring the warmth of new life into old dried-out branches. I know this well enough, but the enemy never stops maliciously rubbing it in as the year draws to an end. I hear a mocking whisper: “Look what you have lost this year; so many worthwhile things that you’ll neveer see again. But all this makes you wiser, less tied to trivial pleasures, more serious and solid—even though you don’t enjoy yourself very much.”

Every New Year’s Eve the Devil keeps a special treat for me. He knows just the right moment to jam his claw into my heart, keeping up a fine mockery while he licks the blood that wells out. And there is always someone around to help him, just as yesterday the Justizrat came to his aid. He (the Justizrat) holds a big celebration every New Year’s Eve, and likes to give everyone something special as a New Year’s present. Only he is so clumsy and bumbling about it, for all his pains, that what was meant to give pleasure usually turns into a mess that is half slapstick and half torture.

I walked into the front hall, and the Justizrat came running to meet me … He smirked at me in a very strange way and said, “My dear friend, there’s something nice waiting for you in the next room.” …

I felt that sinking feeling in my heart. Something was wrong, I knew, and I suddenly began to feel depressed and edgy. The the doors were opened. I took up my courage and stepped forward, marched in, and among the women sitting on the sofa I saw her.

Yes, it was she. She herself. I hadn’t seen her for years, and yet in one lightning flash the happiest moments of my life came back to me, and gone was the pain that had resulted from being separated from her.

What marvellous chance brought her here? What miracle introduced her into the Justizrat’s circle? … I didn’t think of any of these questions; all I knew was that she was mine again.

I must have stood there as if halted magically in midmotion. The Justizrat kept nudging me and muttering, “Mmmm? Mmmm? How about it?”

I started to walk again, mechanically, but I saw only her, and it was all that I could do to force out, “My God, my God, it’s Julia!” I was practically at the tea table before she even noticed me, but then she stood up and said coldly, “I’m so delighted to see you here. You are looking well.” And with that she sat down again and asked the woman sitting next to her on the sofa, “Is there going to be anything interesting at the theatre the next few weeks?”

You see a miraculously beautiful flower, glowing with beauty, filling the air with scent, hinting at even more hidden beauty. You hurry over to it, but the moment that you bend down to look into its chalice, the glistening petals are pushed aside and out pops a smooth, cold, slimy, little lizard that tries to cut you down with its glare.

[… the party continues for a while…]

Julia picked up a sparking, beautifully cut goblet and offered it to me, saying, “Are you still willing to take a glass from my hand?” “Julia, Julia,” I sighed.

As I took the glass, my fingers brushed against hers, and electric sensations ran through me. I drank and drank, and it seemed to me that little flickering blue flames licked around the goblet and my lip. Then the goblet was empty, and I really don’t know myself how it happened, but I was now sitting on an ottoman in a small room lit only by an alabaster lamp, and Julia was sitting beside me, demure and innocent-looking as ever. Berger had started to play again, the andante from Mozart’s sublime E-flat Symphony, and on the swan’s wings of song my sunlike love soared high. Yes, it was Julia, Julia Herself, as pretty as an an angel and as demure; our talk a longing lament of love, more looks than words, her hand resting in mine.

“I will never let you go,” I was saying. “Your love is the spark that glows in me, kindling a higher life in art and poetry. Without you, without your love, everything is dead and lifeless. Didn’t you come here so that you could be mine forever?”

At this very moment there tottered into the room a spindle-shanked cretin, eyes bulging like a frog’s, who said, in a mixture of croak and cackle, “Where the Devil is my wife?”

Julia stood up and said to me in a distant, cold voice, “Shall we go back to the party? My husband is looking for me. You’ve been very amusing again, darling, as overemotional as ever; but you should watch how much you drink.”

The spindle-legged monkey reached for her hand and she followed him into the living room with a laugh.

“Lost forever,” I screamed aloud.

“Oh, yes; codille, darling,” bleated an animal playing ombre.

I ran out into the stormy night.

E.T.A. Hoffmann

Der Wegweiser

The Sign Post

Signposts

Footprints on soundless snow

Environ gray brown and bleak

Frigid wind slashes every step

Sky a clean sheet white as death

Into this heart bereft of warmth

Thoughtless thoughts forthwith

Descend and swirl in a labyrinth

A soliloquy within a black hole

I wander past familiar signposts

Wandered past many times

Now they seem unrecognizable

I observe a gray man disintegrate

I trudge on a stranger to myself

This road awaits without love

There is no tuning back from it

There is no end in sight

Michael Brandonisio

Das Wirtshaus

The Inn

Ballad of the watchers

Auf einem Totenacker
Hat mich mein Weg gebracht
Allhier will ich einkehren:
Hab' ich bei mir gedacht.
     Winterreise, "Das Wirsthaus"

Winter winds blow through cracks in boards.
The moon is gaunt, the trees like thorns. Soot
and rubble taint the air. Logs crackle beneath
a kettle, bubbling stew. Like owls, ikons glare
down at you. Do good deeds: wash, weave,
sew. Carve a ring from yellow wormwood.
Kneel on the floor. Four years he’s been away.
Pray to Saint Simon and Saint Jude, then
sleep a deep and lovesick sleep. (Outside
the hut, the Watchers watch you from dens
like foxes.) Wake to a knock growing bolder.
Fling open the door. The snow is star-bright.
Four years he’s been away fighting. Like prey,
his men died, trapped on ice-slick ledges.

Merciless nights. Hold him as he weeps on
a stool. Tell how you harvested wheat each
fall (the Watchers watching you from trees
like hawks). Let him lift you in his arms. Into
the air you both will soar and, in the firmament
through which you fly, hear the wind cry, carrying
you past lizard-curved peaks to a bleaker world
sans sun or moon. When your feet touch land,
run, run up hilltops, through forests, across
dry creeks. Beasts hiss and snarl. This is you,
dying, after all. Spiders dangle from trees
whose limbs like yours are splintered bones.
The earth laps blood from your unshod soles.
(From caves, the Watchers watch like crones.)

Throw away the prayer book you carry. Your thorn
wood rosary is orange and black like a snake’s
back.  Rip it off.  The crucifix carved from a brook
stone:  hurl it down.  Slip the wormwood ring
from your finger onto his, already bone.  Now,
leap over the wall to where men sleep naked  
but never alone.  (Like angels, how the Watchers
smile at tombs.)  The dead squint their eyes, wipe
them like men not dead.  To a wind-thin tune,
a dance begins.  Footfalls make a crushing sound
as your bodies grind against the air.  Slowly, you,
your lover, all disappear.  Do not fear.  This terror
is Death’s last power.  (From the bell tower, like
saints in heaven, the Watchers unblinking stare.)

Peter Weltner

~

Abandoned

Like a little boy, left outside the bar,

I waited for you, pulled away from me

by phantom hands

stronger than mine;

you, seduced into the carnival's neon lights,

loud-bass jukebox music, guttural guffaws,

and vulgar shouts from beer-itches,

demanding their scratch.

I called out to you

but you couldn’t hear me.

I tried going in to get you

but the door was locked.

And when you stumbled out,

true love had already left,

never to wait for you again.

D.L.W. Pesavento

~

joyful mortality

just to be here
where the land lays out
its undulations
granite rollers topped with green
receding into browns and yellows
sparser reds
as tennis court the grounds
would have some quirky bouncing
to put balls under short skirts
from unexpected angles
a breath of autumn adding
goosebumps to bare thighs
if
there were any of those here
on these slopes
another month to bare branches
the bane of bare thighs
but for now autumn sunlight
mellows skin and bark and fading leaves
and just to be here
and breathe in the autumn
with its hinted scents of colourful
decay but
not a whiff so far
of volatile fatty acids
so far all the corpses are
strictly vegetable

Levi Wagenmaker

~

NO Vacancy

The 'wayside inn' is a lonely graveyard where he hopes to find rest at last.

The wreaths are the tavern sign, inviting him in.

But no - all the rooms are taken, and he must carry on, as he tells his faithful walking staff.

 
Hale these merry gentlemen who rest here!
For they’ve returned to mother earth’s warm womb!
Achievements tallied—birthday to death year—
By those varied roles so briefly assumed!
 
First, son and brother, then friend and lover,
Until they earned "proud" father’s esteemed place.
Now at dusk, their spirits gently hover,
Perhaps wary of my untimely haste.
 
Alas, it is not my time to join them.
My trusty staff and I must carry on.
This branch that braces me, my only chum.
Tolling church bells, a cock’s crow, beacon dawn.
 
We leave these merry gentlemen behind!
Off we go, to our wanderings resigned! 

Roxanne Hoffman, Hoboken NJ,  October 14 2009

Mut

Courage

Sorrow, wisdom's handmaiden, serves frozen reminders,
Death, limbs lost, and pain she evokes,
Icy Squalls, whiteout, and frostbite all heckle in the wind.
A melody spawns from within the ice mansions of memories,
Growing louder, it laughs at the cold,
Deutchland winter births a glacial numb,
But, a ditty from the heart brings a balmy hope.
With his staff and a song his long march goes on.
Beneath the flakes, courage comes from within.

Mark Baumgartner

~

snow flying in my face shake it down again shake while inside me my
song thunders from the center do not ask to send for what it says to
me it cannot be heard by ears so no sorrow no grief that’s for idiots
cold and sleet if God does not exist then we must make ourselves IT!

satnrose

Die Nebensonnen

The False Suns

Black Pearls

Phantom stars orbit her alabaster neck

like imploded suns revealing their essence;

the Tahitian planet near her breast,

a coalesced quicksilver-night lustrous sphere

imbued with hues of pink and blue skies

veiled by clouds of dolphin-green iridescence;

the talisman touching her clavicle,

black as an ebony spider-idol’s onyx eye,

pitiless, reflecting your gaze

imprisoned in its midnight mirror;

the round shadow over her sternum,

teardrop of Satan,

Lucifer’s dying light’s last illumination,

shed for himself, falling fell from grace;

and the indigo sea genie, lying

between the first and second ribs,

jealously guards her territory

with a squid’s malevolent sight:

black pearls, connected by a dream;

our dark worlds, colliding.

D.L.W. Pesavento

~

Three suns fell across the sky
Burning in my hard won eyes
Even closed see through the lids
Never leaving me alone
My own suns you are not
Look away from this my face
I myself at once had three
Now just two are down the best
I wish the third would die
And leave me well in the night

satnrose

~

 In the heresays of there and then
the winter suns set carefully
amid forests of large houses

lining oddly soft steel rails.

Faraway rumours echo of wide screens locked

on channels, doors of an asylum really,
kept gloomish, smoked, and frigid
so nobody can ever touch the wasteland
so artfully maintained in alternative media.

The distance between these places
couldn’t be guessed at, whether the Mozart
performed here gets precious air time there.

Here, at the foot of another decaying wall
where pale weeds grow over old pauper's burials
a disturbing array of sacraments & commandments erupt
like unwelcome bubbles belching from secret
corners of a drink falsely labeled medicinal.

The badly-finished concrete beneath
might make good as a swimming pool,
if only the hibernating tombstones
could be grown a few feet, a moment
so brief, sudden, and withheld
the next dusk would accidentally trod upon it.

After some years, the narcotic idea of ‘home’
hasn’t stuck. Hardly a problem, Santa says,
if some other place were on the landscape,
outside the harsh dark of ceilings
that inch closer through the night.

There are so many murmuring Nots out there
it’s hard not to imagine a wilderness named for them;

Der Leiermann

 The Hurdy-Gurdy Man

Solstice

he remembered the woman: a pale
blonde Rubens nude shivering in a window
gooseflesh of breasts belly and thighs
her breath fogged the panes - she beckoned him
until her face became all faces
faceless - the stain behind a spreading blot
(she was the widow) he had had her many times
and would have her one time more

snow drove him forward - the night
and her name as the blizzard fell
burying his cabin by the railhead -
white dunes swallowed his tracks
his hobnailed boots dug hard
against the massive drifts he
followed the path his father followed
and his father's father before him

she thought of the man as he must be -
entombed with his tins and whiskey
waiting by the fire for a switchman
or an engineer to plow him out -
the widow wandered where the smell of
the corridor seeped beneath the doors:
on the longest night of the year
what fell fell from nowhere

what fell from nowhere banked invisibly
against a console reeking of lemon wax:
it crept into closets - it will not find her
until the man drips with melting weeds -
she'll elude it till he comes to undress her
till the warm musk of her flesh shivers out
he'll press his lips to each piece of her clothing
slip the watch from her wrist and finger the dial

~

Come; hear the hurdy-gurdy man sing!

This bird not weighed down by anything!

Never perched in any one place too long

His sole companions: fiddle and song

No scolding wife scowling at his side

No crying babes to cheer or chide

Perhaps he’s lonely; perhaps he’s sad

Perhaps he’s a fool or just plain mad

The village children follow him and clap

He brings them trinkets from across the map

Their elders throw down coins to fill his cup

At dusk he fills his belly and drinks up

I wish I were the hurdy-gurdy man!

I wish I were this stout and sturdy man!

Tomorrow he’ll be gone to t’other town

Tomorrow I’ll be here and still be down

Roxanne Hoffman, Hoboken NJ,  October 14 2009