From RKleinEngler@aol.com Tue Jan 18 14:35:21 2005 Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 19:34:25 EST From: RKleinEngler@aol.com To: offcourse@albany.edu Subject: poetry submission .NEW ORLEANS SHORTS. LA CHATELAINE Keys on a chain slap his hip. His leather jacket is faded. A ponytail waves down from his backward baseball cap. He goes up to the sofabed. Nature made her to take the muscle of his pain, still, she has a pain of her own. STOPS ALONG THE TOUR On Decatur Street they tell of the first man to make ice in Louisiana. It wasn't my ex, Andy, but it could have been. LA FEE VERTE To be on the safe side, stay away from kids, animals and poo. MASKS AND MAKE-BELIEVE You seldom see the gray light of winter here, except reflected in someoneâ^À^Ùs eyes. Take that hustler there, painted in disco blue. He spent his youth, and now has nothing left. .CANAL--END OF THE LINE. The Odd Fellow's Rest in their vaults behind whitewashed walls. Traffic rushes past. You know how it hurts to wait. What's for dinner tonight? OYSTERS IN THEIR SHELLS We cool! Bling-bling. Oops! Crack. Crack. COURTYARD She walks on the balcony with bare feet, opens a jar for the ashes and lights her cigarette. Sometimes, our wish is like mud, other times it billows like a ghost. STREETCAR CELLPHONE Girl, I be der quick as I can. He makin' every stop. Dis shit's slow. SUNSET LIMITED The train is late. A bright-eyed boy plays with a ball. You can tell he will be handsome one day. Above his head, in the chalky mural, cards are being dealt. NORTH TO NOVEMBER Glaucoma of sky. Weave of spiny trees. Mirror of rain wet rails. We just pass by. Hold us for a while. .THE REFUGE OF BOOKS. We get to class soggy and worn this morning, splashed by the bus and passing cars, then we shake the weather off our umbrellas the way we would the silver tissue of memory. The gift of longing is simply given. Nothing more. It comes or goes below a mystery of clouds. Now, the earth vows to drink what falls upon it, and the sidewalks are glycerin with a skin of rain. I did not expect after twenty years to swallow again a stymied lump of tears, or realize once more that part of me I cannot help. Always, the one-sided moon of affection rises. Rain is not to oil books, their ink dissolves and pages melt in it, but look here, this book was written by the lover of a man I knew. I'm sure by now the two are dry bones and ash. I spread his words and read along the spine. Please open me and let the stones fall out. .THREE BY SEVEN. poems for voice and cello there was a noise, and behold a rattling; and the bones came together --Ezekiel 37:7 THE INFANTS IN LIMBO The voice in limbo is the celloâ^À^Ùs voice. It hangs on melodies like a midnight moon. Imagination makes the child in limbo real, to soak within the juice of possibility, patient, not to know this world, but the world to come. Some say there is a mist of shelter there, whose only light is love, and that is rarified. Would they have grown rather in a time of war, or be tossed like a dry leaf in winds of politics? That dead baby the Afghans throw like a rag doll into the back of a pickup truck, or the boy whose hands were chopped off in Sierra Leone by drug crazed revolutionaries, they may wish to join these infants in the syrup dark. The babes in limbo billow in a foam, floating without care, no work to lose, nor trumpet flesh that sounds the night. They need not give an offering without stain. Perhaps when we are called with them to live again it will be like the blind who see for once the waving trees but think them men. All men have names. It is their knot untied. We make our name stand out by deeds and warp our spirit on the way--those in limbo never savor this or the pepper of philosophy. They cannot say the word that draws them down nor do they know the other name that is the nameless want within our heart. Even on the busy street in broad daylight he hears that long ago name return. They would have shot him, too if they could. Others were shot because their life did not fit a theory, like weeding the gardens of Babylon. Little girls were killed, with just a rifle butt to the face that compressed it like a pillow. Every murderer believes this is the only world. Yet we are all brave today, stepping head first into the faithful autumn light. That man who carries the blister of names and robes of smoke will always love who would abandon him. Try to understand the mystery of his hand-- the promise to be numberless as grains of sand. A CONFUSION OF BONES Out on the porch he sees the boiling clouds. Lightning on the horizon cracks open the sky. The gnarled tree leaps into a silhouette, as a gravel rain drums on the tile roof. It was a dry year farming, then heat came to choke what barely could reach above the soil. Now, this rain that rakes the land comes too late. He gave away his youth to work the wilderness. His neighbor, rich in livestock and families, tends his bulls, heifers, corn, and orchards. He walked next to him once to hear the bells of the eternal and saw the abyss of eyes. Listen to the rain fall like the tingling of steel. Listen to the wind rove like the rush of wings. There is such a puzzle in our field of bones. Whose hand was this, whose thigh, whose rib, and knuckle wrapped with a rusted ring? This skull may have worn mink, that one straw. They thought they saw out there historyâ^À^Ùs horizon, but it was fire and horsemen and flashing swords. The flesh blows away like smoke from a window. â^À^ÜMusic is my life. I bent my bones old for it,â^À^Ý says the cellist. â^À^ÜMusic is a rose perfume, or the invisible vapor of beauty that burns blood from the soil with flames of silk.â^À^Ý How late it is for the marriage of duets, like two blooms before the eye. Which one? A wind will strip the petals from them all. The river surges with its argument of mud. A melody cascades across the strings and gathers up the dross, to flush away. Our hope remains a hallow point, the void we carry even when full, a gift of nothing that sent Abraham out into a foreign land, then on to Mount Mariah with a load of wood. Long drapes of night draw out across the sky. Sometime, way in the dark future, he may hold his hands open like a vessel around the fog of November and say by twilight, â^À^ÜHe held me with his bulk and loved me, and now, these leaves are trailed on the walk by the angel of death, who kisses with autumn incense on his breath.â^À^Ý LANDINGS You may look up and west from Argyle Street and see the dark bellies of the jets as they follow a glide path to land at Oâ^À^ÙHare Field. They are far enough away to be silent, sliding down on the oil of wind, coming in low with their human weight and cargos. Engines lift them from winter to wasteland. Dmitri Shostakovich said his many symphonies were tombstones, a testimony to those silent dead sacrificed to all the ideologies let loose in the world like mysterious storms. Stalin signs papers and men fall into graves. Love did not rescue them and love does not turn the heart of one we miss in flight as far as China. With these bodies, men will always be human. Would you rather have your life back or a song? The music of our machines drowns out the music of tenderness, or the silence before the bullet smacks. The black scrawl of signatures swirl and then the past evaporates. Stones flake to soil. We weigh so much until we weightlessly fall. The boys in rehab, lounging along the sidewalk of Argyle talk and talk and talk, yet the lull that fills their wanting is seldom spoken. Who tells how they are linked to the high jets the way quick fingers make the cello sing? They just get up and move on, muffled as snails, leaving blank the tombstones of cold cement. While he waits, the hours deepen and he feels that peace in the heart moves like the silence of reading. Even today the wind of ideology ushers in dry baptisms, and when longing tosses the leaves of the soul, or a thistle wind rages, letters grow into the vacancy. To carry our body upward is to carry the stone of its pain. The absent lover leaves behind a ghostly shape like clouds the jets fly beyond. He remembers, together in his room, they talked, then assassins came. Now, there is a symphony that fills the air and a hush, too, then the silence of God drafting our furious story above the world--with white wings like paper and black wings like words. A NOTE ABOUT THE THREE BY SEVEN POEMS The relationship between music and words, and the arts that come from these two human endeavors presents the poet and the musician with some artistic challenges. These poems are a product of an attempt to meet those challenges. I have concluded that music is primarily an expression of emotion, and words are an expression of ideas. Yet there is also a place and a season where emotions and ideas overlap, and that is the place and season I want to inhabit when we say and play together. Letâ^À^Ùs call that season autumn, when the bloom of summer and the blank of winter are suspended together in a few brilliant months. Letâ^À^Ùs call the name of that place Limbo. When music expresses an emotion, it is not specific in that expression. Music does not name names. Music can express what it is like to feel love or hate or excitement, but it has no specific content. Music does not say what or who is loved or what makes for excitement. Music is unspecified emotion. The music that comes from a cello seems to me to be the perfect way that the ambiguous voice in limbo can be expressed. Suspended between the violin and the bass, the cello has the perfect ambiguous tone. Unlike the cello, words are specific. Words name names. In a sense, words carry meaning the way our body carries our identity. Words are also practical, and often worn thin by their practical use. We use words to give directions about how to drive to Phoenix, for example, but I know of no way we can give those directions using music alone. Now, when the two art forms of music and poetry collaborate, some interesting difficulties arise. I suppose the German Lieder or the opera may be a perfect blend of words and music. I am trying for something else, however, in my series 3 by 7. I want an effect different from the effects of opera or art song. This something else may be akin to the union of lyric poetry and chamber music. In this work we are taking turns, one plays and then the other recites. This means there has to be a certain common ground, or meaning or theme to what is said and what is played. I tried to reach that common ground by introducing an element of ambiguity into this series of poems. Although I am conscious of the sounds my words make and the iambic patterns they set up, along with some specific images of brutality in various sections of the poems, I wanted keep some meaning ambiguous so that the listener could find common ground with what is played on the cello and what is read aloud. Perhaps reoccurring images in a long poem work like reoccurring melodies in a piece of music. Likewise, ambiguity in a poem may be similar to harmony in music. It is this harmony that draws together meaning and emotion. My other intent is to use poetic ambiguity so that the poems move from the realm of the particular to that of the universal, or from specific to general. Verbal ambiguity may also overcome some of the limitations of my own time and place and make a claim upon the future. We could be wrong about some small things, but hope to be right about the one, big thing. Likewise, we may be politically incorrect but morally correct. We could be mistaken, too, in who or how we love, but saved by the realization that it is better to love than to hate. Such ambiguity is for me the music of a voice and a cello in limbo. .DREAM AFTER HE SAYS GOODBYE. My heart is elsewhere but I listen. Mother tells me to clean up the crumpled papers and leaves from the corners of the stairs that lead down to the basement of the old house. She watches from the porch in front of a tall stepladder. Suddenly, the ladder tips forward and makes her fall to the cement below. I see her bleeding body as small as a doll and wearing a house dress to her ankles. Blood oozes from her side like a flattened, jelly donut. I know I must slide a page of cardboard under her to scrape her from the cement. No matter what I do, she will not live. DANNY GETS A JUGGALO TATTOO The hole inside left by his father beating him when he was nine years old eats away with its patient teeth of snow. Something that glitter must fill his heart, even if itâ^À^Ùs the gaze of the golden calf. Iâ^À^Ùm telling you, the powers and principalies of the world have their kingdom to uphold. Take them away, and Danny will have little to fill the emptiness in his heart, but now he belongs, see the proof on his flesh. There, on his arm, that tattoo remembers, with the pain of its needle jab, jab jabbing. That mark is more than skin deep. Gather around brothers and sister, then remember, the invisible God of Israel has nothing to hide. Robert Klein Engler lives in Chicago and New Orleans. To find his work online, just google his name or click the links below. "Interview" http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/interviewengler.html "The Approach to Pilottown" http://www.blithe.com/bhq6.3/6.3.07.html "Red Beans and Rice" http://www.drunkenboat.com/db2/engler/redbeans.html "A Trip Up River" http://www.newtownwriters.org/SwellRiver.html "Justin the Pirate" http://www.red-coral.net/Grotto09May.html "One Sentence" http://www.midnightmind.com/stuff/englerone.htm "Every Good Boy Does Fine" http://outsiderink.com/04/winter/engler.php "Poetry and Art in Chicago" http://www.xchicago.com/main/article.php?articleID=279 http://www.nycbigcitylit.com/mar2003/contents/FreeExprEnglerPt2.html http://www.gapersblock.com/airbags/archives/dr_rk_engler_on_segregation_liberal_poets_and_those_damned_tacostand_owning_mexicans.php "Some Poems" http://www.slurrymagazine.com/docs/rkengler.html http://www.wiredhearts.net/september2000/robert_klein_engler.html http://www.poetrymagazine.com/archives/1997/october/engler.htm http://www.tryst3.com/issue9/engler.html "Art Work" http://eworks.engl.uic.edu/rio/rio4/englerart.html