POETRY PLATTER

Going to France
by Jane Blue

Embracing Beautiful Failure

James Lee Jobe

Going Through Life Sedated By Annie Menebroker
From Dream Catcher--eleven short poems
Order from the author at
10 Azorean Ct.
Sacramento, CA 95833
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LOVE
Train Station and
RAZING: by Ann Menebroker of Sacramento.

One Amazing Chance Ann Menebroker

for Victor Wong September 12,2001 -Annie Menebroker

The Dance of Days and
The Death of God in Texas, 1934
San Francisco:
These are some of mine.

SUNDAY MORNING: by Wallace Stevens (my favorite poem)

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The Dance of Days a mind rages through the night like a troubled tiger snapping at shifting specters in uncertain darkness each sunset, prism refractions of uncharted futures each sunrise, scattered shards of crystal memories a body moves alone through the day, keeping even rhythm with the music of the hours words laid on endless words like fall leaves in ancient forests and the mind and body spin through cycles of darklight straining to keep step with the urgent earth in the manic dance of days MEADE, 1996 GOING TO FRANCE Chloe said to me while we waited for her mother: "On a Saturday in summer I'm going to France." She was wearing her Easter clothes. I can barely remember my own childhood, it's someone else's that comes so clear. My children played Blind Man's Bluff in the house when I was gone, and Michael broke his nose. Yesterday we drove out across the floodplain to visit Annie. The fog had just lifted. Annie told us how she and Meade twirled balletic and middle-aged, among the art installations at the new wing of the airport At Annie's urging we went too, through rice paddies, secretive egrets in plain sight to imitate them, dancing on a purplish square under a canopy outside the phalanx of gates, setting off sensors of bird calls and gongs. Those dragging baggage --click-click on the tiles above the escalator-- looked at us as if we were crazy. We're not. We're like two people living alone suddenly living together.		The Death of God in Texas, 1934   A darkness moving on his horizon broke the bubble of rewarded toil. He, numb with fear at the black swirling not of it, a thing known these many years, but of consequences upon consequences like bricks in some abandoned chruch. In the days of one good crop in three and this was the one--dissolving now in the dark mouth of the twisted vacuum that sucks man's dreams from earthen rugs. Coming, a mad visitor, to knock at his door to filling the frame of a covered porch. His descent into darkness, waiting under the rending of a small reality then resurrected to a lifeless plain cleansed of the art of gods and men reason and absurdity mate in settling dust And he, on his knees--small like a pebble on the moon--softly saying "From chaos we come, and to chaos we shall return." Meade, 1975
		One Amazing Chance "I have felt the earth breathing, and I've heard it sing to me, and I know that it has the soul of an artist." Meade Fischer It's true I'm old but so are the stately redwood trees that have escaped the cut and so is the rain and the sky and that earth-moon we stare at when it offers itself to our viewing; the sea is old and the sun is so old no one remembers wheo or what it first warmed; the stars are ancient they sing lightyears of songs to us meteorites join the chorus; we ;ostem as if we were so new that nothing has ruined us yet and I turn to you as innocent as faith seizing on this one amazing chance to be loved as I am, ancient and ruined beautiful and wise; I can grow no older than where love begins. Ann Menebroker

SAN FRANCISCO The wharf, tourist coated restaurants, food smells, music from behind doors and sounds of money buying memories. We, behind on dark sand, looking for the beer drinker's toilet hailed from the under shadows by crouched voices wanting cigarettes. In the low places on damp sand they lived below happy tourist's heels. Their home was ours for the price of a few smokes. So we went for wine some of us, some of them and someone with money. Under the pier, the passing of the jug a sacrament of night encounters with Jack, who loved heroin reverend Billy, who loved god and maybe other things less grand and two faceless voices unreal in cramped blackness except for the glow of borrowed smokes orange gestures punctuating mumbled words. Talk of wine and distant homes forsaken of exotic drugs and of the city while looking out from the under place at the view of Berkeley shimmering on the inky water.   The offering of night's hospitality--sleeping bags no rent, morning coffee, lights, or doors--declined. We, and our appointment with warmth across the hill in a place near the sea. We,, from out of nowhere at nine, dissolving like spirits at midnight.   And Jack who loved heroin and Billy who loved god together under the impersonal wharf as if everything becomes the same rivers flowing to that inky bay, now ebbing silently in the fuzzy glow of Berkeley. Distinctions blured by wine and darkness and the urgency of a night's appointment. Then after good-bye, we--drunk--lost in Oakland looking for a gas station, sharing our last cigarette.   Meade, SF, CA, 1976

Big Trouble   on little earth. a man falls away from us, but you know - the birds don't stop for a second and life chops down sorrow - and he who was Egg Shen laughs.   for Victor Wong September 12,2001   -Annie Menebroker

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TRAIN STATION Straingers have gatherd in this station, heading for separate journies, each purpose like the opening of a new play where travekl is the only connection. These innocent actors are family through Amtrack in a momentary destination. They will share the same landscape and the music of miles beneath their cars. Act One is boarding. Act Two is from here to there. Act Three is never concluded. The language of travel and time brings them no closer to their mother tongues. Right now each person can make up a story about who they really are. Annie Menebroker RAZING I stand on the deserted beach watching the surging white-capped waves. My voice is broken on the winds and carried to the hollow caves. Tonight my feet break and imprint the sand close to the wetter shores where shifting grains in never-rest come from the ancient rolling floors. I watch the sea tear down the signs that I ever existed there. It is a masterpiece of death which comes upon me unaware. My tracks are covered, blured and lost. My lips pursue an empty shout until the elements in me are washed from shore and carried out. Then shadows brush against my form and in departing glory, reach; when the last syllable of night speaks for my presence on the beach   Annie Menebroker

LOVE What I know about love could fill a bottle cap. But sometimes I use the word because it feels good and right to do so. If we wait to express something until we fully understand it, we would stand around like they did in the depression waiting for apples and jobs.   Annie Menebroker Going Through Life Sedated by Annie Menebroker -- From Dream Catcher What binds us together is something so frail it wakes me in the night when I turn in my sleep. It is in the darkness when the moon is void and in a quiet north wind whose movements hardly matter. Something is there and we think about it as we do our jobs, or write a poem, or sing, or dream.   Return to POETRY PLATTER

Embracing Beautiful Failure

There is no need to go through life apologizing and longing for release
or understanding. No one needs to wear a hairshirt, or walk

as a cowed dog walks, whimpering and afraid of human voice. 
You may start your life anew at any time, just as a baby does.

Give yourself permission to cry ouot loud like a newborn, scream if you 
need to, and then when the crying is overe, play as you wish to play,

as a child does, as an animal does. Let your body speak for you,
let you body tell you what is true or false. If you fail, so what?

It is beautiful failure that can set you free. Embrace it! And then, 
unafraid, you can begin a life where you will no longer need a name. 
		James Lee Jobe
		2000

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SUNDAY MORNING

Wallace Stevens

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradist? And shall the earth
seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier than than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodioius, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

V

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.<P>

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
that choir among themselvles long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

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