A Gathering of Poems
from ENGL
something-or-other
Poetry Workshop
All rights reserved.
Copyright © Goshen College, 2004
Contents
Tristan
King, a 20th or 21st Perspective Manifesto Table of
Contents
Katie Mast, Three
Mornings, Shorn Hair, and (untitled)
Tabitha Rowe, Colors of a Burn and Love's Landscape
Paul Horst, Quest and Brothers
Joel Fath,
On herons and bubbles and Eavesdropping Poet; A Lesson in Active
Classroom Listening
Tristan King, Prodigal and In the Way of the Tornado
Jeff Gundy, Dark Man Blues and Signature, or Jonathan Edwards and Joe
Walsh Meet in the Electric Brew
Christina Cruz, A place where this
sadness might fit, Being with You, and Found
Art
Kristin Buller,
I used to hate my mother, When salmon do not migrate, and Love is not a feeling
Bethany Blough, Restraint and Patience and Some Things I Haven’t Been Able to Tell You,
Number One
Alice Houston, Upon My Subsequent Arrest by the Poetry Police,
All I Ever Wanted, and soft moss gathers below the falls . . .
Anita
Hooley, Vietnamese Dance, Introduction Poem, and All I Ever Wanted
Kristine Bowman, Of
Earth and Children, Of Childhood Fears and the Moon, and Of Mothers and Daughters
A
Note: During the last week of April, 2004, these
students and I gathered for an intensive poetry workshop at
The poems here are only a sampling
of some of the best work to come out of the workshop, and only a preview of the
fine work that I expect will come from this talented group of young writers in
the future. They are arranged more or less in the order that they came in, though
I did decide to move Tristan King’s quirky alternative table of contents near
the beginning.
Jeff Gundy
May 2004
a 20th or
21st Perspective Manifesto Table of Contents
Introduction. Repeat
yourself.
Chapter 1. Knock on the
walls.
Chapter 2. Listen for
the echo.
Chapter 3. Ignore the
likely painting on the other side
Chapter 4. As you swing the sledge.
Chapter 5. If there is
nothing that bothers you
Chapter 6. About writing
poems
Chapter 7. About
revision
Chapter 8. Or using the
word ‘love’
Chapter 9. We have a
hole for you.
Chapter 10. If poems are
a discomfort
Chapter 11. Write more of
them
Chapter 12. Which will necessitate having a secret ritual
Chapter 13. (tell no one
Chapter 14. to read this chapter)
Chapter 15. For observance after revisions.
Chapter 16. Poems are
like triage:
Chapter 17. Poets are
like triage:
Chapter 18. Decide who’s
going to live and work on them.
Chapter 19. Don’t assume
dignity.
Chapter 20. Keep the
drowning tub handy.
Conclusion. Learn how to
finish a poem.
Appendix A.
New words: calliberalitive,
awout and arald, mulst, et al.
Appendix B.
The Revised and Updated Manifesto.
Appendix C.
Your gift of flying will take over
be honest they will
love you
when you turn your gift
off
at 10,000 feet
Errata:
Conclusion and Appendix B are missing.
Putative misspelled on pages 42 and 193.
Tristan King
Three Mornings
I loved mornings as a child,
crawling over my grandma’s
soft body
to snuggle deep into
the warm space under the covers
between her and grandpa.
Strings played Vivaldi
over the radio-alarm clock sitting on the headboard
while we told each other
our dreams from the past night
and created animals out
of the cracking plaster ceiling
as the sun peeked
through the yellowing curtains.
I told them I’d do this until I turned 18.
For three months of mornings
I lifted my tired body from the foam
mattress
taking up too much space
on my sister’s floor
while Dad put insulation
into my walls.
It was her room; we listened to her music.
Metallica, Ween, and Rusted Root lingered in my head
as I daydreamed
through economics.
This morning I woke with my face so close to
yours
that I felt your
rainforest breath
beneath my sleepy right
eye.
Your arm rested on the soft saddle
between my ribs and hips
and my cells quivered
with the echo from the tympani in your chest.
I stared at the smooth, round flesh hiding
your dreams
from the sun’s
omniscient light.
Katie Mast
Shorn hair
Then the music we danced to in our
salmon-colored kitchen
was British rap:
an angry melding of slang
we couldn’t quite understand.
That was when Rosanna tied her hair into a
hundred pigtails
and laid them on the
table when she cut them,
set aside to give to
friends back home:
comrades who had similar
waist-length locks,
labeling themselves hippies
by means of long hair, homemade clothes, and incense,
(the heavy earth smell of nag champa
smoke)
She whips her chin towards her back in a
motion that would have sent her hair
hurtling over her shoulder
before she snipped the
last ponytail.
She ponders momentarily if she has made the
right choice,
to shed her most
identifying feature.
Yes, she concludes, for in this way
she is free to redefine
herself.
That was when we cooked lemon juice and
sugar,
stirring the concoction for
an hour,
cutting strips of old bed
sheets to fit neatly along our calves:
summer was on its way,
and our winter-hairy
legs wanted air
We laid newspaper in an overlapping pattern
on the kitchen floor
to catch any sticky
drops
before we smear the wax on
our anticipating skin.
The adrenaline rush and foreign feel of
smooth shins
makes this yearly ritual
bearable. In this way,
we pretend we are
counter-culture.
In our bare legs we danced to British rap
smartly laughing at the
slang
we thought was meant
to be funny.
Katie Mast
(untitled)
They tumble from late night parties into
here.
Made-up women dressed as their favorite
literary characters:
Anne of Green
Gables, Huck Finn; the creative one, Grendel.
What a way to save to finish college.
But that’s what I’m doing,
the bakery assistant
sleeping
on Friday
nights. I look at
the clock hanging on
the wall,
remind them that I have to
work at
wish that they would
stop screaming: I am not like them.
Anne of Green Gables has a scarf around her
throat
and giggles into her
hand. She thinks
her dyed fire-red hair
makes up
for what she lacks in
confidence.
“Guess what I did?”
she croons into my ear
and has me examine her neck.
A fresh hickey adorns her skin.
I think of leaving the Coronas on the back
step for Student Life to find
when the girls laugh,
describing the men at the party.
Friday and Saturday, every weekend, they
drink and dance to ‘80’s pop.
We don’t even lock our doors anymore,
so when they forget to
take their keys to the party, like Grendel did
last night, they don’t
have to sleep in the garage
since I won’t hear the
doorbell while I’m sleeping.
In the bathroom, Huck Finn sounds like
someone dying:
shuddering moans and guttural
coughing
as a night of
unimpeded indulgence
shows its unpleasant
consequences.
Grendel stumbles to the
sink, her mascara smudging:
she laughs at how she
needs some water.
I know she’ll wake up with microphones in
her head,
amplifying the smallest noise
into cacophony
But she feels she’s really connected
with people tonight.
I shouldn’t complain; I suppose I connected
with John Lennon tonight
while I danced alone in
the kitchen
to
Katie Mast
Colors of a Burn
Girls with gifts in
Hands on fire,
lit with a crawling
blue flame.
Hottest, darkest
Dangerous.
Heated hands up and out
to the sky in
sacrifice,
Flaming as glow worms
in the dim twilight.
Darker, deeper
Colder.
A spritz of spray,
strike of red-headed
match and sizzle of yellow
flame;
the sun captured on a
stick.
Hotter, lighter
Risk.
Rest in peace with a whoosh
and wave,
hands and skin still
supple.
Still glowing, white flame;
the moon embodied.
Cleansed, softened.
Saved.
Tabitha Rowe
Love’s Landscape
“Sagittarius, laid back and understanding”
but also looking to be
saved.
From lost love, from
found love, fearing to be lost soon.
Three walls of black stone told
me what the heavens
say of me and agree with the stars
as they chafe my mind
against itself.
A mummery of scent. A museum of scent:
is like
the sound of a flute
played not by lips but by wind.
The landscape is flat but still the
melancholy grows steeper.
Tabitha Rowe
Quest
I can feel blood slow
as it works its way
through my arms
and hands.
If I leave them still
they sleep and tingle.
Life seems to slow now.
My body and mind slowly separate.
I look on my body with new awe.
The soul floats away, somewhere above the
trees.
It seems so strange to move this way.
I laugh. How did I move that hand?
I look back at myself as an object of
meditation,
every line, wrinkle and
hair.
As I approach the forest
the wind moves.
The trees talk in loud whispers,
wondering what this creature
is
that dares to come among
them.
In the darkness, messengers of Manito
pop their long necks
from the water
to look upon this
strange starving creature.
Four times the water splashes.
I am accepted.
I ask them “if it pleases you
Let me stay in your presence.
I ask you now for wisdom.”
Silence.
Paul Horst
Brothers
Meandering home after dark,
we see through the
bare trees
a red light, blinking
like a bloodshot eye.
“What if they learned how
to brainwash you with
lights on towers?” I ask.
Ben, the oldest, laughs.
He says it’s ridiculous;
a brainwash is more
sinister
and medieval than that.
“What’s a brainwash?”
Little Chris wants to know:
“In dungeons, they lock you up
and drip water on your
face for hours . . .”
“Do they use soap?”
Poor Chris.
“ . . . no,” Ben says,
“sometimes they
shock you with cut wires
or pull you between
two horses.”
Chris starts to whimper.
The call of some nightbird
pierces like a subterranean
scream.
“Let’s go.”
We head toward the houselights.
“I wonder,” I say, “if mom and dad
are aliens who raise us
for meat?”
A whispered sidelong “shut up,”
and off home.
Paul Horst
On herons and bubbles
Bubble islands surround two twiggy legs
of a blue heron I've
not seen before. Could it be
that the arrival of a
blue heron marks
a turning point for
the
Countless unnatural bubbles stream past,
touching the heron’s skin,
bursting upon contact.
The heron steps out of the bubble patch into
clear water. The bubbles
return,
harassing the heron’s ability
to locate prey.
What brought you here to this river of all
rivers? Why look upon
spotted water?
Do you, like me, ever take your wing and
spread the bubbles away,
out of your vision?
It's like at the bakery when I wash dishes
and the soap
suds obstruct my vision
– the awaiting blade – hidden by
puffy clouds of bubbles.
A friend of mine once saw a heron trip, come
splashing
down into the water.
Have you ever tripped
because of the bubbles?
Bashed your head on a rock?
The bubbles at the bakery are natural, born
of chemical
free dish soap. But what
of the bubbles
at your feet? Do they
clog your feathers,
corrupt your ability to
fly?
To live?
joel fath
may 2004
Eavesdropping Poet; A Lesson in Active
Classroom Listening
Upon sour barkdust
nutrients
are placed the seeds of
new trees.
To ramble without our guided maps
is to put aside those
graduation caps.
Silence's sweet saturated song
stimulates soft sighing,
almost sung.
She pirate in the corner,
knew her as Christina
the former.
Give the bears their own stanza,
allow them space to hunt
their manna.
The pretty naturey
thing
upon which the
nightingale sings.
Pick a flower before throwing it away
like the boy with
flailing branch mows down God's display.
While cooper's hawks make love in the elm
tree
squirrels roast nuts and
nibble on brie.
joel fath
may 2004
Prodigal
From my breakfast window I saw a truck
hauling a lone two-by-four
on its bed
to a construction
site. Usually the trucks bring
culvert sections, pipes,
grates, things to be,
and fulfill their true
excremental purpose
when the foremen’s
mistakes get hauled off
to be burned,
quarantined, or scalded for
recycling. Exiting the
area, the dumptruck tires churn
the pavement into mud
under wasteful
burdens: i-beams protrude like obscene cowlicks
and hundreds of
two-by-fours piled
like the excesses of
God’s original
earth-creature, dual-gendered,
consistently
imperfect, and discarded
after every attempt
at a sixth day.
The insidious, bewildering extra rib,
amazing waste produced in
throes
of nascency,
as if that was the point. With its only
wooden cargo lashed down
three times
the flatbed slowed to a
lurch
along the three blocks of
dirty pavement, turning
gingerly toward the site
as if considering the
wreckage of the entire
intersection to make sense of
the delivery. The final board,
undeniable superlative
slouching toward the addicted
foremen, another sixteen
footer to replace
yesterday’s that was cut by
mistake into uneven
halves and driven off the
lot in late afternoon, refuse
unwilling of an
outcome.
That morning I thought of new meanings for
the word ‘prodigal:’
dogged, scarred, cursed.
Tristan King
In the Way of the Tornado
You had withdrawal pain again
so we didn’t run down
to the cellar, but I was restless too
and cracked a mason jar
against the stone
with my foot. The
tallow dripped
like eggs from a split
fish,
an apology on the
dusty cement.
When I wiped it up the thick
puddle felt textureless, matching
my core temperature.
“It’s symbiotic,”
you said to me from
behind your palm,
“and it holds on.”
Only below a funnel of debris does that kind
of survival make
sense: imagine the fat
exchanging its retained,
surprising heat
for my double-helix in
shared electrical impulses.
The tallow spread down my hand
like another finger,
neither relentless nor
passive,
only pointing itself
thinner.
The sirens above us and the nerves firing in
your legs
and arms overturned the
clean days into
two years’ of
persistent, begging migraines.
You and I cornered our stories underground,
squatted
by the southwestern
shelves, admitting
the silly panic, the
mess of
awkward solemnity—
to be mutually guided,
or sub-chaotic, or regardless.
Tristan King
Dark Man Blues
Who is the dark man walking in the woods
along the path,
beside us, not with us?
The first in line now I feel the steps
of all the others,
their weight and uncertainty and trust
through the hands on my
shoulders. I am learning what
the catalpa knows, the
seedy cousin of the one outside
my childhood window
with its rattly long pods like rations
for the trip to the
next life. I know how the tulip poplar
met the black cherry, how
they agreed to mingle their roots
and live one life
together, how year upon year they leaned apart,
awkward and alive. All
that was obscured is now open,
said the child. Below
the dam the long heron, the emblem,
the selfish messenger,
stalks his late dinner in the shallows.
In the dry marsh last year’s twisted
arrangements
remain in place, and every
small creature waits for news.
The burning cities are still far away.
Rivers have vanished
suddenly, but not our
rivers. Even in spring dusk comes early
in these woods, and
yet the true dark never arrives.
Somehow Jupiter finds its way through the
clouds,
high and
sharp as the bells striking a quarter past.
Back at the dam all the water is still
willing to go down.
Jeff Gundy
Signature, or Jonathan Edwards and Joe Walsh
Meet in the Electric Brew
Signing 200 times in a row will reveal the
weak spots in any soul.
What hope can there be for a middleaged guy who can't make
a decent G or a y that
doesn't get twisted this way or the other?
If I could please myself just once I'd know
what to aim for,
but over and over it's
just no, not quite. I'm no closer to getting
it right than the poor
little guy whose mother just shoved him away
for interrupting—he
stuck his thumb in his mouth and wandered off
to buy candy or drugs
or meet some stranger in the bathroom.
We're one step from falling through the
rotten cover of the world,
always, and that's why I
go on so earnestly about the grammar of trees
and earning the ending
and how to say I am sad and the world
is cold, my house is
poor and my car is old in a pleasingly adept
and grounded fashion,
e.g. The lovely women have cell phones
pressed to their ears, or All the roses
and whisky in the world
won't get me through
another night. No amount of coffee
will realign the nubbly ions of my blood, the world hurls itself
through space at least five
ways at once and not only is the past
gone, it’s way the hell
over there too. I can’t complain
but sometimes I still
do. Even my angry love of the seminal
rock musicians of the
last century is dissolving in apocalyptic
nostalgia as some jerked over
band sings “Norwegian Wood”
in French while the Suburbans and Odysseys and
fight it out on the
streets and the pale leaves of the sidewalk trees
signal wildly at the wild
wind, hey, did we sign up for this?
Jeff Gundy
A place where this sadness might fit
Remember how we saw the day lay its last breath
across the body of the
dunes, how the sky unfolded
its dark-limbs over the
slopes. We trudged searching
through the bone-white
dust, but all we found by nightfall
were sparse stands of
yucca and a hollow where wind carved
through, needling our eyes
with sand, shaking the tent cloth
like a rabbit in a
coyote’s jaws while we dragged it
still flailing to the
ground, rooted it with metal, nylon
slapping like a trapped
bird. When the stakes were in,
we lifted our heads to
the moon and howled,
sky-space filling our rib-cages,
rattling, longing, furious
at the licked-clean
plate of moon that had left us
still so famished.
I couldn’t tell if the sand ate our sound
like our footprints from
the dune-side, or if
it was the wind, dark,
snarling animal, that took
our voices into its
belly, seethed back, smashed the slender stem
of the yucca plants
into the ground, stormed in circles in its cage
of the horizon,
wailing that no sand-built hills could keep it.
No use worrying if the tent will hold on
this cold, shifting
belly of sand. No
use trying to sleep. But remember how
the moon made us each
glow like the center of its spotlight
as we pursed our lips,
hurled up shit-fuck blood-fur cries.
I remember you stirring beside me, the warm
wire
of your body as the night
sprawled, frigid, all directions.
Christina Cruz
Being with you
All day I root myself in the world. I
love every body
I come across to touch, its warm jointed
heaviness
(each fingertip
laid to my lips)—I crave the cold skin
of the soil path under
my feet, the creaking rough graze
of tree trunks husking
with spring under my cheek—
privately, I nestle into the
sturdy torsos
of chairs, savor the
sudden bright seep of my raw-skinned
knees, the pinking
swell—clasp my own two hands
together like lovers
discovering each other because
I know this is the world which houses you,
which somewhere bears
your warm weight like a feather
on its flank, your two
lined clay feet, and that somewhere
you too come alive with
feeling, the tongue of the intimate air
on your skin, sinews
sparking with sense inside the universe.
O my friend. I’m here with you. I’m in
a body too.
Christina Cruz
Found Art
On the road home, you pull off for jagged
scraps
of hubcap from the
gutter, flung from junkyard
cars as they spun down
the highway, coughing
in
tin can waits, mossed with rust, precisely straight-
sided—a metal basin
white-glossed in garage-sale
sun, bottom dark-eyed
with holes like the liver-
marked back of an old
woman—these things
you hoard, a harvest in
your basement—
you gather like a
bone-collector the separated
pieces of bodies, the old
used. You like the
femininity of the rugged and
round, trash that curves
in the organic buckles
of the over-pressed, the smooth
spine-bent bow of aluminum
platters, the spent strength
of clocks pointing
silently in circles, washers opening
in calm O’s,
dismembered gauges from dead machines
that measure nothing
anymore, their arrows that blink
behind glass like baffled
eyes.
Sister, in the cluttered silence of your
studio you sit
till the pieces sing to
you, raise in chord the clashes
of their crushedness. In this junk-heap each tragedy
took sound, made a
metal-scream, caved with unbearable
weight to become its
shock-made shape that no longer
holds what it’s supposed
to.
My dear, I’ve begun to bring you junk
myself. At the river
clean-up, I drag twisted metal
from the opaque body of
the water. The other day
I offered you a chipped plate, full moon
porcelain
webbed with hair-thin
cracks. It’s not just that you
teach my eyes to find
broken things like treasures—
it’s that in the
basement, you reassemble something
I’ve seen before, something roadside-lost,
something
waiting in the gravel—you
find the exquisite way
the curves of old
serving spoons nestle into the waists
of warped counter-tops
pocked with cup-stains,
the precarious balance
of spheres, of negative space.
Christina Cruz
I used to hate my mother
That was years, the same every
day.
My one wish, not to be
chucked back into childhood again.
Some kinds of love leave only
wreckage.
Would I ever be so brave as to
announce
how I hated her?
I’m not nine anymore, wearing
my blue and white striped sweater,
glasses
that shrank my face,
the birthday party
when she forgot to ice the cake.
What poetry demands is worse
than
nakedness, and less predictable,
so I will reach out my hand and
in this new trust
we can wallow
in the muck for hours.
Kristin
Buller
when
salmon do not migrate
Learn my secret name.
Not what I’ve studied but
my sustenance.
I am my own light. Say it and I’ll cry.
After assembling newsletters,
after homemade toast
and Amish jam served with our
words,
after unasked questions and handmade
rosaries
after the softness of your lips
brings me back to myself.
I am my own light. I have bruised
in collisions, stretched my skin
trying to save
what needed to be lost. I’ve done it all
to be known as myself. With secrets.
I have principles. I will listen
about the migration of salmon
in rivers and your voice.
I have nothing to keep me safe--
no flawless promise, no waiting
net, no armor.
I will not shout.
You are standing here in
the navy presence of memory, and I
stretch towards you. Inside my skin,
loving this space
my body believes in.
Kristin
Buller
love is not a feeling
Philosophy Gym is at
Woodlawn and 55th and
her purple heart
tries not to fall apart
as she assembles
radioactive waste along the
northside curb right before Jimmie’s.
she couldn’t tell anyone
about the child and the gift
that had been slipped into
her pocket, how that had
changed everything.
“How do I say goodbye to what
we’ve had?” she shudders and
in a few moments someone
will throw a potato at her
from a passing dodge ram and
she’ll strut after them
and forget about saying goodbye,
or what we had.
I’ve never been as lonely as
when I was with you and
the door to Philosophy Gym
slams shut on the
wasted world
at the corner of Woodlawn and 55th.
Kristin
Buller
Restraint and Patience
The
names of the dead are written on the walls.
Underneath
the words, “Occupation Kills.”
The
arabic script flows red on
white,
passing through two street blocks.
A
little girl draws a picture of a bomb exploding
on a home, in the margins she writes,
“Restraint
and patience are our weapons.”
Doug
says that compassion and respect for the other
are the true religion and if you live your faith they will
see it.
In
my bed, alone at night, I pray for my family,
and fall asleep to whistles from night trains in the
distance.
Bethany Blough
Some Things I Haven’t Been Able
to Tell You
Number One
I
haven’t been able to tell you
about my grandpa who died in 1958.
He
sailed on merchant ships to
He
sent my grandma pictures of the horses
and the European buildings that didn’t remind him of the
barns in
“I
am writing to you with love in the name of Jesus.”
I
found their letters in the attic this summer,
it’s the only time I’ve ever had the chance to hear his
voice.
I
haven’t been able to tell you
about my aunt who, 12 years ago, left my uncle
to live with her boyfriend in the trailer park across
town.
The
boyfriend was an old man from work.
They
met at LAW Transportation,
the trucking company where she had been for six months.
My
mom called her every morning and pleaded
for her to come to come.
She
finally came back that May, full of repentance,
and no one in my family has spoken of it since.
I
haven’t been able to tell you
about my cousin who drew a picture for his family’s
Christmas
Card each year.
The scene was always in black and white
except for a small red cardinal in a tree somewhere.
He
died on his motorcycle two summers ago in August.
His
funeral was on the hottest day that summer,
and through it all a cardinal sang in the treetops.
I
haven’t been able to tell you
that I hold family secrets and our tragedies
like treasures in the box of my past.
We
feign perfection and I’ve learned through the years
that this daily make believe is what begins to kill us.
I
promise you that everything I’ve ever known
will some day be ours.
Bethany Blough
Upon My Subsequent Arrest by the Poetry Police
By Alice Houston, who only seldom and
innocently pokes fun at literary convention
