. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A N D R I V E R J O U R N A L - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sand River Journal is a collection of poems gathered from the newsgroup rec.arts.poems; it is posted monthly in ascii and TeX formats to r.a.p. and related newsgroups. Current and archive issues may be retrieved by anonymous ftp at the site etext.archive.umich.edu in the directory /pub/Poetry. This archive includes PostScript versions of the formatted journal, which is publication quality and can be printed on most laser printers. Poems appear by authors' permission and constitute copyrighted material. Free transmission of this document (electronic or otherwise) is permitted only in its entire and unaltered form; to inquire about individual poems contact the authors by their email addresses. I take no responsibility for the fate of this document, and claim ownership only to any poems I have authored. Send comments and finished contributions (please reference SRJ) to asphaug@lpl.arizona.edu. Enjoy! Erik Asphaug, Editor _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Issue 10 - Summer Solstice 1994 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ------ Winter ------ I raise my hands to the white hush-kiss of the snow. It's light as parachutes, cold as river water. Downhill a rabbit crashes, tumbles through heavy juniper looking for safe haven. She sees a falcon or the falcon sees her; both are lost to me in the early thin sun. Karen Krebser krebser@erg.sri.com ------ Spring ------ Dead feather skeletons Bud cautious yellow-green, rust, The dove wails welcome. David Goldberger goldberg@riker.neoucom.edu ------- ecstasy ------- you should not be watching me like that your gaze is a climbing rose - twining you and me in fragrance and thorns the iceland poppies are shedding their green cloaks like timid novitiates shyly flirting with the dawn-sun the air is like sangria - each flower bleeds among the swords of grass singing chords of music do not weep over the scent of jasmine fresh crushed rosemarys - hold me and heal the stigmata of my hands zita maria evensen bu016@kanga.ins.cwru.edu ----------- Don Quixote ----------- he wandered the dark shrouded streets murmuring memories that were never his own nights spent sifting through the garbage of the world only seeking out the odd photograph or tattered letters abandoned to the past when the days came he'd meet sleep clinging to every line every time worn smile stolen in the night yet each word of separation would coil raging beneath his heavy lids as they fluttered into red then darkness Jody Upshaw jupshaw@hfm.com --------- she bends --------- she bends to kiss me. her hair falls on my face like a warm breeze and shuts out the world like a fragrant summer night. zazu daemon@anon.penet.fi --------- Lake View --------- The wind walks the waters Rippling the sky into a mosaic of tiny blue tiles The breezy fingers caress the grasses Making them whisper hissy secrets William C. Burns, Jr. burnswcb@gvltec.gvltec.edu ------------------------------- In the Armenian Theater Company ------------------------------- I. A desultory summer: I had nothing left to do. I offered to do the lights. Why? Admiration of her morroccan pantaloons? Nonsense! the answer is simple: Loneliness! I spent an evening at an old gentleman's house: he served us tea from ornate pitcher in the boggy dark a citrus-sweet yard, we built sets... turkish doorways and a dais. II. I didn't do the lights. I said, "I am sorry: it is too much for a neophyte" She said, "we are all neophytes here" I said, "Yes, but it is your play, and besides, we only just met... in a cafe" She said, "I understand. I will do the lights myself!" However, she made me spinach pie after a Saturday hike. And told me, two hours too late: "There is no possibility, Ron, of romance." Ronald Bloom rbloom@netcom.com ------------------ Joanna, on Parting ------------------ She lives not closer than the sun across whose tarnished Realm sharp-fangled moment fears to run and love, to overwhelm - she changes faster than the Sky beneath whose pallid arch delirious fury gushes by and blazing footprints parch - she speaks like springtime nightingale resplendent and estranged in passion strong, in lifetime frail, and in deceit avenged - An apparition come and gone, A rainbow in the desert Sun. Ilya Shambat ibs4s@uva.pcmail.virginia.edu ------ Lilies ------ once upon a cliff in lily scented air I found the face of god at eight, the universe was green and juicy sweet I threw my body in rapture into a heaven of crunch and scent flawless communion of yellow and pink my falling unbound in me the glimmer of a ravishing joy which being born in me that day has never died Judy Stanley powell@ingres.com ----------------- Isabelle Brasseur ----------------- l'ombre blanc de son p`ere danse dans ce requiem elle tombe du lancement sur une vive ar`ete tout en gravant un arc qui atte'nue sa de'tente profonde the white shadow of her father dances in this requiem she drops from the toss on a sharp edge scribing an arc that eases her deep recoil E. Russell Smith ab297@freenet.carleton.ca -------------- Recitation Day -------------- I have never seen anything clean manhatten's twilight like this stormy apocalypse of rain through the coolness and blur of the water-lens window a light green odor of leaves while I memorize and recite and recite in rainy gusts of voice the poetry of Robert Lowell Kelly Anne Berkell kab29@columbia.edu ----------- Connections ----------- That was no miracle, no mere coincidence, my friend--you with the raised eyebrows-- when you answered the telephone and knew before a word was spoken; who thinks to put a letter in the box, to raise the flag, and one is there. The mind will muse when no one watches. Like Phaedo, we make our case with other selves and turn the page before they answer--a case that smiles with teeth only when it is caught. You will swear like a don you were not there, or like a witness who was and saw nothing, but they will out as surely as a bell sounds or a parallel thought is spoken-- as surely as dreams are found by sunrise. Larry Whatley larryw@lsid.hp.com ----------------- Pastoral Escapade ----------------- You mutilate language to see how it works, if it can still escape your maze. You boil it down to poetry, the bones into glue. The only proof's a broken-down confession; shelter for the night. To say that trees are silent is to say that the wind whispered to you with her eyes. If it were love, she'd hide the broken crockery. Lost for words, the sky seeps through cracks in glued porcelain, or more simply, dead, brittle elm branches that would love to sway in storms just one more time but as daylight drains away through the swirling moonhole they know it's too late. What's left is just an island; were it a lakeside, it wouldn't curve away so. A swig of blue and suddenly things are back the way they were before - abandoned haywains of desire, a distant cockerel, then rain delaying dawn - but part of the night remains: the black, wrinkles; the brown, blood; the pink, whatever you like - after all, you paid. Its flowers will hunt you down. Tim Love tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk ----- Bears ----- She found finally that she loved him but he was too expensive as bears usually are to keep around her heart he had rough ways which injured and his claw-marks on her life damaged and wounded. There is this about bears a near-sighted obliviousness so large they simply do not notice what is in their way and they have no familial feeling the males and no protectiveness neither and he went through her life like the ravager he was in one end tearing through the other. She visited a zoo years later she recognized that look and squeezed the soft hand of the man she had chosen and felt sorrowful anger towards the large brown form alone in the passing cage. Ralph Cherubini ralph@bga.com ------------------ Those are the days ------------------ Those where the days and my heart belongs to my mamma but today I need something that I can't understand those are the days we walk together to our Odysseia. Jari Suuronen 4jari@adpser2.gsf.fi ------------------ The Fairytale Game ------------------ a thimble and a hatpin were all she'd given in a trembling whisper two common objects to act as fodder for the fairytale our favorite game closing eyes i saw the forest the daughter, the darkman and the dying father felt the cool thimble filled by healing water carried down the high mountain's side i felt that poison prick biting into skin heard the beast howl from the shadowed trees heard her breathing under me and let the story flow Jody Upshaw jupshaw@hfm.com --------- beginning --------- I don't want to think or sing tonight, I don't want to do anything but place your face into my hands like a gift I could stare at for hours. I want to slip you into my fearless arms and tell you that I love you until I run out of breath. As background clocks whir loudly in this aging night, I want to brush your hair softly and study your pupils, wet in their overwhelming honesty and fuller than the dark we sit in. I want to fingertip your sentient lips and feel the start of a sigh deep in my belly. I want to be as old as I am right now, embodying what your eyes say, and believing with unflinching certainty that the soul exists. And though it's nearly summer with its towel of heat blanketing us. Holding you as our skin forms a human seam is as right as the smell of the air before it rains, pristine and almost intoxicating. Let me hear your voice speak one more time before we sleep, for the motion of air climbing your langorous neck rings like a fragile chorus, while seductive and exotic as the shape of your eyes. You have struck me like a thunderbolt, saturated me with life brimming and bathed me in the delicate knowledge that petals know when they eat the morning dew. Today I am wholly breathing this love and it fills my lungs like my first taste of chocolate. ivan garcia stersrch@leland.stanford.edu ----------------------------------------- Albumen and the Myth of the Walking Women ----------------------------------------- Your legs stretched so far that you recalled the Barberini nude locked up as you were in that Noho garret in '65 with the torturous beeping noises and mysteriously contracting lenses Her breast were a pert template for rayon make-overs in steel as you dropped her hard as cardboard outside the Mary Boone praying that death would not skulk in the guise of a yellow taxi. Now she stumbles in straw filled heels again past the Royal Bank on Spadina with huge Chinese characters -a black profile with no armholes seething with the remembrance of ogling stares. Kate Armstrong kmarmstr@uoguelph.ca ------------------------------------ Mark Antony, from Home, to Cleopatra ------------------------------------ Octavia came to me this morning bearing fruit from the orchards: sweet pears and persimmons, figs thick with the scent of earth --for our trees and vines are overflowing now-- and sat near me while I ate, her look hard to divine. Could she know that even now you are in the fruit, that the taste of figs is the taste of your tongue crossing mine by night, long ago but remembered, at dawn, that the scent of orchards swept by the wind off the Tiber before the morning rain is your sweet musk, and that I cleave to this orchard, to this house, even to Octavia, because all things are you and you are in all things? I have grown old, my love, sitting here by my wife's orchards, sending my dreams outward toward you over the sea. You would not know me now. I am going gray and too often I feel the morning mist seep into my muscles. The figs revolt my stomach, the persimmons erupt my bowels, but I cannot tell Octavia. I drink too much. I fear that if I cross the seas again as you have bid me a hundred times, come to you again, you will see me and cry out to think I am a ghost, Julius Caesar, returned. I could not endure that. We are draped in our ghosts, love, we wear them like tatty gowns. When they blow aside, lifted by the winds that drive us, we are exposed, our bared private flesh, held out to aging and the scorn we have engendered in two worlds at once. We are damaged goods, love: tired rags that have lost their shape and color, hanging on dressmaker's forms in separate rooms. We have learned everything except how to dress our lives. Octavia, Caesar, a hundred camp followers, hang from us in disarray. Their smells overwhelm even the redolence of this orchard, even the memory of your scent. You are the fruit, at last, my love. Musk and roses, the taste of persimmons on your tongue, your sweetened breath against my ear in your cry of passion released. That first night long ago, on the barge, then there was no Caesar, no Octavia, no bought and paid for love, only the motion of the Nile and the motion of your hips as you drank me into you. In the morning we stood on the deck and you laughed at the pair of hippos copulating on the riverbank. "They are vile to everyone but themselves," you said, and held my arm. And so they were, and so we are become. I will come to you again, with this letter, on the next tide, and let the river itself beware. Kenneth Wolman woldoc@woldoc.jvnc.net ------------ come tuesday ------------ looking opening up at your star face shine as water reflecting my imagination wash me into a breaking heartache i knew knew knew you were here gena ram ram@bms.com ----------- sand cranes ----------- sand cranes in flight with fingers of hard teak touch light like a steely gentle brush from a butterfly's wing on white sewn skin riding a taut high wire like an undecided marionnette unforgiving gray grains flying under take-off as sun burns rivers of sweat from sand-weathered skin sand cranes with butterfly kisses and wingtips sending bullets through burning summer no one no one no one point point sideout zita maria evensen bu016@kanga.ins.cwru.edu -------- homesick -------- home is where the heart is is where you can't go back to. is when it is august & the days stretch like shadows or cats & fold in by degrees too small to measure out. before you realize it, (eyes closed, cup to lips,) twilight pours into night & you are racing thru backstreets as the crow flies the smell of ocean breeze & seaweed fly away home Jamie Jamison copijmj@mvs.oac.ucla.edu -------- On Paper -------- shouldn't it be that that which can't be said remains most beautiful? dreams shouldn't all be remembered. what we remember, the abstraction that sifts through time, waves that chop against the shore now and then the wind gets rough, what we remember gets locked, distilled and distinct, put down on paper. Erik Asphaug asphaug@lpl.arizona.edu -------- Full Jug -------- Summer trembles in a breeze like Li Po stooping for a hand of white grapes and these grapes are white rooms of summertime jiggling in the eye. Here is a clue to antelope eyes and to my hands anchored to this yoke which is my collarbone laid brittle and bare. And I see a man to his thighs in the current scooped at and torn as a secret. This fruit is wine and never stagnant, it tumbles into gorges like blown silk pitched into summer and round. mike finley mfinley@skypoint.com ------ beauty ------ there are moments which make them stop speechless and opened reminded of something long hidden something supple and green beyond hill or horizon beyond reward or retribution something lost in frenzied avarice or desperation something so lithe and yielding so whirling, trembling, born of bliss lines and light of unfathomable joy colors which enfold and resurrect their deadened souls and make them weep Judy Powell powell@ingres.com ---------- our bodies ---------- our bodies, backs arched, are like the petals of a flower. a humming bird rises burning brighter and brighter. the petals wilt leaving behind the sweet smell of decay. zazu daemon@anon.penet.fi ---------------- metallic highway ---------------- barreling down the metallic highway streaking a smear of moods and hours lithium patient, yes, lithium patient, please please don't wander off too far. but the cars, they are turning their wheels towards me i know, i saw them do that, the parked unoccupied ones. and the people, they are sending thoughts to me, and they're reading mine, i know, i can tell from their gestures and still backs. nothing is as it seemed. there is more to reality than the old reality. this is a little like watching tv with the color knob turned up. this is a little like putting roses in stainless steel vases. this is like no trip i have ever done. barreling down the metallic highway i am the shining i am the whirling i am the connected one. Marek Lugowski marek@mcs.com ----------------- a common language ----------------- every beginning contains it's end lacking common language we barter w/ words a form of exchange he is still able to believe in a sense of progression of intelligent/rational decisions which lead to improved opportunities like manifest destiny stretching to some distant certain future & I on the other hand Jamie Jamison copijmj@mvs.oac.ucla.edu -------------- mourning nixon -------------- so we oh god we oh oh godded our way through the night. twice. then he said "i always wanted to be a gigolo. you know. make women happy then go away. though it never seems to work out that way." after that the flags were at half-mast. it happened weeks after the president's death. JJHemphill jjh54139@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu