From asphaug@lpl.arizona.eduSat Apr 8 11:29:53 1995 Date: Wed, 21 Sep 94 23:16:26 MST From: Erik Asphaug x2773 To: pauls@cic.net Subject: srj10.tex for /pub/Poetry/Sand.River.Journal %-------CUT HERE--------------------------------------------------- % % (This and related files are now archived at the public site % etext.archive.umich.edu (anonymous ftp) in the directory % /pub/Poetry/Sand.River.Journal, courtesy Paul Southworth.) % % This is the TeXfile for Sand River Journal. While you can read % the poems easily enough in this file, the formatted journal can % be obtained by (1) saving it (as srj.tex), (2) removing the header, % and (3) compiling the dvi file (srj.dvi): % tex srj.tex % % To look at the dvi file: % preview srj.dvi % or xdvi srj.dvi % To prepare the postscript file (srj.ps) % dvips srj.dvi % To look at the postscript file: % ghostview srj.ps % To send it to the printer (and leave on coffee % tables wherever you may roam): % lpr -Pps srj.ps % % These are standard on many unix-based systems; your universe is bound % to differ. % \raggedbottom \baselineskip=13pt \font\journal=punksl20 scaled 2000 \font\byline=ccmi10 \font\lsl=cmsl8 \font\smtit=cmr9 \font\tit=cmdunh10 scaled \magstep2 \font\ref=cmitt10 scaled 1200 \font\astro=astrosym \font\editorial=cmr6 \moveright -1.8in \vbox{% \centerline{\journal Sand River Journal} \vskip 0.9truein {\editorial \baselineskip=0pt \narrower\narrower\narrower\narrower\narrower Sand River Journal is a collection of poems gathered from the newsgroup rec.arts.poems. Current and archive issues may be retrieved by anonymous ftp from etext.archive.umich.edu in /pub/Poetry. This archive includes PostScript versions of the formatted journal, which can be printed on many standard laser printers. \medskip Free transmission of this document (electronic or otherwise) is permitted, but only in its entire and unaltered form. Poems appear by authors' permission and constitute copyrighted material. Authors may be contacted directly at their email addresses, which are provided. One purpose of this journal is to make poetry from r.a.p available to the outside world; please share hardcopy with those unable to access the net, at reading rooms, caf\'es, and other venues. \medskip The primary selection process is blind to authorship, but I can make no claim that the journal is comprehensive or objective. The volume posted to r.a.p. now exceeds my capacity to keep current, and dozens of poems per week are lost to me. Furthermore, the standards for selection, however uniformly applied, reflect my own perception of our craft. Alert me to glaring omissions and biases. Send comments, suggestions and finished contributions (please reference SRJ) to asphaug@lpl.arizona.edu. Enjoy! \medskip \hskip 1.8in Erik Asphaug, Editor \baselineskip=13pt} \vskip 0.8truein \centerline{\ref Issue 10, June 1994} \medskip \medskip \centerline{\ref Summer Solstice} \bigskip \bigskip \bigskip \bigskip \centerline{\astro d \hskip 0.2in u \hskip 0.2in n } \medskip} \bigskip \def\title#1{\vskip 0.8in\bigskip\bigbreak\centerline{\hskip -3.5in {\tit #1}}\bigskip\nobreak} \def\smtitle#1{\vskip -0.15in\centerline{\hskip -3.5in {\smtit #1}}\bigskip\nobreak} \def\author#1#2{\nobreak\medskip\line{\hskip 1.5truein\hbox{\sl #1\/}\hfill}% \line{\hskip 1.5truein\hbox{\lsl #2}\hfill}\goodbreak} \hoffset=1.6in \obeylines \title{Winter} I raise my hands to the white hush-kiss \smallskip of the snow. It's light as parachutes, \smallskip cold as river water. Downhill \smallskip a rabbit crashes, tumbles through heavy juniper \smallskip looking for safe haven. She sees a falcon \smallskip or the falcon sees her; both are lost to me \smallskip in the early thin sun. \author{Karen Krebser}{ krebser@erg.sri.com} \title{Spring} Dead feather skeletons Bud cautious yellow-green, rust, The dove wails welcome. \author{David Goldberger}{ goldberg@riker.neoucom.edu} \title{Those are the days} Those were the days and my heart belongs to my mamma \bigskip but today I need something that I can't understand \bigskip those are the days we walk together to our Odysseia. \author{Jari Suuronen}{ 4jari@adpser2.gsf.fi} \title{ecstasy} you should not be watching me like that your gaze is a climbing rose --- twining you and me in fragrance and thorns \medskip the iceland poppies are shedding their green cloaks like timid novitiates shyly flirting with the dawn-sun \medskip the air is like sangria --- each flower bleeds among the swords of grass singing chords of music \medskip do not weep over the scent of jasmine fresh crushed rosemarys --- hold me and heal the stigmata of my hands \author{zita maria evensen}{ bu016@kanga.ins.cwru.edu} \title{Don Quixote} he wandered the dark shrouded streets murmuring memories that were never his own \medskip nights spent sifting through the garbage of the world only seeking out the odd photograph or tattered letters abandoned to the past \medskip when the days came he'd meet sleep clinging to every line every time worn smile stolen in the night \medskip yet each word of separation would coil raging beneath his heavy lids as they fluttered into red then darkness \author{Jody Upshaw}{ jupshaw@hfm.com} \title{Lake View} The wind walks the waters Rippling the sky into a mosaic \qquad\qquad of tiny blue tiles \medskip The breezy fingers \qquad\qquad caress the grasses Making them whisper \qquad\qquad hissy secrets \author{William C. Burns, Jr.}{ burnswcb@gvltec.gvltec.edu} \title{In the Armenian Theater Company} I. \medskip 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. \medskip \medskip II. \medskip 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, \qquad\qquad 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." \author{Ronald Bloom}{ rbloom@netcom.com} \title{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. \author{zazu pitts}{ daemon@anon.penet.fi} \title{Joanna, on Parting} She lives not closer than the sun \qquad across whose tarnished Realm sharp-fangled moment fears to run \qquad and love, to overwhelm --- \medskip she changes faster than the Sky \qquad beneath whose pallid arch delirious fury gushes by \qquad and blazing footprints parch --- \medskip she speaks like springtime nightingale \qquad resplendent and estranged in passion strong, in lifetime frail, \qquad and in deceit avenged --- \medskip An apparition come and gone, A rainbow in the desert Sun. \author{Ilya Shambat}{ ibs4s@uva.pcmail.virginia.edu} \title{Lilies} once upon a cliff in lily scented air I found the face of god \medskip at eight, the universe was green and juicy sweet \medskip I threw my body in rapture into a heaven \medskip of crunch and scent flawless communion of yellow and pink \medskip my falling unbound in me the glimmer of a ravishing joy \medskip which being born in me that day has never died \author{Judy Stanley}{ powell@ingres.com} \title{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 att\'enue sa d\'etente profonde \medskip \medskip 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 \author{E. Russell Smith}{ ab297@freenet.carleton.ca} \title{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. \medskip 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. \medskip 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. \author{Tim Love}{ tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk} \title{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. \author{Larry Whatley}{ larryw@lsid.hp.com} \title{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 \medskip 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. \medskip 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. \author{Kate Armstrong}{ kmarmstr@uoguelph.ca} \title{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. \medskip 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. \medskip 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. \author{Ralph Cherubini}{ ralph@bga.com} \title{Recitation Day} I have never seen anything clean manhatten's twilight like this stormy apocalypse of rain \medskip through the coolness and blur of the water-lens window a light green odor of leaves \medskip while I memorize and recite and recite in rainy gusts of voice the poetry of Robert Lowell \author{Kelly Anne Berkell}{ kab29@columbia.edu} \title{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? \medskip 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. \medskip 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. \medskip 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. \author{Kenneth Wolman}{ woldoc@woldoc.jvnc.net} \title{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 \quad 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 \author{Jamie Jamison}{ copijmj@mvs.oac.ucla.edu} \title{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. \medskip but the cars, they are turning their wheels towards me i know, i saw them do that, the parked unoccupied ones. \medskip 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. \medskip nothing is as it seemed. there is more to reality than the old reality. \medskip 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. \medskip barreling down the metallic highway i am the shining i am the whirling i am the connected one. \author{Marek Lugowski}{ marek@mcs.com} \title{mourning nixon} so we oh god we oh oh godded our way through the night. twice. \medskip then he said {\it i always wanted to be a gigolo. you know. make women happy then go away. though it never seems to work out that way.} \medskip after that the flags were at half-mast. it happened weeks after the president's death. \author{JJHemphill}{ jjh54139@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu} \title{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. \medskip \medskip 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. \medskip \medskip 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. \medskip \medskip 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. \medskip \medskip 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. \medskip \medskip Today I am wholly breathing this love and it fills my lungs like my first taste of chocolate. \author{ivan garcia}{ stersrch@leland.stanford.edu} \title{come tuesday} looking opening up at your star face \smallskip shine as water reflecting my imagination \smallskip wash me into a breaking heartache \medskip \medskip i knew knew knew you were here \author{gena ram}{ ram@bms.com} \title{sand cranes} sand cranes in flight with fingers of hard teak touch \qquad light like a steely gentle brush from a butterfly's wing on white sewn skin riding a taut high wire like an undecided marionnette \medskip \medskip 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 \quad no one \quad no one point \qquad point sideout \author{zita maria evensen}{ bu016@kanga.ins.cwru.edu} \title{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 \medskip our favorite game \medskip 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 \medskip 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 \author{Jody Upshaw}{ jupshaw@hfm.com} \title{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. \author{zazu pitts}{ daemon@anon.penet.fi} \title{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 \author{Judy Powell}{ powell@ingres.com} \title{On Paper} shouldn't it be \medskip that that which can't be said remains most beautiful? \medskip dreams shouldn't all be remembered. \medskip what we remember, \qquad the abstraction that sifts through time, \medskip \qquad waves that chop against the shore now and then \qquad the wind gets rough, \medskip what we remember gets locked, \medskip distilled and distinct, put down on paper. \author{Erik Asphaug}{ asphaug@lpl.arizona.edu} \title{Full Jug} Summer trembles in a breeze \qquad\qquad like Li Po stooping for a hand of white grapes \qquad\qquad and these grapes are white rooms of summertime \qquad\qquad jiggling in the eye. \medskip \qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad Here is a clue to antelope eyes and to my hands anchored to this yoke which is my collarbone laid brittle and bare. \medskip \qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad And I see \qquad\qquad a man to his thighs in the current \qquad\qquad scooped at and torn as a secret. \medskip \qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad This fruit is wine and never stagnant, it tumbles into gorges like blown silk pitched into summer and round. \medskip \author{mike finley}{ mfinley@skypoint.com} \title{a common language} every beginning contains its end lacking common language we barter w/ words a form of exchange \medskip 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 \medskip \& I on the other hand \author{Jamie Jamison}{ copijmj@mvs.oac.ucla.edu} \vfill\eject \bye