the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 492, April 26,
2004
Cyril Morton Horne
(1887-1916)
“‘It shall be so, as you have said;
And,
with this gold, for the opprest
An
habitation I will build,
Where
they shall live in peace and rest.’”
—“The
Noble Fisherman” or “Robin Hood’s Preferment,” The Oxford Book of Ballads, Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed.
Not all
was well in the town. Dogs began barking about half-past broken clock. The
ambulance backed over the alleycat, causing citizens and altarboys all over
town to flee to church towers.
It was
enough, as they used to say, to bring out the water buckets to steam the
evening sun.
Still,
Harry was confident that everything would soon settle back to a steady state of
panic. He gazed out his bedroom window, listening to the row raised through the
valley, and wondered just what was going up there. Jupiter hung in the fangs of
a crescent moon, shimmering with crystalline spikes in the glass. He thought,
for a moment, if he could just take the planet down, put it in the palm of his
hand, he’d be able to walk the streets of the little burg without the merest
whisper of confinement.
But it
imprisonment, alas, was all he knew. The glass in the window, the great dome of
the sky, the screaming alley cat and ambulance. Something every night.
Something every day. Water boiled, people shrieked. Grass grew, neighbors took
a fright. They never noticed, not for a second, the way Jupiter got stuck in
the teeth of the moon, or the way the moon smiled once it swallowed the gentle
beast.
Harry
turned from the window and looked at his own dog, who stood from its place on
the bed and turned after its tail three times and snuggled back into the
sheets. A panther crept down from the ceiling fan and slid onto the nightstand.
Harry was frightened for a moment, thinking that the cat might take his wife as
the moon took Jupiter. But the panther disappeared into the open closet with a
velvet hush.
He lie
back down to his pillow, glad the panther had left its place on the fan, having
made him dizzy all these nights. But now, he thought as he watched the blades
feather the light from the streetlamp, I have to watch myself when I get my tie
in the morning.
It was
going to be a tough night. Cats and ambulances, dogs turning on his bed, and a
large cat in the closet. Soon, it may settle into something normal. Half-quiet.
A steady state of panic and alarm. But not tonight. He closed his eyes and
imagined that little star of Jupiter glowing in his palm, leading safely
through the streets of his town. Everything was tough, he thought. Everything
but this.
By
Philip Miller
Before the end, the beginning:
birds come back to life and sing
as if every morning were another spring
Before the beginning is the end:
summer's wilderness about to bestow
long fingers of shadow;
fat pink peonies lose their blooms
like lost ostrich feathers
blown by inclement weathers
from the hats of fine ladies
at the turn of the last century.
Now you turn to me
with a look between cool and warm,
and with no hat upon your head
you remind me of something I said
(I can't remember when
though of course you can):
somewhere a late bird sings
a last note. Shadows grow and grow
before we turn to go.
The Riverfront Reading Series, The
Writers Place, 3607 Pennsylvania, 816-560-1796
Tuesday, April 27, 8 p.m.:
Dan Jaffe and Greg Richter: Poetry and Jazz
Dan Jaffe, from Miami, FL, former Kansas City
Poet, and Greg Richter, Kansas City Jazzman (Piano and Vibes) will present work
from their forthcoming CD.
Friday, April 30, 8 p.m.
Richard Burgin , novelist and editor of Boulevard
Magazine and the 2002 and 2003 fiction award winners of Boulevard 's Emerging Writers
Contest, Maija Rhee Devine and Phyllis Galley Westover.
send
short poems, short thoughts, fictions, or nonfictions to the poetrysheet, where whimsy, subversion, and dreaming of celestial
bodies are our highest values
submit/identity/www.patrickdobson.com/red hot
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1132 e. 65th st., kansas city, mo, 64131, 816-333-7303.
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