Poetry – Page 11 – Numéro Cinq

Bitterness: Poem — William Hathaway

Mar 132010

Bitterness

For sure that sea is bitter in its seethe
bitterly cold between cold black rocks
below us and one of us remarks
the wind shivering these scrawny aspens
into so much panic feels bitter and raw
across bare faces and I can tell you
if you were to pluck and chew just any
of these leaves around us you’d find
just how much more bitterness lies
beneath the skin of so many things
you thought you knew and so yes it’s true
these words taste bitter that we
are us no more but cold as the black sea
that seethes so raw behind cold eyes
and across hidden hearts frozen faces
never bare except beneath remarks
about weather that taste to us
each apart as savorless as the wind
we chew with every bitter word
fluttering like this monotonous uproar
of bitter leaves whose only fear
trembles in words we dare not say.

—William Hathaway

See also “Bufflehead Dawn,” “Martin Points“

Author Interview with Adam Tavel in Poets’ Quarterly

Carpaccio’s Dog: Poems — Karen Mulhallen

Mar 122010

Okay, I am feeling a little OCD. But here is the second painting with Carpaccio’s dog. It’s in the gondola bottom right. This painting is called “Healing of a Madman.” It’s in the Galleria dell’Accademia. Notice the strange Venetian chimney pots. I find them disturbing. I think they are disturbing because Carpaccio seems to be drawing a parallel between the human figures and the chimney pots. Do we detect here a whiff of autism in a painter clearly more comfortable with dogs and chimney pots than people? (I suggest this knowing that it will set off a firestorm in the claustrophobic world of Venetian art criticism.) What about Carpaccio’s dog thing anyway?

Here are two Karen Mulhallen poems from her book of selected poems Acquainted With Absence. The form is the tanka.

Accompanied by
his little dog, Carpaccio
goes everywhere.

and so would I too:
Abroad with dog, heart’s desire.

Carpaccio’s little
dog is always on my mind,
or at least a world

where small beasts dwell. Desire is
mortal, love not quite fleeting.

— Karen Mulhallen

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“Bufflehead Dawn” a poem by William Hathaway

Mar 012010

William “Kit” Hathaway is an old friend dating from my early days in Saratoga Springs when he taught at Union College and lived in a lovely house on Regent Street with his second son, Nate, and his daughter, Suzanne, a redoubtable high school rower who would join Kit and Steve Stern and me for our Tuesday night liver-and-onions blow-outs at Shirley’s Diner. Kit has published several books. Look him up. He lives in Maine now. We share, among other things, a love for Dalmatians, although he claims I tried to kill his poor deaf dog Lucy one extremely cold and cruel winter night eons ago. Full disclosure: My current Dalmatian is named Lucy.

Bufflehead Dawn

Like so many skunk kits,
trooping one-two-three-four across
a broad golf course, the imperceptible
glide of buffleheads down the center
of this morning’s wrinkled cove
seemed to charm wavelets
only moving as a glimmer and firs
still as ghosts that darkly stand and stare
in mirrors into a full scene more
than merely scenery. But skunks
are skunks and ducks are not,
and to say God lurks in details does not
say God’s more parts than sum
or that seeming should be an end-all
of being, but merely that this mind
this morning once saw a line
of small black skunks waddle to and fro,
white tails flouncing side to side,
along a green, and a charm
like a gift is to see again
both buffleheads and skunks,
now and then, seize this dawn
in simple black and white.

William Hathaway

See also “Betrayal,” “The Poetry Career,” “Today.”

Solomon’s Judgement: Poem — Karen Mulhallen

Feb 082010

This is a poem by Karen Mulhallen whose book of selected poems Acquainted With Absence came out in 2009 (I selected the poems and wrote the introduction). Karen is an old friend, publisher of Descant, the venerable Toronto magazine, a Blake scholar and a poet (look her up) who also had a dog named Lucy once upon a time. Karen and I both come from southwestern Ontario. We both know the Halton Sand Hills and the definition of a turtleback. For years we’ve met for lunch at Southside Louie’s on College Street, a favourite haunt of my boys.

Solomon’s Judgement

Start, don’t arrive
Give, don’t receive
Sow, sow, never harvest
Burn, don’t be consumed.

To be impoverished, but not to cheat
To be disappointed, and again to trust
To be thirsty, yet not to drink
To live once,
and still die a hundred times.

Have faith, live in sin
Hurt, ask no forgiveness
Break, do not bend.
Frozen veins
the summer’s heat
escape

Waiting for the one who never comes
Still among lightning
singing.

—Karen Mulhallen, from Acquainted With Absence

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