Poetry Flash: Poetry #294

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Number 294 & 295
Summer/Fall 2005

Poetry
Copyright © 2005 Poetry Flash

The Good Faith
BARBARA CLAIRE FREEMAN

Philip's Poem
MICHAEL McCLURE

for Nancy Peters

Goodbye handsome Gongora
of San Francisco. I think you’re the end.
The greatest poet of your kind.
You are the poet’s poet of the greatest
poet’s poet poet, as you wrote in a poem.
You split beauty into slivers
to build the sleek ship
of state that carries ashes
and large eyes of cinamon
and musk. After your adventures
and travel we would sit around you and listen
and watch the scarlet ribbons
of your voice move in the sea-green
foam of the air. You are the model
for ten thousand generations of the poet
we believe in. And we believe still.
Now you are as solid as the wounds
of the Christos in a fiery spoon
of morphine on a morning of masses
dripping through funnels
into the first silk tent
of their alchemy,

R
REAL
A
L

LIGHT & LIFE.

Your beauty blesses you.

Michael McClure read with Philip Lamantia at the famed Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco, October 7, 1955.

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Every Place, Nowhere

KATE GALE

Here are needles laid out for some
Vast and curious purpose. Quiet.
Later music shaking up the curtains.
Filthy talk, Grandma would say. Sluts.

It’s a party, a shakedown rumble.
The smoke alive and drifting. Skirts.
Panties, thongs, boxers, bra straps,
tattoos, tongues, thighs all. Showing.

This is brief happiness, Or what passes
these days for fun. Or what passes. These days.
In an unquiet world where the self is blurry
against the backdrop. Of things.

It’s things that define us. And places
we’ve been. The tile in our houses. Counter tops.
Trips we’ve taken. To parts of Europe
where you haven’t been. But we have. So there.

Conversations empty as air after broom passes
through crushing back nonsense. Empty.
What we don’t talk about. So it doesn’t exist.
Loneliness. Our time alone. Ourselves alone. Nobody.

This time. Quiet as shadows. Not even my lover.
Just my secret self against nothing. Breathing.
Speaking elephant language. No on to translate.
Words would float until leaf caught. Then vanish.

Kate Gale has published a novel, Lake of Fire, five books of poems, including Selling the Hammock, Fishers of Men, and Mating Season, her newest, and a bilingual children’s book, African Sleeping Beauty. She is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, President of PEN USA, and Editor of The Los Angeles Review.

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____________________________________________________________________The Good Faith

BARBARA CLAIRE FREEMAN

Like being left hanging upside down somewhere blindly
towards north? Each morning you pinch out
one of fourteen candles,
revive old lessons
in the email notes you tap at intervals
throughout the night and day—
they streak across the screen like lightning,
get hold, grow cold, arrive too soon,
too late: I live on faith—or not at all
while spiny crystals on the window go
nowhere in the breeze.
Self-discipline
depends on silence.
Please don’t suggest crushed percoset
and apples. I’d rather swallow
the sun ten billion times—choking would be better.
In me, beneath me, above me, on my right, on my left—
today at the dawn jagged crows took shelter,
they shrieked and flapped their blue-black wings;
perhaps you’re right that weather matters more
than God. You hide the fifteenth candle
during Holy Week. These lines remark
what’s left unsaid up North,
still freezing.

Barbara Claire Freeman’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly and The Iowa Review, among other literary journals. This poem is from a chapbook manuscript entitled “Artifacts of Earthly Paradise.” She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

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