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TINFISH * Number 3 |
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NATHAN KAGEYAMA Stay Come Spock em, dey stay come; auwe, spock da scayed Movaments, an' da luau feet, Stay all twis' an' kooked Walkin' all jag! Spock em, dey stay come, one afta da udda Scayed, haf moe moe--haf not Wen even spook da snow all white lidat An' soun' stay in da bareeze An' haf stay turn da udda way; Was da "kooks-wit-wings," Safe! Kahunas wit da flyin' kine Nikes! Dey get de silva dogs Smellin' da hauna eya! Ai sos! Ai sos! Dey was da fas' mokes Dose da shaap-smellin'; Dose was da obake of blood Cruisin' on da leash, Shmoke dose leash-buggas [after Ezra Pound's "The Return"]
red flea red flea hore hore bushi "hore hore...hore hore...hore hore...hore hore" "Hore, hore," red flea sings where is everyone? "Hore, hore," sings red flea trying to escape the burning sun? what's happening to all the pineapple and sugarcane? laying fallow or ripped up can't you see, it's a nice game "Hore, hore," red flea sings wife cleans rooms in Waikiki son waits tables at Ko 'Olina sister cashiers in Kapolei papa's doing yardwork for Turtle Bay "Hore, hore," red flea sings "hore hore...hore hore...hore hore...hore hore" just made the rent the other day eh, where everybody stay? "Hore, hore," sings red flea times have changed haven't they? not really...same-o, same-o boss still breathing down your neck and guess who's waiting to get the sack? "Hore, hore," red flea sings "hore hore...hore hore...hore hore...hore"
MALIA PANGILINAN
KAPULANI 
SUSAN M. SCHULTZ We Try Harder The imposter postulates an originary rite beside the tree beside the road where storm chasers collide with updrafts and wind chimneys pivot crazy ballroom two-steps plagiarized from manuals about improving relations between partners after the bankrupcy of individualism. Blank Thoreaus hamletize under shadows of trains, munching home baked cookies as half-baked oversouls somersault the altitudinous air in a simulacrum East where, rumor has it, ideals sprang like slinkies from the ash sodden trench of Ganges or Yangtze, yellow rivers to dip your censored crosses in; this trade deficit in creation myths exhumes others' fears of immigrants, their authentic instruments making hybrid noise of tin can and erhu, gong and guitar, the piano an exoskeleton whose harmonic ribs are plucked from the hearts of those purists stranded in "the happiest place on earth." Minnie Mouse is the feminine ideal--and she has her own house, too!--while Mickey holds audiences for worshiping kids and adults stunned in an early phase, call it paleolithic, who reach to touch his ear or uniform, adjusted to the size of an invisible actor earning extra summer dough. Vocations are also the art of self-suspension, bridge over the river Disbelief where Michener natives enjoy guilt-free sex with white men fresh from pre-Carnival cruises, primitive aerobics not yet featured on any cable channel known to man (sic). Remote control syndrome hasn't been discovered in fossils or crash pits and cockpit recorders withhold those final words we need to believe were heartfelt and eloquent, the myth of perfect air travel built into our national narrative. The city on the hill resists comment until votes are in, and drug stores carry captivity narratives for audiences hungry for biblical certainties, even Job's, fresh from his trial live on courtroom TV, brought to you by Hertz, car company with a heart. Rent an ideal this month and you'll get free tickets to the Polynesian Cultural Center where natives aren't native, the chiefs unchiefly. It takes a village to presume their authenticity, accumulation of trends into truths, driving the economy forward like Thelma and Louise, gunslingers for the new age.
ROB WILSON The Fine Art of Landscape Consumption Dirty weekends lure the dirty realists. Potbelly grows the economy for potluck at the end of the rainbow. "consumption, which is the capturing of the gaze" consumption of consumptives, willing to power "the same auratic site" times 25 million tourists in Waikiki Beach. Oh say can you be the Sun-God royalty of Elvis in Hanauma Bay hut: I was the sublime, nationally interpellated wall-to-wall selves living inside the western-tourist bubble dwelling in the industrial slime. Inequity honed in. Language drowned on, like traveling Rim poets commissioned to do special journeys into the wilderness of Lahaina to emulate the music of whales. We do "Worldwide travel agencies, local travel agents," Like Wordsworth tanning himself in the Lake District the 'view' was always a positional good, scenery-as-a-marker-of-status: poet-God breezing by the picturesque slum. Repatriated profit: mill literatures recall working mills, 'picturesque cottages' of the potato people, my relatives working in Brass Valley milltowns, ghetto tundras. Come from Hong Kong Newtowns to savor the last moral Chinatown in America, live exploited workers! Perform the plantation as special photography spread for Pacific Rim travelers. An unsung army of semioticians floods into pink hotels span out across the neo-Hawaiian landscape of shopping malls around the Royal Hawaiian Hotel fan out, medicalized beaches, immunity of primitive porches; beached-up whales pinkening in the harbor: Wordsworth tanning his language in the Lake District Jack London surfs, longing to be a statue of himself as a Hawaiian.
JOHN KINSELLA The Wanderers Inclement the social weather and the cultural backdrop barely palatable, as huge meat diets taste the local fare as if it were the process, the fetish as determined in the mind and not the passions: where mere bourgeois functionaries set documents in order while nobler selves savage hypocrisy without awareness, this is depth as arrogance, like preserving the tail of a yellow-bellied skink they've scared from its sunning spot, the tapered nerves flickering like the conscience they blot out with righteousness, sitting on piles of dirty money. From country to country, oppressed culture to another, majority or minority in the ousted Apocalypse. We'll have none of that here. As if one could remove the brain and still not overcome the genius {of it all}. Wander- ing to something and knowing it as imperative as derivative as expedient, all in appropriation the emancipating verisimilitude of: hey, your abstractions signifying nothing, soothing the landed ache as if from a seaside (no, greater yet! THE OCEAN) mansion, but of course it's fate and a foil to the Academie!: who gives a damn about spelling! It's like suspicion or the grumbling gut that masques as Eraser- head, the Daddy-power diminished in the manifested sperm. It's climatic, inducing tropical overtones, the fog of similitude, the dusty cradle of civilization a teasing memory, possibility? Who said: "Science is watching us."? But then a wanderer is never a woman in the language; lyrically they denied their way down the oathway, straight is the gate so abhorred it deflects intrusion. Up North the belly dumpers carry Dampier salt, the tides move like nomadic hordes in visualizations of Scythia. It's idyllic at Mill Stream. Once this continent was connected to India. Much later there was a landbridge into Asia. New Guinea and the North of Queensland share(d) flora and fauna: deterministic this singularity against expansion, polemic as redshift: they can't get back now the seasonal turbulence antiphonises the clutterings of their palate, read permanently in translation the land itemizes excursions: like an artist's diary: it's surprising when a background comes alive like instigation, rumour sourcing the point of infinite malice like displacement theory, all belonging to the very same mass of festivity, like Geryon polluting (an) other's songs, like panels set-up to amuse the gentry: itinerant the learned and wordly-wise, this fellowship of wanderers, serious and grandiose in their buffoonery.
CAROLYN LEI-LANILAU For Younger Brother George inspired by my sisters from Under the Aegis of Practicing English: the approaching green series The woman of the dunes swept such a fancy dust master promoted her to sweeping pine needles off his roof each autumn where she discovered her beautiful toes that hurt when she stepped barefeet on his property. In the angle of falling sun within reaches of a dry wind Kasumi hummed with birds pausing to scold squirrels. When she noticed paint peeling on the west chamber she asked master if she could repair the wall just to continue sweeping the roof (so she begged) and he let her. If the villagers happen to amble by they would complain sighing "ahhhay, look at that Kasumi--in another world." Oh, she heard but loving pine pierce her blood, kin to trees seeing the city below: exquisite. As she was only a servant, it was her wont to notice and keep order. Which is how she became woman of the apple trees. First she picked the fallen apples-- gardener was ill and master was at the capitol. When she would take lunch on the steps by the roses and persimmon trees recalling her days in the sand; her feet dreamily missing the coarse roof, one day her eyes (trained to look downward) noticed the falling apples. Crying delicately, she bit her fingers while squatting to gather the rot. "Oh my! what perfume" she exclaimed secretly. After she had piled and packed the apples partially eaten by squirrels and birds, apples brown and wet compressed into dirt dried apples, their bodies outlined like slain warriors little funny faces contorted like babies just born among these she discovered a juiciness like her own mouth which tasted an ocean she had never seen nor heard except in books. She Kasumi servant was unconscious in her own delivery. Which therefore, did not prohibit her from attending her blossoming. From the ground the slightly red, off-yellow scarves high among leaves and pouting green apples flagged her, and in their uncommon dialect, invited her to join. Without caution, the maiden's wide feet lifed her breasts among the ripest. A knee positioned in the tree's elbow, her thigh was free. Which rubbed this way and that as she reached. Occasionally, dust powdered her eyes and she stopped. But soon, her lungs and ears, the tips of her nipples under the eves of her fingernails the ridges of her female sides were gummy with her own wine somewhat salty but eatable. The servant Kasumi surprised the tree. Which boldly clamped her wrists while chanting its ancient wisdom and anointed her. a AY g she was moaning she was being born she was she reaping her: sand pine apple her sap leaked onto the fallen leaves and pleasures in the earth.
ADAM AITKEN Mandalay Fort for Aye Saung Their fortress walls remind us of the British their "iron hand," their gentle terror bathed in holy waters, a river at sunset wears the setting sun, a saffron sky inflects a foursquare moat studded with lotus and colourful police dozing trishaw drivers folded into their seats. We speak, and yes, it's the old master's language dirty as salvage. Soap it down with poems, and let your gaze move outwardly from exile, from a secret lookout in a forest, from the hamlet of equality invisible and persistent in its camouflage, from a Mahayana meditation platform to a Georgian set-square castle, misty now in the dusk, cooking fires along its banks, flooded paddy, parade grounds raked and footprint free the blackened fruit of Tamarind trees and betel-nut expectorant staining the Irrawaddy sand, flower gardens strummed by brooms evicting stray seeds of yesterday's news. Your picture's in it somewhere, labelled Wanted Man: mugshot of an artist in fatigues. Perhaps the Generals foresaw it all: this goal a five-year plan will make a college of fine arts perhaps, or an image bank, staffed by friendly security guards, who have eyes for academic landscapes-- river mists, a sunset with a rosy glow or the petals of a crimson English rose, Miss Burma 1924. Rivers of jungle honey, you'd agree thick enough to sweeten bitter herbs or thorny mountain trails, where my mind travels tonight to a festering hideaway where even a bookworm's classified subversive brewing secret jungle medicines learning the art of crushing roots and leaves that still the wound quicker than morphine. And you can live with that, the pain, you can even live without books, without nation. Antique guns guard windows in the trees. Behind mere lines of least resistance art's devised for the hell of it: sings the dark away like a bush guitar and a journal trains itself into testament: the finest English you can muster and we don't forget.
NATHAN KAGEYAMA Hiroshi's Son About Grammar School Da udda mornin' Mrs. Jones Wen make us read dis bugga nemed John Keats. Shit, what I like know about one bugga who stay already mak'e? Mo worse, da bugga stay one poet An' poetree is fo' girls or fo' buggas like Milton Furuyoshi Who always like dress in his sista Mildred's clothes An' walk aroun' tellin' all da small boys "You so sweet" an' "You so nice." Sometimes I like jus' whack dat panty, But he probably kick my ass An' I going be all shame Espechally if Denise Tanaka stay watching. Anyways, so we gotta read Keats cause Mrs. Jones says. Dats da way Mrs. Jones is. She come from California and she said she went to "Hard-bird" or somtin' like dat. She kind of pretty fo' one haole. Da udda day, my friend Scratch wen try fo' butta her up, An' wen give her one lilikoi an' one mango. Mrs. Jones tell him, "That was very thoughtful of you Shoichi." Shit, he probably wen steal 'em from my uncle Hinano's tree. My uncle get planny fruits in his yaad An' he tell me I can go anytime I like fo' pick. Anyways, we gotta read Keats, An' one of da poems stay talk about one nightingale An' me, I no know what da hell one nightingale is So I go to Mrs. Jones "Is dat like one myna bird?" She jus' smile and tell me in her sweet voice, "No Bryan, I'm afraid they're two different types of birds." Me, I wen feel kine of stupid An' I wen look ova at Scratch An' da little punk like bus out laughin'. So I give him stink eye. You know da kine dat says "I going broke your ass afta." So Scratch, he jus' stop smilin' an' turn away. Me an' Scratch, we friends an' all, But I let 'em know who da boss. Anyways, I go home dat night an' start readin' Keats because Mrs. Jones said An' I like do what she says because she one real pretty lady, But me, I cannot undastan da words. Me, I get all frustrated lidat An' my eyes get all watery because I stay all mad. It wasn't like I was cryin' because I not one panty like Roy Shigematsu. Dat panty wen get likens from Lynne Elazaris Shit, I would neva let one girl give me likens. I cannot undastan da words so da next day, I wen go to Mrs. Jones an' I says "What does it mean dat 'Truth stay beauty an' beauty stay truth'? Soun like da kine stay all confused." She tell me, "Bryan, I don't really expect someone of your age to understand John Keats, But I just admire him so that I wanted to share him with the class." She says, "Did you know that John Keats died at a very young age?" I neva know dat So I went home dat night fo read some more, An' as I was readin' I jus' kept on picharing Mrs. Jones readin' along wit me An' I kina started fo like da poetree. I not sayin' dat I one mahoo or anyting lidat, An' if you tell anyone dat I am, I going broke your ass!
TONY QUAGLIANO || JAZZ NOTE || "The point must be clear by now: that it is repetition, modified in one way or another, that gives poetry its musical qualities, because repetition is so essential to music itself." --Leonard Bernstein The trades up, those long cool winds across the Pacific, as Ramsey Lewis's set starts here in the Waikiki Shell. Repetition compulsions. A retarded adult girl in front of me moves the seat next to her back and forth, back and forth, my own repetition compulsions, form in writing and form in music, even improvisatory free jazz, requires resolution of sets, of anticipations, Mailer's story of the man touching the doorknob again before leaving the house in the morning to feel the energy later through the metal on the subway, repetitive touch compulsion, the spirit in the steel, animism in the modern world, and then the adult girl the woman moves again, moves the seat next to her back and forth and looks around a bit, maybe she's not so retarded, not severely, her movements certainly not fine, not exact not apparently appropriate, the seat moving back and forth, looking about in particular blankness in her face, low affect the docs call it, a blankness denser than the average blankness on the average face on any dull and blank and average day. Day after impenetrable day, here just off Waikiki as the trades flare cool Pacific evening back, hearing Ramsey Lewis playing pure jazz again
PAM BROWN Prospects I've lost the fortune-cookie message & cannot remember my fate am I instantly concerned & thinking a continual thought ? where is it? where is it ? do I possess "my life's ambition" ? or, propelled by the force of habit I sit to think ? to make what wants to be & not to embody the past by entering its world-to-come instead to page-down this century as did, once, R. Mutt.
LIZ WALDNER Dialogum It has nothing to do with me that there are no answers on that answering machine. The cherry tree's cherries descry, deplore, dispute disparity between to be and to seem. It doesn't matter to me: I eat them. The pink tennis shoes chews her gum which moves her henna'd hair. Hers is a dream of Else and Other wise beyond their years. She calls them a man. Who hears that you want him to love and can it mean what you think he fears-- et cetera. Et cetera. That, alone, I'm allowed to say, dear.
JANET BOWDAN Recalling rain we worry over scarcity, seeing in abundance our own starvation and so lay up on all sides what we've seen of the wind in its drifts the clarity consume our ground, blown and lain and water falling in all weathers and deserts after drought life's floods luminous come language-luscious, collapsing drops dwelling whole decades of dream I lie under and under the dream, storm time turns, takes shape, stares me into stutters, but words, signed statements, proclamations of whims, ambitions written in shadows, sealed and sold or sent into the wind. wise child playing late and hard in the night tumbling towards the gravity of the world find me again in the grain of things great storehouses holding against famine
RANGE POETS The Reefer of Reefers in Connecticut pasty beginnings no excuse, the beguine, the beaten flat dominated by arching wild, troped, busted over razor karma with sugar shoelaces unjointured out of regularity. You whispered "curios sanctify fractal" however procedure spun out of stains, broadbeaming-- cowfrons on a heavy boding shepherd-palms bonding laisse-moi avec le tube polinique et la nervure principale I answered, "frequent libations cure" triste drinks en tropique torpor and all the known hysteria ventures, in wisteria patches on faded jeans shirtless shiftless comme on dit, washed out mimeograph printing her face with a fuscia holy cream, the pages pinked eternally the entire intellectual edifice is made of a single moose, drained from a refreshing brand of gusano. Are you still a numerical value? O binhex, o mime type Sappers again sappers again ravaging the sages, reeling them in hand over knee-jerk or mime the wistful wane away
GRAHAM FOUST Alas, the fabulist institute The azure scandal and its matching Parade. A mutiny among our Serried ranks. We linger like kings here In this, the last of the fabulist Institutes. We peel away at the Mackerel sky. From the wrong side of The blindfold, we have known the cold joys Of eating alone: adequate sleep, A missing glass of water. But what's Pornography to a robot, Mach 2 to a mime? Our one dear streetcar Returns our flaccid trunk call. Lovely Oxcarts bring us our coldcuts and gin.
CONNIE DEANOVICH Sestina Salutations to Rodrigo Toscano It is hot Rodrigo. I think of brick the sun capturing it like a hero. I think of oily the negative version. Let's go out for lunch. My favorite meal is lunch. I'll make you, Rodrigo, my companion, platonic version. We'll eat at a chic place called Brick where the food's not too oily where the waitstaff have bodies like heroes. It must be satisfying to be a humble hero the kind without a Recognition Lunch the librarian who crawls out of the ground oily holding a small boy named Rodrigo who fell through a pile of bricks during playtime's deadliest version. On Tutilla Island a version of cricket is played. The hero is the guy built not like a furnace brick but like something more earthy, more like lunch. He can bowl like this one Rodrigo can dance. For spin he gets the ball oily. I love when a fabric seems oily, as silk can in some versions. A designer named Christian Rodrigo has a new line called Hero. If I thought one thing I couldn't eat lunch not even the mittens the color of brick. If you were raised around Chicago brick you'd understand it's a better atmosphere than the oily fast-food for lunch no-ethnic-types suburban version of life spun around sports heroes of life without the occasional Rodrigo. Chicago's a city of brick, a version of architecture not oily but heroic a good place for lunch with Rodrigo.
FAYE KICKNOSWAY Charlie Chaplin Charlie Chaplin was in a circus and got chased up a pole where the air, flat with heat, wrung all the sweat out of him, and his gums shriveled up, and if he smiled his teeth'd fall out and hit the mule or gorilla, maybe it was a lion, I remember there was a lion, leaning its paws up against the pole and shaking it so Charlie Chaplin'd fall down, like his teeth all mixed up with gravel and cinders thrown from the railroad tracks the elephants had carried on their backs all the way from China. Good thing Charlie Chaplin knew how to squint or he'd've lost his eyes, too, like dried snot, in the burnt up weeds getting smashed to dust by the lion's paws. There were no birds or clouds up where Charlie Chaplin was, but he wore his hat against them, and the air, coming toward dark, had a saw in it, and his lungs were soot and closing down, which is where he wanted to be: down, with lemonade on a cool closed porch, a wall of screens between him and a wide green yard. A lady with a towel on her head saw the lion and scolded it, and after it licked her legs with its sharp fat tongue, she folded it up like it was paper and crushed it under her shoe. Then Charlie Chaplin came down, and thanked her by cooking eggs in his hat. She ate them off his handkerchief. Then horses came and she rode them standing up, dressed in a party favor. Charlie Chaplin's eyes got big as cameras; it was love, a whole table of it. But his smile wasn't loud enough and she married a man with an aluminum face and a long silk cape who walked on clothesline looking for fish to drop in a net that was hung under him so he could feed the trunk full of monkeys he kept in his tent. Charlie Chaplin was the star of the circus. He broke dishes. It made the clowns so jealous, one night, to get even with him, while he slept sitting up on a box, they stole the circus and all the towns and trees straight out to the edge of the sky. When Charlie Chaplin woke up, he was alone, and wherever he looked, it was flat and bare.
MTC CRONIN Angel Films can anything be too intense for reality? / films about angels / the joining of sunlight and moonlight, shaping the soul for generosity / poor men with money in their hands / Lancelot & Galahad, the Best & Purest films about angels / why are they so popular? / it's not because the angels envy us / but that there are angels / some days it is warm enough to understand life / some days I remember the trophies still uncollected from years past / what would they do if I went back for them? / would I be recognized as the players' player? best and fairest / how to explain that I have returned for acknowledgment / the tribute once paid / the very nice thin glasses we toasted with / the caterers wanted five dollars for every one broken / and my Irish grandfather said "If yer not enjoyin yerself it's yer own ferkin fault" very drunk / no heart to tell him the baby was born with a frown / and there were waiters and waitresses there who didn't even know we had a baby / thought the trophy was all / the game what we loved the rules were written in a special ink / ink that made you fall in love with the words / so that you memorized them / sung them and repeated them to other people so they could live lives unwitnessed by the singer / as in the angel films where things are shared without awareness we had to dress the baby up like an angel / when you are sad the angel may put a hand on your shoulder / happiness leaks through until you have a shoulder full of wellbeing / but of course you don't why, you think, gee, my shoulder feels good today / and the angel slips away it's a job well done / the baby in a long white dress / crocheted / satin petticoat / embroidery of initials believed from a long way across the sea / "there have only been three ever made" / and we know tradition (the endlessness of the moon for metaphors) / dark lies of the moon shining in her false hood, the night / it's all getting a bit pale and thin around the edges my father insisted that we send proof of the christening we refused to have his was an accurate hate / he never came to see me win / love that never found its mark / on the night of the biggest and ugliest trophies he was not there again / and the angels were shy-like animals / making only small noises as they tripped over chairs / stole after dinner mints the thief backs up against the world / the same world I spit into my glass / envying people who win prizes and don't worry so much that the days keep passing / it's not success but that the days keep passing / and the angel passing / searching for the breath of a child / its light disturbance makes the illusion of dust Saturday morning with the kid dressed in this white get-up / we go down to the Church on the corner / stained glass windows / pastoral scenes / but the angels are invisible / like they are to people on TV / but we can see them / and on the way we brushed the baby's head against a wattle tree / golden pollen rests upon the crown like angel-dust / I smell It is true what they say about the smell of babies' heads / nuzzling and wonderful / as if my nose has been touched by an angel Smiling / as we video the child in front of the church / fake christening / fish in the aisles / at home / I put the trophy away / where I cannot see it to satisfy my father we'll post this film all the way to another country / where people still believe in angels / this angel film of a ceremony as real as angels / where he cannot see it
JOHN OLSON Marsden Hartley's Gloves let's pan for gold, blow off steam, rub a glass rod with silk & make some electricity dance on the head of a pin. Prose is all cartilage poetry a fin. Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end, each changing place with that which goes before. The old myth of artistic purity has many active volcanoes constantly boiling into discourse. There is a touch of cruelty in wax, & a poem requires a meaning that has to be dealt with on its own terms, like a paperweight enclosing a suspension bridge, or the big orange drum of a cement truck going round & round. The robustness of candor, the abraded vigor of Marsden Hartley's gloves & garden shears, all those tough, vivacious browns inventing an emotion, a way to be in the world like Mary Tyler Moore. A metaphor is made of shadows like anyone else, even Sardinia rendered in color several centimeters thick. Beauty requires a large subjective framework incidental as a grocery receipt revealing a pair of breasts in a lacy black bra To be a fool is to bend time & space while enjoying breakfast in a sumptuous robe of probability Try picturing a cat attached to Egypt Cultures intermingle & the mouth is a laboratory for testing words, a pair of dice tossed on the dark mahogany of a Montana bar. There is the music of the toolbox & the music of the loin. The music of the mundane & musk-ox & salt. But a glove, a true glove should fit the hand like the dark in a radio, like the glitter of stars bleeding through the turquoise of a Mediterranean dusk Nothing beats a good pair of gloves, & a pair of worn brown chafed gloves is glossary of new & familiar sensations, a blend of the known & the unknown. The slide of content into the fingers of form & the expansion of form by the wriggle of foraging fingers
CHE QUIAN-ZI I. Constellations from Astronomy
CHE QIAN-ZI II. Ways of Saying from Astronomy "One" is not only, can produce numerous Images. To be more exact owing to the lack of space And ecstatically prolonged by time. Can only see One aspect of "one." Have met only once, then On the two sides of one, grows "two," like two maids of honor With different figures, one in front one behind following the empty throne. In fact In front: in front there is also the disappearing point of "one" All is like this when segregated by creations. But it only lies In unreasonable visual mistakes. "One" this "one" dark and capricious, in "two" and "three," it becomes white ("Three": two white "one"'s.) The rest of life, it is a label and a banner The "one" that we see, is only a substitute As testimony, it is in "two," and "three" It throws amid us the corpses of two and three While white--the spirit of one is endless When called upon, in solitary hours one sees its shadow Like a rib ripped out. The rib of "one" Is "one." Simplicity changes into substance and in turn "One," as if there is really someone Translated by Jeff Twitchell
'Elua Pololia JOE BALAZ 
MARK PETERS Body friends Body funny Body excitement A we body think Of we grace want Of something held we're Innocence Made deeply up In to memory seem Body's unfit thought Touch body this Is this that is Body funny Is part innocent but The also body's the body dangerous Body dangerous is moment Innocent right and away Immortal we're the talked Us it And harm immortal done Body's a thought Of of Us I that don't Know body what Ageless thinking And harm immortal done Body funny And we immortal say
STEPHANIE STRICKLANDLodged in a Nursery Glass
Embryo, instar, fatal creature, nestling there, precursor and pre- figurer: no trope. A more expensive bargain pact: a patented genomic sac, and stainless act, for unto us an infant TechnI.con,©in fact, is born: a real being, being re- hearsed for the real [per-]Son to come.
DUODUO It's just like before walking in a night when snow flutters on the forehead and it's just like before walking over from a blank page and it's just like before walking into that invisible field and it's just like before walking among words, among wheatfields, walking among discounted shoes, walking up to words seeing home, that moment, and it's just like before straightening western clothes in the wheatfield, and it's just like before kneeling on kneecaps cast from a gold shield, and it's just like before this world's most resounding, most resounding just like before, just like before is the earth a time when a ray of autumn light shone between the grass mower's legs, it is a burst of wild laughter within a stretch of golden corn, is it a burst of firecrackers spurting out of the scarlet chili patch, it's just like before No arrangement whatsoever can reproduce its giltedness Its order is a burst of furious growth in the prairie on an autumn day It has ubiquitous powers of persuasion, it is just like it was before A September burst of cold cow dung shoveled into the air and it's just like before October's stones moved into ranks and it's just like before November rain passes through a place where you aren't and it's just like before Just like before seventy pears on the tree smile a crooked smile Your father just like before is your mother a fit of coughing in the midst of laughter The ox's head jolts along the extinguished road and just like before a whole family rides the ox cart watching the snow licked by an enormous ox tongue so warm, warm like before it's snow come from memory, increasing the weight of memory it's lacking snow, at this time not yet covered by snow it's that page snow turned over turned over, and it's just like before winter's wheatfields and burial grounds have already joined up four desolate trees grow right here light of former days gushes into the narration, beyond discourse fragments fragments, and it's just like before your father turns your mother's death into his sky turns his death into your mother's tombstone your father's bones walk down from the high hill and it's just like before each star is experiencing this life and world each shaft of broken glass buried in the back yard is talking for a motive that cannot be seen again, says it's just like before, it's just like before Translated by Gregory B. Lee
BRET BAJEMA The fatigue of death against the urgency to experience every sense to the fullest, every last moment of life, confronting, closing, even laying back and engaging colors electric neon patterns of paisley explosion from Shiva's hands fountains of nirvana the stiff vibration of leaves bright trees in dark trees-- hum (energy buzz and crackle man-made, gray trees-- with symmetrical spheres and boxes make connections that crackle through spheres and tall metal towers tower over trees and houses (houses connected by lines held up by towers of conjunction (train trestles) tower over entire cities Paris the Eiffel tower like American towers-- tower over chain link fences with high voltage signs surround towers shoot off watch towers men in corners watch chain link fences with barbed wire-- barbed wire keeps people from going over fences with men in corners, four corners of a clock (corners of time) that rings mornings (mornings that ring all day long and loud steaming rooting tooting whistle takes on 4 o'clock good-guy personality (good-guy does shrugged-shoulder square dance hands on hips legs kicking-- red with expression) hips on a straight-body whistle chinaman's hat covers train tunnel mouth spits steam-- steam hovers above coffee cups with sports teams on them (teams that win) more popular people in high-school look for a watch ask "what time is it?" sit back and enjoy warm steam of coffee.
SUSAN M. SCHULTZ Safe Haven Inappropriate participle, aroint thee! Excavate no harvest to disseminate legal briefs to inhibited munchkins, moon rovers riven by spending cut, heaven of pennant race and settlement, stars skittering over summer folds, sheepish if amuck. Mad driven exile, haunt malls with magic these incipient weeks when monks drool, read godly thrillers thrown from a mount. Sermons ionize as platitudes alight, hovering scuba tourists naming gnomes, life jacketed fish staring, face masks levitating, these anchorites aloft in liquid casements as Keats (blessed soul) puts pen to locus of lethe words simmering, frothy, dreamed in ancient groves, gimleted knights in ardor who counter chivalry with noun, static warp unwound anemone bud, beer king buried to aluminum glint, surface surfeited, wisdom balloon mortgaged, gainsaid Noah's ark wrecked, a wreath on reefs untallied ho and compass clatch insurgent, strategic mass proctored by priests of weed and wrack, full fathom strive to earn this infamy, president pretzeled in Bosnia tank. Put off posterity: madeleine dipped in blood triggers centuries of worse.
RON SILLIMAN from YOU for Pat Silliman I Hard dreams. The moment at which you recognize that your own death lies in wait somewhere within your body. A lone ship defines the horizon. The rain is not safe to drink. In Grozny, in Bihac, the idea of history shudders with each new explosion. The rose lies unattended, wild thorns at the edge of a mass grave. Between classes, over strong coffee, young men argue the value of a pronoun. When this you see, remember. Note in a bottle bobs in a cartoon sea. The radio operator's name is Sparks. Hand outlined in paint on a brick wall. Storm turns playground into a swamp. Finally we spot the wood duck on the middle lake. The dashboard of my care like the keyboard of a piano. Toy animals anywhere. Sun swells in the morning sky. Man with three pens clipped to the neck of his sweatshirt shuffles from one table to the next, seeking distance from the cold January air out the coffee house door, tall styrofoam cup in one hand, Of Grammatology in the other. Outside, a dog is tied to any empty bench, bike chained to the No Parking sign. II Bottom feeders: shadows shift over the floor of the pool. Chairs askew about the square table. At one end of the food mall a crowd watches a game of basketball on a giant screen. First I imagine what you would look like naked, then as you will look in fifty years. Ball circles the rim, then falls, out. Dressed right for rain, I leap its rivers, carrying an easel in a huge cardboard box. The bad clown. Freeway shut due to a landslide. Desk littered with preprinted postcards, each beginning "Dear Mr. Gingrich...." What fuel drives the engine of metaphor? Walking around with fists clenched. Logic of the alphabet: bat, cat, fat, hat. Behind the parking lot, the arroyo has become a pulsing, brown, swollen rio. A fan-shaped view through the wipers. Large as a fist, the spider gallops up my leg. New error message. Humpty Dumpty, made of cloth, had acquired hands and feet. Footrub that's only a footrub. 1-900-Yo-Poets. Lone man pushing a shopping cart at four in the morning. Endangered species live on in greeting cards. Boy declares toy stove is a rocket ship. Who owns the genomes of tropical plants? III High up in the tallest branches of the alphabet, bare in the hard rain, one small hummingbird hovers, wings translucent with the still motion of flight. Who left the telephone in the oven? Banana peel has 'corners,' but the meat is round. Blimp that glows in the dark. Purple dog with a blue nose. Worms in the compost of history. Balloons blow across the tundra. The hand as a machine demonstrates closure (the narrative of fingers). A vision of vowels vibrates. Shopping cart as machine, every inch organized by the homeless man's system of trash bags (this one for aluminum, that for glass, plastic containers arranged on the rack by size), a cluster convened at the Foster Freeze parking lot, two men and woman, high overhead the first full moon of the new year. Shadow of a boy in the dark demands, "Change my diaper." The name who named Liberty Valence. Broom in the corner exists as potential. An arrow adds to edit. Moon shrunken in the dawn sky behind the last gauze of rain cloud. Balloon effect of fat man in turtle-neck shirt. I should speak.
MARK WALLACE Review of Erratum/Frame(d), by John Kinsella. Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, P.O. Box 320, 193 South Terrace, South Fremantle, Western Australia, 102 pages. John Kinsella's poetry provides an excellent example of what I've elsewhere called post- language poetry. Kinsella has clearly absorbed a wide range of complex, theoretically-based contemporary poetry (The New British Poetry, North American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, similar movements in New Zealand and Kinsella's own Australia). Yet he brings those theoretically-based insights to a variety of poetic traditions, some of which have been often considered not useful for experimental poetry. For Kinsella, form in poetry becomes a matter of situation. His choice of a traditional or experimental form seems based less on the sort of cultural necessity that the language poets, for instance, often claimed for their own poetry, than it does on a flexibility of perception that recognizes that formal choices can emerge from the free play of an author's relation to the world. Erratum/Frame(d), Kinsella's sixth book, represents that part of Kinsella's work that looks most like language poetry. As with a number of other post-language writers, however, once cannot generalize on the basis of one book about what kind of writer Kinsella is, or about the nature of his poetic "voice." In her introduction to the book, Lyn Hejinian claims that in Erratum/Frame(d), Kinsella chooses more "experimental" forms because his subject matter is the present and what can be known of it. Yet Hejinian's insight has more to do with a conventional distinction between "traditional" and "experimental" forms than it does with Kinsella's more far-reaching displacement of that opposition. In Kinsella's poetry, it is precisely any settled difference betwee "traditional" and "experimental" that has collapsed. All poetic forms have become equally available for "experiment" to the extent that they can be tested for new soundings, new possibilities for meaning and its loss. Erratum/Frame(d) combines the precise (and heavily Marxist) cultural detail of a poet like J.H. Prynne with interventions of literary theory and self-reflexivity that mark some aspects of language poetry. At his best, Kinsella swirls these influences into sharply delineated and torqued scenarios remarkable for their range of knowledge, their rhythmic complexity, and their flexibility of action and reaction. The poems are simultaneously localized and broad in scope, ironic and at times directly humorous. His flexibility of vocabulary and approach stands out particularly well in the book's later poems, esepcially the stunning sequences "Tarot" and "Syzygytics," which to my mind are the book's highlights. However, all the poems in Erratum/Frame(d) are not as successful as those sequences, in part because of the complexity of influences Kinsella tries to reconfigure. At times, Kinsella's reconfiguration seems simply to repeat rather than engage his influences. This shortcoming seems most true of the book's directly theoretical and self-reflexive passages. Passages of literary theory or self-reflexivity are not by definition mistakes. However, the theoretical and self-reflexive passages in Erratum/Frame(d) simply seem, like the book's title, too familiar. This problem is highlighted by the way such passages tend to stand out from the more complex interactions that the poems elsewhere embody; too many of the poems start with self- reflexivity, or halt their movement for a moment of overly worn theoretical commentary. One could easily make too much of such moments, because most of Erratum/Frame(d) combines keen intelligence, vast knowledge, visual structure. "The architecture of body and tomb will vary between species,/whether germ, animal, or alien--it's a fact that rot/obscures experimental glass, that a world germ-free is shrouded," Kinsella writes at the end of "Beyond W. Eugene's Photographic Essay: 'Life Without Germs.'" Such a complex intermingling of theory and detail defines not only the troubling conditions of contemporary experience, but also ironically embodies the difficulties of poetic innovation at the present moment. That those difficulties should occasionally be displayed by a book that mainly shows how they might be successfully reconfigured testifies less to any serious failings in Erratum/Frame(d) than it does to Kinsella's willingness and ability to get absolutely to the heart of the matter.