December 25, 2023

“Living the Chemical Life” by Chris AndersonPosted by

Chris Anderson

LIVING THE CHEMICAL LIFE

I have to admit that I don’t care about the historical Jesus.
One way or the other.
I’ve always thought there were larger forces at work.
The sun and the wind. The sadness that comes in the afternoon.
Did you know that our bones are only 10 years old?
No matter how old we are, it’s always the same.
Something to do with cells, I guess. With regeneration.
There are miracles like this all over the place,
in everybody’s bloodstream, and that’s alright with me.
Doris Day was once marooned on an island with another man.
Years went by and her husband, James Garner,
was about to marry another woman. Polly Bergen.
But then Doris came back and sang a lullaby to her kids,
then tucked them into bed. And they didn’t even know who she was.
I think that life is just like this.
Sometimes we are the stone and the Spirit is the river.
Sometimes we are the mountain and the Spirit is the rain.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Chris Anderson: “I am an English Professor at Oregon State University, but I am also a Catholic deacon, and my poetry is one result of the free association and spontaneity of lectio divina, the kind of prayer I practice every morning. In lectio you leap, and in leaping poetry, of course, you leap, and what I love about that is how there’s this mystery, this other story you don’t really understand, bigger than your own, that somehow gets implied in the gaps and jumps. Maybe a poem like ‘Living the Chemical Life’ would seem irreverent to a believer, but for me it’s not at all. It’s joyous. It’s one way of letting the Spirit move.” (web)

Rattle Logo

December 24, 2023

“The Truth Is a Nimble Little Creature” by Wendy VidelockPosted by

Wendy Videlock

THE TRUTH IS A NIMBLE LITTLE CREATURE

Gratitude, too.
The only flippin’ truth
is everything moves
 
says the moon, hovering
over every mantra,
every sparrow,
 
every dollar, every
Congo, every nation,
every little good intention.
 
The more difficult the world
the greater the imperative
toward blame,
 
toward distraction,
toward impossible heights
and humble strings
 
of twinkle lights.
My love, let us vow
that through the winter
 
we shall pause by the river
where below the frozen surface
surely tiny fish are feeding.
 
Let us make a practice
of coming to bear
the weather,
 
of gathering by the fire,
of reading to one another
as the sparrow wears
 
her feather, as the moon
resolves to move,
as the body knows
 
surrender, as the leaves
believe September,
as rhyme succumbs
 
to reason, as the pause
to remember
descends upon the season.
 

—from Poets Respond
December 24, 2023

__________

Wendy Videlock: “I guess I’ve come to believe the more wars that pile up, the more destructive things appear, the greater the imperative toward service, wisdom and the creative impulse.” (web)

Rattle Logo

December 23, 2023

“Jeopardy” by Jeff McRaePosted by

Jeff McRae

JEOPARDY

And so if, when we are old and have lost interest
in things scholarly, and the children are living lives of their own,
what if we become what we strive now so hard to avoid?
Comforted by routine, scheduled by television programs.

What is: the morning coffee you brewed for years while I slept?
Who is: the woman that suffered all my abuses?
What are: the conditions of indebtedness?
And if when we have long since ceased using our proper names,

or your medical condition has me speaking again to God,
who never crossed the threshold of our house, what is:
I will not die first? Who is: the one most likely to better bear
the remaining days? Perhaps we’ll know the beauty of one thing.

Perhaps we will be left with the gift of a breath. A storm is coming.
One need only feel the air to know what lies within
the corpse-colored clouds. When you are young
and certain of your place in the palpable mystery of being

you begin with knowing. Then forgetting begins: forgetting
where you left your glasses (on your head), forgetting
when we first met (in a cold month long ago), forgetting even
what grace felt like (it felt like privilege). It occurs to you

how gently the rain rolls through the deltas of sand on the sidewalk.
What is: an evening of opposites? Who is: the owner
of this lilac-scented drawer of clothes? What are: the brief songs
of crickets? When the world trusts you it will reveal itself

in the language of repetition, in the forked tongue of instinct and culture,
with a stale breath of history. Until then you must learn to live
with small amounts of starvation, with want, with a lengthening list
of valid questions for which you deserve no answer.

—from Rattle #23, Summer 2005

__________

Jeff McRae: “In junior high I copied a poem from a book and passed it off as my own to my mother, who promptly affixed it to the refrigerator. I wrote my first poem to keep the jig afoot. Growing up on a farm in Vermont, I became totally whacked-out on both kinds of nature: the Robert Frost and the James Harriot kinds, and happily remain so.”

Rattle Logo

December 22, 2023

“The God Zoo” by Richard PrinsPosted by

Richard Prins

THE GOD ZOO

I.

Elvis
blimps above
the walrus shade.
Jesus rides an elephant
away from Calvary. Sparrows
learn to fly, pitched from Ganesh’s
trunk. Muhammad’s mastering the art
of a blowhole ablution. Wildebeest chuckling
at Moses’ wimpy forty days. Caesar’s gassy after sharing
unripe mangos with a chimp. Marx is munching grass. Lost a bet
with Nebuchadnezzar. Buddha chucks some birdseed, lectures the pigeons
about desire. Ra folds after a plague of platypusses; his firstborn’s grown a beak.

II.

Twin walruses sharpen their tusks on the dunes.
Buddha’s navel a lager spout.
Only a fool would chug the end of desire.

The wildebeest flies upside-down, jousting all the stars.
Muhammad wears a tunic of sequin nipples.
Only a fool would record their voluminous lactations.

Pigeons crap on godhead an eggwhite fedora.
Jesus plucks thorns out of his prom night eyelashes.
Only a fool would unbutton that snarlyhaired tuxedo.

A chimp is licking termites off a shark tooth comb.
Elvis gets rich off a lunch money racket.
Only a fool would wipe a toilet down with mutton chops.

The elephants windmill their snouts, inhaling each tornado.
Ganesh snorts a boogaloo on his nostril trumpet.
Only a fool would scrape that flugelhorn free of barnacles.

Rows & rows of whale vertebrae. Time to build a railroad.
Ra smells pyramids with every beard-stroke.
Only a fool would refuse a chance to mummify the queen.

Sparrows ford rhinoceri across the fishleaping river.
Marx redistributes chin hair to all the eunuchs.
Only a fool would alienate this harem’s labor.

The platypus is still sloshed and dancing by herself.
Caesar skiffs his gondola across the sky.
Only a fool like Cleopatra would try to flag him down.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

___________

Richard Prins: “When I was eighteen years old I fell asleep on a late-night train and woke with my jacket pocket knifed open, the pocket that always held my wallet. After a few desperate grabs, I found my wallet transplanted to my pants pocket, no money missing. A napkin, however, with two poems inked on it, had been extracted. I’ve been mugged twice since then, once in Brooklyn, once in Dar es Salaam, and still curse myself—why didn’t I think to recite a poem to my attackers?” (web)

Rattle Logo

December 21, 2023

“Flying Back to England That First Time” by Rose LennardPosted by

Aerial by Scott Wiggerman, a collage of colorful shapes possibly representing an aerial view of a suburban subdivision

Image: “Aerial II” by Scott Wiggerman. “Flying Back to England That First Time” was written by Rose Lennard for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

__________

Rose Lennard

FLYING BACK TO ENGLAND THAT FIRST TIME

from above there was something so tender
about the detailed tapestry of roads
and homes and gardens, each one different
and loved and tended, and it was like
seeing inside a body, all the organs
large and small, each with their own
precious unique purpose
and each unknowable, complex
and essential; all existing in conjunction
with the other parts but separate
and distinct. England so stewarded
and ancient, patterned by all the lives
that shaped it once, now buried under stones;
and all the lives that make it their own
and so patiently mow lawns, wash cars,
bring groceries home, take kids to football
and lessons on piano. People going
to lovers’ trysts, hospital appointments,
working shifts, nodding to neighbours over gates.
As the light faded the roads were traced
with streetlights and headlight beams, and each
little ordered patch of earth outlined below
with trim hedge or fence, each house set
quietly back on its plot; and over the engines’ roar
I could almost hear the night-feathered blackbirds
on telegraph poles or high up
in the leafy crowns of apple trees,
spilling out their evening song.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
November 2023, Artist’s Choice

__________

Comment from the artist, Scott Wiggerman: “I created a series of six colored pencil drawings with the title ‘Aerial,’ imagining different landscapes as seen from the air. ‘Aerial II’ is the only one focused on what I picture as suburbia. ‘Flying Back’ also starts from the air, and through exquisite images develops the closer and closer telegraphing of what is below—from the ‘detailed tapestry of roads’ to the extended metaphor of the human body—‘all the organs / large and small’—to the mundane activities of the inhabitants of ‘each / little ordered patch of earth outlined below.’ And then the lovely closing: aural blackbirds as night arrives, ‘spilling out their evening song.’ I found this poem very close to my own sensibilities. I only wish I had written it!”

Rattle Logo

December 20, 2023

“Replacement Friend” by Ross WhitePosted by

Ross White

REPLACEMENT FRIEND

Imagine: you’re new in town. Long-haired, pierced-eared
in a button-down polo town. Stem-thin and gawky
where the preppy boys row crew each morning,
their shoulders like wide cantilever bridges.
You wear paisley and t-shirts from metal concerts,
you listen to Jane’s Addiction in your beat-up Honda
during your lunch period and hope no one will notice. 
And hope someone will notice. The South is unforgiving
for strangers, though sometimes in its shimmering heat
the traveler sees the desert mirage and believes
he can slake his thirst in all that gentility. 
Does it matter to you when one of the guys from Key Club
who obviously cheats on Spanish tests, who obviously
drinks beer in the back of the classroom
and never gets caught, whose last name headlines
the largest law firm in town, a firm so large even the other
high schoolers know it—does it matter to you, when he raps twice
on your car window while you’re belting out “Ocean Size”
like a needle-stick reminder of how small you feel,
that though he’s never spoken to you before,
though until this moment you weren’t even sure 
he was aware you existed, you can already sense a chasm 
in him, one so wide and deep you cannot see anything
other than the ledge? Sometimes between classes you’ve heard
whispers of a dead boy. Drunk driver. Single-car. 
Played bass. Ran track. You asked a senior about him
once. You were met with silence. You understand
that most of these people hadn’t just been friends,
they’d occupied the same positions in the seating chart
since sixth grade to keep the integrated schools segregated.
You understand that you arrived a few months after
the wreck. You can sense yourself sitting in his seat
in American Lit, in Precalculus, in Spanish III, three periods
that move from classroom to classroom as a unit
before you scuttle off to drama class and they go
wherever the rich kids go. A chasm wide as absence.
Does it matter to you, understanding that you will be little more 
than a pair of arms throwing eggs at a rival swimmer’s house 
or a pair of lungs smoking contraband Camels in sixth period
or a refrigerator to raid when he shows up at your house drunk
before dinnertime and says he wants to borrow your bass,
little more than a ride to a rager that he knows you don’t care about
and he won’t invite you to because he knows you won’t go
or a cowering presence in his living room while he shouts
at his father that he’ll never be a self-hating lawyer when it’s obvious
to all three of you that he will, when it’s obvious that so much
of what he does, he does in the shadow of a dead boy, a shadow
you’ll soon wear—does it matter to you, any of it, when at the sound
of the knock, you switch off the car stereo and roll down the window?
 

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

__________

Ross White: “I’d like to believe that this poem had its genesis in the first line of Landis Everson’s 1955 poem ‘These Friends of Yours,’ which was on my nightstand around the time ‘Replacement Friend’ was written. But that was in those first few months of the pandemic, so questions of what binds us to our friends were probably much on my mind as I careened from Zoom to Zoom, lonely in ways I hadn’t been since those first days at a new high school.” (web)

Rattle Logo

December 19, 2023

“A Language” by Robert KingPosted by

Robert W. King

A LANGUAGE

Today the sky is blue dust
and the mountains blue shadows
against the dust so only
the snow line across the peaks
actually exists, a scribbled
white cursive, words piling up
here and thinning out there,
like the long sentence you’d write
against the sky if you thought
you had that much to say.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

__________

Robert W. King: “Where I live, along the front range of the Rocky Mountains, the view to the west is always changing and it never fails to invite poetic attention. One particular day, the snow-capped peaks stood out from every other aspect and helped begin the poem, ‘A Language,’ although the ending—and I always love this—was a surprise.” (web)

Rattle Logo