<div class="line">and dear-john notes: the color is always</div>
<div class="line">the same—off-white, with grime somewhere</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">between the left wing and Toronto. Rain</div>
<div class="line">washed away wet paint from the park bench.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Up to the end, she blamed the weather.</div>
<div class="line">The classical CDs left in her music box are</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">pirated copies, some titles smudged with</div>
<div class="line">liquor. I taught her how to drink hard and fast;</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">we both had the same dance instructor</div>
<div class="line">in school: a Brazilian named Dante</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">who dated us separately before the 9/11</div>
<div class="line">disaster. There comes a time in everyone’s</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">life when solitude gapes from the molds</div>
<div class="line">of cheeses in the fridge, sometimes</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">the shoelace that comes undone in the midst</div>
<div class="line">of a rush-hour crowd. In theaters, <em>Swan Lake</em></div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">continues to draw lonely people: the costumes</div>
<div class="line">are elaborate, the women entrancing, the water</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">and fog deliberately fake. She confessed</div>
<div class="line">watching the prince die seventeen-and-a-half</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">times with another man while I slept in the nude.</div>
<div class="line">The lights were switched off, and I thought</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">I knew every part of the house by then</div>
<div class="line">without stepping on a loose floorboard.</div>


The Miracle of Naming

Connecting Flights

Of Geese

<div class="line">Hyacinthus opens sky for ICU bedders</div>
<div class="line">with the sky bloodied a blue so blue.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">We pledge in Latin our mutated love:</div>
<div class="line">&#8220;<em>‘carinii pneumonia …</em></div>
<div class="line">Kaposi’s sarcoma …</div>
<div class="line">Mycobacterium avium …&#8221;</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">My arm vines your nape for a kiss;</div>
<div class="line">you scratch a furtive glance at the IV pole.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">We make love holding hands instead—</div>
<div class="line">Latin is now our embrace.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">And love—this bright, corpuscular love—</div>
<div class="line">is the endless despair of never coming back.</div>


Prayer on National Childfree Day

Channellock Pliers

Ros and Guild, 1994

<div class="line">When she enters</div>
<div class="line">she has to adjust the seat to her size.</div>
<div class="line">She thinks <em>this is how it feels</em></div>
<div class="line"><em>to drive a stolen car.</em></div>
<div class="line">She leans against the wheel to change</div>
<div class="line">the recline angle and smells</div>
<div class="line">what she’s learned to call</div>
<div class="line"><em>the starvation of damp-palmed girls.</em></div>
<div class="line">The wipers go off. Like chemistry class,</div>
<div class="line">that boy in the skeleton closet</div>
<div class="line">rubbing vapor from his glasses.</div>
<div class="line">For a whole year, he made room for her</div>
<div class="line">in his homework, his tree house.</div>
<div class="line">She is different now.</div>
<div class="line">She is taller. She uses a sharper blade</div>
<div class="line">to shave between the legs.</div>
<div class="line">When her elbows push</div>
<div class="line">against her breasts, she knows</div>
<div class="line">she’s come too near.</div>
<div class="line">She slides back. And forth.</div>
<div class="line">Then back again. Her movements</div>
<div class="line">are arrhythmic, spurred, <em>ose</em>.</div>
<div class="line">The driving instructor predicts a good day</div>
<div class="line">for doing curves. His hands</div>
<div class="line">around the stress ball open. Close.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/AngAdjusts.mp3"></audio></figure><p></p>

ALL OF YOUR MESSAGES HAVE BEEN ERASED by Vivian Shipley

Delta Flight 1152

A Driving Student Adjusts the Seat

<p><em>Review by Lynn Levin</em><img decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/ereviews/images/angbirds.jpg" alt="Seeing Birds in Church... by Arlene Ang" align="right" /></p>
<p><small>Cinnamon Press<br />
Meirion House, Glan yr afon, Tanygrisiau,<br />
Blaenau Ffestiniog<br />
Gwynedd, LL41 3SU<br />
Wales<br />
UK<br />
ISBN 978-1-907090-06-6<br />
2010, 80 pp., L7.99 UK, L8.99 outside UK<br />
www.cinnamonpress.com</small></p>
<p>The poems in Arlene Ang’s new collection <em>Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu</em> bid farewell to mothers, fathers, spouses, children, comrades in arms, and others. My own parents are elderly, and I know that I will endure some of the losses that Ang describes in this new collection. I will return to her lyrics at that sad time because of the tenderness they offer, but I savor the poems now for their beauty. These poems of death and remembrance speak intimately of family ties. While a few poems might hint of regret, most reflect on relationships that are solid, tender, and loyal. Though unsentimental, the poems are steeped in love.</p>
<p>In her 2008 collection <em>Bundles of Letters Including A, V, and Epsilon</em>, a collaborative work with poet Valerie Fox, Ang was playful, experimental, and avant-garde. Her 2005 collection <em>The Desecration of Doves</em> delighted with stylish, and sometimes sexy, lyrics. In <em>Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu</em>, her fifth collection, Ang returns to the lyrical and richly descriptive style of <em>The Desecration of Doves</em>.</p>
<p>Arlene Ang’s metaphors startle and amaze. A house in August wears “heat like hosiery” (“The Day She Was Called to Identify the Body”). Parents contemplating their adult son’s death, stand outside his bedroom door “like phantom limbs” (“As we think”). In a house of mourning, time passes to no effect: “Like a mother, the clock wipes its face over and over/with its hands” (“A Sun That Isn’t a Source of Heat…”). Ang, who lives near Venice, sometimes brings glimpses of Italy into her poems. In “Col San Martino,” a wife drives to visit the remains of the car wreck that claimed her husband, and the landscape speaks: “From this hillside, the vineyards/sprawl like cemeteries, grape stalks crucified on white pales.”</p>
<p>In the title poem, “Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu,” the poet unfolds a painterly tableau in which a sparrow, a pigeon, and a blackbird alight upon a pew, a statue of Christ, and a bronze of a station of the Cross. The poem opens with these lines:</p>
<blockquote><p>The silence never lasts long.<br />
Wings in the air stroke and turn it upside-down.<br />
Ears were made to capture chaos,<br />
you said. A tree sparrow raps<br />
its beak on the pew as if to remind the wood<br />
that it was once a tree.</p></blockquote>
<p>The birds seem to symbolize the spirit of a person – a father perhaps? – who had wanted a room overlooking the church.</p>
<p>Ang often memorializes the dead by describing the spaces in which they lived or the rooms in which they are dying. She shows us a sickroom with its crumpled sheets and pills, a studio, a kitchen. In “Leopold’s Room,” a mother seeks to hold on to the memory of her son who died of cancer by having his bedroom videotaped.</p>
<blockquote><p>The curtains – craggy with nicotine – billow,<br />
smudging a view of the lake.<br />
The tape jams. You don’t slap<br />
the video camera awake, but watch<br />
the wind shut the door on Leopold’s secrets:<br />
the x-rays, the synthetic wigs,<br />
the unworn sweaters<br />
with moth holes mouthing sarcomata.</p></blockquote>
<p>Amid the tender moments, Ang faithfully observes the things that are not so neat and beautiful. Various poems speak of incontinence or food spoiling in the dying person’s fridge. And yet, one of the things that impress me about these poems is how kind the people in them are to each other, the sensitivity they show, and the dignity they accord those who are suffering the humiliations of illness. In “Surviving Grandfather,” a poem written from a child’s point-of-view, Ang writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>In the end, his fingers cast spidery<br />
shadows on the wallpaper, white sheets<br />
became stained: this was coffee,<br />
everyone said, and we shouldn’t stare.</p></blockquote>
<p>The children are then sent outdoors to play, and there they encounter still other clues of the grandfather’s illness.</p>
<p>Ang includes a number of sonnenizios on lines from the poets Ros Barber, Merryn Williams, and Jean Cassou. Invented by the Kim Addonizio, the sonnenizio is a fourteen-line poem that springboards off a line from someone else’s sonnet and which incorporates a word from that first borrowed line in each of the successive thirteen lines. The poem ends with a couplet. I was delighted to discover the sonnenizio, and I see that it is catching on with other poets.</p>
<p>The poems in <em>Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu</em> throw their net over a world that is receding, fading, and therefore all the more dear. The poet says to us: “You are facing a loved one’s death, you are visiting his possessions and keepsakes. I’ve been there, too, and this is how it was for me.” These are poems that console. They are clear-minded, unsentimental, stoic even, and yet they radiate love.</p>


Campaign Season

Aubade For One Dismayed

SEEING BIRDS IN CHURCH IS A KIND OF ADIEU

<div class="line">Like a man’s remains in the belly</div>
<div class="line">of a whale, the throat cultures its own pain.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">A cruelty—a secret love—that drinks</div>
<div class="line">crushed glass from a glass. In dreams,</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">the body runs, twisting its ankles</div>
<div class="line">in different places until the feet break off</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">and swell into barrel cacti from the sand.</div>
<div class="line">A heartbeat cuts the torso apart,</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">fever that draws a birdbath from the groin.</div>
<div class="line">To possess a head is to wear it inside-out</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">after the hair finishes licking the pillowcase.</div>
<div class="line">On one wall, there’s a charcoal sketch</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">of Death digging up his mother.</div>
<div class="line">On another, a mirror holds the moon</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">captive inside the room—deformed</div>
<div class="line">and unborn—like a diaphanized turtle in a jar.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/AngTonsillitis.mp3"></audio></figure><p></p>

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May 5, 2016Ros and Guild, 1994Arlene Ang

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May 5, 2016Ros and Guild, 1994Arlene Ang

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