by Russ Sargent

Calle Lorca will always be the scent
of fresh bread clinging to me
all the way to the tenth century ruin
where al – Mutasim invited poets
to make their songs.  Few come here now.
It’s hot.  There are no refreshments.
Yet the stones of a thousand years
are like loaves of bread to me.
Memory – songs the gods keep.
Durable as the twin peaks
of Las Hermanitas across the bay.
Something rises in me here.  Ah,
to walk the hills of Almería
with lips singing, wondering how
they survived the Andalusian moons
and the rigorous schedules they keep.
Waiting here in the dark.  I sit
in moonlight.  The rocks warm
as bread freshly broken.
Strange nourishment, stone is.
This stone I eat.  This stone
I feed to the dead.

by Michael Palma

How Whitman would have loved it here,
This diner on this Sunday morning.

Bright with the chrism of the rain,
He’d track pure mud across the floor,

Fleeing the houseful of strange siblings,
The soldiers pleading from stained cots,

The Captain with his shattered skull —
All past his healing hands and heart.

What mouths he’d make at that mechanic,
Griefs he’d embrace in that old man.

What words he’d swap with the counterman,
Sturdy American sayings, bright with use.

Unbuttoned, hatless, large, he’d whoop
O counterman!  O comprehensive nation!

Then we would cluster round him, stirred
By his delight in the little jars

Standing at intervals along the counter,
Containing and dispersing the salt of the earth.

by Michael Palma

The one who thinks he’s in despair
Or nearly there
Crawlstrokes down the morning
Flapping translucent wings.

Beauty’s withdrawn, tenderness,
The wet surrender
To the animals inside.
Bare wires partition the air.

Mouthing the slick bone
Of duty, he buttons buttons.
Windows, corners: everything has
Its essence, none of it his.

The hands do no good
For anything any more.
Nothing uses them any more,
Not woman, not wood.

Hiding in his life
He assumes a vertical posture
To probe the sockets of nature.
What jelly is left?

Once in a blue power
He bit into the flower
To unravel all the days.  Expecting
Nothing now, he bites the flower.

The eyes are thicker,
Heavier all the time.  They weigh the head
Down into the greatcoat.
He remembers the man who said,

You don’t screw around,
You don’t drink or dope,
If you’re nuts it doesn’t show,
So how the hell can you be a poet?

Imagination ravens to be old
On the back porch, all definition gone,
The pennants slack in a flat wind,
The work behind, forgotten, half undone.

Thirty years down, he wears
A smaller face,
Fills the minimum space,
Finds less and less to need.

Violins spiral from the stereo,
The window grows no bigger all the time,
The sun won’t shine,
The rain won’t let him go.

Beauty that shrivels with its sickly smile
Forgiving the stone world
Gets him nowhere now.
The beautiful is what survives.

Blunted with hope, he aims to stand
Hidden in the naked land.
His insides jump and dance like any clown,
He beats the line down to the possible.

Bombs shake the camera eye,
Shake the ground.
Pots rattle on the shelves,
The view holds steady.

The line holds steady.  The sections of the brain
Click cleanly like a rifle mechanism.
Fingers crooking over the clicking keys,
Like any clown, he hits another note.

by Michael Palma

Sometimes, like an old clipping
I carry around with me,
I unfold the time we went,
For no particular reason,
For a weekend on Cape Cod.
We’d driven all day long
Through wet and dirty weather.
Fog had begun to cling
To everything by the time
We came to our motel.
We couldn’t see a thing
As we crossed the empty road
Hand in hand, except
A misty blob of moon
From the streetlight overhead.
Once in the restaurant
We settled comfortably
In the corner, just as we
Had settled into years
Of marriage.  Later on,
In the fog – heavy air
On the motel balcony
We looked out toward the ocean.
Though nothing was in sight
We knew that it was there.
By then I’m sure we were
Too tired to touch.  Just one
Unmemorable night
I remember now and then
And think of, happily,
For no particular reason.