by Richard Jackson

       What I thought was an ethical problem
       of existence was only just a broken heart.
                                                 — Jack Myers

A night with ticks inching across the sky like stars.
The lost moon, or only a spotlight from a store opening.
A mind without the wings it so desperately needs.
Not an elegy.  Only meteors we almost think we see.
A heart with its phone lines all tangled.  Our place
in the cosmos like a seed buried in an orange.  His
Gerry Mulligan, Moonlight in Vermont, the baritone
notes strolling through pastures, bumping into trees.
A lesson you can see on the other side of the waterfall
that you’ll never understand.  Not an elegy.  Only this
graveyard of unfinished sentences.  The scenery of a life
heaped up at the side of the stage.  As when a tree falls
inside your head.  As when even the atomic clocks can’t
tell.  All day, raindrops exploding on the windowsill.
And tonight this broken spider web, a glistening galaxy.
Perhaps the history of clouds: Lenticular, Pyrocumulus,
Noctilucent.  Perhaps the history of myth, — Mot, the god
of death arriving in the Neolithic age like a desert.
Or that age when the liver was thought to be the heart.
Blind thoughts.  Words asleep in the throat.  A voice
over your shoulder calling you back.  Blind echoes.
Francis Bacon writing that science will stop misery.
All those pink mushrooms in one spot hiding the giant
mushroom beneath the turf.  The bird on that rotting
branch thinking it is a leaf.  No elegy.  Every elegy
in love with its speaker.  No, nothing to learn from
that self absorbed moon.  Every breath an experiment.
The street singers forgetting their words that fly
off like swallows circling the chimneys and trees.
The first light falling from the sky, the first darkness
rising from the earth.  The train that keeps traveling
on rails that grow impossibly narrow in the distance.
Old wagon roads the forest already claims.  The wind
arriving uninvited, it’s needles trying to stitch you
to pure air.  Impossible to calculate how many
protons pass through us each day.  Colliding particles
to discover what the world was like before it was
the world.  Each life a singularity no physicist could know.
No elegy.  A poem with a flask in its pocket.  A poem
unable to complete itself.  A poem that refuses to settle
in one place.  The story of the Buddha telling creation to be
patient. A good bird can sleep on the wing.  Thus
the star shaped prints the robin leaves in the mud.
Thus the pain of the moon that can’t claw its way back up.
And this, a paper boat set on fire and gliding on
a glowing river leading nowhere.  A lesson there, too.

by Christopher Russell

Hi Jack, is what I want to say.

But at this moment
there’s this little voice loving its perch,
screwed into a reflection
revolving the back of my head,
bopping my frontal lobe up and down
like a lollipop kid from Oz,
who’s barking into my spirit’s inner ear:
What in the hell are you doing
writing this letter to a dead guy!

Since the only letters I ever wrote,
I wrote into the soft side of a fungus
I’d earlier snapped off the side of a tree
and dried out in the sun.

In this way I guess I grew up
using death and decay as paper,
as the vehicle
through which the printed word
got communicated, as my messenger.

But if I were to take each thing about this
weird almost purist form of letter writing
           into me,
I’d say all I ever really did writing those letters,
was send myself into the heart of hearts:
The passage of our bodies
and whatever snaps off of them
into the next question,
the next unknowing changing its color
underneath something like your “alien sun,”

which later I’d also want to take into me,
longing for that mystical experience,
that spiritual intimacy
all mystics spend the minutes of their days
trying to convince themselves
is a normal, everyday fantasy,
everyone thinks of constantly,
but never admits to marrying.

Still, I’m learning
there are all forms of being alone.
I remember the first time you asked me
if I was done playing with myself,
when all my running at the mouth
to finally get nothing whatsoever out,
was shooting wads into my eye,
and patching me up into the pirate
of his own one way ship to the island of
Noonegivesashitbecauseyoudont,
which is located just off the coast of
Whatareyoumostafraidof.

And while it seems kind of ridiculous to say
           I’ll miss you,
since you’re already somewhere beyond the grave
by now, boxing with the Gods,
it seems pertinent to mention
the last thing you said to me on Facebook,
after I told you I’d sent another manuscript out
to one of those first book contests
I probably shouldn’t be sending out to,
and certainly can’t afford,

which was that you’d sent one out to the same contest.
A coincidence that seemed to spark the fighter in you,
who was then, in your loving, Jack Myers kind of way,
wondering
“Will the student be able to kill his master?”
I believe is what you wrote me.

The answer, Jack, even though I cried for you
more than I did my own father last night,
is obviously, and still is, no.
I love you.  Thank you for teaching me
it’s not wrong to make Me the “tea” of my poetry.
Somehow you knew that’s what I wanted.

by Suzanne Rhodenbaugh

The soul of Nietzsche, the scruples
of Alfred E. Neuman.  After stanza one
it yawns, picks its nose
and farts.  It takes a drag on my cigarette
and I wait for it
to sting me, strike me,
give me bilious fever — anything.
The poem sulks.  It won’t budge.
I feed it a hot fudge sundae, an entire
bag of sour cream flavored
chips.  I’m its sole supporter.
I tell it not to bite the hand
that feeds it.  It whistles Dixie
and reminds me I’m way over forty.
Hell I show it
every scar I’ve got.
I tell it I come from a bad blood line.
It wants Stevie Wonder, wants pizza.
Wants stuff to rhyme with Nietzsche.

by Sydney Lea

Our good friend Mark forwarded your lovely
          “Cirrus” soon after you died.
                    I’d have wept at it even if you’d been alive.

We are bound to honor your words: let my epitaph be /
          the glance, the edge, /the mist.
                    You were a mensch to the very last,

your poem touched by that rare wit I’ll forever
          connect with you, but to me
                    it’s the splendid late – life humility —

among the poets a quality much rarer —
          that makes you dearer.  Tonight,
                    having read you, I slip back to meeting The Blue Notes.

They were then no longer The Charlemagnes,

          but Teddy Pendergrass
                    wasn’t their lead yet.  I was in those days

a regular at that bar at 5th & Pine,
          and every visit was worth
                    every penny, its jukebox the best on earth.

One night I shook the hand of the soul group’s founder.
          I actually met Harold Melvin,
                    which seemed an unmerited blessing.

He’d come into the place with two of the other singers,
          their names unremembered now.
                    They stood by the door and then broke out

in an a cappella version of “Out and Let Me
          Cry.”  ’65.  All hell
                    was breaking loose, Dr. King in jail,
war burgeoning.  The three men’s harmony —
          though it’s only now I can sense
                    what it was that I saw come to pass —

epitomized the astonishing impulse to song
          against all the reasons to cry.
                    You too had reasons — and sang.  Today,

I long to sing back to you, friend,   somewhere along
          the edges,   among the mists.
                    I met you,   I heard you for years,   Jack.   I was blessed.