by Carolyn Gelland

          “Beauty becomes petulant to me,” said de Kooning.
          “I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous. . . . ”

jackals cackling
haloes around their teeth,
forms somersaulting
inside zooscapes of rotten fruit,
popping nooses
that I look through
like a lorgnette:

this pair of flying buttocks,
these brutal
burlesquing legs
under a venomous
swish of skirt,
this parasite and zany of the stars,

ah, ah,
but to speak here of mother–love
is extravagant.

by Carolyn Gelland

The gutter of New York grounded me —
that’s my kind of space.
There are streets here too
that give me the same feeling.

There is a time in life
when you just take a walk,
and you walk in your own landscape,
hovering on both
sides of yourself.

I’m in my element
when I’m out of this world,
then I’m in the real world.

You should always be drunk,
that’s the great thing.
Drunk without respite.
Drunk with what?
Wine, poetry, virtue . . .
But get drunk.

The last stanza is a paraphrase from Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen.

by Carl Little

I know these, too, from the pond
I skirted as a child, the green
cake knives clustered along the shore
doubling in shallows

where I cast hula popper hoping
the weed’s namesake might snatch
and tug the line into nearby lily pads.
Oh lovely slime of thrashing fish!

And now I find them again — the weeds —
in a corner of Somes Pond where Wylie
once paddled her canoe and spooked
at a vision of red–faced natives,

pickerel weed spiking the air,
water bugs scurrying among stems.
They hold the pose through summer,
a few blue blossoms adding to the thrill,

part of an overall green that we greet
with affection after a long winter.
Elsewhere, water lilies are more prominent
in the waterscape, but haven’t a clue

about the subtleties of beauty. Weed, yes,
but such a exceptional one cutting
the air this way and that in a light breeze
that animates us all.

by Carl Little

Small Green Grass Snake
          Great Spruce Head Island, Maine

Slithers through the grass, although
slithers doesn’t do its movements justice —
maybe glide or ripple or shape–shift,
so delicate, thin, moving up the path
ahead of my footsteps.

God or someone saw the shape in the grass
and called it green grass snake, an easy
ID compared to, say, Bactrian camel
or nudibranch or ocelot, all part
of Paradise, which makes me think

of the poor snakes of St. Croix
enjoying reign of a virgin island
looking up one day to find mongoose
in their path, which proceed to rip them
skin from skin, brought in

to clean up Eden, a Rikki–Tikki–Tavi
nightmare for the serpent crew,
a kind of injustice played out by man
playing god, and the ghosts of those snakes
rattle dry corn shakes while here

on this island a slim slider of a light green hue
that wouldn’t know a mongoose from a mole hill
heads off to the left in search of edibles
in the northern kingdom of Great Spruce
where no one holds dominion over nothing.