ed. M. L. Weber
with special thanks to Susan Tichy

Contents:

Detour
Planting Myth
I Follow
Medea Reproaches Jason
After Reading Elizabeth Bishop
Letter
At Land's End
Love Poem
Voices
from Utopia
Insomnia
Night Watch
Retreat
Mazatlan
Mescalito
Beauty and the Beast
Notes from the Reservoir
It's True
Invited into a Room
2 a.m.
God's Home
Two Spies
War Zones -- Les Grandes Rues
Looking for Light
Water Color
Sunday Morning
Floodplain
Friends Desert Us Like a Bad Family History
Breakdown
Light Covers the Bodies
Equilibrium
Your Name Travels Before You
Walk the Streets Slowly Enough
As the Presence
In a Dream
When We Could Amuse Ourselves No Longer
Appearances (1)
Appearances (2)
Saying Goodbye
Inventing a New Road
Winter
Convalescing
The Misunderstanding


addendum:


Three Collaborations with M. L. Weber


a poem by M. L. Weber:

Green Earth


a poem by Susan Tichy:

Oct. 25, 1983


a poem by Stephen Oliver:

Finding Linda Bohe 1950-1983



note:
adjusting font size

Detour


I drive two thousand miles to leave
you and find your shadow,
spine whipped by wind,
in snow-filled valleys where hills
are hidden in white air and fields sleep.
You will yourself into this landscape
the way one can staunch the flow
of blood or simulate death.

My car window is a camera lens.
I watch a train
curve along tracks and
into a tunnel. The moon
spills across land so cold
the cattle moan.
My map is crumpled
and I read it like a letter.
Fifty miles before I reach
a new home. Relief comes in waves,
shocks without a center.

Planting Myth


Tonight I dream with talent. Crowns dull and coins turn
black. I skirt the frozen red mud that will not bury the
dead. Better to count the twenty-eight ribs of each
buffalo. Or plant the corn that sprouts from the belly
of a mule. There's no vigilance like sleep. I cling to
threads like a kangaroo in her pouch grasping her
mother's teat. Time enough to swallow the bitter sea. I
can drink orange juice in the morning while the sun
kisses the dew to death.

I Follow


I follow the trail to the shoreline
where the water delivers bodies
to the canyon's mouth.
The fish, entangled in moss,
want to accuse me but do not compete
with the seagulls hovering in the black sky.

I am not alone.
I carry a satchel of letters.
Their ashes fall
from the same cliff she chose for herself.
The night grows, a crack
in the earth's crust. When I scream
you awaken me, though this is not
a nightmare but the surgery
I perform after death.

Medea Reproaches Jason


How long I waited, wondering
why I feared the landscape.
The sky shook loose a few birds.
They flew straight out over the water
and I watched, deceived by the ease of it.
What could we expect, your return
ill conceived, your new bride
no more beautiful than I.
These quarrels are seductive as courtship.

I remember being a woman
in this room, my legs around you,
your hands tugging my nipples.
You knew how to persuade me well enough.
But you authored these crimes,
introducing her, your bodies
braided together, as though talking
in bed. And the moon rises
over the dead all around us.
Tell me how they accuse you.

After Reading Elizabeth Bishop


As though we preferred the iceberg
to the ship, I lie across
my bed, refusing to go anywhere.
You are visible as desire.
I'm attracted to the word, choice,
and the way Medea's nurse
understood her mistress.

Time alone presses against me.
We didn't reach the water,
the waves that were real,
giving in to one another.

Letter


Your hat and gloves look foreign
here. I move them daily.
Bring them to the open window
as if they were heliotropes, fed by light.

Have I changed, I can stare
at my hands for hours. Some nights
I drink too much. Wake up
fragile, like the little broken
images that come before sleep.

The March winds were unbearable.
I slept alone, bothered by debts.
Or walked the streets carrying
my troubles like shadows. You forgot
to write. I rationed memories like food.

What do you mean when you ask
what is central? In my dreams
you yield like water. Mornings,
your words evade me, like music
played behind closed doors. Like abandoned
lovers, stars fade before dawn.

At Land's End


I come, intrigued by a name,
to share the same latitude
with Portugal. At low tide
I jumped rocks across the breakwater.
The fish entangled in moss
and the gulls. I'd forgotten nothing,
though I say I'm new here.

The bay opens, turning away
from the land for luck.
If I rest at night, the water
pulls me under. Strange complicity,
the two of us and sometimes all
I want is sleep.

Love Poem


He wanted to be casual.
I said we were braided
together, seamless and bright.

Dreams are muscular. The body
beside me doesn't startle me anymore.
We are the same lips barely touching.

This was to be our wedding night,
that moment we'd been waiting for,
when the children would arrive
wearing our clothes like a future.

Voices


you have been desperate to know streets
life has worked against interpretation
you have penetrated the Chinese print on your wall
with someone's lover you crawled into the mountains
no one has discarded you but you suffered anyway

2.

you ride through the outskirts of Paris at night
you inspect the ears of Parisians
en realite tu devians un voyeur
you boarded the train in Bordeaux
in solitude you summoned the great masters
your clothes are in disarray when you return to him

3.

you hid on the ferry from Vancouver
everywhere you chanted for protection
you walked aimlessly in strange cities
and watched with feigned detachment when he loved you

4.

there are moments when you want the wrong man
in one recurring dream you count your loves
when you awaken there are fourteen memories
you meditate and your back grows tired
sound returns to you before you are ready

5.

in the overgrown courtyard with no flowers
two derelicts witnessed your vows
you visited the D.H. Lawrence gallery
of florescent pastel pornography
the balking ex-Catholic blessed the union
you found a motel in Taos
$4/night for a room with one window

6.

in bed you dream of another life
you move closer to him dreaming of other men
he allows your thigh over his
car headlights make tree patterns across the ceiling

7.

you have known about the brevity of his appearance
you require different attitudes for imagined departures
again you are lying in bed
with the slim line of his belly
each morning the center of the Dharmic circle awakens

8.

you hear the word estranged
and for the second time in a day you break into a sweat
on crowded streets you seek the same body type
you walk into a bar and order a drink
you discuss the range of the feminine voice
with a cyclist from Dallas

9.

"communication is too difficult," you shout at him
he speaks but you can't hear
you say good-bye into the telephone
he receives your messages
you have never known what you meant but you said it anyway

from Utopia


I recall koto melodies continuing
as the stage collapsed in flame.
Straining at fire-glint ankles.
Anxiety that this pen
would never be picked up again.
I recall fame from another life-time,
that day we smoked a pipe
on the cliff where I fell 30 feet
and the lonely look on your faces
as I crashed into broken rock.

I wanted to sleep in a cave.
I felt cold and shock and
all of you were acting strange.
You were not building a fire.
You were not creating a better world.
No one tended to the radishes.
There were no pictures on the wall,
no shadows.

You led me out to the brown ridge.
We smoked more
and flew down the mountain.
The full moon traveled with us.
My broken ankle was a broken wing.
I was running gracefully in front of you.
I limped to the truck.
I loved our tenuous existence.
We saw a hawk on top of the cliff.
The track of deer had led me to the precipice.

Insomnia



Across the canyon a pianist practices
his improvisations like
barking dogs repeat previous nights.
Scenes blur, pictures traced in
then rubbed out. A window outline
emerges . . . light gathers
the colors, spools of thread
unraveled in a half-open drawer.

Night Watch


I do not need to call out to know you're not there.
Perhaps it's better that your voice is quiet now. Your
son sleeps in the bedroom. This snow is so unbearable
that the cattle moan in their sleep. Tomorrow we will
walk as far as the narrow foot bridge that you built
across the frozen red creek. There your son will climb
the narrow neck of a spruce and watch for your long
legs to cross the hill behind our cabin. I lie in bed,
holding my side as if a child were being born from my
right hip bone. In the morning I will take your
photograph out of the my bureau drawer. Even the
mountains pale in my memory.

Retreat


Each day the sun slopes
in a different place. You stand
on the porch, between two lives,
while lamps bloom in neighboring houses,
buds opening after a storm.

Your eyes follow a man as he crosses
the meadow. His arms hang
limp in their sockets, heavier than the weight
of bone and muscle. He reminds you of a mood
you've fallen into too deeply,
nights when you walked dreaming of others,
stumbling through trees and rocks,
unable to focus on the ground below you.
Turning, he blurs into a stranger, free
from your fictions. Dogs bark, huddled together
on the horizon, repeating previous nights.
Thoughts wander like fragments of an ice floe
carrying light out to the open sea.

You remember morning and the way brown leaves
spiraled into water. You jumped across stones,
faces staring up from the bottom
of the river. Later you gathered apples
glittering across a field overrun with trees
and birds. One for each day of winter.
Time alone presses against you more heavily
than a body. Dusk frames your house
as you sit on steps, anchored to chill. You sing
to yourself all the old songs, cutting through quiet,
a swimmer forced to surface for breath.

Mazatlan


Three days of driving before
we reach Mazatlan. A blur
of villages punctuated by
uproar. Two women alone.
Endless stops to appease
the Federales. Always looking
for guns. They treat us
like a joke, two fancy whores
in a big American car.

Tired, we look for a bar.
Past the market a pock-faced man
stuffs a piece of rancid fish
into my sister's mouth. Parrots
squabble. Vicki spits, chokes.
We think maybe a drink
will help. Calm our nerves.

Inside, we order tequilla.
No one will serve us. A woman
in a burlap dress watches
from the back door. I smile.
She turns abruptly. Her body, full
in the doorway for a moment,
gives us her news.
Another child to feed soon.

The glare of the street
is unbearable. Thirsty, our voices
crack like mud in the sun.
We search for a cafe.
Adobe walls are perforated
by shops. You have to be

willing to trust the dark.
Easy to begin walking,
never come back.

I gave a quarter to
a small girl. She lets
us drink from a dirty
canteen. Beyond the
plaza, three catatonic boys
stare. A fourth throws knives
at a papier-mâché woman
dangling from a branch. "Sick,
man, you're really sick."
They laugh quietly, kicking
up dust.

Mescalito


Fear brings back mirages.
The dog's mouth is frothing.
I chop off its head with an axe.
His eyes reproach me, refuse to close.

I run until images break
and I am forced to travel in shadow.
The woman picking scabs off her face
is my mother. I tie her to a tree.

Two profiles freeze in the act of love.
Too far. If I take another step
the noose at the cave's end
will wrap itself around my neck.

I roll in grass that is
breathing near a lake
that is crying and we grow
quiet together to dance through air.

What shall we call me and
where do we meet? Earth
and water embrace me
but they will not sing my name.

Beauty and the Beast


I, who believed too much in appearances,
saw only the beast.
He bought me for a rose,
the one my father stole for me.
I came to make amends
for the sins of my father,
exchanging my life for a flower.
I said nothing about the army,
the one that surrounded his palace.
Or my father's vow to win my freedom.
I returned but I said nothing.

I never pretended to love
the beast. I loved only the danger
and I escaped. I crushed
my promises, broken petals, and
the stamen snapped nearly in two.
The beast cried out and I left him
lying on the ground, endangered,
nearly forgotten, and I returned too late.
Pathos, not purity, led me to his garden.
Why did I wait til after death's threat
to offer him such a small gift, a kiss?

Notes from the Reservoir


1.

I must write you this letter.
The seagulls above have gone crazy,
diving and staying under too long in murky
water. From the summit
of this manmade mountain
I watch the shining yellow tractors,
brilliant in sunlight, halted in mud.
I smoke"j'allume au feu du jour ma cigarette,"
while layers of cold air surround me.

2 .

Across the freezing miles my father
lies on a black leather sofa.
He drives a hearse, an old Thunderbird
with a silver cobra on the hood.
He drinks good bourbon
and listens to old records:
"when my bed gets empty make
me feel awful mean and blue."

I cannot share in his debauch.
No more baptismal drowning
in the green mossy slime
or shouting backwoods
of an Arkansas river.
This poor white girl won't jump.

It's True


It's true I broke the glass
and I wanted to see it shatter.
I enjoyed hearing the crash, too.
I, who live too sagely
within these careful boundaries
as you accuse me.

Look at how I'm no longer a witch,
choosing the Bordeaux burgundy carefully for you,
and warning my kind messengers,
Careful. See how easily the wine bruises.
See how it must be right this time.

Invited into a Room



She was invited into a room to view the objects that had frightened her. A person she couldn't see, a dark form who seemed always to be standing behind her explained that these were the objects that had scared her. She saw the red devil; it was attached on both ends to a stick, like a lever on a machine. The red devil appeared as a cycloid. It was not human, not breathing. The devil stick was a prop, the voice behind her explained, the way a Dionysian festival was no more than a puppet.

2 a.m.


The night, an easily aroused animal,
wrestles with its surface. We sink
into the promiscuous tangle of sheets
and our voices drift until only this fog
of concern lies between us.
Your body twists around itself,
craving sleep like any small kindness.

God's Home


Just as the wind drifts, strangers
mingle in my domain.
Here where there is no home,
my body is my only home, I live
too quietly for your words. The exotic
ostrich fans her wings in the masculine landscape.
I do not bury my problems anymore,
only my ancestors, precious as black star sapphires.
Here we speak daily to the dead.
Such love songs! We fear no one here.

Seagulls dart out straight into the sky,
like seaplanes and pilots without parachutes.
The birds reach out into the stark reality.
The wind chills the ostrich and rain pours
across her bed-raggled coral feathers.
The ostrich flirts with death and God's anger.
We pair off. We're holy trinities with God.
The lady buries herself. The men weep
and heap still more dirt upon dirt.
Who truly buries anyone anymore?

Two Spies

Don't speak of loss. I hear the sirens
cry too loudly and the moon pales.
Where is your faith? I see your wounded
and your dead. They parade before me
in the streets below my window.
They refuse to speak. They do not cooperate.
Say how, Nothing is real but death.
Pain is not real. Blood is not real.
Only the noise is real. Hear the guns.
Feel my gun. It is metal, cold, black.
Talk. They believe you. It is better that way.

Watch the gray pigeon with a broken wing,
feathers spread limp across the roof.
Listen to the men running up the stairs.
Say how, The police will enter the room.
The wound will fester. Silence is suicide.
Refuse to talk and they will burn your skin.
If you're lucky, then you'll faint.
Say nothing about the wind and cakes.
Or the money. Hide your new suit
and the warm overcoat and the gloves.
Telegraph out. Pretend you suffer.
It's better when they believe we suffer.

Tell them to fight for us. They're crazy.
They make me laugh. I'm drunk with irony.
Don't say, They out-number you a thousand to one.
I made a deal. Each night
I feast with the enemy. Don't say that.
Telegraph out how the night is so vast
and deep like an army trench,
like a dagger, like the inside of a cannon.
Give them war rhetoric. They are hungry.

War Zones -- Les Grandes Rues

         after Apollinaire

1

The market is strange with the scent of wild men.
Soldiers press against each other.
The beautiful lady weaves in and out
of the war fabric, the soldiers, the riff-raff,
enemy pressed against enemy.
The beautiful lady desires stockings and cigarettes.
She weaves in and out.
The machinery of war pushes her forward
and she lines up behind the market counter
between the hookers, the mobsters, the church-goers,
the ones who stay behind and search under the pews for gold.
Who will fund the war crimes?
Radios blare out casualty counts like sports scores.
The marketeer harasses the beautiful lady.
She counts slowly and coins roll along the counter.
Customers shift their weight uneasily back and forth.
Who fires the guns in the street before them?
The avenue fills with agitators, spiffs, and agents.
Who has a conscience?
What is missing in the picture?
What is wrong with the picture?
Who protects the beautiful lady?
Why does she wear a veil?


2

The hookers, too, desire stockings and cigarettes.
Modern war is not subtle.
They eat sirloin or they starve nearly to death
in their hovels as they plot against each other.
Ravaged streets crowd against manicured avenues.
Who infiltrated the blessed homeland?
Who brought the war within the blessed confines
of the blessed homeland?
The wounded fall, unable to fly to heaven.
God broods with eternal love.
Televisions broadcast pictures of bombing sites
like home-movies of summer vacations.
Who wears his conscience on his sleeve
like a pre-signed confession?
Why does the beautiful lady weave in and out
of the marketplace? She skirts the war crimes.
Leave the odious schemes, the shocking verdicts
to others. She is hungry. Fresh food frightens her.
The apples look like human skin.
At home she looks out her window too often.
She prefers plain crackers and hot chocolate made
with boiling water.
She does not taste her food.
She is beautiful with suffering.


3

Her face glows with the human fever of slavery.
The soldiers crowd beside her on the streets
to protect her, to glimpse her face,
to press it into their memories.
They puzzle through long nights of vigilance, and hookers,
the flash of a thigh, a breast,
a scream, is it orgasm or murder?
The beautiful lady is at once a madonna, a sacrifice,
a martyr, a grandmother.
She keeps her people close to her bosom.
She protects the moral fabric of the society which hides
behind the metallic war machinery.

Late at night, she is like no lady you ever knew.
Hear the screams, the men running away from
the blood and the bodies, swept away
like the debris of a wild party, by market time.
The cities are occupied.
Love is rationed as strictly as medical supplies.
Why are the curfews so strict?
Turn out the lights and watch the streets late at night.
The cities are obese with war machinery.
A man holds his woman close to him and covers her ears.

Looking for Light



On Fifth Avenue I saw a rainbow
framed by an oil slick.
Water disperses all gloom.
If the man I love sleeps
with another woman, shall I disappear
into the night?
My umbrella,
a good bullet, hugs my thigh.
Its handle swings from my belt.
I remember hurling it at him once
while he applauded, comparing me to Apollo.

There's no time to stop in midtown,
or Union Square, or by Manhattan's southern tip.
Traveling north I follow the river.
Never far enough away, I forget about home
as I work at pacing the island.
What a great idea to find a focal point
that doesn't hurt. I believe in alchemy.
Stars bloom in the dark cracks of the sky.

Water Color



How rain embraces pavement
the way I hear old songs
guitar chords and a photograph
of a concierge, I pretend I'm
her, dress in black veils doing
whatever neglected women do
when they live in Paris.

Gray and blue raincoats
splash back and forth
through muggy streets. The old
storekeeper mumbles in Japanese
as he counts my change
and I place today's headlines
above my hair and run

past stringy teenagers
and their radio's reply
I'd rather be blind than. . . .
walk these streets again?
I wonder, my eyes following the veins
of light that curve
through high buildings.

Sunday Morning


She awakens to the clamor of telephone.
A voice calls to ask for names of sane but interesting
people to invite for dinner. She feels reluctant to explore
this question since an almost seductive event had filled her
dreams since dawn.

She stretches her thighs and arms, remem-
bering his hands on her back. The voice asks her to
explain the nature of Buddhism in North America. She
suggests there were other people with more expertise
in the matter.

Her dream begins to slip away from her. She
calculates the possibility of recapturing him if she could fall
asleep again. The telephone receiver grows heavy. The
voice drones on, thin but persistent. She feels desperate.

Now the voice makes sounds of friend-
ship. It is lonely, has had a hard time of it, inquires shyly
about the possibility of coming over. So many questions
to pursue, the voice pleads. Topics explode through tele-
phone wires. How can artists interact better with each
other and the community? Is it true blondes have more
suicides? What can we as artists do about ecological
degradation? The voice becomes shrill.

The facts are: it's noon and she is lying in
bed with naked indulgence. She will do anything to get
rid of the voice. She agrees to visit the voice tomorrow,
then allows the receiver to fall out of her hand. Later
she can say they were accidentally disconnected.

She lies quietly in bed, retaining fragments
of dream. Her daytime lover enters her mind, then rests
beside her body. In late afternoon, she tears the telephone
out of the wall.





Floodplain


Every hundred years, floods
threaten the valley. We chant
Hosannah at the water's edge.
Purge us of bad marriages.
Take the sick and suicidal.
We have forgotten to couple
the animals. You say
we slept together too long.
Renew us with sin.

The night brings unexpected gifts.
We tire of staring at debris.
Patience is no triumph.
Stars appear, colliding with the open sky.

Friends Desert Us Like a Bad Family History


No one goes home with the right person.
I drank too much and each step
is more deliberate. A television actor
recites how the past is over,
the future is here. I fill my lungs
with smoke, their only natural resource.
Fumbling for valium and cigarettes,
my hands are like the dream
where the artist makes mistakes.

Breakdown


She lay in bed alone
and the door melted into human form,
crying at his lack of attention.
The surface was jazz playing,
the surface was water rippling,
a mint julep in her hand.
When a person has an illness
she must not think about it.

In one recurring dream I take
pink and red flowers to the cemetery.
I return to crush the pink petals
and pour burgundy on the withered grass.

Light Covers the Bodies


My brain fails me late at night, the way a razor blade
turns blunt under the light of a full moon.
We are energy being channeled by form. Why do
witches wear hats in the shape of a cone? The secret of
the pyramid is its shape. My skin will grow rough and
pebbled if you try to leave me.
I'm tired and my mother returns from the dead. Nacre.
Her pallid frame floats over the mountains and into town.
An earthquake threatens. I run into the open doorway and
chant, risking your sanity with these pure responses to a
quiet life.

Equilibrium


I hear my voice return
to me from the other side
of the room, quieter, the way colors fade
as the sea deepens. A vermilion sun
passes though the ribs of mountain.
Memories creep under soft skin, ridges
along the ocean floor. I imagine
this as a hotel, stars congesting
across the ceiling and all my old friends
sitting in the lobby. I speak
these words not knowing yet
what they mean, as though wind
were just another voice, the moon
I studied last night becoming
another version of my story. When we turn
to a new life who is to say
when we awaken or if the dream
has stepped into our body?

Your Name Travels Before You

             for Roger Echohawk


Halfbreed Pawnee sleeps
alone. Blue fungus thrives
in the wine bottle.

At dawn an eagle
attacked him for laughing
in the sweat bath.

Walk the Streets Slowly Enough


and the treetops bow down to you.
Animals squirm on the balcony.
Legs marked by sun are strongest,
lines connecting one to another.

Blue deer in ditches.
They caged you
and memorized the look
in your eyes. Today I see
silver-green eyes of cats.

What dream recurs
in and out of our bodies?

Pale gray air.
Sun is burning a deep black disc
in my throat.

As the Presence


As the presence of a solitary muskrat
defined the surface of a pond,
I wait here,
ready to describe what is missing.

Beneath the ocean
lies a well, lined with rocks.
And the room is open
where you never allowed anyone.

In a Dream



You return, as though death
were seasonal, and we walk
through sodden leaves. Clouds
cover the rumbling stars,
deep in the throat of a storm.

What of it if we waver?
How gently the rain
skims the surface of the pond.
Already the night
has grown into its body.

When We Could Amuse Ourselves No Longer


When we could amuse ourselves no longer
by tracing lines across the tablecloth
as we spoke or watching our faces
and recalling all the stories
we walked out to the street. The stars
were fixed in their places like dim lights
above a bar. We moved slowly
and inspected the ground as though it were a photograph
revealing details of each other's lives.

We climbed to the top of a hill
watching the moon as it hung
too gracefully over the valley.
All around there was the wind's prattle
like the foam of language in the air.
Even with the pressure of your arms
to brace me I began to slide
on the rocky slope. You caught me
before I could fall or leave you there
as in the past smiling alone above the city.

Appearances (1)


I'm awakened by thunder
and lie in bed, dressed
in a sheet, hearing the weave
of trees and wind.

My future here reminds me
of a Sunday afternoon. Easy
to let it slip by, reading books
and listening to music. I stretch
in early morning, pale
as the leaves I crushed
with last night's footsteps.

The sky clears and I try
to imagine you here,
exotic in this mountain town,
like a boat on the Mediterranean
loaded with snow water.
I won't stay. My breath forms
circles of fog on the glass.

Appearances (2)


This is what you say to yourself late at night. You
suspect that you've chosen a lover with bad character.
He tells you lies and you collect them like pearls,
acutely polished. Soon you have a string of pearls to
wear around your neck. You wish that you could take it
off.

You close your eyes and smell the sweat in the palm
of his hand. Damp locks of hair curl on the nape of his
neck. You sleep intensely. In your dream God shines
like a sun. Spirits move friendly through the bedroom
door. A corn snake wraps his body around a field mouse.

Saying Goodbye


You dream in slurred speech,
sifting through the past, clothes
abandoned in a hotel room.

Dogs lift their thin tongues
to the moon and speckled deer
approach the cabin.
I memorize their bodies outlined
against the lights of the valley.
Sleeping with you is like contracting
a fever. I feel the night
through your skin. You want
a woman in your dream,
your hands pillow my back
as it arches for you.

What am I thinking as you rest
beside me? Better to say nothing
than trust the way words combine.

Inventing a New Road


Black water spills pathways, veins
through ice that cracks
as we walk along the lake's shore.

We can see the city, distant smoke
and light scratching air. Already
the night has grown into its body.
we search through clouds for Ursa Minor.
For the first time we meet in winter. You say
only the stars are a precise
indicator of time. When we lived
in the same town I questioned
you less. Muscles separate into mosaic
under your coat when we touch.

Slender flakes blossom on branches
of willows like the pattern drawing
our future to us. Wild geese
hover over this valley.
We watch them dive, sleek
head meeting wings and the water, below.

Winter



My spine bends in the wind
and I smile, feigning comfort.
Only my hands are warm,
secured in mittens and I concentrate
all my energy there. Stark bushes flower
and vine tendrils break in waves.
I've grown a second set
of eyes in my fingertips.
We turn towards home,
that room where I've stared
at the curtains so long
the pattern looks no more
like snowflakes than dust.

Convalescing


I was photographed, a bruised right lung.
Now my hand often gropes for the healthy one,
somewhere around the heart, I think.
I prescribe long, solitary walks across the terrain.
Under the open sky I forgive my past,
the way I free my breath, the cough of misery.
What of it if I wavered, like a convex moon,
saying obstinately, "Feelings don't connect, the way
our right and left sides aren't mirror images."
I remember now I am a guest of life, my host
never tiring of my stay, always asking me
what I desire. Feathers and stones weight my pockets.
I need no miracles to remind me, not even the mustangs
driving their shining bodies hard across the plains.

The Misunderstanding


Too much glass has been broken in this room.
Naked feet become a luxury.
New York is expensive that way.
Here, gray skies weigh more than water.
Like the East River, we are transient.
Like the Hudson, our names carry a history.

I brush glass from my plate,
keeping dinner warm for my new protagonist.
If we laugh at love's needs, mistaking fire
for air, words for food, then the city
is a place where the young congregate
to learn death's manners.
I have cleaned the mirror
and my lipstick is a coral invitation,
contrived, like the lights on the Empire State Building.
Only the roses he will wish he remembered,
the burgundy ones, will be more vivid.

He will come with his softest voice
and the arms that don't tug so hard.
We will spend the evening drinking Pinot Chardonnay
and speaking in the subjunctive.
If we sleep, all the Upper East Side will have drifted
under before us, except for the drunken couple
crossing the street, chic young devils with halos,
swinging high, as though lifted by their umbrellas,
slick as wings.

addendum:



Three Collaborative Poems with Marc Weber


1


you hold my foot with gentle candor
for you must touch everything you can

but in crowds you touch no one
so because of loneliness you continue

back to the room where a mouth opens for you
without emotion your eyes respond to the light

can a body be awakened too many times?
or is it just a restlessness?

others have answers who would tell you for money
that a quietude belongs to no one


2


alone on the blasted hill
until a Japanese woman brings me a cup of tea

I settle into place
await some things to happen

or a person to appear
slender mirage who disappears when I open my eyes

believing in the validity of life
I caress the tender new leaves

which do not leave with
the first snowfall

and rush into a churning wind
that kills Indian summer


3


lost in the middle by the request of her lies
he pretends to be someone who can't exist

staring into the morning he awakens
the body beside him will not move

although everything is tried the dream goes on
now coastlines are traced on maps

patterns of life will not leave him
but he broods too much about death

his sense of feeling concerns a reality of movement
that she would crush in one soaring moment

Green Earth


Green earth,
only imaged by the senses,
wind off the sea,

not grasped
until you break
from duality.

Green eyes,
how you
wondered,

green eyes,
how you saw.

Marc Weber

October 25, 1983


On the sidewalk this morning someone unknown lies dead,
invisible within the chalked lines of memory.

Headlines tell me: prepare for war. I turn
in circles: on my beaches, it is all the same sea.

I remember you as a woman of light, and remember
that a great light throws such heavy shadows.

In your going away is a loneliness, and a fear
that in any loneliness I will meet you.
It is like the fear that I will never meet you.

For in this country there is no continuity.
The man who came to tell me you were dead
no longer lives in this town, and this town
no longer stands at the entrance to a new life.

There is no new life. It has become
the old one, with a tide of dead soldiers
sweeping away the last solitary grief.

But here at my feet some kind stranger lies
in the shape of anonymous grief. So, like a widow
at the tomb of an unknown soldier, I remember.

And there lies between the passing cars
and the sky, a brown silence, a sorrow.

My sorrow is the quiet in that Greek cafe
where the waiters who hated laughter had their way.

Susan Tichy

Finding Linda Bohe 1950-1983



'those million-shaped clouds'
a dying of the light that is eidetic at the day's end;

paddocks lift darkening backs to it

while the last, wedged bird-call drives home
       between the small silences at dusk.

Not far off, once a small village with
       'a spire like a fine Spanish needle'
untenable in the heavily tenanted space

as one suburb, leapingly, bounds over another.

Once I had said:
       Your lipstick reminds me of tall,
buildings pale pink.

Once you had said:
       My lipstick is a coral invitation
contrived like the lights on the Empire State Building.

We had never met.
       I knew nothing of you.

I found your poems years later yet faintly memoried,
       Linda Bohe, by 2003.

And leaving this life, did you pause
at the narrow footbridge across the frozen red creek
       your companion built?

And moving quickly on, did you again hear
the piano notes of the moon hold to the canyon wall?

In your poems, you played out the ultimate
human secret, that love discloses little more than loss.

       I felt I knew you.

Stephen Oliver

        From a military family, Linda Bohe grew up in various parts of the country. Her childhood was mostly in the South, her mid-teens to young adulthood in Colorado. She later resided in New York City, where many of her poems are set.
         Linda studied with Alan Dugan, William Matthews and Richard Hugo. Her terse syntax perhaps reminds one of Hugo, but with an eclectic bent. Her broad range of poetic taste was shown in the magazine, Attaboy, which she edited with Phoebe MacAdams.
         Among other writers of her generation with whom she was in close personal contact were Jayne Anne Phillips, Wendy Battin, Nancy Schoenberger, and Susan Tichy.