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Featured Poet
David Hunter Sutherland
Steel Umbrellas
-for Vartouhi Yeranos
And its been raining mostly
folderol
gush and puff of silver thaw,
squalls of verse and hoarfrost ballads'
rime riche song.
And we've been swept along as casualty
bedewed and cordoned in refrain,
life's sudden showers, swift denouements,
rain again.
Beneath umbrellas fettered parasols,
below a canopy of cloud,
blow nimbus parables whose metaphor
announce a spectral sky;
in thunderous outbursts,
fount anew neath fir and pine,
as falling leaves on limb and meristem
augur a season's slow demise.
And tonight this forest green ephemeral
deciduous alike our lives,
toss fragile keepsake, time's memento
to earth then stars on stormy night.
In thick of wind and violent tempest
in tumult waves on sand and dune,
our precious dreams find sentried breakers
or wash up beach with each monsoon.
For all these shelters in our firmament
the fierce and gentle both abide,
and move in silent admonition
forever through us and through time.
Within The Press
I lose my shape within your sex.
The hardened nipple split and ripening,
the fattened curves
rich yoke on entering,
et al..sweet creams, ingested suffering...
Within the press of bodies serving you,
minion soft of flesh and fold,
drone sweating pores
assembled murmurings,
hungered patently for you.
But you are
corrugated wet dreams,
bittersweet anemones,
whole desires masterbating;
Adams' rib cage,
when you speak
exhale to answer
jetstreams narrow out to bone,
nucleids fuse into thin vapor
within this press
we love and know.
Abscissa of Flesh
Lines
drift lines,
of creme filled illusion.
Make-up painted into mask,
a faint resemblance
come of age,
the olive mercies
kiss-and-touch
of hips enjoined.
In dreamy swagger
shear and fray her masculines;
on heavy womb, on sleeping belly
wade inside this liquid flesh.
Then draw each breath
through silt-fawned nipple,
pink lolling tongues
on blood rich grain.
Delights that ease
this sensuous ardor,
sashay this soul and heart
to sleep.
Ripcord
Behind collars in a parish sitting
Hang a cathedral's dark frescoe
over the lime plaster of an aged icon.
Down islets of floorboard's hard pine
the trusted flock in solemn ritual
We decry our silent offerings; will they come?
Bandits on the touch of a sacred light,
angelic attendants whose sidereal eyes
fill the piscinal's dark apse for baptism.
Here glows a resin of opal and jewel
marking the bowl's outer circumference,
Beyond this voyage of creation's apotheosis
we gesture to a marble statue whose martyr
hangs in shrouds on desecrated limbs
And how does the ascetic still, as still as I stand?
Where flourishes the Bo Tree?
or the immovable spot between life and death?
One holds the rationed hand in supplication
the other extols virtue.
While in bodily passion and pain
noble truth is fulsome beauty.
And Dear Guatama, who dare touch the spine
through palates of flesh and bone?
Or return mercy to a violent world
of dysgenic offspring.
Whatsoever aligns in the perfect wu wei of change
Hides with the sage in profound quietude. For us,
magic, the thinnest of wall between shoulder and blade
masks our ignorance with idleness and pretension.
For today there is blood in factions and frays.
The true and banal kneel to prophets carved of sandstone
and milked on the smoldering undercurrents
Death is most generous for a king
or a farmer who grows field over heady prosaic
of animal theisms and brute dead casualty.
Striking again, what is most generous?
To the Allah? The Abraham? The Christ?
And who lay hands on the Sumerian
whose symbolic mind provisions a transcendent love
of Ra and Bellona of fire and rain.
All pieces in a puzzle of obscure piety
mouth agape in ceremonial bliss and tongue.
And do we drink the sweet tasting bauble of proverb
or choke on the profound talk of not knowing?
Never knowing why. Why the the sloe fruit
whose blood dark pigment and tart core
bleeds as easy as a man.
Why a child of passing chance
and gentle mind pawns reason for sense
For could you sense the sky over ocean and mountain,
or abide in his unseen glory?
"But the Lord was not in the wind"*
or hidden in tremors or quakes or given over
to our broken lives of fierce and mild dieties.
Driven to conform one cannot build a god
or cure from old casks corpses centuries spoiled.
Sharp are the edges of our natural understanding
a veil which splits itself again and again,
and like a bereaved bride of baubles and mock scepters
we ascend this altar of truth only to fall;
fall between the night terrors of djinn and lore,
descend between the awesome dialects of mind
that suspend themselves above bedlam yet far below divinity,
and sway in the uneasy balance of lividity and madness.
Left, there are millstone weights, myriad divers and chance
nudging us through a hatch mouth wide to oblivion
as we crawl to stand, stand and pull.
* 1 Kings
Automaton
"His Firm stanzas hang like hives in hell
" -Wallace Stevens
No muse of saturnine demeanor,
no song.
No highbrow ballads, fantasia, fabliau,
no myth.
The bard of flowery verse
floats in and out
of our disjunct consciousness
in courage in love in fear.
In hope in charity in loss,
our quiddity a viscid thick disease
poured into molds of flesh
and cured in wooden lathes.
From birth to death
through cognizant shells
of rapture, pain, romance.
Through fire drill memories
and lucid mirages
our short creative spark
fans the blaze in an existential world
inflamed with survival.
No epitaphs,
sidelong gait no fall, no death.
Six maybe seven feet down
the mind's eye of a king or fool or savage
mimics the fear that
all entelechy is lackey;
a mere stool-boy fooled by imitation
converses with a parrot
on the brass-tacks
of its construct.
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