Featured Poet Gene Doty

Riddle Me Two hearts I have, or three, or more, Layered on my sorrow like leaves On an autumn hillside. Each heart has its ownmost voice, Calling through sheets of burning rain The tunes Heaven forgot. I have more bodies than appear And souls aplenty, wrapped in cloud, In drifts of bitter snow. Each body labors with each soul, Working confusion where silver owls Remark the stars' cold fall. More hearts have I than angels count, More souls, more bodies, and more voices Than human flesh can bear. Measuring measuring her body with hands and tongue I discover the lengths to which she goes Marx's Beard -for Toni Scott atoms endlessly pour from Democritus's hands, swerving in their flow to avoid vortices of pain "and if all the words of their sorrow and pain were written, the world could not hold them" the tin disk on top of the globe, half black, half white, marked with time zones, has rusted into one place ". . . it's good the world has so many people— there's always someone to blame, someone to hate, someone to kill" Marx's beard blazed— fire, light, smoke— now it smolders in this damp corner ending a century, ending a millennium Night and Day flash without pause from Earth's ancient turning; human blood still muddies the dirt of the bottomline Fragrance When God retired to his private chambers, he carried with him no book, having no further need of words. Where T. E. Hulme called the night sky a star-eaten blanket, I prefer to see it as collander perforated by children. Before the ikon, incense burns steadily, its fragrance a parody of the devout heart burning to ash. In the yard, a sparrow's carcase; its slender ribs define a winged and feathered cathedral for maggots. Lady Wisdom danced at the very Beginning of beginnings, her only raiment a belt of unopened eyes. Job, Solomon, and the dour Preacher all knew the sweetness of Wisdom's kiss and its bitter aftertaste. Jupiter hangs in the southeast night after night, hoping, perhaps, that some mortal will remember his majesty. Gino, you chose, not just prison, but this very cell, locked yourself in, and swallowed the key. Pray for emesis. Sistine Ghosts The discarded foreskins of mangled infants form a sieve to filter the anguish of hunted bees. White grubs under a gravestone writhe in a script never intended for mortal deciphering. Beyond your concern, a blind woman carefully builds a mosaic of kleenex blown full of memories. Fingernail parings glitter in shadows cast by a new moon illumined by drifting lights. Caught among twigs clogging a downspout, last year's faded graffiti, spelling no shapes, marking no names. Mouse-turds in empty pantries encode the answers to a catechism of furtive appetite and loss. The surgeon in anguish smashes scalpels into fingers that dial every wrong number answered by Sistine ghosts. ". . . many selves" After the Flood, Mesopotamian gods bring their many selves to feed on sacrifice, swarming like flies on humanity's many selves. "The State is dead; long live the State" cries the revolutionary— the soon-to-be dictator ready to feast on a nation's many selves. The person who has only one self (a miser with a single coin in his tattered pocket) cannot count the shadows of our many selves. Crossing the pasture in a Spring night, the farmer's fire eats dead grass, Agni in Kansas, one of the blazing deity's many selves. How can there be honesty, Gino, how can there be compassion, when even the turtle in the weeds can't cope with its many selves? Into The Flow Five Tanka in memory of Floyd E. Doty pheasants startle from a spruce my father's trailer padlocked and dark his tires flat the rings he made lying empty on his workbench his bare fingers worry the tangled hospital sheet father I barely knew— my last gift faxing permission to cremate his remains trout stream out of the Bitter Roots reeds & gravel where my father's ashes drift & settle into the flow wearing his wedding ring I delete my father's number from the phone's memory Five Lines Down issue 4, January 1996

Gene Doty, teaches English at the University of Missouri-Rolla. His classes range from World Epic to Technical Writing. Gene's current research interest is religious ideas in fantasy and science fiction, especially James Blish and Russell Hoban. Until 1988, Gene's legal name was Eugene Warren. He published several collections of poetry under that name, including Geometries of Light, Fishing at Easter, and The Similitudes. Since changing his name in 1988, Gene has published mostly tanka, haiku, and ghazals as well as several long angry poems. He is also the co-poetry editor for the critically acclaimed internet literary journal, Recursive Angel I've been influenced by all the usual ancestors, but would like especially to mention Jack Kerouac and Henry David Thoreau. I've been married for over 34 years; my wife continues to be my mostreliable muse. We have seven grandchildren, who are endlessly delightful.