The first day of a new month is like the beginning of a new poem: that tantalizing musical phrase, maybe just a few words, that arouses the mind to fresh configurings. Autumn color has finally set in, making the long rays of late afternoon still redder, but it isn’t very chilly. My roses are still blooming; so are my rosemary, basil and salvia. Last night’s Halloween was balmy. In between candy handouts, I sat down with the magazine The Hat, with its orange-and-black cover appropriate to either Halloween or monarch migration season. And the poems do flit. Want to see Hungary?
Jacqueline Kolosov:
You stroll along the embankment overlooking the verdigris Danube,
Savoring boysenberry sorbet and the cosmopolitan faces in upmarket cafes.
(“Old World”)
Or we could go back to the Renaissance, courtesy of Lois Marie Harrod, who riffs on the history of a font face:
She knew he was a type first used
for Cardinal Bembo’s tract
De Aetna, a silly little dialogue
on the nature of volcanoes
(“A Note About the Type”)
Maureen Thorson’s delightfully compact poem takes us over the ocean:
Beat up this one time in Paris
By a German in a blue hat.
Why were you so far from the sea?
Who gave you guys shore leave?
You’re forever ignoring your sails—
More often drunk and holding matches
To the bowsprit than darning tears.
You yell, we’ll let the mother burn!
(”Ye Mariners of England,” with a final great line: “Your own salty Champs d’Elysees.”)
And since it is All Souls’ Day, I can’t help but quote Aaron Belz’s “Pushkin” in full:
Beautiful man looking around
with hair like iron and the eyes of a clown,
darting across the street at the first
sign of a break in the parade of carriages,
a sheaf of political poems under your arm:
I love you and miss you after all these centuries.
I am saddest, I guess, about your scandal-torn marriage
that ended with gunplay and you falling down.
I picture the single smokey burst
and can’t help but wonder why you let him shoot first.
On that frozen day, had you no intention of bringing harm
to anyone at all, you gentleman—not even young d’Anthes?
Oh heartbreaking final lines! Oh unobtrusive rhymes! Aaron Belz, thank you for this poem. Editors Jordan Davis and Christopher Edgar, thank you too.
Perhaps the combination of a new calendar page and these fresh poems will provoke my first poem of the month? My last poem of last month was unpublishable, but conceptually quite stylish—it consisted of seeing my son (who wanted to be a rock star for Halloween) and my husband (who always dresses up in the djellaba and fez from our year in Morocco) and blurting out, “Oh, you can say you’re going as the Clash song ‘Rock the Casbah!’” So they did, and they got a Best Costume award at the church Halloween party. I sort of feel it’s my prize.
Hey I have a question, something I’ve always been puzzled by that Clash song– can someone explain the politics of it to me?