Issue Eight

• At Night, Tree Riesener
• For Me, Tree Riesener
• Moonlight, Tree Riesener
• Tionning, Tree Riesener
• In the Waiting Room, Bill Batcher
• Tradition, R. L. Kennedy
• Editor's Comments

At Night

by Tree Riesener

The bat searches for jewel-filled hair, in silence emerging from a lair at night.
Tangled in strands of gold, once seen, desired, flight exchanged for manacles at night.

Lost in the Marais, sweat-drenched I stagger through the labyrinthine torrid streets;
then linen sheets coolly redolent of meadowy chamomile lightly comfort me at night.

A bottle washed and filled with fireflies, holes punched in the lid to make a Jesus light.
Easy, unlike a thousand years to fill a jug in hell with tears, weeping on your bed at night.

Carried in a pyx to visit the sick like a child in a car seat, the consecrated host; in the
aumbry fluttering like a moth, then tender in a cats mouth, stolen from the dollhouse at night.

Sky-blue cross shaped in stone, birds in air, fish in water, tigers bright in jungle dark;
bodies jigsawed into the tao of light and darkness, lit by a comet comma in the sky at night.

What are we to love? Spider in web, moth in trap, fly fallen into the syrup jug.
In the salty sea, angel wings in water, foamy sequin edging on the curling waves at night.

Streets deserted, silk-wrapped creatures gone away, Gods light-and-dark strobe on and off.
Trees branches, moist green by day, fill with nesting creatures not of this world at night.

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For Me

by Tree Riesener

Actually, I like my bursting buxom mask, but sometimes I long to take it off, go free,
be, for a while, that long-legged apple-eating, poetry-writing, years-ago teen-age me.

A lot of my transformations have been okay: baby to woman to the middle of the cusp,
but what about tomorrow, an hour from now, the day that last second will be for me?

Pulled toward religion and prayer, alcohol, sex, books and drugs and rock and roll,
I took a course on time management and ensured multi-tasking time enough for me.

When Jesus comes, what true faces will our souls look for among the graves, with
no instructions and the choice such a long-term committment for me (and thee)?

Will the ground be slimy underfoot on judgment day, with two-celled abortions? Lost
but potential friends and relatives real and virtual, will they still have some love for me?

The Egyptians drew each body part from its characteristic point of view; remember
these words when you make my mask—a Rolling Stones mouth and tongue view for me

Waiting. The long sleek silhouette of a car, headlights swerving. From the window,
who do I see, under the dark shadow of the driveway tree, who's that coming for me?

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Moonlight

by Tree Riesener

Bodies blend into white linen, naked, defenseless, dreaming, sleeping in moonlight;
six legs, six arms, furry tail, turning like synchronized swimmers, sleeping in moonlight.

Only a rustle as ivy encloses the gated community, trickles of water as glaciers melt;
cougars in affluent suburbs and prophets in the ruins of Babylon are creeping in moonlight.

Elizabethan dancers long dead rest from their pavanes under the trees; an art deco gazelle
from a sleek 1930 Buick hood rests his head on a brocaded virgins lap after leaping in moonlight.

These are sounds for nesty dawns or midday sunlit chicken-yard banqueting; sad and lonely,
coming from a child's room, a fluffy dyed Easter chick's inappropriate lost cheeping in moonlight.

Rollerbladers following through Paris streets the black-plumed hearse of the midnight dead
emaciated singers, beloved lap dogs, ancient relicts of empire weeping in moonlight.

She borrows butter and pays back cream; dresses in silk and crystal fit for a wedding, weeds
lazy lettuce under the stars, does her day's work on overtime, finishes sweeping in moonlight.

Death waits after dinner on nights when trees quake in wind, politely accepts the postponing
demi-tasse, the pousse-café apologetic but inexorable, the grim worker reaping in moonlight

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Tionning

by Tree Riesener

Rectangle of softness, cover warm and soft as grass or cornsilk, an altar for you snuggling in my
arms during the liturgy of insomnia, hidden hours to plan our lovers' canonization.

Music from you slides up my right arm, down the left; birds fly in air, fish swim in water, lovers sleep
in bed with God, the handy everywhere drug, always there for our intoxication.

"Don't come to confess until you have entered fully into sin, and I have had time to try it out,"
thunders the priest of stonier stone. "If you rush, you're only taking evasive action."

A green plant for words is better than a sheep's container; words on the flesh side,
of course, conceal any misplaced diacriticals and blood surpasses sap for illumination.

You were the butterfly, we were the pins, but The Man with the net caught your agony
for mp3's, bribed dj's for exposure, called the echo of your screams the incarnation.

Only so much I can do to hide—lose my hair, my teeth, add a tattoo or two or three.
In the end, unlike Tut in multi-coffined gold, forge my death mask from digitalization.

Day filled with rain, my heart as cold and dry as the nighttime desert; grass covers my desolate, shaky house
constructed of tree, by tree, for tree, in tree, Tree's incarceration

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In the Waiting Room

by Bill Batcher

Arriving early, I sit by myself in the waiting room
and glance at the magazines on the shelf in the waiting room.

Highlights for Children: perennial standard—Follow the maze
from the reindeer to the little red elf—in the waiting room.

New Yorker: The following day I had an appointment and would
have been in the Tower September twelfth in the waiting room.

Architectural Digest: Seablue curtains and a renaissance frieze
coordinate with the islamic delft in the waiting room.

Men's Fitness: while I do enjoy an occasional run
I just can't visualize myself in a weight room.

Another patient arrives and sits beside me, coughing.
Here's an oxymoron for you: health in a waiting room.

When the Great Physician calls, "Bill, your turn has come,"
will I be sitting thumbing Self in the waiting room?

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Tradition

by R. L. Kennedy

Mute prophets ever show the way.
Blind seers can bestow the way.

A roted Shaman's sermon droll
Will never set aglow the way.

No scribe, no runes, no bells which toll;
All rites designed to slow the way.

No dervish spinning towards his goal
Can drill a seed to grow the way.

Let lazy eyes caress your soul.
From no man can you know the way.

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Editor's Comments

It's a pleasure to present more of Tree Riesener's fine ghazals. Her long lines encompass imagery, melody, and rhythms, with a range of reference and feeling that astounds me.

I don't advocate lines this long for all ghazals; each ghazalkar (ghazal poet) will find her or his breath-length, the number of syllables one can sustain for each line.

Here is the first phrase from "Moonlight," showing Tree's ease with sound and rhythm:

Bodies blend into white linen, . . . .

One of the things I relish in Bill Batcher's ghazal is the inventory of waiting room magazines. Sitting and waiting, we read articles we'd not otherwise read in magazines we'd not otherwise pick up. The references and images touch several of our current anxieties but with wit. Bill sounds the spiritual theme of the ghazal tradition clearly but lightly in the makhta.

R. L. Kennedy's ghazal is at an opposite extreme to Tree's: tetrameter lines, terse phrasing, imagery that cuts slices off a single theme. The qafia on "-ow" is especially effective, with its echoing of the long "o" in the rhymes in shers 2, 3, 4, and 5. Bob's use in this and other ghazals of more rhymes than the form requires strikes me as, among other things, a clever riposte to the cliché that English is a "rhyme-poor" language. I've used that cliché before and likely will again; there's some truth in it. Yet this ghazal shows that the language isn't so rhyme-poor as all that.

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