John Wood continues to discover exciting new poets: Ana Cristina Rudholm y Balmaceda and Keagan LeJeune offered two unique voices for different titles with Josephine Sacabo (of which one, Gilded Circles and Sure Trouble, is available). Daniel Westover was an early discovery published in our silver series title, Toward Omega, with Vincent Serbin.
Trinidad del Cielo at a Train Station
BY ANA CRISTINA RUDHOLM Y BALMACEDA
Death flashes me a thin-lipped grin
behind arched windows where I wait
with desert lilies and songs.
In the cantina, promises spill from goblets
and will soon be forgotten-
or remembered forever.
Ghosts open satchels seeking letters and tickets
lost among blue paper birds.
I wait for love sunk long in silver-hewed marbled caves
beneath the river where I hear your cries
lying beautiful and broken-
like tiny, discarded thorns.
You never arrive
so I drain my heart of blood
and offer it to the wind-
who claims it with long fingers
burning in gossamer gloves.
Bentwood
BY KEAGAN LEJEUNE
The food all gone, the dishes cleared,
the table's centerpiece is all that's left:
a rosewood bowl with a clutch of eggs,
each a marbled shade of brown or red
and too beautiful to be what they are.
All fact grown fragile as a finger bone,
we ponder them-half in awe, half in dread-
and ache to hold such oddness against our palms.
In the hand, their weight says they are not eggs.
Stones? If so, all rocks are jewels; all earth's a prize.
Awe and wonder number as pebbles on a shore.
No, we realize the truth rests hidden in the grain.
The showpiece is nothing but a woodwright's trick:
the spheres aren't eggs, the eggs aren't stone,
merely copies spun from a craftsman's wrist
and lathed with skill enough to dupe the brain.
The carpenter knows best the curse of wood.
His chair never comes out quite the way he's planned,
and though the board shapes when carved or bent,
what he has made will never stay made for good.
For a moment, though, beauty gathers in that curve,
and there, we hear the whir of his machine,
smell the pine, feel the thatched nest of a bird,
see a host of gilded feathers upon a golden bough.
DANIEL WESTOVER
From the introduction by John Wood
Daniel Westover, a poet as brilliant in his art as Vincent Serbin is in his, had long admired Serbin's work and shares a similar vast and evolutionary vision. In "The Physics of Angels," the best poem about angels since Rilke's Duino Elegies, written to accompany Serbin's Earth Angel, Westover writes,
They travel fast as photons,
having long ago eclipsed terrestrial speeds
though they once tread on the ground,
wingless as you.
But now they have "broken clear of fettering flesh" and "realized the spirit's relativity." Westover tells us they were once like us. They learned "that suns explode and fizzle, that starlight / can lie, concealing a burnt-out source." Like us
. . . they learned equations, formulae---
mechanics to explain a cosmic clock
and numb them to the gravity of faith.
But when they swiveled skyward,
reason fled beneath that astral tapestry,
for spirit knew what calculus could not:
the universe is more than lifeless flames
and dusty nebulae; it is an orchestra
of life, an iridescent possibility.
And finally in a stanza of intense poetic beauty Westover, like Serbin, weaves physics and metaphysics into one as he writes,
They orbit us, unbound now
by the mind's lust for quanta, untroubled
by the frequencies of unbelief.
They navigate by their imagination,
and what they see is instant fact.
For time dissolves at light speed,
and fruits of faith are ever-ripe, ever consumed.
Each glimpsed omega is their now,
is wrapped within their wings' geometries,
and heaven burns with angel lights,
becomes an ever-breathing hymn,
a universe of singing, silent fire.
Josephine Sacabo from Cante Jondo
Josephine Sacabo from Gilded Circles and Sure Trouble
Gilded Circles and Sure Trouble
Vincent Serbin from Toward Omega
Toward Omega