Dragonfly (pages 42-43)

The last poem in Dragonfly is focused on Aboriginal life and art in Australia. Heirloom . . . 'tobacco pouches' made from dried scrotums of Blacks . . . bodies skinned for their cicatrice patterns and pickled in the South Australian Museum basement.                                                 —Kevin Gilbert, Introduction to                                                     Inside Black Australia (1988) How trippingly flits the phrase dried scrotums of Blacks In a drawing room, perhaps a parlor         on Downing Street, some famous explorer               in tartan waistcoat, watchfob glinting in gaslight dips his ivory Meerschaum into the pouch                                                                             the coarse kinky hair left                                                                             cunningly on the outside                               like Robinson Crusoe's goatskin cap Dried scrotums of Aborigines Whose balls these are I think I know His skull is in the museum though Why not                 pyramid of bones in Khmer Rouge jungle                 for one escaped into Egypt, a thousand babies' heads                 skin flayed into filigree, a shade for an Aryan lightbulb                 human cobblestones lining the road to My Lai                 in darkest Alabama, strange fruit blossoming                                                                                                 Why not                                                                                                                 Why not? On a cliff face, ancient in Australia                                                               an x-ray man                                         is peeling himself from the rock                                         his cross-hatched heart, his lungs                                         glisten white in the sun In the haze, a frill-necked lizard looks                                                                      then zips into shadow Page 42                                       The x-ray woman her see-through breasts, her ovaries outlined in ochre spirals                      moves toward her lover sparks fly as they fuck, like struck flint, like flames of synaptic junctions They come, the x-ray man and woman             his testicles glowing like twin stars             her uterus a gleaming cloud, a galaxy Shimmer into their Dreaming, a billion one-celled Aboriginal girls and boys Page 43 X-ray Rock Art from Arnhem land, Australia (from Ayodeji Matthew Akomolafe) The poem's epigraph describes awful racist acts against the Aboriginal people of Australia. The poem begins by sarcastically imagining such racism not only in Australia but across the world, throughout history, and then contrasting that against the artistic power of ancient Aboriginal rock art, called X-ray paintings because they image creatures and humans with their internal organs visible, emphasizing their connection with nature and with the ancient mythical period of creation called Dreaming. It's a poem of eternal hope in the face of horror. Did you see the little parody of Robert Frost in the first half of the poem? As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (pages 38-39)

At this juncture in Dragonfly, a poem about how war and military service were seen in 1980s America, as evidenced by a news story from 1987. Veterans Day 1987 It snowed this morning in Washington, and I saw, on the early news, a black gash carved from a white hillside. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a waiting-room TV in the VA hospital. The gray-haired veteran next to me telling about wearing his army uniform into a tavern in 1945—they bought him round after round. The boys finally home for Christmas. Even after we left Vietnam, in 1975, my haircut was brand enough. I wouldn’t have worn my class A’s into a civilian bar. I tried it once in a honky-tonk in Chowchilla, and was chased out. They wouldn’t believe I had never been to Nam. Today, I watched those real Vietnam vets in jeans and field jackets, beards and berets reflected in stone. Only 0900, but already a small legion was mustering. The TV cut away to the Wall Street Drill Team in a Philadelphia parade, a platoon of men and women in blue pinstripe suits with matched briefcases. They opened ranks and placed the cases in rosettes on the asphalt. Then countercolumns and other exotic marching maneuvers. The crowd on the street cheered, but there wasn’t a single chuckle or even a smile in the waiting room. In my mind, those vets at the Vietnam Memorial are wearing colors: a black and yellow eagle screaming on a shield, a sable horse against a field of gold, a sword notched in slotted stone. No, these patches aren’t coats of arms. They’re telegrams from a jungle, monkey howls, Page 38 a litany to match words cut into a wall. But you and I know it ‘s been almost fifteen years, and there’s the Ayatollah and Afghanistan. The Contras. American journalists sending their love on videos shot in some terrorist’s basement. And somewhere the Wall Street Drill Team is marching on. Page 39 The Fred Hill Briefcase Drill Team from Hometown Life (2021). This poem was occasioned by my seeing on TV news a drill team of men wearing business suits and carrying briefcases on Veterans Day in 1987. I can't recall now if I made up the name "Wall Street Drill Team" or if I maybe had actually seen the Fred Hill Briefcase Drill Team pictured above. Either way, drill was seen in that 1987 news show as comedic rather than ceremonial. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (page 37)

The next poem in Dragonfly was originally inspired by The Tunnels of Cu Chi, a book by Tom Mangold and John Penycate (1985). When I taught at Humboldt State University, starting in 1989, I met David Shaw, a Native American veterans' counselor at the university, and he told me about his US Army service in Vietnam where he was a tunnel rat. Thanks to David for some of the details in this poem. Tunnel Rat —for David Shaw Scorpions, salamanders, spiders, earthworms tracing dim tattoos in the target beam of my flashlight. Here, I am my own man. Up there, buddies stuck in the crotch of the Green Mother. The Corps. Vietnam: one hundred degree heat and leeches—shriek of jets and choppers—chicom grenades and pungi stakes. Just now, a scritch ahead to my left. A snake . . . or Charlie crawling to his post? I heft my .45 and flick my light off. I hold my breath. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Empty—just a hole in the earth—and then a face, the moon. My weapon’s on autogetem— Rock and Roll—Mad Minute—till I’m bleeding from both ears. Thunder jazzing the tunnel like Jimi’s guitar, like breaking glass. I’m out of there, back in the sun. Fire in the hole. Our frags boom in the ground, deep and hollow. Then another tunnel. Another tunnel. Always another tunnel. But you know I’ll always go down. The dark hush, the cool air on the back of my neck. I love the tunnel, the solid weight in my clenched hand of pure steel. There it is: the solace of pure fucking steel. Page 32 Photo from "The Tunnel Rat Experience in the Vietnam War" (The Armory Life). David Shaw is an Apache and joined the US Army during the Vietnam war in order to fulfill his tribe's cultural traditions of being a warrior. During that war, there were many Native Americans who joined the service for that very reason. Tom Holm's book Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War, discusses that phenomenon as well as how Native American soldiers often had an easier readjustment back to civilian life from their tribal ceremonies to heal warriors after war. Check out the two books I mention in this post about fighting in Vietnam. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (pages 35-36)

At this point in my book Dragonfly, I turn toward several poems focused on war, specifically the Vietnam war. Halloween 1963 Ricky Chang swept Edgewood Lane with his Johnny Seven assault rifle—single shot, rapid fire, grenade launcher, bazooka, breakaway pistol, and who can remember what else? In khakis and bush hat, little Frank Asahi was a desert rat, brandishing his M-1 carbine with its plastic wood-grain stock. I had on old fatigues, lovingly daubed with brown, black, yellow green. An olive-drab submachine gun, just like Vic Morrow’s on Combat. We patrolled San Francisco streets: Victorians perched on steep hills. Our rucksacks bulged with Tootsie Rolls, Chunkies, black and orange kernels of candy corn, pippin apples. At Edgewood Lane’s dead end, a house with windows shuttered like dark eyes. We chorused, “Trick or treat!” The young woman at the door said, “I’m from France, I’m sorry, I don?t have any candy,” until her hand fluttered like a white wing to her mouth. She whispered—not to us— “Dien Bien Phu.” We must have thought she was speaking French, maybe even giggled as she lurched like a spastic marionette back through the open door and froze in front of the living-room window, a statue. “That’s OK, lady,” we yelled, and tumbled down her steps in a clatter of bandoliers and plastic straps, whooping like movie Indians. Page 35 At that very moment, a Green Beret advisor was pinned down in a firefight at the edge of a montagnard village, his tribesmen firing scalpel bursts into green jungle. At that moment, President Diem’s generals were braiding an iron lariat around his palace: a noose of tanks and machine guns for Saigon’s mandarin. The morning sun like a blind eye. But my mind keeps circling back to that woman. I later heard her name: Jacqueline DuBois. Nine years before, a French paratrooper— her father—had thrown himself on a Viet Minh grenade, saving his squad just three hours before the French surrender. I see her now: poised at the window, her face and white dress barred by the half-open blinds. She sees the white flash. Asian faces—just boys, really—surging over the redoubt. A monsoon of hot metal. The sickly sweet stench of burning flesh. A mist of blood on the breeze. Her window faces east, and as she stands there, she cannot see the amber fields rolling away into the night, where America’s sleeping children dream on the edge of history. Page 36 Image by Kodini from Pixabay On Halloween 1963, I would have been eleven years old, and this poem draws from actual memories of my friends and me trick-or-treating. We were probably not very much aware of the American war in Vietnam heating up at that point, though ironically we would have been playing at being soldiers at war, as we did in real life. The fictional French woman I imagined for this poem would have been about our age when her father died in the French war in Vietnam nine years before. And of course for these boys, the Vietnam war would soon be very present in their lives, in American life in general, as the closing image of the poem suggests. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (pages 33-34)

In this continuing serialization of Dragonfly, the next poem is an ekphrastic poem, of sorts. Instead of a work of art, the poem's subject is a robotic ornithopter . . . a work of art still, in a way. The speaker of the poem is the inventor of the pterosaur robot, aviation engineer Paul MacCready. An Aviation Engineer’s Tribute to Leonardo Paul MacCready's latest project in flying machines will set the clock back millions of years . . . [a flying replica] of a pterosaur . . . with a 36-foot wingspan, the largest animal ever to have taken to the air. —Science 86, April 1986. When you painted The Annunciation, you perched your unlikely angel, haloed by a disk of golden needles, against a scrim of unlikely trees. What pins your Gabriel to earth are his massy wings, hardy engines of muscle and hollow bone fletched with pinions and downy feathers, rooted in feminine shoulders. The painting just another excuse to fiddle with your obsessions: mechanics of flight, impetus and percussion, friction and load, your personal war with gravity. You caged sparrows merely to let them fly, freeze the moment in ink and pencil. Leonardo, this spring I thawed wings from stone, resurrected a dinosaur, my simulacrum flapping to life like a rare bat reborn after millions of years. Quetzalcoatlus northropi. Pterodactyl's city cousin crafted from plastic and piano wire. Its dreams a stream of electrons jumping silicon hoops. And wings, Leonardo! Not a propeller. Not a parachute. One morning at El Mirage, my Frankenstein took her maiden flight. Largest ornithopter ever— the cybernetic pterosaur glided and soared, Page 33 flapping hard in desert thermals. She cocked her head to and fro, the bony crest like an Indian warfeather bucking the wind. I could see your Gabriel suddenly flexing his wings. He shrugs, shakes off random flakes of paint. Sliding into sky, a ragged void left in the painting, he cruises centuries into this desert: archangel and dinosaur wheeling in heavenly ballet. Page 34 > Leonardo da Vinci, The Annunciation (1472-1475) detail of Archangel Gabriel Paul MacCready with his pterosaur ornithopter at El Mirage Lake in 1984 (from "Living Pterosaurs") You can see MacCready's pterosaur flying in this short video, unfortunately grainy. Another interesting footnote: I wrote a sequel poem, "Quetzalcoatlus roboti Heads Home" that you can read here; it was published in the anthology Multiverse. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (page 32)

The next poem from Dragonfly is inspired by a girlfriend I had at the end of the '70s, early '80s, fictional but with biographical elements. Morgan Kali Murray Her mother had named her after the car, the MG’s richer cousin, leather belt strapping down the engine cowling. She added the middle name while into Hindu mythology at Vassar. She had always admired Kali’s many arms, the necklace of skulls. But I met her at the dentist’s. Auburn hair like a candle flame above her dental assistant’s whites.                                 Wild, wild nights every Sunday at her basement apartment, she still sweaty from a weekend of riding. Jolene the Rodeo Queen, Budweiser-loving barrel racer. Then Monday mornings, I’d be in the chair, the dentist and I breathing each other’s breath. And Morgan sitting just to my left, a hand on my thigh, smiling through                              a mist of blood and water,                              suspension of tiny shavings of teeth. Page 32 Morgan Plus4 1963 (Wikimedia) As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (pages 30-31)

In the ongoing serialization of Dragonfly, the next poem is an ekphrastic poem. If you're not familiar with that term, an ekphrastic poem is written about a work of art. Ekphrasis may be focused on any kind of art — music, say — but lately, the term ekphrastic poetry has increasingly referred to work on visual art. Hunter: A Sculpture in Glass —William Morris, Artifact #3 (Hunter), 1988     Brendan Walter Gallery, Santa Monica Pelvis, tibia, metatarsal, skull are pieces of glass strewn on polished ebony under the gallery's soft spotlights, cool fluorescent splashes. Floating ribs glisten, slender half-moons. A crude, chiseled crystal knife leans up against luminous spine, the hand nearby, fingerbones asparkle. At the recycle center's bins of glass— green, brown, and clear—I saw the identical play of glinting light. Lofted bottles gleam in bright air, end over end. Then the shatter, the satisfying crash. Graveyard of hopes and dreams: broken champagne glasses, Gerber's baby-food jars, French brandy snifters, a crystal vase, green beer bottles, cracked glass from a picture frame. These twinkling bits of lives will soon be fed to fire, made new again, annealed in flame. O you glassy skeleton on your bed of dark, mute desire: under what apocalyptic sun, on what dreaded Judgment Day, will your translucent body appear? The air winding around your bones will stiffen into luminescent meat, Page 30 transparent as the clear blade-like bone of deep-sea squid? Stars shining through your flesh and blood like semi-precious stones. With hollow bones of hummingbirds, your two slender arms flare into wings of crystal vivid as church windows—lucid and frail. A single wingbeat: you sail into brilliant blue. Page 31 William Morris, Hunter (1988), Litvak Gallery As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (page 29)

Next from Dragonfly: a poem inspired by a poetry reading James Galvin gave at Humboldt State University some time in the early 1990s, when I was teaching there. At the Poetry Reading in Science B 135, A Snowstorm                                                             —for James Galvin Upon his shoulder, three seats to my left, her hand slinked like the pale tongue of an ebony snake. Really all I could see was her black sleeve and a sliver of skirt, saffron Indian print against his faded, ripped Levi's. He was young, maybe not yet a college junior, slight beard the exact shade of pilsner, rimless glasses, white shirt with thin red stripes. A book opened in his lap, while she tossed her hair, flaring out beyond his head—her bronze nimbus, the sun eclipsed. The poet's words rushing over us, hot as a Santa Ana. Sirocco. Some devil wind. His finger traced lines in the open book. Her palm brushed his right ear, the stone on her ring glinting like a crimson eye. Under the cool fluorescent lights of this classroom I saw the boy's blue iris pierce like a nail into the page. Her hand forgotten, flickering in his sandy hair. For him, the world implosive in silence,                   solitude,                                   and space.                                                       A white                                                                     storm in some Wyoming wilderness.                                                       Someone shrugs on a sheepskin coat,                                   rawhide gloves, beat-up Stetson. A door                   opens to crystal air. The snow gleaming with                                             inner light. Dark tracks lead away. Page 28 Illustration by FreeFunArt from Pixabay As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (page 25)

Picking up again the serialization of my book Dragonfly from 1994. Been almost 12 years since I posted a poem here. The next poem in the book is another rock poem, this time on the inimitable Janis Joplin. Like before, 'nuff said. "Janis, 1987" —twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love History slipped a sprocket or two last week. Invited as separate guests, Sonny and Cher sang "I Got You Babe" on the Letterman show. David swore it was an impromptu reunion. Like before, Sonny sang a bit flat and Cher tortured her vowels, but I loved it. I wanted them out of their 80s clothes, back in the optimistic garb of innocence. I wanted giant fake-fur vests, purple and orange flowers on bellbottom hiphuggers. And I remembered seeing Janis Joplin on Haight Street after school. I'd be wearing my St. Agnes uniform—brown pullover sweater, salt-and-pepper cords—while she would be glowing in sheer silks, beads, feathers. The Summer of Love was my summer before high school, and I spent weekends in Golden Gate Park at free concerts: Quicksilver, the Charlatans, and the Grateful Dead. The best moment was Janis on a flatbed truck, the toe of her right shoe nuzzling the arch of the left, fingers cradling a battered mike. Surrounded by Big Brother's electric haze, Janis was floating through a dreamy rendition of "Summertime," her voice not yet rough from pills and Southern Comfort. She gazed out into space. If she had known the bottle would bogart her life, would Janis have changed a thing? She could have reunited with Country Joe on the new Smothers Brothers hour, glossy in Miami Vice threads and spandex. And hawked Nike shoes and Nautilus health clubs.         Janis Joplin by DECARPENTRIE on Pixabay Page 25 If I remember correctly, I wrote this poem during MFA school at Indiana, and the Sonny and Cher reunion was then quite recent, so "last week" might have been actual at the time, not fictionalized. This is obviously a free verse poem and I was still developing my technique on lineation. Speaking of anniversaries, Saturday Night Live had its 50th anniversary recently, and Cher, age 78, performed in a sheer black bodysuit and thigh-high boots, amazingly. She looked like a toned 30-something. Lots of hard work in the gym, as well as some medical miracles! As always, I'm very interested in getting some feedback or discussing anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

The Stafford Challenge, Day 23

A couple days ago, in The Stafford Challenge facebook group, Mike Luster's poem about a stranger helping change a flat, reminded me of a stranger helping me out of a bind years ago. No fancy poetic forms today . . . just some free verse. Lifesaver The brisk temps this morning, in the low 30s, reminded me of the Utah desert 40+ years ago. I was pulled over on I-80, long enough after sunset that it was about full dark. Not much traffic at all. Late spring, mid-May, heading home for summer from college, and my Karmann Ghia was dead. Dead in the water, as they say, except no water, just snowflakes spitting across my windshield. Every time a vehicle would come by, headlights spiking through desert darkness, I would open my driver’s side door and blink my little flashlight. It was starting to fade. No luck stopping anyone. That night was beautiful. Stars filling the sky, the Milky Way a long splash of diagonal light. But I couldn’t appreciate it. Cold. Getting late. Then headlights. I flashed again. Last chance. The semi slammed on its brakes, screeching and almost fishtailing. The rig came to a stop a hundred yards ahead and then backed up to thirty feet in front of me. Crazy good driving! The driver clambered out and we talked there on the roadside. After hearing my story, the red light on the dash signaling electrical trouble, the long wait as car after car after car sped by, the driver said, “Let’s bump-start her. I bet she’ll fire up.” The two of us pushed the Ghia to a roll and I jumped in and popped the clutch. To my great surprise, it started, bucking a bit. He said, “Get going in front of me, no lights, and I’ll shine my high beams right over you. We’ll make it to Wendover, fifteen miles up.” And off we went, the semi just five feet behind. I could see the road very well with his lights. I was afraid to look in my rear-view, ’cause his bumper and grille were right there, about to drive up my ass if I faltered at all. On the other side of the highway, passing cars flashed their high beams: your lights are off, dummy, and a semi is tailgating you! I ignored them all and concentrated. Hard. After maybe ten minutes, the Ghia started to buck like a bronc, and I had to pull over. Miraculously, the semi did not run me down. We stood again next to the two vehicles. He said, “Let me get a rope and we’ll tie her behind the trailer. When we come up to the Nevada state line, I’ll pull you through the scales and let ’em know I’m assisting a motorist.” He pulled the rig ahead and backed up to within ten feet, and we tied the Ghia to his back bumper with a hefty rope. Then off we went again. This time, I had to really watch out that I didn’t run him down — yeah, right! — if he had to slow down. We were going freeway speed. Maybe more frightening! In Wendover, Nevada, he pulled us into a huge casino parking lot. Glitzy lights on the tall building, very different from the Utah desert’s dark landscape. We rolled the car into a space alongside a closed gas station, and I offered to buy him dinner. “My name’s Merlin,” he said. “I’m a Mormon.” Over a couple burgers — no beers — he told me funny stories of the many highway rescues he’d done over the last twenty years on the road. Damn, that Merlin was a wizard, for sure! Later, out by the Ghia, he told me, “Don’t fix it here. They’ll take an arm and a leg. Just have ’em charge up your battery and drive till you’re about to die, then pull into a gas station and do it again. You’ll get into Frisco before nightfall. Good luck!” And up he went into his cab. Next morning, at sunrise, I started his plan and leapfrogged all the way to The City. I pulled into my father’s driveway just before dark. I often wonder about Merlin: is he out there, 80 now, still saving lives? —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Photo by Venrike on Pixabay. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

Day 23 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2022

Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a conspiracy poem. Line your ball caps with aluminum foil, cover your walls with cryptic sticky notes, and write a poem that exposes (or refutes) a conspiracy. Is the Earth flat? Are all professional sports (and entertainment awards ceremonies) fixed? Did people really talk about Bruno? Write your poem, because I want to believe.” Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: "Today I’d like to challenge you to write a poem in the style of Kay Ryan, whose poems tend to be short and snappy – with a lot of rhyme and soundplay. They also have a deceptive simplicity about them, like proverbs or aphorisms. Once you’ve read a few, you’ll see what I mean. Here’s her 'Token Loss,' 'Blue China Doorknob,' 'Houdini,' and 'Crustacean Island.'" Here's what really happened today, folks, at least before the conspiracy stuff kicks in in the second half of the poem! Conspiracy of the Wind Today, my daughter Amelia and I — we're the band Groovy News — played an outdoor gig for Good Neighbor Iowa, a non-profit that tries to change people's lawn and garden practices to stay away from using pesticides. It was a very blustery day, and Amelia's music stand blew over. Her music binder flew open and sheet music scattered in the wind. The audience ran around snagging the tumbleweed pieces of runaway paper, and stuck them willy-nilly in the binder. Later I discovered all the music was there; We had lost not a single sheet! What had conspired with what to make that happen? Had the pro-pesticide folks schemed with the wind gods to interrupt our music hour? And then had the wind gods, behind the backs of their erstwhile partners, made a deal with the chaos god to ensure our music sheets were not lost? And why did any of them do that? Was there blood money afoot? Were there invisible sprites making sure all the people caught every single sheet? Should Amelia and I pick up some lottery tickets right now? Who knows? Somebody knows! Give us a sign, whoever you are! —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Here's the logo of the Good Neighbor Iowa program. Check them out at Good Neighbor Iowa .org. Worthy cause. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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Day 27 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2020

Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “write a poem in the form of a review. But not a review of a book or a movie of a restaurant. Instead, I challenge you to write a poetic review of something that isn’t normally reviewed. For example, your mother-in-law, the moon, or the year 2020 (I think many of us have some thoughts on that one!)” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “write a massive poem. The poem itself could be massive in size and length. Or it could take on a massive problem, describe a supermassive black hole, or praise a massive bowl of ice cream covered in chocolate syrup and whipped cream. Whatever you write, I hope it’s a massive success.” My poem today only cursorily arises from the two prompts. The words review and massive just appear in the poem momentarily. This installment in the aswang novella project fills in an earlier gap: how Clara’s villagers begin to think she might be an aswang. Also, a “sari-sari store” in the Philippines is a Mom-and-Pop sundry shop in a rural area; sari-sari is a Filipino phrase that means “variety.” In terms of the story, it’s important that the two men in the poem are at a sari-sari store, which would be a community hangout, so their conversation could fire up the local gossip mill. Two Men Talk in the Sari-Sari Store Okay, let’s review the facts, Nestor. You got lost in the woods last night, and then you came upon a massive meadow you’d never seen before.                       That’s right! The moon was shining through the mist,                       and in the meadow a huge black dog was running,                       no, prancing. Above, a dark winged shape soared                       like an eagle wheeling. No, more like a bat. That would be a manananggal, an aswang.                       Well, Jojo, I saw her face! It was so clear. Who was it?                       That cute girl in the market. You mean, Clara? —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Form-wise, this is a curtal sonnet in rhyme and meter but takes the shape of a (seemingly) free-verse conversation with two speakers. The tricky section is line 10 (“Who was it? That cute . . .”), where a dropped line indicates a change of speaker in the middle of the line. Alan’s poem today takes the idea of review in an entertaining direction. The Sentences I Write When the Person Demanding a Letter of Recommendation Will Not Take “No” for an Answer When I consider what ______________ has accomplished in the time of our                 acquaintance, I find myself shaking my head in wonder. I honestly cannot imagine that ______________ could do a better job than he does. It amazes me, when I give ______________ training, data, and protocols, what I get                 back. I have often wondered why ______________ has not moved to another position                 already. I cannot say enough good things about ______________. I absolutely can imagine ______________ in a high administrative position. “Pleasant” does not describe having ______________ as a co-worker. ______________ has made an unforgettable impact on our entire department. I am confident that the upper administration is aware of ______________’s                 contributions to our university. Some often ask me, “Just what can we do with                 him?” I know that students have reconsidered their career paths after their meetings with                 ______________. Should ______________ get a position elsewhere, there will be a major gap to be                 filled. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] We appreciate your coming by to read our work. Stay safe and be well. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don’t find the word “comments” in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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Dragonfly (pages 4-5)

The third poem in the book addresses fatherhood and (im)mortality in what is — I hope — a unique fashion. Here goes:

Tutankhamun, September 1979 The moon's pale crescent has beached like a stone boat into these skeletal knobby trees ranked and filed in front of the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. Almost midnight, this crowd is queueing up for the exhibit: royal scarabs of blue glass, constellations of semi-precious stones, the burial mask of solid gold. My son Marty's eyes shine like brass buttons in creosote light. In ten years, he'll remember this as the afternoon I told him, "Take a nap," almost as if he were two years old again, the small brain buzzing like a hornet's nest, fighting off sleep. But our afternoon strategy has worked and we file this night wide-eyed past the concrete gatekeeper Sphinxes, who look genuine for once in their counterfeit decades. Inside are miles of beaten-gold inlay on chests of aromatic wood from Thebes, cedar shawabty figurines, ankh mirrors, the scorpion goddess Selket's slender gilded statue, a faience blue and crimson boat of acacia wood, a stone ibex with real horns, ivory lions, Horus falcons, serpent gods, a leopard's head with quartz eyes, lapis lazuli beetles, and ebony jaguars. The sheer volume of panoply and pomp is too much for Marty, and I hoist Page 4 his seven-year-old frame upon my shoulders. His head, heavy with hieroglyphs and alabaster carvings, rests upon my head. And now, the pièce de résistance: Tutankhamun's nemes headdress. The mask's profile sharp as a ship's prow, a recurved Pharaoh's scimitar slicing through millenia. I front the boy-king's face, his pearlescent eyes level with mine. Between us my milky reflection shimmers in plexiglass, my features superimposed on his, and for a minute our faces meld. On Tutankhamun's forehead rise the vulture and cobra of the two Egypts just where Marty's hands are clasped. Around the brass moon of his face, the indigo stripes of his headdress flower like a pyramid. Around my own face is another headdress: the body of my sleeping son draped over my shoulders, his forehead striped by sweaty hair melding with my own. And across the Nile-wide abyss of centuries — amid the drone of humanity bustling like grave robbers in this fake Egyptian hall — through plexiglass, something passes between us: a whisper of how it feels, even for an instant, to be immortal.

Page 5

Ever since grade school, I have been fascinated by Egyptology. When I was in college, for example, I researched in great detail for an art history class the evolution of the Horus falcon figure from representational sculptures of the bird itself to the iconic falcon-headed man (see picture at left) that symbolized the Egyptian sky god Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, and bestower of divinity on the Pharaohs. What an Egypto-crypto-nerd I was! (And still am, thank you.)

So, anyway, when the traveling King Tut exhibit came to San Francisco in the late 70s (with the famous golden death mask, no less), you damn right I was there. And I wanted to pass on my love for all things Egyptological to Marty. However, our tickets to the exhibit were scheduled for midnight (the museum was setting up the tours of Tut's treasures 24/7), and I was worried eight-year-old Marty wouldn't be able to stay awake for the entire tour. So, as the poem's narrative says, I had him take an afternoon nap earlier that day; that worked for a short while, but the rooms and rooms of gold and blue faience and lapis lazuli and ebony and filigree tired Marty out, poor kid, and I ended up carrying him on my shoulders, asleep, for much of our audience with the great boy-king, the magnificent and ultimate golden boy for the ages.

In terms of poetic craft, one can't help but notice the wildly varying line lengths here: more a visual free-verse device than a metric or syllabic one. I do sense the influence, in the occasional dramatic line break, of Sharon Olds (as I mentioned in my last blog post), but for the most part there is quite a lot more control in my lineation here than in the previous poem in the book, "Gallery of the Mind." I just now double-checked my Master of Fine Arts thesis, and it doesn't contain this poem, so I must have written it after I finished my MFA in 1989. Probably 1990 or 1991 then.

Something craft-wise that jumps out at me now is the poem's diction. My obsession for phrasings you don't get to say out loud often and which are like hard bits of ever-lovin' candy in your mouth: skeletal, queueing up, creosote, gatekeeper, faience, ibex, lapis lazuli, panoply, scimitar, pearlescent. And of course those lovely Egyptologist words and phrases: shawabty, ankh, nemes, "the scorpion goddess Selket" (pictured above) and "the vulture and cobra of the two Egypts" (shown above on the brow of Tut's death mask). Ain't it all just grand?

As I was recently searching the Net for images to accompany the poem, I found a couple that deserve special attention. The first, on the left below, is a black and white shot of a face-to-face moment between Tut and a young woman that astonishingly parallels the feeling of my poem's ending but from a woman's point of view. Clearly such feelings have been shared by other people viewing Tut's golden face.

The second image interestingly highlights Tut's glass enclosure, his fishbowl that both protects and imprisons. Looking back at my poem, I notice the word "plexiglass" appears twice, so that I was evidently (though probably subconsciously) also honing in on that barrier. And it is that barrier that allows for the superimposition device at the end, right?

In these two images and in the poem there is a fascinating focus on what separates us from Tut, the glass wall that paradoxically as well as poignantly emphasizes our shared humanity with him. I suppose we all have our figurative gold masks and invisible cages.

Note: The image on the left is from the blog Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia (28 Sep 2006). The image on the right is from Royal Exhibitions, which could put on a King Tut show in your very own mall. I do want to make sure to recommend "Queen Mediocretia," which I discovered only because of this King Tut photo; this blog is one of the best I've encountered lately in the blogosphere: tremendously entertaining and witty, never dull. Check it out, especially The Great Hall of TMI, though only if you are 18 or older! Fun.

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