PoetryMagazine Glen Sorestad

Al Rocheleau’s work has appeared in more than fifty publications in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Austria, and Poland. Journals include Confrontation, Van Gogh’s Ear, PoetryMagazine, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Pennsylvania English, Illuminations, Nedge (with Edwin Honig), CHB Anthology # 3 (with Peter Meinke),Slant, Ship of Fools, Pig Iron, Outerbridge, Iodine Poetry Journal, Nebo, Sahara, Revelry, and Poetry Salzburg Review (with Virgil Suarez). In 2004, he received the Thomas Burnett Swann Poetry Prize, offered by the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers’ Association. A manual, On Writing Poetry: For Poets Made as Well as Born, was published by Shantih Press in 2010. In 2012, he founded and still directs the Twelve Chairs Advanced Poetry Seminars, a 180-hour, 30-seminar program available to private students of all ages. The program offers full scholarships to high school students, and it is accredited by the Florida State Poets Association. A Massachusetts native, Al has lived for more than thirty years in Orlando, Florida with his wife and family.

NEW ANTHEM OF THE SUN

After the tears

the impostor, now gone for hours

and reliable as a bad suitor,

has no claim here.

I am the sun.

And I am striking

for a new dignity.

I beat the signals out

electric in long waves, a lasso

of worlds.

The song banks off Martian moons,

sets them to billiards.

If there are accountants there,

they weigh the profit and loss.

Thick men of Jupiter

roll in their beds. Hot ones

of Mercury bounce their wives

like basketballs,

bang their heads.

The Uranians walk

in a fog to castanets

and shakers,

hum a kind of soca.

Saturn senses it is not the time

to be just beautiful;

Neptune abstains, of course.

So to hell with Neptune.

Venus, aligned with my attitude

in the night sky under

canopy and screen

winks its understanding.

Copernicus was right.

I am right.

We agree to disagree,

that cliché of bygones sailing

in the ether,

unreflecting in our trance,

satellites of radiance

failing.

SOMEWHERE IN THE CORNER OF REGRET

I would like to think

a world could be devised

that would undo

the doing that hurts and defiles.

Measured by a calculus of second chances,

a life where reversal balances

the forward frenzy,

the dash

to a pool of no water.

Take this whiskey

and this glass.

Having fumbled it

to the fanfare of gravity,

and just beyond the pity of my clamber

it shatters on the floor.

I am left undrunk, unnumb.

It too.

All we were counting on

seeping into a floorboard,

cutting the bare heel

of next September.

A world, rather, that could

expunge regret and sadness,

that was not always devolving

into chaos and the misfortune of an audience,

shards that recrystallized as a talisman,

drink that shimmers brownly golden

of reverie, a mouth to return it to,

bottle to re-cork,

a letter to evaporate hints of rain,

a chance to understand, to remind,

to revel, to float in the interminable

sea of warm content, to define

love with gesture and confidence,

to anticipate, to hope,

to breathe and know that one is breathing

in the sextant of eyes,

to tell time “stay awhile,” or at least,

for God’s sake, countenance

retrieving.

PERCY GRAINGER

“People like me ought to be burned at the stake.”

— P.G.

He had an obsession

with blue eyes,

ate only rice, tinned peaches

and stale bread,

hated Jews, blacks, Latins

anything not of Nordic, pale flesh;

had violent childhood relations

with his mother

(she whipped him regularly)

so he grew to be a sadist

and a masochist

whose greatest pleasure lay

in giving and receiving

intense pain.

He wanted to have children

(had none, fortunately)

so that he could beat them.

And yet

he wrote hundreds

of the dreamiest transcriptions of the masters—

Bach, Debussy, plainsong and chorales,

the handbook of English centuries,

its landings airy,

languid, sentimental

as a thrush on sweet-pea; his “Danny Boy” alone

provoked weeping from

usurers, the deft piano

evoking crestfalls

of Irish rainbows, Scotch heather,

the breakers

of the Northern reef.

So how can it be

that cornflowers

and chrysanthemums grow

from the shit of humanity,

the smell of sweet hope

shined and rinsed

on pointed staves of

a saned and manicured

insanity?

Play on. Aaaaah.

Worry of it all tomorrow

in the parlors, playrooms,

conceptions of

our vanity.

DESOLATE ANGELS

I believe the desolate angels wait

at edge of our calamity, poised, preening

to wax their wing upon our waning light

and soar at last, to the last of everything.

Old guardians, kicked beyond this scene

draw lots for the next few unencumbered souls

that fill the offspring newly sprung from water

to a warm pink vase, with a card of offering.

Gabriel, horned and Azrael, his broken lute

a-strumming form the yanyin of embrace,

the death of life and lost in life’s place

another living name, a new forgiving.

OTHER WOMEN

Persephone hugs her Hades’ neck at tea

secure in dank Rubbermaid surroundings, her coming-

out notice and school plays trunked and mortified,

curling at the edges, the persistent hyacinth weeds

clipped from stoop and step to the ramp of the Lethe,

wellworn hands that dig with a suicide dagger,

with point lost (or clearly forgotten) just to keep

these walks of Forever very, very clean—

it’s better to pocket sorrow, settle, agree—

query the widows who stumble on stubble-filled streets

out of Ilium, or she, half-mortal mother of a dead

bastard son, who’ll say “This was my Achilles— ask me.”