THE AMERICAN AESTHETIC
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POEMS of EIGHT POETS
(Summer 2014, Volume 2)

Picture
Emily Strauss                                                                

Swimming in You

Let me swim in you, sea
coiled in tresses across my shoulders
down my naked back
cool water shivering me
I break for the surface
forehead to the hot sun
momentarily
then sink again
you chilling thick abundance
azure turquoise depths
dropping to black, I emerge into you
as a fairy into night
mingling in some middle zone
winding through my hair.
Let me swim deeply--
you will enfold me
flowing in your currents
I drift content
without thoughts
watching colored fishes graze
knowing you surround my open arms
your blue-green rays shining the way
to my rest, I will linger in you
Ocean forever.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.


Picture
Des Clark-Walker

The Rainbow Serpent’s secret   

From the Arafura sea, birthplace of cyclones,
the northwest monsoon brings cumulonimbus
rising over the Arnhemland escarpment
where colliding clouds incite chaotic lightning
as thunder threatens to shatter the cliffs
awash with torrential rain.

After the storm, respite comes from clearing showers
as the Rainbow Serpent arcs its merging colours
against a dark sky.

Among indigenous people the Serpent has countless names
intermingled with myths and legends,
traditional mantles for their being.

Its perfect arc and colours cannot be denied
but tetrachromats with four visual pigments
can see ultraviolet beneath the violet,
an invisible hue for us,
impossible to imagine.


[Note: "
tetrachromats" are organisms that have "four independent channels for conveying color information, or possessing four different types of cone cells in the eye"--Wikipedia]
[Note: Poem has also appeared in Balliol College's Annual Record, 2014]
Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.


Picture
Nabin Kumar Chhetri

HIDE AND SEEK

Surendra, you used to give me boiled eggs
with grinded black salt, cupped on your palm.
And pieces of honeycomb drooling with honey.
And we played hide and seek in the maize bush
at the back of our hostel.

I would always find you out
crouching behind a row of trembling leaves
or up on the branch of a Neem tree.
Your breath taut behind your closed lips.
In the end, our teacher used to call us back.

Now, I heard that you have gone hiding again
It's almost winter now.
The clouds will soon turn into snow and fall
over the hills and lakes. I am beginning to worry

I give up buddy, now show up.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
James G. Piatt
​
 The Last Train

In cold spherical winds
Of earth bound absurdities,
My fading breath carries
That which is hidden
Inside caches laden with
Darkened secrets: This
Reality slowly flows from
the rusted rails of the
Last train as it vanishes
Bit by bit into the dark
unforgiving spaces, of
unbending veracity.
It is then that I know.
 
Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
Ray DiZazzo

​VOYAGER 1

                   
(The most distant man-made object…
                    launched in 1977… traveling at nearly
                    40 thousand miles per hour and now,
                    finally, leaving our solar system…
                    entering interstellar space.)


How far ahead?
How many centuries along the arc
a thing with mass enough 
to bend your flight?
                         
Is the night you cross
wormed with howls?

Light itself
hurling upward
off the trampolines of time?

Is never slowing down

    your catapult across
    the interstellar bow-shock
    to the pull of radiant holes


a form of answer?   

Will you end at something? 

                                       Anything?

                      Or tumble
 
      wingless

calling back

      calling back

           
  calling back

across the long forgotten
arc of our existence.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
Roy Blokker

​THE WAIT

The wait excruciates.
The wait is life
Between those brief seconds
Of pain and joy,
Terror and elation.
The wait is tea
Too hot to drink,
Friends too far away
To see.
The wait is your teenager
Out past curfew
In the family car;
The flowers clutched like
Precious escaping air
In your trembling hands
Two hours before
Your date;
The conversation before
The kiss;
The long nights of anticipation
Before the Guest arrives.
The wait is an un-ringing
Telephone,
Doctor on the other end
Waiting.
The wait is that
Long stretch of highway
With no vista points asking
“Are we there yet?”
The wait is paint drying,
Grass growing, the twelfth hole,
The pre-game show
And then the commercials,
Q. E. D.;
The fish to bite, the war to come,
Winter.
The wait is calm seas,
Dark skies,
Stars fixed in space
Imperceptibly dancing,
A symphony of largos,
Orchestra on break.
The wait is an unmarked grave
In a French courtyard,
Truck engines running
Near the Kremlin Wall,
A short, last kiss
Blown to the boys
As they lined up,
Wait over.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
Tulip Chowdhury

I’m Quiet Today

I'm silent today
who do I talk to?

The wind is not blowing
not whistling or singing
the songs and lullabies
so who do I talk to?

The rain is not falling
no thunders crashing
no raindrops pattering
on window panes
to knock and awake me,
and so who do I talk to?

Tree by my window
stands silent
no birds or wind
to share untold tales,
it seems to say sorry
for not having any company,
and so who do I talk to?

There are people all around
they chatter like birds
shout like raging storms
but they don't listen,
really listen you know
to what I say.

And so whom do I talk to?
I'm quiet today.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
Brice Wade Luse

Praise For an Unurned Soul

"Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
 Must lay his heart out for my bread and board."
 — Robert Lowell, Words For Hart Crane



They never found his body. He had jumped into
the Gulf of Mexico, pale face with downcast eyes,
off of the coast of Florida, still drinking, blue,
waves rolling to the shore beneath those distant skies.

His thoughts, delivered up from his moon-slanted mind,
from some white coverlet and pillow, I see now,
were his inheritances—delicate, refined--
they fell from off his northern face and broken brow.

For all his optimism, his uplifted moods,
he really couldn't take it in the end. He left
right in the spring, another of those countless dudes
for whom this world's so heavy it can not be heft.

Across the continent, I cross th' Astoria
Bridge over the Columbia, huge, grand, and green.
It soars up to the clouds, around up from Marine
Drive, like a tower-swept phantasmagoria,

and driving there, up to'rd the sky, I cannot help
but think of his unkempt and touseled, wrought despair,
so heavenly that height, so horrible that hell,
so frightening that light, so lofty in that air.

O, scatter please these well-meant words, foam from his life,
upon those sunlit waves he had no chance to see,
his unurned ashes passing through America,
while drifting down the eddies of eternity.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

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