can we have our ball back--let me finish the thought

I didn't intend to post the last entry on can we have our ball back without at least a couple of poems from it. I, of course, hit the wrong key and posted anyway. At any rate, here are two poems which I absolutely adore. The first is a sestina, which I like so much because it's, well, a sestina without all the philosophical noise that typically accompanies sestinas written post-Renaissance . . .

Non-stop
by Jo Ann Wasserman (from Issue #9)

um, the pictures, the ones she is wearing make-up and stilettos
something bigger than the city or choosing fresh cut lamb chops?a rootcanal
the kind performed over and over, a building from the inside, a real-life
morality play, no one gets out free, not the smokers or the wintergreen
gum chewers, not much forgiven, raincoats all deeply resembling the newest
color and winter shapes, shaped like a few winter?s ago, only gray

if I saw cosmetic or the small cosmetics bag she often had, but too small, it was gray
shoes, gray and silver waffle-iron steps, the moving faster her in stilettos
it isn?t easy to say how far we had walked, she was silent, mourning the newest
way of losing it, it was booming all around and he had been booming, ?it is only rootcanal?
not the Holocaust? which of course nothing really was, chewing Wrigley?s wintergreen
gum I was aware that nothing in my life would be the Holocaust but what was that? in real-life?

the Holocaust? we wouldn?t have been able to tell you, riding that train was real-life
her hand (right) offering the green papered bit, emerging from a bullet of leather-gray
glove was not as soft anymore or she could have said, with wintergreen
gum disappearing and reappearing, ?my hands are not so soft? tapping stilettos
against the grim-gray slide train, "don?t let this happen to you, this awful rootcanal"
which was said not to be the Holocaust but reaching into her life, pulling and newest

pulling out of the station and pulling off her heavy coat, I am pulling off my newest
best coat, a coat I hate and have tried to lose on buses and skating trips taking it out of real-life
to make it someone else?s life, I left it at Mrs. Gage?s house, but it was a singular, ugly rootcanal
of an overcoat but like Sunday, rootcanal, fists and yelling?no Holocaust, just real-life
she read a magazine folding the square of silver paper, flaking away the shine until it was gray
she was the prettiest almost ever in her gray sweater and clicking a slice of wintergreen

gum, ?you can?t say a word about this,? (she is laughing) ?about this wintergreen
candy to your sister, she is too young and could choke easily? choking becoming the newest
non-Holocaust event but still bad and I promise and she crosses her legs, the stilettos
point forward dangerous, a pain is through me, is thinking these shoes are more about real-life
than anything , her hands feel soft, her sweater is soft but wiry and mossy gray
I look at her too long, she says, I sense I have learned something on the way to rootcanal

If I was looking to learn something on the way to the rootcanal
I knew I had learned to chew gum and not swallow, put it back into the Wrigley?s wintergreen
paper but we were not looking to learn something and the final station floor was sad and gray
it snowed and I had hot cheese sandwich later, in Union square, in my newest,
best, coat, with a ripe pickle spear and my mother only smoked after all it was real life
and ate a frosty, dish of yellow vanilla ice cream she said, I have to get out of these stilettos

she removed the stilettos, on the train home from the rootcanal
sitting with me just like real-life and eating lifesavers?wintergreen
She fingered my newest and best coat, laughing, ?this is terrible, even if it?s gray?

. . . It's something of a love poem, in the Troubador tradition, and so not only technically a sestina. But it's more than that. It's an ambitious experiment with six words. If you've not tried out the form yet, you must. Find yourself six good words and have at it. Alternatively, write a six-line poem, then keep going, using those six words again. And again. If writing poems is discovery, the sestina is a great form for discovering where the poem will take you.

Here's another poem I like . . .

THE EMPTY THEATER
after photographs by Gordon Parks
by Arielle Greenberg (Issue #2)

Chapter 1. We are big as the china and alone.
Chapter 2. We are bristles and the scum.
Chapter 3. But smiling. An electrical problem --- cord xzzz cut ---
what that truck --- is xxzz two braid zz the --- back up
to --- xzz black now si --- silv wave face xzz silver --- gone
Chapter 4. Flags of weary, stripes and stars.
Chapter 5. Do we live among the blind?
Chapter 6. We are the career of the empty theater.
Chapter 7. Circus peanuts. Baptism. Pool hall. Junk truck.
Chapter 8. Whitewash, swing low, church-go, thumb suck.
Chapter 9. Now the wheels are still and our souls taken.
Chapter 10. All souls. Boxers. Fluff-headed girls.
Chapter 11. Arise, old fedoras! Arise, light-skinned girls!
Chapter 12. Arise, new Moslems bent forward as women!
Chapter 13. A call to arms, and the newest hands.
Chapter 14. The blind house of snow.

What's to say? I am struck--no, make that fully charmed--by the line "we are the career of the empty theater."