PAGE 13
NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , DECEMBER 2001
PHOTOGRAPH BY GENE FAULKNER
VERSE FOR OLDER CHILDREN
EARTHLINGS
Do not volunteer truths,
these will make them pale
Do not disturb fantasies.
If one smiles, smile in turn.
If you are spoken to, listen.
Do not look at them for long.
This they take as staring,
causing crotch panic.
Do not look closely at them.
They are angry enough
even when smiling.
I think I shall never see
A book of verse written by me
TO A SKID ROW WAITRESS
Give us your bravest a m. smile,
wipe the fogged counter of our minds
Towel up the crumbs of our flaky poems,
ignore the deep-fried disorder of thought.
Dismiss the weak coffee paleness of wit,
forgive the dishwater muck of our words.
But really you season the soup of the day,
you butter both sides of our bread
Out to the street for whatever spare change,
this day we shall drink to your eyes only
P.O. BOX 424
If I don’t find someone
to share me with soon,
I may turn on myself
and bite my own ass!
FURNISHED ROOM
(WRITER’S BLOCK)
The Muse whispered at the keyhole of his mind
He let her in, cautioning about the clutter.
She smiled and unzipped a comer of the room,
unzipped the ceiling and down the farther end
They stood in other walls of his head.
She urged against one wall and another,
raising the ceiling to an outer world.
He complained of the dark an cold,
standing in other walls of his head.
An axe was swung in all directions.
The room reduced to a child’s toy block,
the Muse fled through the keyhole of his mind
as he stood in the four walls of his head.
MICHAEL MARSH, POET
The poem ended,
you lie in your grave
grey with exhaustion.
As in life, unkempt,
wrinkled as your brow
retaining wonder.
THE PARTY IS OVER
All credit cards nationally canceled,
America's Elm Street shades are drawn
Women and children, under pastel bedding
lie stunned before TV static and snow.
Manly beer bellies soured and gaseous,
the boneheads under hardhats are crushed
as Military/lndustrials foreclose on the land.
Now matriarchal scout cookies are crumbled,
the air let out from all our balloons.
-BILL BERTIN (1973)
Bill Berlin died in Astoria on Monday, December 3 at age 73. He spent the last
five years of his life in Astoria after much of it as a merchant sailor, and his youth as an
orphan raised in New York. He lived nearly thirty years in Portland.
He did live to see a book of verse written by him, published just before his death
by stroke and incipient cancer. The poems on this page are from that book, Verse For
Older Children, which he had printed for friends, and from other publications such as
the North Coast Times Eagle.
I knew him for a long time before he moved to Astoria I printed many of his
poems in the NCTE, and just as often committed typos upon them, which he declared
in a favorite phrase, “Shocking horrible!” Just before he died I read a few on KMUN-FM,
which Mike McCauley told him about “I hope he got them right,” he said.
I hope I've got them right this time also.
- michael M c C usker
ALL ANIMALS IN CHORUS
WINTER FOR A DEAD POET
No one came by today
You should have seen the way
the thinner first year trees
stood shaking in the breeze
No one came by today
The dog is just a stray
who sometimes comes to tease
by nosing at my knees.
No one came by today.
It seems a waste to play
at whispered rhymes like these
with only me to please
LOVE STORY
AT THE ROUND TABLE
Seated and dressed
in that particular pride
of men who have been tried
and passed the test,
they would meet for breakfast.
Longtime knights
of the neighborhood.
Appetites
whetted by a good fare of memory.
Their shared treasury.
Pancakes and eggs and hashing through
ball games
business deals
World War II.
They accepted the strangeness
of all the changes
that were occurring
while they were maturing
And held their exemplars
devoted to Buicks
but generous critics
of their children’s imported cars
Materialists. In the best sense.
Past tense and present tense
- mike M c C auley
CHILD’S PLAY
There never was a plan
More suitable for Man
Than going to the moon.
May you all leave soon!
ON COOKING A GOOSE
Working from her own recipe,
she peeled the skin all around
exposing trembling sinew and nerve-ends.
Exposing, as well, the purpled hurts,
the yellowed strands of self-rejection.
There a shriveled peach-pit heart,
a quivering liver choked with bile
After a time she looked it over
Basting with juices simmering darkly
When all was done she simply left it
Having, really, no appetite for goose.
Love me or leave me, she cried!
Leave you? Not ever, he lied
Say I'm the one, she pleaded
But of course, he conceded
Then, later, he loved a lot.
But then, later, she did not.
I was just her toy, he sighed —
the more wounded in his pride.
In a moment of delicious madness
she gleefully undid the knot of his navel.
Undone, his bottom fell to the floor.
Shedding an alarming stuffing,
the rest of him collapsed in her lap
She fingered the exposed spinal cord
until his jaw began to work at her:
No, he would not forgive, would never forget
Unforgivable then, never to be forgotten,
gathering his several parts,
she dropped him from a many-storied window
Waking, tearfully confessing maybe murder,
she is given Kleenex, a hug and a smile
In the next room, trembling, paler,
Brother’s birthday teddy bear is appalled!
CULTISTS
Centerpieces
waiting in dark grottos,
drawing the unwary
to dark embrace,
down hollow maws
without echo
BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS
B. KADRIE, NATIVITY (1968)
In sarcophagus within sarcophagus within sarcophagus
the mummy smiles
thinking of the good times he did have
the golden days, the nights brighter than gold
And he smiles recalling the further truth
all lives are but dreams of the Ancient Ones
MALACHI KEEFE
BORN DEC. 3, 2001
SON OF JENNIFER & PATRICK