Poetry by Jessica Murray, Aleksay Porvin, and Anis Shivani

JESSICA MURRAY

Johnny Owen

    It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.
– Hugh Mcllvanney

A boxer knows that even art must end,
and that the final word is always none.

He laced his thick red gloves
and failed again for love

or something like it, the steady tick of days:
if all the world’s a stage,

like some slight Cordelia he followed suit
and gave his lines where lines were moot

and everything was in the gaze—
he looked and looked; we couldn’t look away.

Lupe Pintor

    You must carry on boxing in memory of Johnny.
– telegram from the Owens family to Lupe Pintor

Repeat, with variations, your heavy gloves
to the soft skull,

fist to chin, cheekbones, nose and eyes:
theme and variation:

how many ways are there to kill a man?
One is by accident, in the vagaries

of self-examination: boxing is the discipline
of giving more than you can stand.

He Dug His Heels in at Q.

    – after Woolf

If Q is I been there, there is nice…
and not to be afraid
of telling, a little,
when a little can be telling,

or a forge whose heat is plastic
perpetual and inductive,
then it is also the reliquary
of the moments
we call understanding,

which have turned
the coils of the brain
and have been touched
in turn:

hammered into hinges
swinging on bronze pins
into the white light
that falls through white frames

and which will be known
after the fact
as ordinary, in ordinary speech,

then R is a life full
of limitations,
the snow of fleeting accretions,
where, instead of discretion,
one asks again
the anxious question,
mistaking its intention:

(Where is the hinge, the handle,
the entrance latch?)

R is what is leant
to the fire
leaning back out—

or to bear
the lack of someone
almost given something
taken back.

ALEKSEY PORVIN
(TRANSLATION BY PETER GOLUB)

Swings

The face is taken by the wind.
Only the calico “forgive me”
is crumpled
to the heaven.

Luba, where is the body
moving to the world of love?
On the palm the pronoun
settled:

with the pronoun of warmth, or
forgiveness, in place:
won’t fit the age
into strength.

Strong enough to fly higher
the unheard “forgive me,”
the creak of celestial
anxiety.

ANIS SHIVANI

Acoma Sky City

Of this enchanted pueblo, the less sublime word
unfits.  A gruesome green nonexistence, whose promontory
we climb, under the guided hand of the spirits
which shepherded time in place, heralded the arrival
of history in its machinelike minutest moments.
No, I will not find my lost twin-souls here, on this red-yellow earth,
nor standing hatless and mute beside the jutting brute buttes,
like the prophets lesser-known to time.
I bargain with the red earth’s terrorist presence.
If I could only breathe in something of the erosion of spirit,
which is present here in the continuation of habitation
in the middle of the valley imprisoning death,
I might perhaps learn to lie and cheat yet.
I see the pueblo atop the mesa, the toylike homes in the distance,
under a clean but mad sun, and I think I hear the echoes
of all the invaders through time sighing, Death, death,
Death to the winningest warriors, Death to the patrons,
and it sounds like my own ear whispering rebellion’s courtesies.
Yes, this is where the souls come after being extracted.
This is neither time nor its antithesis, but something a little more grave.