Issue 14: Charles Tarlton
After Roethke
CARMODY: I woke from a dream, but the dream persisted.
In fact, I may still be dreaming.
BLIGHT: My worst nightmare!
1
if to lie naked
in sand, in silted shallows
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar, to sink up to your hips in a mossy quagmire;
of a slow river
or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log, believing you'll return again, as a snake or a raucous bird.
fingering a shell, thinking:
once I was something like this
2
I ran till I was out of breath, to the end of the trestle, beating the train again.
that was being alive
and ten. But, so was crouching
Watching kitchen lights come on the other side of the lawn, I dreamed of Indian warriors or wanton film Marines.
under the Pepper tree
in the rain, listening to the rain
The lost self changes, turning toward the sea, a sea-shape turning around.
feeling the world squeeze in
3
An old man with his feet before the fire in robes of green in garments of adieu.
if these are my roots
faced with my immensity
An unmasked road-lover worries where I am, how far, and whether I have lost my way.
too old to follow
cold trails of scattered breadcrumbs
this deep in the woods
To find in falling shadows, in the fading light a safe way out?
All finite things reveal infinitude: the mountain with its singular bright shade.
the blue shine on snow
after-light on ice-burdened pines
The odor of basswood on a mountain-slope, the scent beloved of bees; and silence of water above a sunken tree.
*
Philosophy must understand what is: in the flow of history, the volume of plain fact (that my grocer believes in honesty, e.g., but shorts the change).
is left to writhe
over solid sea-rock like tides
Our prejudices we need to catalogue and advertise. Logic is the tool with which we float the argument we must not sink below.
sea urchins yawning for breath
Psychotherapeutics
CARMODY (as OTHELLO): There was in my ear a grave imbalance
sent me lurching out of bed, stumbling in
the grass.
BLIGHT (as IAGO): You are perhaps too finely tuned to self.
He was always asking whether this or that could make you cry, whether it ever made you cry, and what was wrong with that?
turning things around
he studied symptoms just the way
He was building up a character that he could play out on the street, for his inward peace or when coping with others.
you might learn your lines
So, he researched the lineaments of noble personae; the courageous chin and strength linked to sensitivity.
had you been cast in some sad
theatrical tragedy
He believed if he could only find the tendrilled way down to his true thoughts, he might verify the workings of his mind.
how they might admire
his style if they could understand
So everyone might see not just his actions, but the deeds illuminated by a script, a sort of dictionary of his morals.
see something deeper
The courageous touches then applied—a walk, of course, a subtly halting speech for emphasis, his heart worn on his sleeve.
how he quivered when pained
his anguish so exquisite
Along the Gallery Wall: A Review
CARMODY: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Paul Klee, Hans Hoffman
...these are your true realists.
BLIGHT: Now, that really is Platonic!
1
Four small square paintings on a wall about eye level in a row from left to right and subtly colored.
it is not in words
they speak, the colors reaching
The first composed of flattened blackened squares that yearn across the gap to grasp an idea of umber fountains in the second.
mute and hopelessly
rooted between black and orange
The fountain in its own corner stretching backwards after orange swaths as for a breath of air, overwrought and threatening to fall out of the frame.
explosions in the next
2
On the farthest right, like a flag on fire, a white band breaks out from rough-brushed reds. The center blocked in its regress by thick filigrees of orange and green on the left.
no bridging that gap
the green waits like a spider
Even though a complicated story of wingéd fairies etched in soft pastels and petals framed in still more black is urgent from the farther side of that.
the story burgeons
The palest blue weeping onto gray is anchored either side of pictures two and three and the whole of two is harmony an easy percolation up through pale cream and sandy colorations.
till a bridge is carefully
pitched across the open air
3
black is heavier
and weighs the left end down
That is the first canvas and the darkest one, a seething overlay obstructing something fainter, far more distant, lighter.
a tarred obliteration
Its explicit meaning hidden—I imagine some graffiti artist’s moniker in scroll buried under overlapping swatches of streaky black and gray put on with a roller.
at the start. Forward from that
the whole folds into the void
Charles Tarlton has published a number of poems since 2009-2010 in several e-magazines, including Jack Magazine, Shampoo, Review Americana, Tipton, Barnwood, Abramelin, Simply Haiku, Haibun Today, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Atlas Poetica, Blue and Yellow Dog, Shot Glass, Sketchbook, Skylark, Six Minute Magazine, Cricket Online Review, Red Booth Review, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, and Rattle. He published his first tanka prose in Jeffrey Woodward’s Haibun Today in 2011.He published an e-chapbook entitled La Vida de Piedra y de Palabra in the 2River series, an extended historical tanka prose poem ‘Five Episodes in the Navajo Degradation’ in Lacuna, and ‘The Turn of Art,’ a short poetical drama about Picasso and Matisse, composed in tanka prose, in Fiction International.
