Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
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Cheryl J. Fish


Unabashed                  For Martha King
 
The Poetry Project, our full-service station for
visual  verbal             musical  mobile
Soulful generosity      curated, unabashed
                         Community.
Memories       move     within      enlarged   spaces
So many friends gone.
Part of our      everything.
 
Transported by art and arrows: Pages on canvas.
            In one issue alone, Project Newsletter 132, Feb/March
1989: Your Giants Play Well in the Drizzle journal.
Basil’s talk, “A Painter’s Bestiary,” featuring poems
            written for painters    Johns, Warhol
O’Keefe, Tomlin.   Workshops by Bernadette Mayer,
Carmen Valle, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Kofi Netambu.
            Dance/Poetry collaboration:
Waldman/Kraus, Cooper/Houston-Jones, Elmslie/Almon
            Grimsted/Reed/Blank. A Celebration of virtuoso
Miguel Pinero, hosted by M. Algarin, A. Baraka and N. Shange.
Poems by Bill Kushner, Bob Hershon, The Portable Lower
East Side reading, many, many more.
 
How glorious to recall this magnanimous feast.
            How many brilliant lights in lines and shouts.
Memory/pride, hallelujah.       Achievements, Martha.
            You on the podium of dreams.
            Language-arts. Finding jobs
for friends. In tranquility and rain.
            Keep it tender as you tend     
Sweet life        the multivalence of voice.

 

Median
 
In the middle of the street
You stand still, buttoned up
            In the middle
             You wait.
 
Melting.
Necessarily vague
            Winter
When sidewalks empty
            Transversing the middle
 
A treasured memory
            tosses, turns
not apart from the window
 where a face deflects
            the measure of glass.
 
Truck slams on brakes
            minute blast
Somewhere in the farthest lane
            Erasing there
to here.
 
Assembling what you
            Made in the middle of
Revising
            What habit-forming does
Driving hand-over-hand
attending to the diagram
backwards
walking, waving
in the middle
            of the street.
 
(An earlier version of this poem appeared in
The Newsletter of the Poetry Project #135 Dec/Jan. 1989-90)