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    Zack Rogow's most recent book of poems is The  
Selfsame Planet, from Mayapple Press. Their web page is: http://www.mayapplepress.com. His three previous collections of poetry include A Preview of the Dream from Gull Books. Poems of his have appeared in a variety of magazines, from the American Poetry Review to Switched-on Gutenberg on the World Wide Web. He translates French literature, and was a co-winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award for Earthlight by André Breton, and winner of a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award (BABRA) for his translation of George Sand's novel, Horace. He teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of San Francisco. At UC Berkeley he teaches in the Academic Talent Development Program and co-founded the Lunch Poems Reading Series with Robert Hass. Linda McCarriston has said of his recent book, "The Selfsame Planet is an intriguing study of love and loneliness, longing and the human flaw that requires it. Rogow's varied and rich persona poems in the voices of women artists permit this collection an emotional voluptuousness... I was moved by this seemingly understated but daring and beautiful collection."

Josephine Baker 
in Her Dressing Room 
at the Folies Bergeres, 1927

Well, Lila Harris! Aint seen you
since Forty-third Street!
What brings you to La France, honey?
My number's on in a minute but we can yak a little
while I put on my face.

'Member how they stuck me at the tail
of that longlong chorus line in New York?
Last sure was first that time, wunnit?
I just made such a spectacle a myself,
slippin my hips all over an crossin my eyes
till they practically switched places.
I needed to steal that show
badder than a empty larder needs a stick a butter
cause there wunt no way
I was gon back to wipin floors in Saint Louis no mam.

Used to dry those floors
by wrappin a rag round each foot
an dancin em dry!
Started there eight years old,
peelin an gratin an rollin out crusts.

Know what they call me here?
La Bakaire-like I was the Eiffel Tower or somethin.
And see these? One days fan mail:
hundred seventeen love letters
and eight men askin all seal-voo-play
can they have my hand.

Stroke this sable. 
I aint eatin no more scraps.
Best thing I ever did was jump that boat an go
leavin no forwardin address 
for Mr. Jim Crow. I wonder 
could this someday happen
in Saint Louis?

                               I see you lookin 
at my banana skirt with the rhinestones. 
If the no blouse jungle routine is what I gotta do
to dance, thats what they gon get
but lemme tell you I watch 
them boys come bobbin into the club
with one leg left in the War now
that there was a jungle
and it wunt no Africa.

You like any a those shawls hangin up, Lila,
you just help yourself,
cause I got more at home
than I could wear on a nippy night
in Greenland.

                              Go ahead
and take in the show
from the wings. 
I can make em laugh, I can get em hot,
and when they on the second bottle
of the bubbly stuff I sneak up
an croon somethin that makes em cry in French.
Oh, you gon see a shimmy, girl,
like nobody done since they wrote the Bible. 

Swings

The chains are creaking, 
sweeping, counter one another,
pendulums of clocks that stand 
a head above us.
Shadow swings go rippling 
over sand.

Mothers, fathers fling their pushes,
hair with edges tasseled gray.
Toddlers scream out, "Higher!"
Back and forth the seats are tolling, each describes 
an arc in air.

Adults chat words
that swing between them,
talking solid food and potties,
children's hair flips back
as swings head down
from zenith.

Faces of those pushing could be ours,
or our parents',
or our children's thirty years from now.

Lunar Energy

I challenge the existence of the moon
for the following reasons:
She doesn't work regular hours
I've never sifted her platinum dust in my hands
She creates a barrier to important rockets
She costs as much to maintain as the Acropolis
I don't believe in her spongy gravity 
There's already a Man in the Moon
The moon is too beautiful her color 
is too much like silk
The poet Li Po drowned when he tried to kiss the moon 
in a drunken lake 8th century A.D.
Some nights she looks so close 
so amazingly round 
that I feel I know her better than anyone else

But the moon is too full she'll never feel for me
Or sometimes she's such a pointy sliver she doesn't really count
And she looks too good naked
And the tides are lying to us
And the moon won't fit in the gibbous belly of a woman
But still I want that moon 

The Selfsame Planet

At the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital 
in Sydney, Australia an intern named Rita watches
a heartbeat translated
into Northern Lights
on a screen. She sees the transfusion
hasn't yet stabilized
room 613 down the hall.  
	"Dear Nance," she writes,
"you remember that doctor 
who kept circling me.
I can't believe he keeps after me
after I filled him in
about Joe. He even confessed
a wife and two sons. Why
is it men think the least
about the people who love them the most?
Although it was my father
who frantically drove around for hours one night
and never caught up with my mother.
Fidelity is a marathon
I started training for right then. 
I shouldn't have unveiled to that doctor
my idea on how light flicks on headaches
but he was the only one
who ever smiled at me like that
when I told him about it."

Meanwhile back in Iceland, a driver
is working his truck up a steep valley, 
like a salmon. The landscape is so lunar
the occasional green seems otherworldly
as he makes his way toward Thingvellir.
The driver-his name could be J-nas-
pulls over and flicks open
his lunch pail. Inside      
is a pad on which he jots down a poem
he's been writing in his head:
"I know I have no business
loving you. I've plucked my life already
from among the many possible
as you've picked yours.
They're good lives, better
than anything
I could encircle you with.
But there is still a love, Birgitta, 
that only we can give each other
and I can't let that out of my hands.
In a way, you seem almost like my sister, 
our minds touch so close. As soon as we start talking
even if it's been months,
we tell each other truths
we give to no one else.
And when I look at your body
I know what happens 
when lightning hits a lake.
It fills the water
till all of it glows." 

The Empty Seat

I enter the train:
it's long, skinny-a fluorescent light bulb.
Every seat half-filled.

I'm faced with a choice.
Where to sit?
Next to the person most like my mirror-
beard, glasses, thin,
what everyone expects-
or the woman with earth-color skin
whose ancestors were kidnapped to this land?

Often I choose the unlikely
just to reach out
an invisible hand
and rest it on a shoulder
as the stations snap by.

Today I find a seat mate
whose body tells me
she loves jewels of dark chocolate.

As we near the end of the line
the other riders drain
out of the car.
No one is left but a few in their bachelor seats,
except me
and the woman at my side
eyeing me suspiciously.

Now what to do?
Give my seat mate more room
so she can read her bestseller 
with its gold necklace
of letters on the cover
but possibly offend
by abandoning her
for an empty seat?

Or should I stay by her side, 
both of us squirming 
at suddenly being as close
as a couple reading in bed
while stop after stop smudges by,
neither of us willing to budge?

Or peculiar, should I get up
and make a pair with another solitary rider
as we roll through ghost stations,
kindling a conversation?

Finally I decide to take a stand,
and sit where I am, no matter how empty the train,
or how many stops
at the end of the world
my seat mate and I have to go through together,
or who gets off first.
And when one of us is gone
the other will finally breathe freely
but still sense the empty seat

© All Copyright, 1999, Zack Rogow.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.