Poetry Magazine, Featured Poet: James Bertolino, Summer 2003

Poetry Magazine

James Bertolino

USA

James Bertolino has published nine volumes of poetry, the most recent being POCKET ANIMALS from Egress Studio Press (reviewed in the Dec/Jan issue of PoetryMagazine.com). His out-of-print books MAKING SPACE FOR OUR LIVING
(Copper Canyon Press) and PRECINCT KALI & THE GERTRUDE SPICER STORY (New Rivers
Press) are available online at CAPA: Connecticut College's Contemporary American Poetry Archive. Other books in print include NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and FIRST CREDO and SNAIL RIVER, Volumes 26 and 34 from the Quarterly Review of Literature Award Series. His recent chapbooks include GREATEST HITS: 1965-2000, published by Pudding House Publications, and both PUB PROCEEDINGS (in collaboration with Anita K. Boyle) and 26 POEMS FROM SNAIL RIVER from Egress Studio Press. Poems have appeared in
Ploughshares, Notre Dame Review, The Raven Chronicles, Crab Creek Review, Bellingham Review and online at The Drunken Boat, Mudlark, Switched-on Gutenberg and Arbutus. He lives beside Toad Lake on Squalicum Mountain, and teaches Creative Writing at Western Washington
University.

THE GIFT

Their relationship moved forward
like a chrome bar

over the frets
of a guitar--each new stage

of resistance and release
brought music, as though

beyond their ken, some
ghostly hand was strumming.

WEATHER

There is a woman whose presence
encloses everything

like weather. He wants to be wet
in her rain. As he thinks this

the cock pheasant's call begins to sound
like sexual moans. His only desire

to do with her body
what air does to a feather.

STEW

1.

Before he knew
cancer
was snaking its dark
increments through his brain,
he started wearing lace
gloves, so delicate,
so white.

2.

For some, being happy
is like trying to stand on
one foot--of course you can,
but only for awhile: that other
shadowed foot, the foot of frustration
and melancholy, grows heavier,
heavier, and always
goes down.

3.

She has strewn
the remnants
of their stew over
his papers, lumps of rutabaga
and carrot sullying
the syntax
of power.

HIEROGLYPHS

A rock scarp towers inches over
the debris of pine needles and dried moss,

its surface decorated with lichen hieroglyphs.
Huddled nearby, in an attitude of scholarly respect,

are curved seed pods and cones, exchanging annotations.
A low wind, having discovered a beetle's empty

carapace, sounds a somber note--disturbing
the quiet deciphering of antiquity.

POLLIWOG

Balanced over the brink of the creek, loose
shred of skin dipping now and then

through ripples: leg of deer.
A bright-eyed black squirrel is interested,

looks away, is interested.
Two dragonflies are sewing taut lines

from oak to fir to blossoming bush.
A polliwog bellies through wet moss.

CHANGELING

Imagine an entity that resembles
a flock of millions of tiny birds.

This living creature changes shape, speed
and direction with the randomness

of play, of pleasure. It exists in outer space,
its life not limited by feeding, responsibility

or age. Its purpose, simply,
is to change.

Credits: the eight-line poems above are all reprinted
from POCKET ANIMALS, Egress Studio Press, Copyright (c) 2002 by James Bertolino; "Stew" is reprinted from the Fall, 2002 issue of Bellingham Review.