THIS is the next page more samples of poems by John Calvin Rezmerski UNSPOKEN DIALOG (from Breaking the Rules) All the way home I gaze up open-mouthed at the melancholy moon. The jaundiced pock-marked face seems to need some words to scream. Harvest moon, they call it, but its own harvest is the gathering of the gloom we cultivate below. It is Fall, and we are falling again. We have fallen so far from youthful appreciation. It may be want of love, someone to receive our ache, that has accomplished this mockery of light. For some, the plain soreness of failed labors tells the desolate tale: empty granaries, empty stores, empty purses, empty houses, empty beds. For some, the old desire to be where they are not and are not able to reach locks them in with the hanging clutter in the closets of their own lives. Am I the only one who imagines the moon feels sorry for us? I look up as if to ask directly, but the stone face stays stone. Is this a hint that here things are the way they have been in spite of disciplined goal-setting, in spite of anything we hope we believe? NO RESIDENT CHILD (from Breaking the Rules) “And if your house has no child, you can always gather into your arms the sleeping infant of yourself.” --Billy Collins, “Moon” So I was born the oldest boy and will never be younger, nor ever as old as my daughter’s eldest daughter’s youngest. Children of various generations have graced my house with uncommon grace I was never able to achieve. The residue of last Christmas’s generous chorus of greedy cries and giggles lies in the corners. Now the house has no resident child, though a few toys remain for me to play with. Ghosts of colored wrappings.— tatters of old presents— steep in time, in treasure chests in attic and basement. My clumsy ways with toys and tools and the rules of games and company kept me from providing good example. The boy I used to be and may become again might find some use beyond memory for old stuff sometime. When I sleep, I dream of the way the warmth of soothing my first grandchild felt on my neck. The breath of the baby was exactly the warmth I think I remember when my father picked me up. MARIE (from What Do I Know?) Born under Scorpio, her first love was a white horse she saw in a book, and later in movies and magazine ads, the white horse everyone seemed to admire, the white horse under the masked man, the white horse of Joan of Arc, the white horse with a thousand faces. A white stallion with flame-red eyes LOMP members Maxine was what she desired Russell, Char Donovan, the and speed that would make Pegasus late Jeanette Hinds, and Shirley give up on his wings. Ensrud at a NFSPS convention. She used to go down to the high fence All are award-winning poets. at the horse-boarder's, ten years old, watching for that white wind that would bounce her bareback through fields of cloud by day and by night meadows of stars. She watched as much as she could, never saw him, and never told anyone for whom she was watching. At eleven she began to climb over, at twelve loved the smell of the stable. At thirteen she talked her father into going to auctions and from the third came home with a mare she called Cotton. She was Cotton's only master-- happy to have a mare, feeling without thinking, a horse is a woman's woman. Now sixteen, she tosses her black hair at the men she tells what she wants done for her horse. Every other day, she has a terrific craving for a ride, feels stiff without it, works her sluggish saddlehorse into a lather on frosty mornings when she rides without a jacket, going home to wipe and brush the mare, loving the smell of sweat and urine-soaked straw. She loves to ride bareback for exercise, jeans soaked, breath coming fast, white in the chill, the calm power of the horse rocking her pelvis, loping along the lake where she sometimes stops and looks into the water a while. Sometimes in the summer she camped there. She loves the rub of the saddle on an evening ride, doesn't mind riding herself sore, wishing as she splashes horse-knee-deep in and out of the water, reins loose, horse having her own fun, she could have the power of the horse she wishes she had. She wants to follow the sun down to the Pacific, wants to ride off into the surf at dusk, bucking the waves all the way to Asia. But here is the prairie, no ocean, not even a sight of the Rockies, no visible worlds to conquer, no way of following today around the world. This is not her silver stallion, this is her phlegmatic white mare, whose only interest in the west is the wind they turn their backs on headed back to the stable. She can't forgive Cotton her open love of home and oats. That is why she uses her crop and heels so hard to hurry her out so close to sunset, when she never looks up from the horizon at the colored clouds. That is why she complains to her father, "We never go anywhere," and makes the stablehands little promises if they will take good care of Cotton through the winter, and plans grudges against them for the end of another season of desire when she will not have the white stallion again.