Dane Cervine Writes

The Mystical Stand-Up Comedians; and, The Dreams of Antelope; in the MONTEREY POETRY REVIEW

The Monterey Poetry Review is publishing again along the coast of California. You can check out two poems of mine here:

2 Poems in Monterey Poetry Review

Just scroll down till you see my name, and read some of the other wonderful work along the way! Or read them below:

 

The Dreams of Antelope

In Yosemite, they introduced wolves back into the mountains, which fed again on the antelope, which stopped over-eating the willow trees, so the birds returned to sing and beavers started making dams again from the fallen branches, resurrecting the marshes, and once more everything started turning green because a wild predator was allowed back into the dreams of antelope.

 

The Mystical Stand-up Comedians

Sitting by morning fire,

I arrange books on wooden table,

ponder the cover of Bly’s Morning Poems,

open another instead, begin reading

The Spiritual Athlete In An Orange Robe and,

foggy, think I am still reading Bly. I laugh

at his irreverence, my meditator-friends flinching

at lines such as He sits inside a shrine room all day,

so that God has to go outdoors and praise the rocks.

I love this line, a permission to lift eyes from navel,

to run wildly through the enraptured day

rather than sitting immobile as a cross-legged

contortionist. But it takes an old rascal like Bly

to wag his finger at the spiritual authorities.

After a bite of oatmeal, pinch of brown sugar,

sip of coffee, I wake up, notice I am not

reading Bly, but Kabir—15^th century Indian poet

writing ecstatic bhakti verse amid the staid

Hindu bureaucracies—and I laugh again.

The mystical stand-up comedians span the centuries,

remind us spirit is not a competition,

but the comic timing of cosmic humor,

the stick in the rib, the ungodly guffaw,

enlightenment the subtle joke remembered

by the man in the back pew, running now

from the church, falling down on the grass,

laughing.

 

 

 

 

TOP 10 Commentary Pick at CONTRARY Literary Journal

This was a fun surprise....CONTRARY magazine celebrated its 10 Year Anniversary by choosing the top 10 pieces of writing in each genre it publishes, including one called Commentaries. An essay of mine from a few years back, entitled Prepare To Believe, was chosen. It's about a trip to the Creation Museum in Kentucky that my daughter and I took, and the strange things we encountered....check it out again at:

Prepare To Believe 

While you're there, you can also read again an earlier Commentary entitled, A Secret In Plain Sight, about a surreal visit to a "gentlemen's club" in the Midwest:

A Secret In Plain View 

And of course, the newly published Commentary entitled, The Church of Poetry:

 The Church of Poetry

The Poem ANTI-MASS in the Loose Leaf Tea Literary Journal

A short prose poem entitled ANTI-MASS appears in the new literary journal Loose Leaf Tea: A Journal of Cultural Expression. The on-line publication opens and reads like a "book", so look for it on page 68:

Loose Leaf Tea Literary Journal

The poem is based on a stunning art piece made from the burnt timbers of an African American church, hanging from the ceiling of the de Young Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA.

Here's a copy of the prose poem below:

Anti-Mass

  Charcoal and Wire modern art piece by Cornelia Parker

Charred remains of a Southern Black Baptist Church destroyed by arsonists hang from the ceiling, blackened board fragments suspended in air by wire in a perfect rectangle, defying gravity, floating as a miraculous spectral object—the lost church. The bodily presence of its congregation made more powerful by their absence. The unthinkable happens. The sign says Mass: elemental substance of the universe; and the sacramental ritual at the center of Christian faith. This blackened sculpture an Anti-Mass, then. Nails still embedded in wood.

New Poem: THE DARE - In PERFUME RIVER POETRY REVIEW

THE DARE is a new poem appearing in the first issue of the Perfume River Poetry Review. You can click on this link for a free PDF of the entire first issue, or order a print copy for $10.

Perfume River Poetry Review

I've included a copy of the poem below for a quick read:

 

The Dare

The correct word, he says, is death

that had happened to him. Perhaps

it had only been near, but his heart

had stopped, everything just stopped

on a dime. Lucky

to have been in a hospital already

where angels in white lab coats

and fabulous machines pulled his

twenty-one grams of weighted soul

back into his comatose body,

waking three days later to a world

fundamentally changed, though

he could not immediately say how.

No memory of the past month,

including the World Cup soccer match

he’d watched with his sons (who won?

was one of his first questions after

the coma). But no matter, here

was life, still, again—and the basic

questions could no longer be assumed.

What to have for breakfast. Whether

to move to India, minister to those

nearer death than he. Anything

possible now in a fundamental way:

breathing, swimming against the tide

of world politics, standing now

under this very sun in the parking lot

of Home Depot where immigrants

still linger awaiting work. Telling

this story. Each hour, he says, a luxury.

The problem being how to honor the passing minutes,

as though a king had staid your execution,

given you the keys to his kingdom,

dared you to be great.

 

Poem in new anthology: FACING THE CHANGE - Global Warming

 

An earlier poem of mine called The Last Days, about my daughter and I reading the newspaper over breakfast musing on the state of the world, just appeared in a new anthology from Torrey House Press, entitled Facing The Change: Personal Encounters With Global Warming.

You can check out the anthology description at the Torrey House Press website:

Torrey House Press

 

The Last Days

My daughter looks up from the Sunday news—

an earthquake in Pakistan, the many dead—

betrays a quick glance of fear, after so many

hurricanes these last days, New Orleans flooded,

Texas evacuated, Florida bracing, Indonesia

reeling from the last tsunami. The book

of Revelations lies in my childhood memory,

prophecy of flood, famine, fear—but I

can’t bear to tell her my secret misgivings,

that I am nearly fifty, peering down the gauntlet

of my own last days, wondering how to spend

judiciously, extravagantly, each one of them.

But this is all so personal, a sin, really,

when living in the belly of an empire

bent on catapulting us into the next war,

the next bald-faced robbery of a planet’s future

for this year’s money-grab, the whole world

aghast and envious of this drunken bully

staggering belligerently towards oil

like an addict who would do

         anything, anything

for just one more fix. But I am no prophet,

succumb to the small world of breakfast

my daughter and I share, intimate,

in these last days of childhood, poised

as she is on the lip of a world that would

just as soon devour as kiss her, and

how can I prepare her for this rogue?

The way fear’s scripture insinuates its way

into the petty concerns of a life lashed

to the mundane but longing for revelation,

for some final reckoning. How do I say

I love you when this world is the only gift,

the pitiless dowry, I have to offer? How

do I say it is you, your brother, your friends,

the only hope for this brooding planet,

a new seed of reluctant messiahs peering

at the earth you shall inherit from us—

this thin, ephemeral line between

Eden and Armageddon.

New Poem in Van Gogh's Ear (based in Paris, France)

An experimental prose poem entitled The Anthropology of Memory was published in a Paris literary journal on-line called Van Gogh's Ear. Follow this link to the poem, then explore their website for other work and E-book editions of earlier issues:

The Anthropology of Memory, at VAN GOGH'S EAR

 

The Anthropology of Memory

Death swallows all. The existentialists, particularly the French, understand. Still, there are the small rebellions. There is memory. Digging for the forgotten. Holding fragments in hand, lifting them into light.

So after Paris, I buy a used book cheap to remember the French existentialist Henri Michaux, who in turn remembers an Ecuadorian poet named Gangotena who was possessed of genius and ill luck—who died young, along with his poems, most of them unpublished, burnt up in a plane crash. 

No internet search will find them. No Library of Congress hold them. Even then, the great library at Alexandria burned, and some future viral plague may yet take every word now saved in the world’s great memory banks with it into oblivion. Of course, there’s always our own Sun’s eventual solar demise, against which all human arrogance, and every poem, will fail. Unless that beautiful arrogance find us, somehow, a home on another world, a younger world, where Henri and I may yet reside side by side in gold or titanium memory chips, or even subtler clouds of data. But the Ecuadorian poet’s poems are, despite all arrogance, despite love, forever lost. Except his name, Gangotena.

That he was a genius. That he had bad luck. That someone remembers.