Charles Hansmann: EN POINTE

Someone’s daughter loves to dance. Any unheard music seems to do, and any partner. The table’s shimmed leg attends her lifted heel. She gains a peek beyond the windowsill.

ballet slippers
pigeon-toed
beside the bed
.
.

by Charles Hansmann
Sea Cliff, New York
first published in Frogpond 31: 1 (Winter 2008)

Charles Hansmann: SLANT

Some times of day don’t show themselves direct—they’re just reflected on the surface, skittish moments slinking down to drink, rippling indistinct the instant that we see them. Then turn around. Some times of day only follow on their memory, haven’t happened till they’re past, a set sun lighting up the hill behind, reappearing as we climb.

up all night
to see what cats see
alley moon

.

by Charles Hansmann
Sea Cliff, New York
first published in Frogpond 31:2 (Spring/Summer 2008)

Charles Hansmann: SEDUCTION OF THE POEM

.

I am talking you away from the lover who promised to be faithful – that isn’t a typo, and that lover’s still me. Get into the car. That’s all that it takes. You’re being talked

to the place where nothing you choose will determine what happens. For haven’t you wanted to ride in the rain with the top down ever since watching the wind blow the spume

off those waves at the cliff house? I tell you we are going to go fast. That way the windshield’s a fending umbrella, and your thin cotton shirt will not start to reveal you. I don’t

have to know. It’s your adventure, not mine, and right now you don’t care what is under your clothes. Right now you are watching the streak of these wipers for that dry explication

that lies between lines. And this corner we are turning – this corner that’s maybe no more than a bend – puts behind you any notion that anyone who knows you

still has you under tabs. For now you are my sweetheart. In this grip our world’s glove turns the wheel that will steer us. In this fist our palms lie palm to palm.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

first published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, August 10, 2007

Charles Hansmann: NOON

.
Time again, each morning when we wake – and place too – us, then me, you – separate

sides for swinging out our legs, a day taking place (we say, though meaning

taking time) as approach succeeded by withdrawal, as if the highlight were

exactly that, our lives meridian-centric, a countdown

to a moment – the gunfight in the western street, the church

bell, the firehouse whistle – and then a count away from it.

lunchers
in the clock-tower shade
eyeing their wrists

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

first published, in an earlier version, in Lynx XXII: 3, October 2007

Charles Hansmann: COCOON

This caterpillar’s hibernaculum is flawed, frost invaded. No butterfly or moth

bums an insulated ride. The metal playground slide conducts

the chill the children (summertime) find so thrilling, in winter sled the hill –

my woolen mitten frozen to the ladder rail.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

first published, in an earlier version, in Chrysanthemum, V1, N2, October 2007

Charles Hansmann: THE LONELINESS JACKET

You wear it and it snows: tracks empty the park outside the museum. A promo pen blues

your breast-pocket lining, and a snag starts to pull at your sleeve. The last one left

is as good as extinction. So says the quote on the leaking plastic.

But someone’s pinkie shined of wax on this second-hand tweed

flecks the lapel with an old, cleared hearing – conversation recorded in a stain.

The branches listen in, for this tree is like talk and there’s always a point

from which you are behind it, windows lighting up in the dinosaur wing.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

first published in Snap Poetry Journal

Charles Hansmann: THE WHOLE WEST

We play cowboy so long our canteens go dry and when our mother gives us root beer we call it sarsaparilla. We wear matching six-shooters but when we play frontiersman we take them from their holsters and pretend they are flintlocks. We have a steer’s sawn horn and when they are flintlocks we say it’s for powder. But when we play cavalry and need reinforcements we raise it to our lips and blow it like a bugle. Then my sister snags

onto that holiday word and calls it Cornucopia like naming a doll. We’ve had hats and vests all along but now I get chaps and she a fringed skirt. Girls sometimes pretend they are boys, she says, but boys never pretend they are girls.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

text first published in bottle rockets #17, V9, N1, Summer 2007 in different form

Charles Hansmann: POSTCARD

We sit in the back, each with an arm crooked out a window, miles on end, not passing a word. Pressed to our doors, undeclared, we compete: whose left

will tan darker than whose right? Ladybug

on the odometer, numbers flipping, travel trailer in tow, I tell you now, on this final stretch home, I’m as close to my sister as I seem to know how, leaning

as far from her arm as this Ford will allow.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

Charles Hansmann: PERIPHERY

This grass that is looked at looks different

from grass that is not. For one thing it’s greener than your eyes. But that’s just because your glasses are tinted and this is the color you chose. It’s the grass that has not been looked at that today we keep a lookout for. We are talking this morning of the infinite

ways to describe what the unlooked-at looks like. Look straight at the mirror. Try to watch

your eyes look away.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

Charles Hansmann: CLARITY

Literally the shining one, she greets me from a window seat exactly the height of her knee. A perfectly horizontal lap, backlit by glassy sun, as far as the eye

can see. I wait for the unfolding. Her summer robe falls free. Nothing beneath, but nothing showing.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

Charles Hansmann: HAIBUN POEM: A DEFINITION

A haibun poem may tell or give an impression of an actual or imagined experience.

It is written in prose and differs from the standard haibun in that it will usually not have a haiku. It is written with one or more (usually intra-sentence) line breaks. The line break may take the place of haiku and serve a similar purpose. Among other things, the line break may suggest a shift in meaning, introduce a juxtaposition, pause before an insight, link to something unexpected or alter a perspective.

The line break may also function in ways similar to a line break in poetry. For instance, it may work against the syntax of a sentence, so that a word’s part of speech (e.g., whether it is a noun or an adjective) may seem to change from the enjambed line to the line that completes the sentence. The line break may also signal a change of movement or suppress or highlight various internal features of the prose, such as rhyme or off-rhyme.

The number of line breaks is restricted by the writer’s concern for maintaining a sense of prose.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

Charles Hansmann: DOLDRUMS ENTRY

Sand isn’t land, nor is it sea. Shore is where both or neither want to be. Can’t say the same about air. This boat won’t stir

until it freshens. In the meantime, thought invents inverted lessons: to do there is nothing, hence this jotting. And who’s to say the sky doesn’t need every inch beyond the earth to make it blue? Blue because for all

purposes endless, nothing gets past, though now there’s a breeze, and wind amends this

stall – fast.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

first published in Chrysanthemum, V1, N2, October 2007 in an earlier version

Charles Hansmann: WERE IN MY ARMS

Our first married buy is an 1860 bed that has made it to the States by container ship. English, we think, but French, we are told, chateau furniture from the coast of Normandy. The Channel was a conduit of influence. This strikes us funny, repeated in the car. The next week we set out to haul the bed home. It’s two states away, the Hudson spread out below our rental truck in its

endless, landless flow. “Christ that my love,” I begin to recite, for crossing the bridge, in cold slanting rain, it seems we have set out to sea.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York

Charles Hansmann: FERAL

The cornfield filled with whispering follows us

as we skirt it, our voices husky and the sharp stalk leaves keeping us from cutting through. In there lives the girl put down to nap without a fan, the scratches on her arms a stranger’s

entry through her open window.

by Charles Hansmann

Sea Cliff, New York