Dean Blehert   FISHING Take a bit of lowland, a basin, a small valley, a hole, fill it with water, even just a few feet, and you get a mystery, this glossy flat surface from which you look back at yourself, broken, bent, puzzled, unable to see the bottom or walk there to talk to what may live there, through the looking glass, where you kind of life dies. ........................Fishing conquers the mystery, sitting under the old sun, dropping a barbed hook through the mirror, yanking out an emissary (a hostage?); something that, in its thin, flickering life was part of the mystery, a shifting flaw in the reflecting glass, ........................now flopping at your feet, turning dull in the sun, something you can eat, can understand, living, struggling, in pain, dying, caught. Pam Coulter Blehert Backyards, Front Royal. 24 x 30. see more work by Pam Blehert     THE LAWS OF LOSS When we can't find something that "just HAS to be here somewhere, Goddammit!" (whether a diamond ring, a lover or a sock), we search, and if we don't find it, search again until we find it or give up. Two laws govern searches: First, The number of searches before we give up does not necessarily depend on the value of what's lost. As important is our certainty that the damn thing has to be here, how STUPID! I know it was right here...--our zeal in the battle of reason versus chaos. Second, there are universal patterns in our searches (I'm sure anthropologists could document this): The first search is always quick, cursory; the second more thorough; the third ridiculously painstaking-- looking in impossible places (nervously lifting the cobwebbed sugar-bowl lid in search of a lost child); the fourth quick in a hopeless way, yet including desperate flourishes of token thoroughness (turning over unlikely stones, but forgetting to look underneath)--and so on for as many searches as our zeal demands, each having its unique flavor--for example, the calmly dogged flavor of a 23rd search. We could, then, describe any life (since we all search for something) by knowing how many searches have been made and understanding the value of what's been lost and to what extent reason has been outraged-- I put my childhood RIGHT HERE! I KNOW I had a goal just yesterday! HOME!-- where did I put HOME! You--how is it you are always with me, yet I can't find you?       QUICK THINKING You are roaring along the freeway when suddenly all time (except your thoughts) slows almost to a halt. Your car creeps ahead snail-like (at 65 MPH), slower and slower, the accelerator, your own foot no longer responding, and you realize it has taken you a decade to get around that curve (not a bad decade as decades go, lonely at first, but you learned to hear and separate out thousands of voices in your head, grew accustomed to their inane fixations, held long conversations, made bets on whether the car on the right would pass by the end of the year, even had a brief fling or two...), millennia more before you'll get home, so you slowly (it takes centuries) steer your snail-car in front of the car in the next lane, which slowly (centuries again), but inexorably presses and eats into you with erosion of steel, a noise like the moving of mountains and flame that explodes like the growth of an oak tree-- and with a ten-year sigh of relief, you welcome the torture--attenuated to a fine tickling thread-- of century-long death (hoping to come out in a world that moves at your pace), which will be reported in tomorrow's papers as a fatal traffic accident, causes unknown.   HOW POETRY IS DONE You can make any sentence poetical by mentioning blood or bone. For example, instead of "Yesterday I went to the store," say "Yesterday I went to the blood and bone store." Instead of "The moon rose," say "The blood moon rose" or "A bone of blood moon rose." For "I love you" try "Bone and blood I love you." Bone and blood are instant intense. For profound, add in an inapplicable abstraction, such as "geometry" or "calculus," or a scientific reference like "hologram" or "ecology," and throw in a juicy verb. For example, "The geometry of blood laments this hologram of bone." But intense and profound are not enough. You need an ironic (hip) sense of mortality, as in "Chanting its inevitable theorems in every fatty cell, the geometry of blood laments this fading hologram of bone" except that "theorems" makes too much sense with "geometry," so change "theorems" to "charade" (not "singsong," which makes too much sense with "chanting"). This gives us a satisfactory Twentieth Century poem written in a fresh unique authoritative etc. voice, especially if the line lengths are a bit weird, for example: Chanting its inevitable charade in every fatty cell the geometry of blood laments this fading hologram of bone Entitle it Collage #7 and sent it right out to a very little magazine or anything that ends in "REVIEW."   THE NAMES OF THINGS Death is no big thing. When I met him, he looked like me, but without the beard. An old friend turned up the same day, but said nothing much. When I went upstairs to my room, just to change clothes, the one who was me went along, as if to change clothes too. "Who are you?" I asked: "You aren't just someone." He replied: "You are the one who refuses to know the names of things." Then he was close before my face, breathing on me; I let go, drifted like a feather, hearing from his mouth my own and other voices saying who I was, what I'd done, accusatory, I guess, but not close to me. Then he blew me back into the tightness of my temples. There the dream stopped. (I never went back downstairs.) Overcast dripping morning, walking the dogs, who stare mutely as usual as I leave, then wet asphalt, the freeway, thinking, soon I'll die; then thinking, no, it's this distance, this letting go, happening now: "Soon I'll die" is just a name for it. If we name things truly, they become themselves and can leave us. Death, too, is the name of a dream that is going away.     Dean Blehert has had seven poetry books published, most recently Please, Lord, Make Me a Famous Poet or at Least Less Fat and Kill the Children and Other Disconnections. He also publishes his own poetry letter, Deanotations, which has come out every two months since August 1984. Currently Deanotations has about 300 paid subscribers, and has often been praised for its quirky viewpoints and slightly offbeat humor. Deanotations has readers in most of the 50 states and in Canada, England, Germany, Israel, and Australia. He's had poems published in over 100 places including New York Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly Review, Crosscurrents, Bogg, Visions, Lip Service, Gold Dust, Dark Horse, Modern Haiku, Carousel, Light, The Lyric, Krax, and Orphic Lute. Issue 55 of New York Quarterly ran his article, "Shrink-rapt Poetry," in its State of Poetry in America series. He's been featured at readings in California, New York, DC, Texas, Maryland, and Virginia. He also runs a poetry workshop (first Monday of every month) at the Reston Barnes & Noble. For more information, visit his website, www.blehert.com. Published in Volume 3, Number 4, Fall 2002.