Autumnal Rumination

It is a grey day, the yellow trees standing out against the misty landscape as if they were dressed in something loud for a sixties theme party. I'm going to wear my new grey sweater bought on major sale at the E. Bauer warehouse and my navy shirt, all care of The Boy and our shopping trip yesterday for the "outerwear" sale. He bought the softest olive parka, a(nother) black fleece vest, and a grey down parka vest that makes him look all Redford and frosty. But it's not all that shopping that got me to thinking, but the sweet phonecall from my best friend and his comment that our night sounded really nice and the plan to barbeque together after we sign on the new place and that all that I have really loved is still here and that it just keeps getting added on to. My good New York friend (and first love) off to Berlin and healing after losing his wife two Thanksgivings ago when we cried on the phone together at 6 a.m. and I was brand new to Columbus and so alone that I went to Barnes & Noble when they opened and walked around there, lost, grieving, so lonely for four straight hours. And of course, there is the Bear and the baby bear and the cherished Juniper and her mother, J that have become dear to me, too. Not to mention the great friends that have offered to help move me to the new house, have offered us all kinds of help in building and repairing and how J brought boxes and M offered to dress like cat burglars for Operation Terracotta and it goes on and it's true what my friend said about an average Monday night when me and mine tried on clothes for each other and then went to the Y and then home again for our bevy of shows before the sleep that comes from the new chill of fall, which is also warm and extraordinary.

Condolence Note: Los Angeles

The sky is desert blue,
Like the pool. Secluded.
No swimmers here. No smog—

Unless you count this twisting
Brush fire in the hills. Two kids
Sit, head-to-head, poolside,

Rehearsing a condolence note.
Someone has died, "Not an intimate,
Perhaps a family friend," prompts

The Manners Guide they consult.
You shouldn't say God never makes
Mistakes, she quotes, snapping her

Bikini top. Right, he adds—You
Could just say, He's better off—or
Heaven was always in his future.

There's always a better way to say
We're sorry that he's dead—but
they're back inside their music now,

Pages of politeness fallen between them.
O do not say that the Unsaid drifts over us
Like blown smoke: a single spark erupts

In wildfire! Cup your hands, blow out
This wish for insight. Say: Forgive me
For living when you are dead. Say pardon

My need to praise, without you, this bright
Morning sky. It belongs to no one—
But I offer it to you, heaven in your future—

Along with silent tunes from the playlist,
The end-time etiquette book dropped
From the hand of the young sleeper.

It's all we have left to share. The book
Of paid respects, the morning's hot-blue
iPod, sunlit words on a page, black border.

Carol Muske-Dukes

There's something about weeping cellos and willows

that my student said today and something about red taffetta and how September is a fragile month, palming a blown-glass carousel. Or it's not. Fragile. Blown-glass. What it is clear, intricate, wonderous and so on. Last month I started another blog, a secret place for trying on ideas, essay bits, a place to explore what it means not to perform or to perform anonymously like whoever left that painting against the telephone pole last month and what in me wanted to drive back for it--floral-beauty of a thing and what in me said "leave some pretty for someone else" so I did.

M makes me think about identity, how much people hang themselves out of windows and say, in essence, "look at me" but with no real art to it. Just talk and show. Just desparation so loud that it is hard to really look at. Facebook does that. The status updates that I too, indulge. How many bits of what I might be able to call literature lost themselves to the wasted moments of gossip, trivia and time-wasting and now, here, how I linger when I was just preparing manuscripts and which I will again soon. With luck, the little fragments I am shoring up will soon be stories, poems, essays, novel and will make of my time a worthwhile sacrifice. For now, back to it. But not before I share a pretty.

(Save)

The throaty jangle of pennies against
pennies against the porcelain belly
of a dressertop pig, or a train ticket
slipped into the space between book pages.
A sweater stretched across an empty seat
in a concert hall lit with pinball chatter
before the house lights dim. Pickling jars
on a pantry shelf, gold-lidded terrariums
to preserve the seasons: crooknecked
cucumbers, drifty layers of lemon wheels,
round red beets. It's time to reset
all the clocks, create a new architecture
of daylight and dark. It's time to stand
in the sun and stain our shoes with
cemetery dirt. Now we're parceling
the contents of the house, what's left
in this shingled shell. There are colors:
the plump yellow sofa, the empty gray
coatsleeves brushing against each other
in the hall closet, the fleshy deep green leaves
of the jade plant, stout stacks of white
dinner plates. There is a full set of sterling,
a pair of Eames chairs. There are old letters
softening in shoeboxes, there is everything
suspended in ink, and everything that is not.


Copyright © 2010 Alison Doernberg All rights reserved

Blessed Be & So on

which run together just reads soon. By which I mean not a moment too

I walked down to the reservoir today, by this I mean: I walked through a house at the edge of the woods overlooking a body of water that will soon find me and mine on a boat of some type looking down at ourselves to see that this is really us, this is me, everything I couldn't have even known to want and at long, precious last.

There is no month more beloved to me than September, and to have it announced like this, against a sky that called a heron and its mate off the water's edge and mirroring one another from lake-skimming flight to sky-topping soar in a wonderful parallel symmetry was almost overkill on the pretty and the right.

If this were a beaded bracelet there are beads to ward off the evil eye: breaks in the pattern, deliberate fate-tricking "mistakes." We haul our big personalities in wheelbarrows and sometimes we bumper-car them about. We need open country and unassuming horizons to remind us how good the quiet and calm, how illustrative.

Soon I find what lives in 1965 again, what shares space with a curved countertop and a wood-burning stove with its ceramic starburst tile in every shade of mod. But not before we Tampa and parent-meet and Evan-celebrate. Such good verbs this life.

I am afraid of how good it feels to be this very me this very month.

Good Mail

Imagine a package with a packet of columbine seeds and bachelor buttons, a little Chinese envelope tied with delicious coral ribbon and containing a pair of cloisinne Chinese fan earrings, a drawing of the most vibrant butterflies rendered in the most magical of magic markers and flying against a yellow construction paper sky. Imagine a little handmade card that accordions out and contains the most incredible little drawings. Between that and my recent addiction to Alberta Hunter and my late-to-the-game discovery of the newly-late Abbey Lincoln, it has been a week of gifts.

Stone Seeking Warmth

Look, it's usually not a good idea
to think seriously about me.
I've been known to give others
a hard time. I've had wives and lovers—
trust that I know a little about trying
to remain whole while living
a divided life. I don't easily open up.
If you come to me, come to me
so warned. I am smooth and grayish.
It's possible my soul is made of schist.

But if you are not dissuaded by now,
well, my door is ajar. I don't care
if you're in collusion with the wind.
I wouldn't mind being diminished
one caress at a time. Come in,
there's nothing here but solitude
and me. I like to keep the house clean.

Stephen Dunn

Almanac Magic
for John Wood

Believe in the bounty of drought,
of fire and locust. Count on
jackrabbit luck to grow your seed
and the tip of a dipper for rain.

If the man in the moon is late arising,
and your wife swells with your future,
she'll be craving clay and kneeling down
to eat that dirt from the root cellar.

But know your future will grow up
to leave you, to follow the magpie
with a song of honey and foil
from city neon alive in its eyes.

You stay to plow through days of sod and rock
and pray the rusty dray outlasts the harvest.

Let the wild oat drill into your hands
crooked from handles of shovels and hayforks.
Read your future in the cracks of this land,
in the bumble of tumbleweed and the stir of the hive.

Now listen for wind to shush your wheat asleep
and the scythe as it whispers its name to the sheaves.

Copyright © 2010 Allen Braden All rights reserved
from A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood

Sometimes a day rotates on its axis and where we were
becomes a shadow of where we are, the day rotates, the axis
holds the place but we are cast across the room from ourselves
former or otherwise and we are cast in bronze, out of Eden,
off like a bad wig, in a role all wrong for us
but begin to occupy it, shout its bad lines with so much
sincerity, we forget the selves across the day from us
and then days gather so fast. We are matter's playthings
we are matter's peacock pyrite, dumb, pretty stones
all color in enough light, but where do we ever find
enough light to give the stupidity of stones insight?

Sometimes we pass a costume shop on a Sunday, Cleveland
where things are often set for the nonstatement of middle America
but in this case, the window, the closed costume shop and the boa
cheap feathers but regal somehow makes us want to break glass
in what really is Cleveland, Ohio, mid-August and on the run.
The car, black, being driven by someone we imagine into the rest
of our lives, and the boa, a blue like the blue that the Blue Men
honor, a blue so thick with a cobalt-intensity, nearing violet
but holding-off so that the punch of it hits miles after
we pass the thing and know that alone we would have found
a way to bring that blue home,us it against one a.m.
when the someones all sleep us off. Elegies are wasted
on the dead and the living alike.

A.Paine

Migration
After the rain, trees burn with monarchs,
come this winter on dust-and-paper bodies.
Some of the dead cling to trash on the road,

frames of wings like frames of broken windows.
You say you never saw anything like them
in China, though you cannot say for sure.

As a girl, you leashed crickets with ox hairs
and baited bees with sweet tomato flesh.
But nothing like this, you say, like this orange.

This monarch generation lives three times
longer than its parents, than it would without
a migration to complete. They are given

time to break their bodies over mountains
and heave themselves onto warm trees
so they all might survive. Are you wondering

how much more time you have been given
to learn a language and forget a language, to break
your body over an ocean for this pale

redwood dusk and this daughter?
I know you were not drawn here to save
yourself. I cannot tell you that I have

nothing to save, nothing that waits for me
to be drawn, nothing that says, you must,
you must break your wings for this.

Melody S. Gee

The patio door keeps flashing silver and it seems all Hopkinsesque to me, that shining, that shook foil of night on lake and the rumble that makes all the plants on the patio smear themselves against the backdrop of gunmetal and blown-lace sky. Everything's in motion out there and sleep seems to be tearing through the night too, swinging through those trees like a little boy playing Tarzan or like something called to the window by the lost boys and asked to fly the nightsky. Three flashes of light just made the trees shake-white and inside one girl types by the rectangular light of a screen and one boy turns over to a blank patch of sheet and pillow and wonders why that girl sleeps so little. It's nice to have a sleeping someone to curl back into and nice too, to trip words out on the wide water of the night, like flat-stones meant for such gliding.

Tomorrow marks the final day of my final summer course. I am a little weary. This one was an emotional wring-out in a lot of ways. There will be too little recharging time before I'm back at the gates and someone pulls the trigger and for so much less cash and three times the teaching, I am galloping, hanging from my weak arms by the horn of the saddle. The thunder is tripping alarms all over the parking lot and I am reminded of my deaf student on the day the alarm went off at school. Everyone in the room grimacing and her laughing as I walked in and she gestured to me a sign that I understood as alarm and she was enjoying being the one to translate the chaos that she knew I could hear too loud and too well and that she was mercifully-spared.

Take that, she might have said to music and the good noise of the spheres. Which is kind of me just now in ways it's hard to explain. There is so much scattered just now. Too much matter to shuffle about but the true matter lies miraculously in the next room and the prayed-for-this is not lost on me.

I am working on a first poem for Evan. Something about the way he waves goodbye as he sees the wave, at himself. How there is not greater thing to teach him about that. His whole life he will be trying to remember that that is how goodbyes work, your own hand facing you and the fingers opening, closing in a gesture that could just as easily be come here if the intention was not farewell and that farewell never so much directed as anything as back at yourself.

He is all joy, that baby, and all gift and the ten childrens' books I send along to him soon are what this aunt can most give: words and the way that at 3:35 a.m. even if someone you love dearly sleeps through the storm and to your peripheral right, seering electricity stabs the night into midday for one jarring millisecond, and you cannot sleep in all that white-heat, words, words, can keep you company for as long as you ask.

Before and after all of this, remember that first fall, fat with colors and the swerves in canyon road that your body took for the car, and unafraid as if your mountain-birth meant mountain rights and your body recalled each jig and jag, each rick-rack heartlining the slope with what could only be a steady pulse. Before and after it all, there is just what you lean into or slow down from fear. I could never ski for this reason: body trust and terror, the certainty that speed craved more of itself and the body accelerated is a brittle, blown-glass thing. I did my extreme sports with my soul, catapulting it here, vaulting it there, the long stretches on French heights, the soul pedalling hard and finishing barely and far behind.

When You Return
Ellen Bass

Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.



Ode to The God of Atheists
Ellen Bass

The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake
or pry off your fingernails. Nor will it make you
bow or beg, rake your skin with thorns,
or buy gold leaf and stained-glass windows.
It won’t insist you fast or twist
the shape of your sexual hunger.
There are no wars fought for it, no women stoned for it.
You don’t have to veil your face for it
or bloody your knees.
You don’t have to sing.

The plums that bloom extravagantly,
the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,
each pebble and fern, pond and fish
are yours whether or not you believe.

When fog is ripped away
just as a rust red thumb slides across the moon,
the god of atheists isn’t rewarding you
for waking up in the middle of the night
and shivering barefoot in the field.

This god is not moved by the musk
of incense or bowls of oranges,
the mask brushed with cochineal,
polished rib of the lion.
Eat the macerated leaves
of the sacred plant. Dance
till the stars blur to a spangly river.
Rain, if it comes, will come.
This god loves the virus as much as the child.

Wild Strawberries

Relax
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she's a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours, for a month.
Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn't plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you'll come home to find your son has emptied
your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You'll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

Ellen Bass

Days on Water, Babyskin, Grilled Lobster, Mirth Kitchen

Days on water, on air and two if by landed, at last, albeit gently but arrived. Some holidays remind you why you live. Three sisters dancing with one baby boy in a kitchen full of so much warmth and not because the days touched the near hundred mark or the cooking. This what being alive was meant to be I felt as that little babyboy dancing with us and laughed and each of us, for once, had all this plus good love in our lives. It felt like the pay-off for years of work. Three sisters so happy and the husband/brother-in-law all we could wish for in chosen family and my boy: a perfect, beautiful fit and hit with everyone.
For our one beach night, we chose St. Petersburg instead of Treasure Island, and the water bathy and the sand a pristine white and in the mornings there were two ribbons of amazing seashells to be gathered. One so large and intact,rusty-striped, that it looked like I cheated and bought it from one of those seashell shops.

Days in water, the heat so heavy that there was only to submerge: a swimming pool lovely and fountained, an ocean with white sands and clean warm water and so much splashing and laughter that the days could not contain more, though they tried.

Back in Ohio, I keep dreaming Florida. How relaxing and easy it all was. How crazily right my life became all at once and without warning.
Now to teach and then to try packing some things. I don't know what my new address will be yet, but the adventure of that, plus days up in Dublin with a swimming pool and workout area on-site, plus the best garden patio, are things to be savored right now.

My sale-hydrangea is yet-blooming and if it hangs in with me, I will be planting it in the soil of a home I can call my own for a long time. Right now, it hangs on a third floor balcony over a lake loud with Canadian geese and teeming with ducklings and the background of only water and sky. Bliss.

What Two Oh Seven A. M. is For

If not looking into the darkness and finding it line-broken, the caesuras and commas most of what life is: waiting rooms. The waiting takes more as the days get shorter and after reading Jackie Osherow's God's Acrostic again, and after considering all she says about how maybe God has hidden things in plain sight, down the vertical margins of our seasons and science and our eyes, dutiful drones, glide left to right while we lose the most pressing part of the message.

It's two a.m. again and I have been up twice since I went down. I sleep too little and fitfully, but there is good in this here insomnia and there are dreams. Just now I am thinking a student's after class conversation about how "whatever it is: fate or God or the universe, I feel like things are floating all around me and just when I need them, some drop down and into place." Never have I been more susceptable to such musings as this year, this everylargethingatonce year. The new babies in my life, the maybe-house-buying, and all the love, in various and unexpected forms but there and with people magical enough to know what it is and to tend to it.

The line breaks give the line another way of meaning, I told my class today. A visual moment of holding a thought and then, like breath, releasing it to the next unit of attention. The line breaks give a poem a way of being art with the strings of beads and the pattern of any given musical line of design, a way to pause for a minute and "hold that thought" while a line of prose would be lost to the paragraph, the line break allows that linger--however momentary and un-slowed in the reading--to give the eye a small trinket as it leaves the one line and serpentines down to begin the next. Only a poem does that, and sometimes, when we're lucky, a day.

In a few days, I hold Evan again and my sisters meet the boy and the beginning of the kind of unity of all that matters to me continues and there will be the sea too, some rented convertable and a stretch of stupidly-clear sky. What clouds find us, find us laughing.

For now, sleep.

Demimonde


She writes with lavender ink on cream vellum. A crow
takes roost in the monkey puzzle, is lost

in its formal bracts. It rains; the rivers rise.
Clouds drifting east swell with the monsoon

flooding Thailand; the woman weeps
as she writes. A cargo liner headed seaward

escapes the tip of a triangle. Fingers of rain
point down. A foghorn declaims the enormity

of ocean, its black fathoms. In a small town
on another coast, a man checks the sky,

puts on his raincoat, opens his mailbox — galvanized steel,
flag for rural delivery — inside, an envelope

that he slices with the knife he folds
and pockets before removing her letter.

He will know the spidery purple, the fine cream,
the strokes that slope left, slightly. See, the ink

on the letter is smudged, I just need to know
you are there, the envelope, rain spotted.

Copyright © 2010 Diane Kirsten Martin All rights reserved
from Conjugated Visits
Dream Horse Press

How Swiftly Fly the Days These Days

Teaching all summer and gratefully-so but the days are gone before I know it and the things I meant to do gone with them. A special stolen afternoon with dear Les and the laughter from that and her good brain and heart and the wonderful "buddha bowl" of my old north star made an unexpected treat of the afternoon. Sad began it, her worries and devotion over her dearest friend, but the time itself was good I think, and I was grateful for it. Tomorrow I meant to Yellow Springs, to watch a movie in the art theater there but I may just meander here, make some time for the pool, pack some boxes, get my life into a portable mode.

Tonight I am enjoying the few minutes before I turn in and the last few weeks in this place and in my own place, too. We're off to new adventures. My adventure is the "we" of it and the address, and the house or the symbolic commitments to a place, a set of walls, a bunch of what humans do to say "permanence" while the seasons and the gods laugh. But aren't we pretty to think so? And aren't we beautiful in our attempts? In the face of so much that says no, not bloody likely, as my beloved-boy would say, we say, "if you don't mind, I'll try just the same."

I mean, I believe in the goings-ahead and I am thrilled to be up to the task for the first real time in say, nine years. I am excited to have a yard where what I plant grows and what gets buried can be decorated with my homegrown flowers. I am happy for all that has had to change and be grown and buried to make this new now possible.

Echoing Canto of Fixedness

The effort made by stars
to move for us is massive:
from our fixed point

looking up through crevice
or canyon, at the vast and intricate
patterning, appraising

from a cleared or blank space,
is frightening. `Miracle'
of tawny frogmouth,

aesthetic as torn wood
in its belying swoop, distending
mouth swallowing pinpricks

of gnat-light, is nudged
aside, or magnified if waxing
spirits move the display,

intensity of mortality,
to account for fireworks:
intertexts and skyshow.


Copyright © 2010 John Kinsella All rights reserved

Time to Make the Doughnuts

It's 3:00 a.m. and I am awake only because there was iced coffee today and as much of it as I could down despite knowing tonight would read something like this.

Life is good at Intaglioville. Life is drastically-revised. By summer's end there will be new dwellings, a luscious new room-mate and happiness, laughter every single day or maybe I mean now on those last two.

Back from visiting the family, the roadtrip to Denver and now the big plans, including a visit to the sun and sea of some place I have never been. I will try to post something poetic soon.

Mostly Southern Appendages

Today I was offered a list of payphrases, which I declined, but not before looking them all over. I love language.

Oh Poems, how I have failed thee. Still there is one coming for Matt G. that begins with "I have these feelings about spatulas." There are others. The world is a weird kind of poetic lately. I feel settled and un in equal measure.

But I am eyeball-deep in interesting reading. And I have no need to go scrambling about in the most mundane of activities, the most soul-stealing and futile (dating). So there is space, calm and some kind of simpatico to my see-saw.

More when I come up for air. For now, I grade and class-plan and wish to finish some more writing.

A zillion poems behind

blame it on Denver, the catch-up of returning, the emotional exhaustion (for life-revolutions don't come cheap) the so-much to do and so-much that matters.

Plus, two poems that I can't post. They are not only my stories to tell. Even w/o those, I am behind.

I have begun a number, completed some little ones and kept up on much of the prose-intended. I have promised my California-ed away sweet-chimp that I will have fifty pages of consecutive text ready by the weekend.

For now, a little taste of Day 5/TMI, with apologies to GML for his cribbed-idea and stolen memory. I promise to share many memories to even the score. More than a few weeks or months can hold.

Facebook

He rakes the yard and gets angry at snapshots
blown from the trash and down the alley:
turned into a corridor
of personality and look-at-me,
wonders what happened to decorum,
or dated-though-it-sounds, modesty.
Wednesday his wife changed her status
to it’s complicated, today’s Friday
and she’s asking to separate. Four hundred
thirty-seven people knew as much two days
ago and he wonders when friend became a verb
how and when she unfriended him and a faded
shot of a Ford Taurus blows into the tam or the fitzer
he’s never sure which,a picture of a German Shepherd
posed in front of a cape cod in the middle of Ohio
appears against the chain link, somebody's swingset,
somebody's clothesline billowing with unmentionables
photographed, no doubt, for the way wind
blows up a garment, lends it form,
blows down the alley end over end.

April Prose Posies Days Three and Four

3
Sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in let’s call you memory and be done with it. But I won’t be, won’t be done waking to the thought of climbing those back stairs again, the black matte linoleum I painted to match the kitchen caught somewhere between a moment in 1930 or reawakened into the 50s, the mint green cabinets and the plastic utensils I spray painted around so that throughout the black background, it appeared that murders had taken place and the chalked-out bodies were those of forks, knives, spoons, all haloed out in shades of white, red and mint. The creaky wooden back steps and then bursting into this room, Sam there at the counter, Hey Annie, and it was all there: the things I couldn’t conjure up if asked, the blender here, coffee pot there, what ever happened to that pitcher—the one with the handle re-glued after the cat threw a bowl off the high shelf like a bomb to it. Sam there pouring the morning into our matching cups, Sam there, tall, cheerful, Sam there…and I’m stuck in that place in time again.

I am stuck in that place for a minute like something locking up a gear. What I know of love and memory are gears, how they grind things up or are only stopped by finding what to lodge in their workings.
(from Season of White Flies)

3

Partly Due

to seven seasons since the satanic ritual
we called changing-my-life

to timing—as with automobiles, air travel,
fertility, comedy, marketing and yes, love.

yes, Love, partly due to the dew itself clinging
like a real diamond on a blade of grass;

partly due to all the cubic zirconias, bad flashy
rhinestones, paste sparkles and cloudy stones.

Partly due to death--its morning breath reeking
up the new day. Ask anyone: things die

you will and so will I, we are partly-due
for bliss in some fashion. Partly due to war

that nonstop party, partly due to the diminishing
honeybees, the vanishing gorillas, the faces so human

one can read the elegies inside their dark, wet eyes,
the requiems they compose across their own brows.

partly due to somewhere, in some language,
taking hold and letting go must be one in the same

partly due to a newfound fluency and passport
in need of renewal, a globe spun like a girl

whirling her frothy dress around just before
a dance, a thrill in wherever she’s going next.

Day Two April Poem by Guest Poet G.M. Lear

You're supposed to every day drink a lot of water
I know it's very difficult, but you oughter.

April Day Two Brewer

Geese scream the pond’s surface out of smoothness
a hand re-wrinkling the bedsheets.

To skim the season off the top of the lake
and hang it in the panes for a way to look out.

To look-out from the balcony to any god’s hand-mirror
and see the sky’s jigsawed countenance on the ground.

The rainfall that fell there, falls up, regives.
What isn’t earth, isn’t air, isn’t fire is.