The Resolve

To come to the river
the brook
hurtles through rainy
woods, over-
topping rocks that
before the rain were
islands.

Its clearness
is gone, and
the song.
It is a rich brown, a load
of churned earth
goes with it.

The sound now
is a direct, intense
sound of
direction.

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by Denise Levertov, 1963

Rules of Evidence

What you want to say most
is inadmissible.
Say it anyway.
Say it again.
What they tell you is irrelevant
can't be denied and will
eventually be heard.
Every question
is a leading question.
Ask it anyway, then expect
what you won't get.
There is no such thing
as the original
so you'll have to make do
with a reasonable facsimile.
The history of the world
is hearsay. Hear it.
The whole truth
is unspeakable
and nothing but the truth
is a lie.
I swear this.
My oath is a kiss.
I swear
by everything
incredible.

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by Lee Robinson

Snow in Summer

     Snowy Egret lands, the name and color of a substance she will never see.  There on the muddy bank, still as chalk her carved and ancient figure stands, stilting.  Like Nike she leaps sailing into the bright, wide-winged above the shallow water where she feeds, so white sunlight seems shadow.

     What could be the purpose of such brilliance, Snow in Summer?  Perhaps in some prior life this most strident, most absolute of colors kept her safe.  Perhaps she lay to in a frigid land and all these amazing feathers are only artifact of dim ice ages past.  Or in the brief season between her comings and goings this is her temporary color, as polished and transparent as paper made of rice.  Except, there is no other phase than white in egret-painted skies.

     There is fragility in all this.  The bird, the salt marsh where she lands, even the turbulent sand.  From the South the assault comes by hurricane, each season earlier and more ferocious than the last.  From the North it is the melting.  And where there is not flood, drought.  There is no reprieve.  As the brackish plain is silted out or altogether gives way, where will Snowy Egret go?  How will she retreat from Winter when Winter itself is in retreat?

     When the sun pounds like the hammer to the anvil all life is forged to the blow.  The upper latitudes break away.  The equator burns.  North and north and north the southern creatures go driven there by unfamiliar weather.  Life once rare becomes common.  The common vanishes.  Perhaps it is not camouflage but survival of a more intense and personal kind that turns the Egret white, reflecting not just light, but heat.  Maybe she will be all right.  What about us, I wonder.

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by Mark Seth Lender, 2011

A Rainy Country

Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux
                                                    Baudelaire


The headlines and feature stories alike
leak blood all over the breakfast table,
the wounding of the world mingling
with smells of bacon and bread.

Small pains are merely anterooms for larger,
and every shadow has a brother, just waiting.
Every grace is sullied by ancient angers.
I must remember it has always been like this:

those Trojan women, learning their fates;
the simple sharpness of the guillotine.
A filigree of cruelty adorns every culture.
I've thumbed through the pages of my life,

longing for childhood whose failures
were merely personal, for all
the stations of love I passed through.

I am like the queen of a rainy country,
powerless and grown old. Another morning
with its quaint obligations: newspaper,
bacon grease, rattle of dish and bones.

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by Linda Pastan, 2004