Monday, May 26, 2014

Hesperus

My four-year old daughter handed me a card.
To Daddy written on the front
and inside a rough field
of five-pointed lights, and the words
You're my favorite Daddy in the stars.

In this western night we all light the sky
like Vega, Deneb, Altair, Albireo,
the Summer Triangle,
Cygnus the Swan, our hair
tangled with wood and gravel,
our eyes like vacant docks
that beckon every boat.

Tell me about the word
stars, I said.

Oh, she said. Sorry.
I didn't know
how to spell world.

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by Shann Ray, 2013

Monday, May 19, 2014

Birdsong

Bustle and caw. Recall the green heat
rising from the new minted earth, granite

and basalt, proto-continents shuffling
and stacking the deck, first shadows flung

from the ultraviolet haze. A fern
uncurls from the swamp, the microscopic furnace

of replication warms the world, one
becoming two, two four; exponential blossom.

Lush with collision, the teacup balance
of x and y, cells like balloons

escaping into the sky - then the dumbstruck
hour, unmoored by a river,

a first fish creeps to the land to marvel
at the monstrous buds of its toes. And stars

grow feet and walk across the years, into these dozing,
ordinary days, climbing the spine's winding

stair, where crickets yawn and history spins.

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by Joanie Mackowski, 2011

Monday, May 12, 2014

Private Beach

It is always the dispossessed -
someone driving a huge rusted Dodge
that's burning oil, and must cost
twenty-five dollars to fill.

Today before seven I saw, through
the morning fog, his car leave the road,
turning into the field. It must be
his day off, I thought, or he's out
of work and drinking, or getting stoned.
Or maybe as much as anything
he wanted to see
where the lane through the hay goes.

It goes to the bluff overlooking
the lake, where we've cleared
brush, swept the slippery oak
leaves from the path, and tried to destroy
the poison ivy that runs
over the scrubby, sandy knolls.

Sometimes in the evening I"ll hear
gunshots or firecrackers. Later a car
needing a new muffler backs out
to the road, headlights withdrawing
from the lowest branches of the pines.

Next day I find beer cans, crushed;
sometimes a few fish too small
to bother cleaning and left
on the moss to die; or the leaking
latex trace of outdoor love...
Once I found the canvas sling chairs
broken up and burned.

Whoever laid the fire gathered stones
to contain it, like a boy pursuing
a merit badge, who has a dream of work,
and proper reward for work.

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by Jane Kenyon, 2005

Monday, May 5, 2014

Bravery

A rung's
come broken in the
ladder to the mow

and so one hesitates
to clamber up there
just to bomb a cow
with dung or bother
swallows from their
rafter cakes. It takes
a new footing some-
where in the ribs'
treads, about heart-
height, to climb it
now. A new gap's in
the smile that smiles
from the limed barn
floor. There seems
to come a break in
the war. But soon, one
of a neighbor's sons,
too young to know
it was otherwise once,
braves it, and soon,
even with a sweater-
swaddled kitten or a
BB gun, all the kids
can do it again, nearly
at a run, like pros, and
so it goes, as before.

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by Todd Boss, 2013