Driving in Oklahoma

    On humming rubber along this white concrete,

    lighthearted between the gravities

    of source and destination like a man

    halfway to the moon

    in this bubble of tuneless whistling

    at seventy miles an hour from the windvents,

    over prairie swells rising

    and falling, over the quick offramp

    that drops to its underpass and the truck

    thundering beneath as I cross

    with the country music twanging out my windows,

    I'm grooving down this highway feeling

    technology is freedom's other name when

    —a meadowlark

    comes sailing across my windshield

    with breast shining yellow

    and five notes pierce

    the windroar like a flash

    of nectar on mind,

    gone as the country music swells up and drops

                                    me wheeling down

                          my notch of cement-bottomed sky

                                 between home and away

    and wanting

    to move again through country that a bird

    has defined wholly with song,

    and maybe next time see how

                             he flies so easy, when he sings.

    

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    by Carter Revard, 2005

Alone with the Goddess

The young men ride their horses fast
on the wet sand of Parangtritis.
Back and forth, with the water sliding
up to them and away.
This is the sea where the goddess lives,
angry, her lover taken away.
Don't wear red, don't wear green here,
the people say. Do not swim in the sea.
Give her an offering.
I give a coconut to protect
the man I love. The water pushes it back.
I wade out and throw it farther.
"The goddess does not accept your gift,"
an old woman says.
I say perhaps she likes me
and we are playing a game.
The old woman is silent,
the horses wear blinders of cloth,
the young men exalt in their bodies,
not seeing right or left, pretending
to be brave. Sliding on and off
their beautiful horses
on the wet beach at Parangtritis.

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by Linda Gregg, 2008

Dwelling by a Stream

I had so long been troubled by official hat and robe
That I am glad to be an exile here in this wild southland.
I am a neighbor now of planters and reapers.
I am a guest of the mountains and woods.
I plow in the morning, turning dewy grasses,
And at evening tie my fisher-boat, breaking the quiet stream.
Back and forth I go, scarcely meeting anyone,
And sing a long poem and gaze at the blue sky.

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by Liu Zongyuan, 805AD

Hunger Moon

The last full moon of February
stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow.
Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west
stealthily changing position

until now, in the small hours, across the snow
it advances on my pillow
to wake me, not rudely like the sun
but with the cocked gun of silence.

I am alone in a vast room
where a vain woman once slept.
The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches
on guard beside her bed.

Slowly the light wanes, the snow will melt
and all the fences thrum in the spring breeze
but not until that sleeper, trapped
in my body, turns and turns.

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by Jane Cooper, 2000