Foreseeing

Middle age refers more
to landscape than to time:
it's as if you'd reached

the top of a hill
and could see all the way
to the end of your life,

so you know without a doubt
that it has an end—
not that it will have,

but that it does have,
if only in outline—
so for the first time

you can see your life whole,
beginning and end not far
from where you stand,

the horizon in the distance—
the view makes you weep,
but it also has the beauty

of symmetry, like the earth
seen from space: you can't help
but admire it from afar,

especially now, while it's simple
to re-enter whenever you choose,
lying down in your life,

waking up to it
just as you always have—
except that the details resonate

by virtue of being contained,
as your own words
coming back to you

define the landscape,
remind you that it won't go on
like this forever.

-Sharon Bryan

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.


-Mary Oliver

On a Perfect Day

... I eat an artichoke in front
of the Charles Street Laundromat
and watch the clouds bloom
into white flowers out of
the building across the way.
The bright air moves on my face
like the touch of someone who loves me.
Far overhead a dart-shaped plane softens
through membranes of vacancy. A ship,
riding the bright glissade of the Hudson, slips
past the end of the street. Colette's vagabond
says the sun belongs to the lizard
that warms in its light. I own these moments
when my skin like a drumhead stretches on the frame
of my bones, then swells, a bellows filled
with sacred breath seared by this flame,
this happiness.

- Jane Gentry

Ready

I remember a Sunday with the smell of food drifting
out the door of the cavernous kitchen, and my serious
teenage sister and her girlfriends Jean and Marybelle
standing on the bank above the dirt road in their
white sandals ready to walk to the country church
a mile away, and ready to return to the fried
chicken, green beans and ham, and fresh bread
spread on the table. The sun was bright and
their clean cotton dresses swirled as they turned.
I was a witness to it, and I assure you that it's true.

I remembered this thirty years later as I got
up from the hospital bed, favoring my right side
where something else had been removed.
Pushing a cart that held practically all of my
vital fluids, I made my way down the hall
because I wanted to stand up, for no reason.
I had no future plans, and I would never
found a movement nor understand the
simplest equation; I would never chair the
Department of Importance. Nevertheless,
I was about to embark on a third life, having
used up the first two, as I would this one,
but I shoved the IV with its sugars and tubes
steadily ahead of me, passing a frail man in a hospital
gown pushing his cart from the other direction.
Because I was determined to pull this together,
hooking this lifeline into the next one.

- Irene McKinney

The End of Science Fiction

This is not fantasy, this is our life.
We are the characters
Who have invaded the moon,
Who cannot stop their computers.
We are the gods who can unmake
The world in seven days.

Both hands are stopped at noon.
We are beginning to live forever,
In lightweight, aluminum bodies
With numbers stamped on our backs.
We dial our words like muzak.
We hear each other through water.

The genre is dead. Invent something new.
Invent a man and a woman
Naked in a garden;
Invent a child that will save the world,
A man who carries his father
Out of a burning city,
Invent a spool of thread
That leads a hero to safety;
Invent an island on which he abandons
The woman who saved his life,
With no loss of sleep of the betrayal.

Invent us as we were
Before our bodies glittered
And we stopped bleeding:
Invent a shepherd who kills a giant,
A girl who grows into a tree,
A woman who refuses to turn
Her back on the past and is changed to salt,
A boy who steals his brother’s birthright
And becomes the head of a nation.

Invent real tears, hard love,
Slow-spoken, ancient words,
Difficult as a child’s
First steps across a room.



-Lisel Mueller

We Have Come to Be Danced

We have come to be danced
Not the pretty dance
Not the pretty, pretty pick me, pick me dance
But the claw our way back into the belly
Of the sacred, sensual animal dance
The unhinged, unplugged cat is out of its box dance
The holding the precious moment in the palms
Of our hands and feet dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the jiffy booby, shake your booty for him dance
But the wring the sadness from our skin dance
The blow the chip off our shoulder dance
The slap the apology from our posture dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the monkey see, monkey do dance
One two dance like you
One two three dance like me dance
But the grave robber, tomb stalker
Tearing scabs and scars open dance
The rub the rhythm raw against our soul dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the nice, invisible, self-conscious shuffle
But the matted hair flying, voodoo mamma
Shaman shakin' ancient bones dance
The strip us from our casings, restore our wings
Sharpen our claws and tongues dance
The shed dead cells and slip into
The luminous skin of love dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance
But the meeting of the trinity: the body, breath and beat dance
The shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance
The mother may I?
Yes you may take ten giant leaps dance
The olly olly oxen free free free dance
The everyone can come to our heaven dance.

We have come to be danced
Where the kingdoms collide
In the cathedral of flesh
To burn back into the light
To unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
To root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced
We have come.

by Jewel Mathieson

The Big Picture

I try to look at the big picture
The sun, ardent tongue
Licking us like a mother besotted

With her new cub, will wear itself out.
Everything is transitory.
Think of the meteor

That annihilated all the dinosaurs.
And before that, the volcanoes
Of the Permian period all those burnt ferns

And reptiles, sharks and bony fish—
That was extinction on a scale
That makes our losses look like a bad day at the slots.

And perhaps we’re slated to ascend
To some kind of intelligence
That doesn’t need bodies, or clean water, or even air.

But I can’t shake my longing
For the last six hundred
Lberian lynx with their tufted ears.

Brazillian guitarfish, the 4
Percent of them still cruising
The seafloor, eyes staring straight up.

And all the newborn marsupials-
Red kangaroos, joeys the size of honeybees—
Steelhead trout, river dolphins,

So many species of frogs
Breathing through their damp
Permeable membranes.

Today on the buss, a woman
In a sweater the exact shade of cardinals,
And her cardinal-colored bra strap, exposed

On her pale shoulder, makes me ache
For those bright flashes in the snow.
And polar bears, the cream and amber

Of their fur, the long hollow
Hairs through which the sun slips,
Swallowed into their dark skin. When I get home

My son has a headache, and though he’s
Almost grown, asks me to sing him a song.
We lie together on the lumpy couch

And I warble out the old show tunes, “Night and Day,”…
“They Can’t take That Away from Me,”…a cheap
silver chain shimmers across his throat

rising and falling with his pulse. There never was
anything else. Only these excruciatingly
insignificant creatures we love.

Ellen Bass