The Little Ways that Encourage Good Fortune

Wisdom is having things right in your life
And knowing why.
If you do not have things right in your life
You will be overwhelmed:
You may be heroic, but you will not be wise.
If you do not have things right in your life
But do not know why,
You are just lucky, and you will not move
In the little ways that encourage good fortune.

The saddest are those not right in their lives
Who are acting to make things right for others:
They act only from the self
And that self will never be right:
No luck, no help, no wisdom.

William Stafford

After a While

After a while you learn
The subtle difference between
Holding a hand and chaining a soul
And you learn
That love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t always mean security.
And you begin to learn
That kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes ahead
With the grace of a woman, not the grief
Of a child
And you learn
To build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow’s ground is
Too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way of falling down
In mid-flight.
After a while you learn
That even sunshine burns
If you get too much
So you plant your own garden
And decorate your own soul
Instead of waiting for someone
To bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure,
You really are strong
And you really do have worth
And you learn
And you learn
With every goodbye, you learn…

Veronica Shoffstall

Respite

And then this morning, on the seventh day of crying,
A calm came over me like the one I remember.

I’d been laboring all night
And into the next afternoon, the white
Room filled with doctor, midwife,
Photographer, friends. Someone
Suggested they all leave us alone.
I lay with my head in my husband’s lap,
And in that quiet, contractions ceased,
Pain stopped. A stillness
Came over the enclosed world
Like the cool emptiness coiled in a basket
Of sweetgrass. Like the air
Inside a bell. I couldn’t stand it.
I thought I should get going again,
Get back to my work.

Many times since, I’ve wished
I’d lain there longer:
A kind of Eden, a bestowed peace.

But today, when the respite came,
I didn’t move. I lay limp as a lizard
On a lizard-colored rock, spent.
I didn’t question it, this hush.
I felt my breath enter
And leave. The small wind of it
In the mesh sacs of my lungs
Like that too brief gap in labor
That I couldn’t give myself to
Then, hellbent, ignorant as I was.

Ellen Bass

ice skating

“Just fall,” she said, and of course, at 13, falling’s easy.
You do it everyday, ballooning embarrassments
in the locker room, in English class, singeing your hair
over the Bunsen burner 6th period, a mispurchased outfit
calling attention to your breastlessness, your too-bony hips,
a school dance dismantling your chances for a boyfriend.
the lack of everything you wish would hurry up and get here.
So when she said it, her stare widening under arched brows,
there was disbelief and impatience in her voice, in the way
she eyed my frame, how she couldn’t understand the difficulty
in allowing this self-induced tumble, a brief horizontal flirtation
on the outside corner of the rink, where there was no one watching,
no one there who would stare at me with their leveling ridicule
as I lay on my knees to get the idea of what falling would feel like.
She didn’t understand my hesitation, didn’t understand why I didn’t
just shove off and go, speed down the lane like the rest of the skaters,
make long wide arcs in time to the Christmas music blasting out
the speakers rink-side, didn’t understand my wobbly comportment,
why I kept looking down but not out, why I insisted on being left
behind while she and her sister glided past like little snow angels,
like mini Olympiads. She couldn’t see the lock of my ankles
against the skates, didn’t know the heat of my back at the inside of my jacket,
my stiff arms, my flighty, fearful heart doing its best to keep me upright.

“Just fall,” she said and I couldn’t do it, not even when she showed
me how, splattering herself comically on the ice, buckling her knees,
stretching her arms flat against the cold wet, not even when it looked
so easy to just give into the rules of gravity, that sweet slip earthward,
a tumble to elicit giggles and revelry and a reason to form an impromptu
snowball to hurl at a younger sister, not even then. Standing rigid
on her right, never too far from the edge, my palms outstretched to
ward off any possible fall, I had never felt so fragile,
so far from safety, ice so slick, a sea of skaters swimming by,
“Just fall,” she said, “so you know how it feels” and instead I thought
about the poem I could write about ice skating, a beautiful poem
about grace and twilight and December and the visible air
coming out in bursts all around, small children squealing their
way around a circle, teenagers holding hands shyly, an old man,
maybe a grandfather, teaching his granddaughter something of his
past, I thought about that poem, and perfection, and the glide
and symmetry of skates, and how white the ice was, and the
mother grip of winter, and the warmth inside afterward, hot
drinks sipped gratefully, all this love intact and pure.
And then, lost in my own impossible dreaming,
I fell.

Maya Stein

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.

Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator

and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.

Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.

Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.

Don't even sew on a button.

Let the wind have its way, then the earth

that invades as dust and then the dead

foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.

Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles

or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry

who uses whose toothbrush or if anything

matches, at all.

Except one word to another. Or a thought.

Pursue the authentic-decide first

what is authentic,

then go after it with all your heart.

Your heart, that place

you don't even think of cleaning out.

That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth

or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner

again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,

or weep over anything at all that breaks.

Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons 
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life

and talk to the dead

who drift in though the screened windows, who collect

patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything

except what destroys

the insulation between yourself and your experience

or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters

this ruse you call necessity.

Louise Erdrich

The Dental Hygienist

She said "open up,"

so I showed her my teeth,

a chipped-white fence

that keeps my tongue penned in.


She rinsed my mouth.

She suctioned my cheek.


She said "How do you like this town?"

so I said "Mmpllff"

though I meant "More every day,"


and she said "Gorgeous weather!"

so I said "Mmpllff"

though I meant "In my mouth?"


and she didn't say anything,

so I said "Mmpllff" and "Mmpllff"

though I'm not sure what I meant,

and she took me to mean 
"Would you like to go out tonight?"

and "to an expensive restaurant?"


When I arrived with a bouquet of roses,

she stuffed them in my mouth.


She told me all about her feelings:

how she feels about fillings,

how she feels about failures.


She said "open up." 
She said "It's like pulling teeth

trying to get men to talk about their feelings."


So I said "Mmpllff"

though I meant "You smell prettier than the flowers in my mouth,"

and I said "Mmpllff"

she thought I meant "I'm afraid of dying alone."


She said I was a good conversationalist

and showed me her perfect teeth.

I felt an ache in my jaw.

I felt drool crawling down my chin.

Tom C. Hunley

The Art of Disappearing



When they say Don't I know you?
say no.


When they invite you to the party

remember what parties are like 
before answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voice

they once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.

Then reply.


If they say We should get together

say why?


It's not that you don't love them anymore.

You're trying to remember something

too important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.


When someone recognizes you in a grocery store

nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven't seen in ten years

appears at the door,

don't start singing him all your new songs.

You will never catch up.


Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Lessons

I have learned
that life goes on,
or doesn't.
That days are measured out
in tiny increments
as a woman in a kitchen
measures teaspoons 
of cinnamon, vanilla, 
or half a cup of sugar
into a bowl.

I have learned
that moments are as precious as nutmeg,
and it has occurred to me
that busy interruptions
are like tiny grain moths,
or mice.
They nibble, pee, and poop,
or make their little worms and webs
until you have to throw out the good stuff
with the bad.

It took two deaths
and coming close myself
for me to learn
that there is not an infinite supply 
of good things in the pantry.


Pat Schneider

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that's been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that's been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

Sharon Olds

The Patience of Ordinary Things

It is a kind of love, is it not?

How the cup holds the tea,

How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, 
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes

Or toes. How soles of feet know

Where they're supposed to be.

I've been thinking about the patience 
Of ordinary things, how clothes

Wait respectfully in closets

And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet

From the skin of the back.

And the lovely repetition of stairs.

And what is more generous than a window?

Pat Schneider

Antilamentation

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Dorianne Laux

Music for Guitar and Stone

In music I can love the small failures, 
the ones which show how difficult it is:
the young guitarist's fingers slipping, 
for an instant, from their climb of chords.
He sits alone on the stage, bright light, 
one leg wedged up on a step, his raised knee 
round and tender, and the notes like birds 
from a vanishing flock, each one more exquisite and lonely; 
the fingers part of the hand, yet separate from the hand, 
each living muscle married to the whole. 
In life the failures feel like they'll kill me, 
or you will, or we'll kill each other; 
it's so hard to feel the music 
moving through us, the larger patterns 
of river and mountain, where damage is not separate 
from creation, transformation; 
where every mistake we make can wash 
smooth and clean as stones in water, 
then land on shore, then be thrown in again.
I want to sleep, like a stone, for a thousand years. 
I want to wake with creatures traced smooth on my skin.
I want to forget I loved you and failed you 
as you failed and loved me too, in the lengthy, painful 
evolution of our kind; I want to sleep 
for a thousand years, then wake up in some other world
where failure is part of the music, and seen 
to make it more beautiful; where the fingers 
forgive each other; where we can sit naked again 
at the window, watch the notes fly by like birds
who have finally found their way home.


Ruth Schwartz

To All Those Who Say Write What You Know

I will just say this. I know a river or two, the easy ones—the Thames, the Danube and Seine—quick to give their beauty to everyone who nears their banks. I know others who keep more to themselves—the Hudson and Snake, the Elwha—content to take and carry your secrets with their own, they leave you for the sea, though you keep watching the eddies for some answer that is not quite love, staying past hope, the way you stay every Sunday for the singer's last song in the bar on Fourth and Lafayette because that voice, you think, will finally give her away.
I know the silver ready of takeoff and the unearned divinity of cruising altitude. I know, too, the melancholy rush of final approach, of returning, as we knew we must, to earth. I know the allure of always going somewhere else.
I know the winter hush of a cathedral, the effect of prayer on stone, light through stained glass some sort of proof, and the dare of my own footfalls in the nave, how they become a sudden hallelujah. I look up, the echoed nowhere, Sanctus.
I know girls who still love their bodies, who let their hips draw commas in the air before them, paving the way. I know women who used to, whose hands and teeth and shoes are asking always: how do I get back there.
I know noise: car alarms, steamed milk, sex, baseball crowds, last call, the drone of mortar fire on an unwatched TV, a train abiding its rails.
I know sounds, too: the crystal wink of a champagne toast, a bedsheet lifting at lights out, a dead piano key, a breath held, the surprise of insects on summer screens, the quick applause of embers from flame, snow underfoot, a flicker of birds in the cemetery trees.
I know the smell of juniper, the bright gin and tree of it, and of unbathed bodies, street-heavy and ripe with someone else's shame. I know in these streets our sadness.
I know something of desire. I know the blue spell of afternoon on his skin, the way a minute's kiss can absolve one hundred wasted days. The plain chance of bodies I've been willing to mistake for fate, like playing cards found facedown on the sidewalk. I know the words—the yes and the sorry and gone—that stand in for other things we can't say. The constellation of freckles on my left arm I am waiting for someone to read me like tarot. I know the aftermath of want.
And past the cemetery fence on the hill above Southstoke, I know a gray horse, his nose in grass, mud to his fetlocks, dappled with the threat of rain. I was there four years ago now, every afternoon in that cemetery deep with strangers, because I did not know any more to write. And now I find myself there more nights than not, dreamwalking over the bone soil, the gray horse standing between me and another profane morning in the world.
Sensing me he lifts his neck, a movement slow and improbable as marble, and nickers a welcome, the kind that says he knows I will not stay, for I am just passing by. And yet in his voice there is the recognition that we've met somewhere before, and we have—I swear I know him, though from where I couldn't say. I stop for a moment, though I do not reach out. Touch is too easy an answer.
In the town below, certain windows have been left open, letting in the sky. Rain nears. The streetlamps stand at ease, waiting for night to come again and bring them purpose. I can feel the light inside the churches shifting its weight. Breath between us, little else. Across the vale in Landsdowne, all the greens confuse themselves, bleed willingly into storm.
With no warning, a lark lifts itself out of the boughs, rising against the rain, which is coming now, still weightless. The headstones grow dark with water. Aloft, the bird waits, buoyed by an updraft off the hillside or by some other unlikelihood, maybe the one that has kept me here, too, past sundown all those evenings ago and now, years later, still tethered by some sweet reluctance to this field of stones, to the memory of this lone bird in the green transept of my unmade cathedral, waiting for the Ave, for the first winging chords of a song I want so badly to know.

Kate Petersen

The Wordsworth Effect

Is when you return to a place

and it's not nearly as amazing

as you once thought it was,


or when you remember how you felt

about something (or someone) but you know 
you'll never feel that way again.


It's when you notice someone has turned

down the volume, and you realize 
it was you; when you have
the

suspicion that you've met the enemy

and you are it, or when you get 
your best ideas from your sister's journal.

Is also-to be fair-the thing that enables

you to walk for miles and miles chanting to
yourself in iambic pentameter


and to travel through Europe with 
only a clean shirt, a change of
underwear, a notebook and a pen.


And yes: is when you stretch out
on your couch and summon up ten thousand
daffodils, all dancing in the breeze.

Joyce Sutphen

Watching my Parents Sleeping Beside an Open Window Near the Sea

Needing them still, I come

when I can, this time to the sea

where we share a room: their double bed,

my single. Morning fog paints the pale

scene even paler. Lace curtains breathing,

the chenille spread folded back,

my father's feet white sails furled

at the edge of blue pajamas.

Every child's dream, a parent

in each hand, though this child is fifty.

Their bodies fit easily, with room

to spare. When did they grow

so small? Grow so small—
as if it were possible to swell

backwards into an earlier self.

On the bureau, their toys 
and trinkets. His shaving
brush
and pink heart pills, her gardenia

sachet. The tiny spindle that pricks
the
daily bubble of blood, her sweet
chemistry.
Above our heads

a smoke alarm pulses, its red eye beating.

One more year, I ask the silence.

Last night to launch myself

into sleep I counted their breaths, the tidal

rise and fall I now put my ear to,

the coiled shell of their lives.

Rebecca McClanahan

The League of Minor Characters

The main character sits on his childhood bed

naming everything that's gone—ex-job, ex-wife,

ex-best friend-and finally apprehends


the breakdown we've felt coming since chapter five. 
When his doctor calls with test results, most of us
decide to remain minor characters


like the quixotic neighbor growing

bonsai sequoias, or the waitress with thick 
glasses and a passion for chess,


because the main character, in the thrall 
of a relentless plot, can't help hurtling toward

the crumbling cliff edge. And who needs that?


Some inherit genes from generations

of minor players, some must learn to guard

those sunny Sundays with the paper


full of heroes in distant gunfire. And some of us

who've gotten smug over the years turn another page,

turn on the football game, until one day


the doorbell rings. We close our books, 
adjust our eyes, and the protagonist

sweeps in insisting himself into our lives


with his entourage of lust and language,

sorrow, brio. Hero, anti-hero, it hardly matters

with the lights this bright. The music crests


and it's time to speak.

Kathleen Flenniken

Amphibious

My daughter wants to take 
a framed oil painting to school,

a nude with loose breasts and a belly
ripe as the full moon. Why? Because

we're studying frogs, she says,
and it's a frog. I cock my head

to consider the angle of the draped arm
but can't get past the female form.

My daughter, though, is swimming
in amphibians, bringing home

scribbled pictures of tadpoles sprouting 
splayed feet. At night, she sleeps

in the bedroom I painted pink, 
her shelves lined with confectionary

teapots and cups. By day, she wants
to be her brother when she grows up.

Lately, she's morphed into 
a creature who'd rather squirm free

than be held. O, how we see what we 
want to see. My daughter, looking at

a nude, sees a frog for show-n-tell.
I look at her and see myself.


Erin Murphy

Why You Travel

You don't want the children to know how afraid

you are. You want to be sure their hold on life


is steady, sturdy. Were mothers and fathers

always this anxious, holding the ringing


receiver close to the ear: Why don't they answer;

where could they be? There's a conspiracy


to protect the young, so they'll be fearless,

it's why you travel—it's a way of trying


to let go, of lying. You don't sit

in a stiff chair and worry, you keep moving.


Postcards from the Alamo, the Alhambra.

Photos of you in Barcelona, Gaudi's park


Swirling behind you. There you are in the Garden

of the master of the Fishing Nets, one red


tree against a white wall, koi swarming

over each other in the thick demoralized pond.


You, fainting at the Buddhist caves.

Climbing with thousands on the Great Wall,


Wearing a straw cap, a backpack, a year

before the students at Tiananmen Square.


Having the time of your life, blistered and smiling.

The acid of your fear could eat the world.

Gail Mazur

How To Be a Poet

How To Be a Poet

(to remind myself) 

Make a place to sit down. 
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience, 
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything 
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.


Wendell Berry

Hafiz says

Hafiz says:

If God
Invited you to a party
And said,

“Everyone
In the ballroom tonight
Will be my special
Guest,”
How would you then treat them
When you
Arrived?

Indeed, indeed!

And Hafiz knows
There is no one in this world

Who
Is not upon
His Jeweled Dance
Floor.

The Pitch



 It's the story of a math genius posing as an imbecile or the one
where Porky is saved form the slaughterhouse by a woman
who wears no underpants. It's the story of a rapacious weed
that takes over the earth, of One-Breasted Wanda falling in
love with Jungle Jack. Ed Anger writes the story up. It's the
story of a rash. And the story of a rash of deaths caused by a 
sea hag. It's the story of a woman who could not open her
mouth and a woman who could not close her mouth. Maybe
they meet. Maybe they don't. Maybe they are the perfect 
couple. It is the story of a man possessed by his tattoo. It's an
exclusive. It's a curse or a commandment; it's a commandment
on cursing which says for God's sake thou shalt not laze about
on your chaise lounge. It's a true story. It is the story of a man
who talked his way out of credit-card debt. It is the story of
the sunrise on July 10, 2003. It is the story of a traveling
shadow. It is an old-man-walling-down-the-road story. It has a
sculpted base to rest upon which can be yours if you act now.

Catherine Wing

If Life Gives You Lemons, Make

your mouth into a trough, a spout 
from which that sour sauce will pour,
pulp and spittle swimming down your 
chin, eyes pinched shut, each acid thought
welling under the tongue. Thin slice
of pain wedged on the salty rim
of your face, let its tart grace skim
your glass neat: no sugar, no ice
to temper this bite, this slick burst
that cankers your lips. Life gives you 
lemons: cut your teeth on their rinds,
tear them with gusto, slake your thirst
with their slavering, jaundiced juice,
swallow hard, leave no seeds behind.


JENNIFER PERRINE

Creed

I believe the chicken before the egg
though I believe in the egg. I believe
eating is a form of touch carried
to the bitter end; I believe chocolate
is good for you; I believe I'm a lefty
in a right-handed world, which does not
make me gauche, or abnormal, or sinister.
I believe "normal" is just a cycle on
the washing machine; I believe the touch
of hands has the power to heal, though
nothing will ever fill this immeasurable
hole in the center of my chest. I believe
in kissing; I believe in mail; I believe
in salt over the shoulder, a watched
pot never boils, and if I sit by my 
mailbox waiting for the letter I want
it will never arrive—not because of
superstition, but because that's not
how life works. I believe in work:
phone calls, typing, multiplying,
black coffee, write write write, dig
dig dig, sweep sweep. I believe in 
a slow, tortuous sweep of tongue
down the lover's belly; I believe I've
been swept off my feet more than once
and it's a good idea not to name names.
Digging for names is part of my work,
but that's a different poem. I believe 
there's a difference between men and 
women and I thank God for it. I believe
in God, and if you hold the door
and carry my books, I'll be sure to ask
for your name. What is your name? Do
you believe in ghosts? I believe
the morning my father died I heard him
whistling "Danny Boy" in the bathroom,
and a week later saw him standing in
the living room with a suitcase in his 
hand. We never got to say good-bye, he
said, and I said I don't believe in
good-byes. I believe that's why I have
this hole in my chest; sometimes it's 
rabid; sometimes it's incoherent. I
believe I'll survive. I believe that
"early to bed and early to rise" is
a boring way to live. I believe good
poets borrow, great poets steal, and 
if only we'd stop trying to be happy
we could have a pretty good time. I
believe time doesn't heal all wounds;
I believe in getting flowers for no 
reason; I believe "Give a Hoot, Don't 
Pollute," "Reading is Fundamental,"
Yankee Stadium belongs in the Bronx,
and the best bagels in New York are
boiled and baked on the corner of First
and 21st. I believe in Santa 
Claus, Jimmy Stewart, ZuZu's petals,
Arbor Day, and that ugly baby I keep 
dreaming about—she lives inside me
opening and closing her wide mouth.
I believe she will never taste her
mother's milk; she will never be 
beautiful; she will always wonder what
it's like to be born; and if you hold
your hand right here—touch me right
here, as if this is all that matters,
this is all you ever wanted, I believe
something might move inside me,
and it would be more than I could stand.



by Meg Kearney

Remodeling the Bathroom

If this were the last

day of my life, I wouldn't complain

about the shower curtain rod

in the wrong place, even though

it's drilled into the tiles.

Nor would I fret
over
water marks on the apricot

satin finish paint, half sick

that I should have used semigloss.
No. 
I'd stand in the doorway

watching sun glint

off the chrome faucet, breathing in

the silicone smell. I'd wonder

at the plumber, as he adjusted the hot

and cold water knobs. I'd stare 
at the creases behind his ears and the gray

flecks in his stubble. I'd have to hold

myself back from touching him. Or maybe

I wouldn't. Maybe I'd stroke

his cheek and study

his eyes the amber of cellos, his rumpled 
brow, the tiny garnet

threads of capillaries, his lips

resting together, quiet as old friends—
I'd gaze at him

as though his were the first

face I'd ever seen.


- Ellen Bass

Six Billion People

And all of you so beautiful

I want to bring you home with me

to sit close on the couch.


My invitation inserted in six billion bottles, 
corked with bark from the final forest

and dropped in the ocean of my longing.


We would speak the language of no words,

pass the jug of our drunken joy

at being babies growing into death.


Sometimes, I know, life is stupid, pointless,

beside the point, but here's the point —
maybe we would fall


in love, settle down together, 
share the wine, the bills, 
the last of the oxygen and the remote.

Tom Chandler

Now

I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.

It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows

at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched 
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old

and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,

to have spoken your name at all.

Greg Watson

Snow

A heavy snow, and men my age

all over the city 
are having heart attacks in their driveways,


dropping their nice new shovels 

with the ergonomic handles

that finally did them no good.


Gray-headed men who meant no harm,

who abided by the rules and worked hard

for modest rewards, are slipping


softly from their mortgages, 

falling out of their marriages.

How gracefully they swoon—


that lovely, old-fashioned word—

from dinner parties, grandkids, 
vacations in Florida.


They should have known better

than to shovel snow at their age.

If only they'd heeded


the sensible advice of their wives

and hired a snow-removal service.

But there's more to life


than merely being sensible. Sometimes

a man must take up his shovel

and head out alone into the snow.


George Bilgere

Night Hunting

Because we wanted thing the way they were
In our minds’ black eyes we waited. The beaver
Raising ripples in a vee behind in his head
The thing we wanted. A weed is what might grow
Where you don’t want it; a dahlia could be a weed,
Or love, or other notions. The heart can’t choose
To find itself enchanted; the hand can’t choose
To change the shape of water. How strange, to hope
To see the signs of motion, to make an end
To Peter’s old refrain: He’ll be along, son of a bitch,
And then you best be ready. So sure, and so sure
That when he shines the light the thing will show
Along the other shore. What next? Well,
You’ve killed animals before. Invited here
For company in the cold night, and because
Ever handy with rifles. What next is wait
And see, what next may be the lone report, the ever-
Widening circles, blood-blossom, the spirit rising slow
Like oily smoke above still waters. We wanted
A pond to look like a pond: standing poplars,
Shallows unsullied, fish and frogs and salamanders.
The gleaming back of fur and fat may not belong,
Or may: God of varmints. God of will, forgive us
Our trespasses. We want precisely what we do.

John Casteen

The Story of My LIfe

Each day goes down in history, wets its feet,

bathes in the clear or murky stream, drinks deep,

comes out to join past days on the other bank.

We go in with the bathing day, every morning,

brace the shiver on our skin, taste the slaking

of thirst, find footing on mossy rock. Climb out

with sleep. Waking, we're back on the first bank,

wading with a new day into the kaleidoscopic

water. Days far from either bank are barely seen

and seem unseeing. There is no recording of them

that knows the cold and quenching of their moment

in the water. Yet I cannot let them go, nor bear

the strong suggestion formed by their fading figures

that they have let us go and that those coming cannot 
be foretold anything actual of water, flesh, or stone.

Publisher holds out a large envelope says, Sorry.

We can't publish your autobiography.

Man sighs, says, Story of my life.

All these words, then, are only for the stream?

The stream is everything? The stream is not enough?

The specters on the banks are deaf but listening?


by Jennifer Michael Hecht