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TURNING TO WOMEN
My friends are men. They think their heart
a river they can ford They take no deep breath
to go for the bottom, to grab muck. To turn to women
I must float my heart on a kindling raft,
wade into greasy water, yell and try to cry.
This is wind in dead trees
Women tell me kindly, We are everywhere you go
like light reaching around to morning
Forget success. Blow it from a mountain.
What you’re after is how to move along your spine,
not on the land. There is nothing out there
you’re coming to. You wait to come to your skin
like spring water rising You will touch
things that become and die in days,
insects, flowers, hundreds
POETRY
Only touch makes sense. Strange
to touch things underwater. Turning to women
makes my stomach feather. I want high ground
The black rock must be obsidian. I scratch my name
Rain can cut it in so deep the rock must crumble
to wear it out. I tell men that turning to women
may be as simple as water through land
LOVE AFFAIR
WITH A WAITRESS
No, they say, your fear talks, not some white
cloud calling. You want to hold your gone mother,
kiss away her cunning tears. This slop
we barrel to fatten pigs. We take your pouch,
notebook and trapping string Scatter like birds.
She pours coffee
I drink it.
- morris mcgarry
You men who move to have children, eat, kill or die
— keep your shoulders huge in bear skins.
Dance around your lightning tree, go hounding
and back to your big room of heads of cats.
You won’t feel why your chests are marked with breasts
I leave my sex in river mud
rolling in spring, curl in high trees
in the nervousness of small animals,
and see how loons and deer live by a different light.
BARN SWALLOW
Metal-still
on the shed-roof tin
until it cocks its head
to eye the world
which has begun to crack
its own black shell
until its claws pull
its body in
with soft trigger-pressures
it’s up
and up higher
all up in an arc wheeling down swooping
and screaming smoothly down dead
on the twisting trail
of a dragonfly which turns
quickly in the silver
signals of its wings
until the swallow takes that silver
for treasure in its beak
and the beak’s blunt scissor
shuts down hard
and harder
then the bird pitches down
the sheer cliffs of air
slipstreaming God
to the shed-roof where it sits
and eats
and is
out again spinning
a thin blade turning
on a dotty moth dazed from every side by light
and stoneblinded surely by
this cataract of black
and is an air-ace barnstorming
stealing the stomachs of the watchers
with its dolphin’s bounce from an air to an air
and twists tricks turnings for the joy of it
and flies butterfly-fluttery
at all edges of the sky
and there turns as quickly
as a liar in a lie
-MICHAEL HARRIS
BIKER
Pulling away from a stoplight
with a tire’s sharp bark,
he lifts his scuffed boot and kicks at the air,
and the old dog of inertia gets up with a growl
and shrinks out of the way
-TED KOO SER
SUNFLOWERS
Nine sunflowers against a wall,
heavy with the load of summer,
their stems thick but leaning
like telephone poles, their heads
over-large, once jammed with seeds like teeth
Life ran up, now runs down, the leaves
pock holes of missing seeds,
swelling at the rims, peeling
underneath Summer was a fist.
Still, their obedient crippled heads search
for the sun, which is moving south.
FLOWERING PRIVET
Left to itself, the hedge gradually rises
past roses, delphiniums, higher than doors and windows
till it reaches the trees and becomes a green train,
bearing sparrows and warblers into summer.
The night comes down floor by floor. My skin
is the scared boy of my memory, but I will wait
and let all I was go
as deep grass lets go light when a wind rushes.
Already the iris have lowered their sails.
Petals litter the grass and then sink into it.
And robins, which tumbled so lately from the nest
to tremble under the hemlocks are floating, drifting,
learning to track the worm’s slow exodus.
-PETER SEARS
Already the sun approaches its zenith. Soon
each day will again be less than the last.
Finally the hedge itself enters into the glory,
grows milky with stars whose fragrance thrills
the bees. Butterflies flicker like signal lights.
INTO THE WIND
Sitting again on the front porch of the first cabin.
Grind of the deerfly, hone of the bee
Someone is mourning inconsolably somewhere else.
Yellow of goldenrod, bronze of the grass.
By the creek bridge, the aspen leaves are waving goodbye, goodbye
Silence of paint brush and cow pink. '
Take the dirt from the old trail up in your hand, Pilgrim,
and throw it into the wind.
At night the opossum mounts a billowy frond
and sways as if bewitched. Voles twitter and
twitch at its base, nibbling crisp shoots.
And someone stepping out on the porch for a moment
into the scented shade, feels a gust of wind
on her face, as if she has just plunged into the wake
of something rushing past in the dark.
-JANE FLANDERS
-CHARLES WRIGHT
dead red sun grow again I am young
-MPMc
DARK CIRCLE
My little one,
they roasted pigs in Nevada
as a test
in the 50s
and on the film you can see
people with suits on
in the confused pen
and then on the vast
stretching desert floor
they slip the pigs into
aluminum clothes
holes cut in the sides
and then they are placed
into boxes on stilts
all in a row
and blasted with a nuclear
blast to see how well their
skin survives
a plutonium wind
So like human skin.
So like suede on my shoes.
So like the split in the
avocado pit I keep above
water to save,
seeing the knotted thing
inside that takes forever
to grow,
seeing my hair in braids,
they wrap around my neck
owning me
I am a pyromaniac and
my silken strands,
ties for a Coleman
lantern mantel
-SUSAN ANDERSON
CONTINUITY
The moths will continue
to commit suicide
and I will continue
to paint my fingernails red
Until there is a change
-DAWN DeSYLVIA
FOLKSONG FOR
WHOEVER DREAMED
UP THE CHILDPROOF
PILL BOTTLE
Daddy read what it said.
Daddy sweated and swore.
Daddy punched the bottle
To the bathroom floor.
Sonny grabbed the bottle
Sonny couldn't read.
But he sized up the problem
With child-like speed
Sonny chopped the top off.
The pills scattered wide
He picked them up, ate them,
And promptly died.
-SEAN McGIFFERT
-STANLEY RADHUBER
FUTURE FOREST
GOODBYE MONOCULTURE
HELLO GENOCULTURE
Our father was a birch,
Our mother was a spruce.
We all have just one name;
They call us Bruce.
Once, various this wood.
Now we’re all the same;
That’s why we trees
All have my name.
Not only that, but when
I see another tree,
The bough to whom I bow
Is really me.
You see, a clever beast
From chromosomes took genes,
And mixed them with ideas
To make a seed.
It split that single seed
Into a multitude,
And grew myselves all here
For only its own good.
Oh yes, we’re happy here.
The problem is — we know
'Twould take but one good trick
To lay us all me low.
-LARRY BARROWS