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Equity
Desmond Croan
I no longer crave legends
Nor wish to comprehend
The truths of Ancient Chinese texts.
The difference between solitude and happiness
Reveals itself quite close to the ocean,
Under the shadow of the magnolia tree,
Upon great piers overlooking ageless waters,
And I shall have the photographs to remind me so.
~ . ~
Souvenir of a Closed Rite
Laura Sherwood Rudish
When it rains at Stonehenge, the crows unfold.
Their shadows tend the abandonment.
They roost among plinth holes
Pick at dropped crisps and soggy bits of ice cream cones.
Lambs graze by a broken gate.
There's something waiting beyond the corner
Of my eye. If I could only catch a glimpse of.
So clothed in hazes.
White sheets snap on the clothesline by the kitchen door.
~ . ~
Living in the Falling Apart
Elaine Schwager
Death is nearby, breathing where life doesn't,
sure in the dark downturn, the rush of no control. Life is
stripped of wanting us. We are suddenly
undesirable, fattened with poor man's
faith and rich man's sweets, ignored by
what we believed in. Strangely, we only want to be
caressed in the way we caress by other than what we think
to be a thought in a silence we wander into
thoughtless. We, the outside, like night is
outside a star's-two faced profile, watching
old light twinkle—a reminder
that universes have their life spans too.
There could be an end to the desire to find
a metaphor to describe something horrifying beautifully.
Then beauty and horror would end.
And there'd be nothing stopping anything,
just we outside like night is outside
a star's two-faced profile
believing this is an interesting place
to find oneself, this end
that is wider
than whatever was
out there till now.
~ . ~
Express
Sophie Cabot Black
(i)
I measure ways out of here. Scan a room,
Memorize each exit sign. Count the stairs.
It's easy to blame the dark, the infinite
For what hasn't happened yet. I know all the names
Of the highways, the exact wrenchings of elevators,
Their clutch: every night I have had to lie a little more
To come back, the heart a little more finished.
In the vacant lot the resident alchemist hums
To herself. Punkers practice on her head,
Shave great arcs, try to shape a word. She resurrects
Makeup, paints her nails as if waiting
For something important she has known all along.
(ii)
The dream goes like this: from my window I hear Jesus and
Mitchell walking together and at the end of my street
Jesus says to Mitchell,
"My house is closer than your house,
Why don't you come home with me?"
And when they finally found Mitchell
In an alley between two brick buildings,
He looked like overripe fruit, ready to gush
At any moment: him with his mouth at an odd angle
Ready to take an entire world
Into himself, into his arm. Just inside his coat
A bone-white packet marked Express.
(iii)
All I wanted was to make love.
Slowly to use the body up
Piece by piece till it's only night twitching,
Saying goodbye. But his voice keeps on going: No Power
Was there at your beginning, and there will be
No Power at your end. No Angel, thighs
Of fresh rope, feathers glistening, wisps of hair
Heading back up as he touches
Down on your life. No Angel, only pictures
Of people you love, edges
Curling in. There is only what you might do
And what you damage. Even now the house you build
Fills with others, with the last of the god-loved,
Patient animals. They move in, watch us carry
All we carry against ourselves.
And I said: come
To bed real soon and hold me tight.
(Prior publ.: Ploughshares)
~ . ~
Let the other yew . . .
. . . And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply. . . .
—T. S. Eliot
("Ash Wednesday")
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