Words
BY DANA GIOIA
The world does not need
words, It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves,
and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for
lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak
only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully
itself though no words were spoken.
And one word transforms
it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste,
perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss
betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or
gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or
knee, the silent touching of tongues.
Yet the stones remain
less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the
mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is
less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz,
cousin to the flint in Kiowa
carved as arrowheads.
To name is to know and remember.
The sunlight needs no
praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and
leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet
back into the clouds that engendered it.
The day light needs no
praise; and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves
and all the airy words we summon.
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Fens
BY KENNETH C. STEVENS
The flat land was a watery eye
Across it came the dribbled notes of
curlews
Lamenting sunset. Occasional herons
stood
Up to their knees in blue water
Hunched grey coats on their old
men’s backs.
The reeds hissed in among the pools
And a quick curve of otter pattered
over sand
Dissolved in a deep ring of nothing,
Stars shone weak as pearls and no
moon
Climbed into silence.
Only a flagging line of geese in
rags
Came down muttering Eskimo on thin
water.
Barn Owl at Le Chai
BY GILLIAN CLARKE
Tonight, cooling off on the terrace,
glow-worms lighting the long grass,
we listen for crickets,
nightingales, nightjars,
turning our palms to the first
stars.
Little mists rise in the night
garden,
then, a shriek of something taken,
and in the darkness under the trees,
white
flowers, feathers, her cry in
flight,
and the air is blood-flecked,
a grief in retrospect.
Here at the Tide’s Turning
BY KEVIN CROSSLEY COLLINS
You close your eyes and see
the stillness of
the mullet-nibbled arteries,
samphire
on the mudflats almost underwater,
and on the saltmarsh whiskers of
couch-grass
twitching, waders roosting,
sea-lavender
faded to ashes.
In the dark or almost dark
shapes sit on the staithe muttering
of plickpack,
and greenshanks, and zos beds;
a duck arrives
in a flap, late for a small pond
party.
The small yard’s creak and groan
and lazy rap,
muffled water music.
One sky-streamer,
pale and half-frayed, still dreaming
of colour.
Water and earth and air quite
integral:
all Waterslain one somber aquarelle.
From the beginning, and last year,
this year,
you can think of no year when you
have not sat on this stub of a salt-eaten stanchion.
Dumbfounded by such tracts of marsh
and sky—
the void swirled round you and
pressed against you—
you’ve found a mercy in small
stones.
This year, next year, you cannot
think
of not returning: not to perch in
the blue
hour on this blunt jetty, not to
wait, as of right,
for the iron hour and the turning of
the tide.
You cross the shillying and the
shallows
and, stepping on to the marsh, enter
a wilderness.
Quick wind works around you.
You are engulfed in a wave of blue
flames.
No line that is not clear cut and
severe,
nothing baroque or bogus. The voices
of young children rehearsing on the
staithe
are lifted from another time.
This is
battleground. Dark tide fills the
winking pulks,
floods the mud-canyons.
This flux, this anchorage.
Here you watch, you write, you tell
the tides.
You walk clean into the possible.
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Sleep and Spiders
BY CATRIONE’ O’ REILLY
It is too strange to kill,
The symmetry of its eyes,
its eight paired legs askew
on the lintel, exoskeletal
and tiger-striped, all digestion.
It looks sudden but is still
for hours, eyes on stalks,
awaiting news from hair-triggers
that might be legs or fingers
(the whole thing a claw)
come to touch me in sleep—
hammock from which
black shadows seep.
Stars go milky, then go out.
I wake at five to what five is—
A cold blue glow and a self
Trussed, barely breathing,
Paralytic with dreams.
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Dreaming Birds
BY JOHN POWELL WARD
The eyes and feathers intermesh.
Descartes said birds were small machines.
A startles starling clattered off
And flew away at that, it screeched
That birds are loops in modern minds,
Weird flights, a mode, a fatal curve,
Of values in the air. The thrush
Is proto-sculpture on the lawn,
The SS crow patrolling down
A motorway’s hard shoulder struts
At sentry duty. From a pole
A blackbird soloist transmits
Its live performance and the cool
Woods pay to hear him, dark guitars
Are slung there and electric cries
Flash down the alleyways of spruce,
Afforestaiton’s gentlest crop.
The dreamer Kant thought of a dove
That found air fretful and conveived
Apurer flight in empty space.
I dream of swifts that soar asleep.
The Drive
BY HUGO WILLIAMS
The trees attend to the high wind
Laying back their heads
Sweeping low again.
The wind shakes loose their leaves
Which float down through the air
Becoming days.
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If the Owl Calls Again
BY JOHN HAINES
at dusk
from the island in the river,
and it’s not too cold,
I’ll wait for the moon
To rise,
And then take wing and glide
To meet him.
We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching
with tawny eyes.
And then we’ll sit
in the shadow spruce
and pick the bones
of careless mice,
while the long moon drifts
toward Asia
and the river mutters
in its icy bed.
And when the morning climbs
the limbs
we’ll part without a sound,
fulfilled, floating
homeward as
the cold world awakens.
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Becoming a Redwood
BY DANA GIOIA
Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,
And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.
Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.
And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.
Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.
The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,
and the last farmhouse light goes off.
Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.
You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,
Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.
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Piute Creek
BY GARY SNYDER
One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.
A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.
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Totems
BY LYNNE ELSON
As if retrieving pebbles
Filmed with shine
from the curbed spine of a beach,
waves lisping
our faces stung with salt, our
talk fresh with
discovery, we carried
each season
to our door: catskins, first snow
of
blossom,
the flotsam of our journeys,
sweet chestnuts’
porcupines, pectorals of
cones. Turning
varied textures in our hands,
fleetingly
touched by their strangeness, subtly
changed. Bringing
the outside in, so the house
swam
in its
wider rhythms, the flow of
storm,-clouds, hills,
moraine, the shuttling arc
of
the sun.
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Of Grass
BY GEORGE SZIRTES
It was the shade of grass—no, something greener
We touched on shortly before sleep, so soft, so bright,
No metaphor could touch or scumble it,
I cannot speak it though my mouth is green.
In a dream following a cobra nestled
Against my chest- we wrestled as in play
Then I lay poisoned in the open air,
I was nothing and the grass was nothing,
Only my fingers were aware and moved
In search of feeling, but they found
Nothing except a tongue and it was yours
Speaking of something in a foreign language
And I being your tongue’s interpreter
Understood the word you spoke as grass.
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