'All
Evening' by Mary
Crow
Our skis slid over the whiteness
that glowed in the dimming afternoon
but we were lost, childhood as far away
as ever, and the trail blotted out
by
so many fluffy bread crumbs,
tired happiness radiant around us
like an aura shielding us from the fear
we knew cowered behind the trees.
Beautiful
to be slipping toward a greater
and greater whiteness as if moving
into invisibility or as if the whiteness
were a curtain that would open into
some
other world, once again green, and new.
No one said a word as we kept moving
in the direction we thought led home,
that we'd been following too long
already,
and
my thoughts filled with white
rhododendrons blooming on the slopes
of the Himalayas, poor lost souls
the angels bend over whispering,
"Grow."
Out
of place as we are, traversing
this still universe with no horizons ---
only the great vacuum of its vastness
pulling us on, and the snow.
'Girl
Talk. Piano.' by Nancy
McCleery
Told her when I was away for a gig in a new
town,
the first night I awoke abaout 3 a.m. because
I'd been sobbing, coming up out of a deep sleep
where I'd been walking past an old house
where men were taking sledge hammers to an old
upright,
where I'd been crying and hollering at them -
You can't DO that to pianos! PIANOS are like
ANIMALS! Pianos ARE animals! But the
battering
didn't cease. I asked her, what the gods abhor they
first
drive out of their senses, as Euripides noted?
All
the same, I continued, it pleased me to think that
a
sly savagery enriches the nuances of art. And
sometimes we ask ourselves how well do we
dream what we think. Or do what we
dream.
'The
Soul' by Tom
Crawford
The soul, I imagine, lifts up out of the body
through the top of the head when a person dies. But
I suppose it could come out about anywhere and it
would be refreshing if, for once, it were to come
out in color, or better yet, carry a flag.
Something to show us it really was on its way. The
flag wouldn't have to be large, or American, the
kind you see on car lots in Los Angeles. But
something pretty we could follow with our eyes up
toward the ceiling. Or if the person died outside,
a tiny flicker of blue light ascending through the
branches of a tree. That's the problem with death,
isn't it, that it doesn't meet our expectations in
life? To be focused on the problem seems to be the
problem. We want a send off that we can recognize,
the way a white cruise ship might pull very
gradually away from the dock, the stretch of water
widening between the steel hull and the wooden
piles, confetti streaming from the hand rails,
people smiling, crying, waving. It's cheap, isn't
it, to want the ordinary? That I can't envision
something greater than I can envision really
irritates me. You can see that I'm not arguing for
the existence of the soul, which is to say, I'm a
man of faith, but only why we shouldn't have a
glimpse of it floating away. And I say floating
because in death I can't imagine us still running
before the bank closes. In violent death, I've
read, the soul literally jumps out of the body and
somersaults like a gymnast across the floor. I
don't know about that but the image is beautiful.
The other night in Korea - it was very late
actually and I had all the lights off so I could
sit by the window and watch the stars - a strange
feeling came over me. I wasn't sick. But it was as
if something inside of me was getting up for the
first time in my 55 years and moving to the couch.
It wasn't in a hurry either. More the way a bear
moves, deliberately and with authority.
'Reading
The Cherokee' by Donna
K. Wright
Bone of my bone! Flesh of my flesh!
O
plains eagle on silent wing,
I scan the skies to solve the mystery in your
feather,
draw the bead, focus the lens --
and gasp to see your bright eye burning down on
me!
Old
plains warrior, native farmer,
you left your spotted pony far behind you,
hieroglyphics printed on her flanks,
stamping red dirt, tilting at silos.
No Rosetta Stone translates the dust bowl
alphabet
inscribed in your deep-carved, runic
face.
Indian
father, wordless, stalwart brave,
did your stern heart ever yearn
to break the granite silence,
to feed your children's passions,
to shriek the eagle-cry from far
above?
You
guide my hunt in leather stockings,
invisible scout just out of sight.
I scorch myself in firewater
but not a sound betrays our commerce:
the lesson is spelled out in buffalo bones
and painted on the shells of snapping
turtles.
Old
man, can we forgive your silence?
Do we have to read the stars and trace the
trackless path
to know you?
Must we look for messages in tree bark,
decipher winter's end in melting snow?
