So Tell Me How It Ends (excerpt)

--Andrew Hemmert

But stars aren’t cold, no matter the distance, no matter what

we want to believe. The coldest one we’ve yet found is still

warmer than a cup of coffee left sitting for a minute.

There’s an iceberg frigidity we inject into our gods—

something like the Arctic Ocean, something like a parade

of the dismembered bodies of glaciers. I remember

seeing the scattering fleets of ice and thinking churches

floating out into space. So hello universe! My name

is temporary and my bones are made of you, you

with your far mountaining nebulas, you with your fires

that have shown us the way, that show us how there is no way

except where we already dream of going. October

and the nights are growing cold. October and the nights

are full of stars saying there is nowhere left to go.

 

So Long, Oblivion

--Andrew Hemmert

Like a dollar I am depreciating all the time.

Like a lighthouse throwing the net of my pretend moon 

on the predator shoreline. Like an invasive boar 

I have been known to root and roll in rain and dirt and roam.

Like the earth sometimes in love with turning away from all light 

though never really leaving. Like a beach I have wanted 

to spend years softening though not always wanting the footprints 

which to ghost crabs are craters. Like a paleontologist 

resisting always the impulse to ransack my skeletons  

for drumsticks, though here is the gong, here is the timpani 

like a bird bath full of absinthe before me. So so long 

oblivion with your small dreams of silence. I am going 

to the bank of myself with my pockets hanging out 

like two ruined countries, like two broken and gorgeous wings.

 

What Kind of Bird Changes Its Name

--Andrew Hemmert

was what the search engine recommended before I could

finish my intended question—what kind of bird changes

its song? The bird in the old oak over my parents' pool

goes through phrases in approximately five second

intervals. It is a busy song. It is nothing special

says a hanger full of blinking servers whose thinking requires

a mountain full of coal be dynamited every day.

Some mountains were once considered gods. Some kings were considered

gods, then carved up in the public square. This is progress

towards democracy, which is a name America

has never worn well. The search engines eat what we feed them

and shit out tailored advertisements. These advertisements

perhaps are more evocative of ourselves than our names

though don't we go on saying our names, mockingbird?

 

[ Large Pine and Red Earth ; Paul Cezanne ]

 

 

 

Love's Last

--Christian Wiman

Love's last urgency is earth

and grief is all gravity

and the long fall always

back to earliest hours

that exist nowhere

but in one's brain.

From the hard-packed

pile of old-mown grass,

from boredom, from pain,

a boy's random slash

unlocks a dark ardor

of angry bees

that link the trees

and block his way home.

I like to hold him holding me,

mystery mastering fear,

so young, standing unstung

under what survives of sky.

 

Rhymes for a Watertower

--Christian Wiman

A town so flat a grave's a hill,

            A dusk the color of beer.

A row of schooldesks shadows fill,

            A row of houses near.

A courthouse spreading to its lawn,

            A bank clock's lingering heat.

A gleam of storefronts not quite gone,

            A courthouse in the street.

A different element, almost,

            A dry creek brimming black.

A light to lure the darkness close,

            A light to keep it back.

A time so still a heart's a sound,

            A moon the color of skin.

A pumpjack bowing to the ground,

            Again, again, again.

 

All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs

--Christian Wiman

All my friends are finding new beliefs.

This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.

In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew

God whomps on like a genetic generator.

Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.

Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.

One man marries a woman twenty years younger

and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;

another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles

into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases

like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,

decides to die.

Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,

high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,

sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of  being ...

All my friends are finding new beliefs

and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track

of the new gods and the new loves,

and the old gods and the old loves,

and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,

and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,

and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,

my beautiful, credible friends.

 

[ On the Earth ; Viktor Vasnetsov ]

 

 

Poem

--Charles Simic

Every morning I forget how it is.

I watch the smoke mount

In great strides above the city.

I belong to no one.

Then, I remember my shoes,

How I have to put them on,

How bending over to tie them up

I will look into the earth.

 

Evening Walk

--Charles Simic

You give the appearance of listening

To my thoughts, O trees,

Bent over the road I am walking

On a late summer evening

When every one of you is a steep staircase

The night is slowly descending.

The high leaves like my mother’s lips

Forever trembling, unable to decide,

For there’s a bit of wind,

And it’s like hearing voices,

Or a mouth full of muffled laughter,

A huge dark mouth we can all fit in

Suddenly covered by a hand.

Everything quiet. Light

Of some other evening strolling ahead,

Long-ago evening of silk dresses,

Bare feet, hair unpinned and falling.

Happy heart, what heavy steps you take

As you follow after them in the shadows.

The sky at the road’s end cloudless and blue.

The night birds like children

Who won’t come to dinner.

Lost children in the darkening woods.

 

Evening

--Charles Simic

The snail gives off stillness.

The weed is blessed.

At the end of a long day

The man finds joy, the water peace.

Let all be simple. Let all stand still

Without a final direction.

That which brings you into the world

To take you away at death

Is one and the same;

The shadow long and pointy

Is its church.

At night some understand what the grass says.

The grass knows a word or two.

It is not much. It repeats the same word

Again and again, but not too loudly.

 

[ Butterflies ; Piroska Szanto ]

 

Haiku - 2025

another bird song

with yet another bird song

and still there's stillness

an old childhood song

from a passing car window

as the ice cream melts

a warm evening breeze,

as good a time as any

to let some things go

 

Shining

Rays of sun countour temperature,

cluster virginia spiderwort color,

follow slumped bends of gravity

to prism the applause of thunder

after the quick miracle of a rainstorm.

Sunlight so basic. Unbinding elements

for forms that merge a continual.

How it shrinks shadows at the height

of solar noon, how it moves beyond 

what was thinking, an energy with all

which is an entirety that's not a day

greater or lesser than offshoots

of wind. Light of eternal forward,

that the world has fall aslant as it backs

away off on the diagonal, returning

to the personal axis of turning,

what makes for the inertia of time,

the toll on life, gravity's relative older

amassed by the heart balanced in orbit,

as you go elsewhere while earth it stays, 

while light it stays ongoing, right here

and there as it is never to be waiting,

never even grasping, and it too, also

always, always weightlessly passing.

 

[ Sunflowers ; Andrew Wyeth (1982) ]

 

Field Guide

--Tony Hoagland

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,

up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather

floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,

like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.

That’s all.

I mention this in the same way

that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,

so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

 

The Window at Night

--Jennifer Grotz

Eyes wide like an owl’s, an aspirin-pale face

foretells in lamplight how it accumulates age.

Somewhat masked, somewhat naked, there’s no way

to know what others see when looking at it.

All five of the body’s senses crowd

on this small planet a weather of hair surrounds.

 

My face is not a democracy—the eyes are tyrants

and the ears are radical dissenters.

In the conversations of eyebrows, mine are whispers.

Like the window at night, the face reflects too,

uncertain how to change when greeting itself

(and is it not cruel when another’s face

won’t reflect acknowledgment of you?).

 

My mother, my father, and my brother are found

in the blurring of feature and expression.

Cynicism finds no purchase here;

the same cannot be said for sadness

(and look deeper—anger hides in the jaw).

And while the nose quietly broods

like an actor rehearsing his soliloquy,

the empty page of the forehead, when I raise my brows,

fills suddenly with questions.

 

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

--Wallace Stevens

The difficulty to think at the end of day,   

When the shapeless shadow covers the sun   

And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,   

Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk   

And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,   

Without that monument of cat,   

The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,   

In which everything is meant for you   

And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;

And east rushes west and west rushes down,

No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,   

The whole of the wideness of night is for you,   

A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.

The red cat hides away in the fur-light

And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—

You sit with your head like a carving in space   

And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

 

[ Sunrise ; Arthur Dove (1924) ]

 

Song for a Small Boy Who Herds Goats

--Yvor Winters

Sweeter than rough hair

On earth there is none,

Rough as the wind

And brown as the sun.

I toss high my short arms

Brown as the sun;

I creep on the moutains

And never am done.

Sharp-hoofed, hard-eyed,

Trample on the sun! --

Sharp ears, stiff as wind,

Point the way to run!

Who on the brown earth

Knows himself one?

Life is in lichens

That sleep as they run.

 

A Summer Commentary

--Yvor Winters

When I was young, with sharper sense,

The farthest insect cry I heard

Could stay me: through the trees, intense,

I watched the hunter and the bird.

Where is the meaning that I found?

Or was it but a state of mind,

Some old penumbra of the ground,

In which to be but not to find?

Now summer grasses, brown with heat,

Have crowded sweetness through the air;

The very roadside dust is sweet;

Even the unshadowed earth is fair.

The soft voice of the nesting dove,

And the dove in soft erratic flight

Like a rapid hand within a glove,

Caress the silence and the light.

Amid the rubble, the fallen fruit,

Fermenting in its rich decay,

Smears brandy on the trampling boot

And sends it sweeter on its way.

 

The Fable

-- Yvor Winters

Beyond the steady rock the steady sea,

In movement more immovable than station,

Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes,

A slow obscure metonymy of motion,

Crumbling the inner barriers of the brain.

But the crossed rock braces the hills and makes

A steady quiet of the steady music,

Massive with peace.

And listen, now:

The foam receding down the sand silvers

Between the grains, thin, pure as virgin words,

Lending a sheen to Nothing, whispering.

 

[ The Other Side of the Rainbow ; Roland Petersen (1972) ]

 

Positivity

--D. A. Powell

“Anyway, it isn’t forever,” Chris said,

“eventually you’re dead.” And we laughed

Besides, everything is better now. Not us

but implants, blenders, children, heart attacks.

There’s never been a better time to be alive

than when you are. If you are. Black-throated

blue warbler says chewchewchewchewchewww

drawing the last chew out like a sucking drainpipe

to say he has mated and is satisfied. Say what

you will about that. His joy is uncontainable

and yet it has a form, a measure, to make it clear

he’s not upset or feeling anxious. And if he’s bragging,

well, it’s no shame to brag that you’re happy.

Honeybees cavorting on the goldenrod are working

toward a common goal they’ll never see achieved.

They lay down the walls of their cathedral of honeycomb

and will not cope the spire, busy in the present task,

trusting that the work continues. I’d like to write

a children’s book called everybody dies. Upbeat, of

course, and pragmatic. You only got so many

days. Don’t think about death; when you’re

ready, death will think about you. Go out

tonight with your friends, like Chris, who went out

big or not at all. Have a ball. Plan ahead.

 

Happiness

--Lewis Meyers

On the coffin-sized back porch

high above the ground

where anyone worth his salt

pursued his heart's desire,

I didn't know what to do

and asked my mother that.

I was seven. It was August,

the Capital's glandular month;

it came in with morning glories

between its teeth, or darting eyes.

We were in a natural sweat.

My health took the heat off,

but not Baudelaire's boredom

which I wasn't aware I had.

Mother couldn't allay it,

but I thought it must be happiness,

the word on everyone's lips

just before the end of the world.

And I stood on the screened porch,

looking in on the kitchen

while mother made lunch

and Tosca played on the radio,

bored to tears of happiness,

or happily sweating with boredom.

 

from the sustaining air

fresh air

There is the clarity of a shore

And shadow,   mostly,   brilliance

summer

                the billows of August

When, wandering, I look from my page

I say nothing

      when asked

I am, finally, an incompetent, after all

--Larry Eigner

 

[ Moto Moon ; Diane Birch ]

 

Dragons

--Devin Johnston

We gathered in a field southwest of town,

several hundred hauling coolers

and folding chairs along a gravel road

dry in August, two ruts of soft dust

that soaked into our clothes

and rose in plumes behind us.

By noon we could discern their massive coils

emerging from a bale of cloud,

scales scattering crescent dapples

through walnut fronds,

the light polarized, each leaf tip in focus.

As their bodies blotted out the sun,

the forest faded to silverpoint.

A current of cool air

extended from the bottomlands

an intimation of October,

and the bowl of sky deepened

its celestial archaeology.

Their tails, like banners of a vast army,

swept past Orion and his retinue

to sighs and scattered applause,

the faint wail of a child crying.

In half an hour they had passed on

in search of deep waters.

Before our company dispersed,

dust whirling in the wind,

we planned to meet again in seven years

for the next known migration.

Sunlight flashed on windshields

and caught along the riverbank

a cloudy, keeled scale

about the size of a dinner plate,

cool as blanc de Chine

in the heat of the afternoon.

 

Cold Trail

--Devin Johnston

The feeling of time derives from heat,

an agitation of molecules,

oracles from the friction of air

through fissures and the leaves of oaks.

A few gnats stitch the lake’s edge

where a fox turns off the gravel road

to nose through rhododendron

as children crawl through winter coats

to reach a closet’s dark recess.

Dawdling at the edge of sleep

you work through problems already past

though unresolved, a notional path,

a crease through heads of wild blue phlox

that waking, you can’t follow.

 

Telephone

--Devin Johnston

A mockingbird

perched on the hood

of a pay phone

half-buried in a hedge

of wild rose

and heard it ring

The clapper ball

trilled between

brass gongs

for two seconds

then wind

and then again

With head cocked

the bird took note

absorbed the ringing

deep in its throat

and frothed

an ebullient song

The leitmotif

of bright alarm

recurred in a run

from hawk

to meadowlark

from May to early June

The ringing spread

from syrinx to syrinx

from Kiowa

to Comanche to Clark

till someone

finally picked up

and heard a voice

on the other end

say Konza

or Consez or Kansa

which the French trappers

heard as Kaw

which is only the sound

of a word for wind

then only the sound of wind