Late September Song

--Linda Pastan

With the sound of

a freight train

rushing

through the trees,

the first strong

wind

of autumn

makes each

leaf

sing the song

of its own

execution.

 

 

[ September Sun ; Charles Burchfield (1946) ]

 

 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow Again

--Craig Morgan Teicher

Of course I don’t know what

happens to us: if we survive in the

hands of love; if Cal, if Simone

and all the trembling answers

those questions entail; whether

by time or by disease or by

an atom bomb right in the eye. Is it

possible death could be thrilling

and fun? And after could there be

something somewhere and what

will we do if we see each other

there? Will the same songs stay stuck

in our heads? Will medicine

succeed in making life so long

we will beg for medicine to end it?

One cannot lock eyes with a bird,

its eyes vacant as ball bearings, but

mustn’t there be some recognition

in everything? Some fury, some

questioning? If one phrase could echo

throughout eternity, would the ear

on the other side return

a word? But what am I asking?

Will I ever see a whale, and will his size

compared to mine be a true

form of knowledge? Loneliness

has depths writing fails to fathom.

I could be clearer, say more, but

it wouldn’t mean as much. Mother

will I ever find you again? Is fear

of spiders fair? Is a power

above minding the scales, be it

science or gods or the weather,

and can they be tipped toward

balance from here? Is beauty more

than another form of pleasure?

What, which, when, how is better?

 

Another Day

--Craig Morgan Teicher

It should be difficult,

always difficult, rising

from bed each morning,

against gravity, against

dreams, which weigh

like the forgotten names

of remembered faces.

But some days it’s

easy, nothing, to rise,

to feed, to work, to

commit the small graces

that add up to love,

to family, to memory,

finally to life, or

what one would choose

to remember of it, not

those other leaden

mornings when sleep

is so far preferable

to pulling over one’s

head the wet shirt

of one’s identity again,

the self one had been

honing or fleeing

all these years,

one’s fine, blessed

self, one’s only,

which another day fills.

 

Immortality

--Craig Morgan Teicher

        I feel like Emily Dickinson did, running her pale finger over each blade of grass, then caressing each root in the depths of the earth's primeval dirt, each tip tickling heaven's soft underbelly. I feel like Emily alone in her room, her hands folded neatly in her lap, waiting forever for one of those two daguerreotypes to embalm her precious soul.

        At my most attuned, the present is a pair of wings stretching forever in all directions, flapping calmly, calmly flapping. But as soon as I notice how happy I am, how close to the sun, there I go plummeting into the background of the same damn painting as ever.

        If I could reach my hand out to you now, would you take it? How do you think it would feel? Warm and soft and certain? Or like Emily's: clammy and brittle as hardened paste? Is that not how you imagine her hands? Look again—they were like that, otherwise she could never, would never, have written those poems.

[ The Song is You ; Charlie Parker (1953) ]

 

Haiku- Summer 2026

all summer long 

and just but once-- 

a hummingbird 

 

first week of august, 

the lengthening of twilight, 

so the crickets sing 

 

Autology of Song 

The ones with nothing new to offer. Open 

handed pitch like a release from the sky, 

each wing, a fin for the star of an oriole. 

Life's swift ubiquity that’s flying enjoyment 

through supple channels of meaningfulness. 

A place created here that spans between 

as a butterfly with a flight of florescence, 

where it can carry ideas inside yourself  

and learned to be recognized as your own, 

a new piece of you for a mirror of what 

shimmers an eclipse of nostalgia colored 

by the never ceasing flux of lost youth 

which was you, has always been you 

and now having made it there to here,  

sunrise to sunset, it sits with a patience 

you’ve inspired for your place in the part.  

 

[ Composition II ; Ion Alin Gheorghiu (2000) ]

 

 

God of Song

--Tracy K. Smith

My son listens into daylight,

head tilted, eyes tuned 

past the range of  the seen.

What he seeks to see is 

vibratory. A butterfly’s itch. 

The pitch at which a mind

is freed to dart, spark, break

into flight. His gaze rakes space. 

What does his ear see? Beads 

of  breath rising from the body 

of a bee. A whiff of rain batting 

a new green leaf. I watch him— 

tall as a man with cheeks 

soft as plums—coax music 

from pure air: trash bins 

dragged across pavement. 

An ant staggering under 

the weight of a crumb. I’ve 

watched him birth a tune,

held in that rite like a moth

in porchlight. Dispeller

of sorrow. Flame maker at

the holy pyre. All that repeats—

though it might tear out from 

the breast and ravage the air 

on its way to the timid heart in its 

hollow lair—all that repeats 

is sweet. Sand in honey. Gold 

doused with blood. Birth pains 

obeying love’s pulse and tug. 

My water broke weeks early

to his body needing out. Knees 

drawn, and that first long note—

All that repeats and repeats 

to survive. Heart tone. Hunger 

yawp. Fear handled by want 

and love. All that repeats 

and repeats. All that repeats— 

let it be sweet? 

 

From Below

--Carl Phillips

There’s a kind of shadow, easily missed, that

depth of field and depth of character

sometimes share

between them. Suffering, there, can seem

especially far away, though it’s 

never far. It was one of those days when

just to have spoken at all

aloud feels like honesty or maybe more like

wanting to be honest, as if one had forgotten,

almost—not to want to,

but how. A lost art, 

like predicting the future by 

listening to the sounds leaves make, each

to the other, touching,

not touching ...

                         And yet so much,

still, to wish for. To have loved

differently, less deeply, more

reliably. I call that hope,

not regret. Bellflowers,

sand flowers; there at the field’s far edge.

 

Effort for Distraction

--Josephine Miles

(for Henry Adams)

Effort for distraction grew

Ferocious, grew

Ferocious and paced, that was its exercise.

Effort for distraction strained,

Legged in the hour-like single stretch

Its heels and sight to feel, so slit its eyes.

Effort without effort or with

Greatest possible effort always centered

Back in the concentrated trough where lies

The magnet to the filings,

The saw tooth to the tongue,

The turn of life to a returning life.

By all the traction of mind and spin of spirit

Having gained grasp gasped to bear it,

Having got ground groaned, furious title holder.

Paced and cried, so sore for a different direction, grew

Ferocious, grew

Unkind to strength that gave it strength to grow.

 

[ Water Painting ; Gary Hume (1999) ]

 

 

Muted, Mutate

--Leah Poole Osowski

Boarding the rowboat in shadow bodies,

the light, everywhere in tongues, except

on them, and ears positively ringing

in insects, muted pastels, pasted shore.

Steady, ineffectual as a goal, ghosted by

the lake and her mood swings, the water

snake’s tendency of effortless division.

One of them weighed the day, bagful

of nectarines, the other measured monthly

progress of the sun yolking the horizon.

Their sluice-blue hearts irradiating their

chests, they speak heron in undertones,

oar-lock in the pauses, until a thunder

overhead, an all-consuming decibel

escalating atmosphere and the hearts

climbed their jet-fuel-coated throats,

slipped out their mouths, tranced

as bucket carp, drifted straight down

to mud-depth and detritus, a split-decision

to estivate for a spell, burrow torpor and set.

 

Requiem

--Leah Pool Osowski

Simmer down. The freezer is doing its good work. The ocean,

a degree higher than yesterday and in that one

your ankle bones can rest.

Estuaries in labor, the birds, white with angular wings

missile on a dime. Jets above the cirrus thrum their numbing.

Your own acute awareness of surface area, corralling sun.

Still as a sinker. Slack line to taut.

Sliding glass doors you feel in your gut.

Some hard beckon. Like water after hours of none.

Your ice project, trays to empty and refill.

Your own private igloo.

In miniature. In relief. Against the back of the neck.

After the dock and sparklers, after they burned all the way

past where you held them, left a scar, some cartography of then,

some, this is the way you turn and turn and keep your inner ear.

Some sanctum.

Aloe and hassocks. The light on lull. Ultimately,

you were my every thought.

Like pre-storm knees. The smolder of nine o’clock high June.

Her tendency towards leaving.

 

Inconclusive

--Leah Poole Osowski

As if the nectarine on the counter wasn’t alone

in its bruising. Or the burn on your forearm

hadn’t blistered, now locked up from daylight

for a week. One small turtle in the tidal pool

its life most likely diminishing.

As a child you wanted to keep your sadness

in a shoebox, buried on the hill between oaks,

or was that your happiness? You wanted to keep

the possibility of something more mysterious.

Like string lights between branches,

like one soft-as-rabbit-skull driving glove

splayed amid a dark lawn. The light changing

into linens so the skin can breathe, the map open

and smoothed across the table, fold lines

like new, nameless roads imposed, posturing.

Deciphering desired like stone fruit—

flesh surrounding a pit, some soft conspiracy

to brush with fingerprint dust,

lift a life off its surface with clear adhesive tape.

 

[ At the summer house in twilight ; Isaac Levitan ]

 

 

Learning to Paint

--D. A. Powell

Firstly to confess lack of nearly all perspective.

Eye sees things at the ends of stalks of the mind

planted in the dull fat head and facing forward.

Sees things flatly and lacks the way round.

Consider this a lesson in how to see.

As with a poem or a play, we start with a line.

Where does it go, how does it go, that line.

Early humans had four principal colors

for drawing, but why limit.

The important thing is light. See light

make light shape light bend it into spheres

as heaven’s hot bodies form in the void

take on the light. When the eye is dull

and deadening the round world flat again,

leave it slack and one feels the slackness vibrate.

Draw the reverberations inward and they’ll emit

a phosphorescence against the dark.

Losing sight again is part of the journey.

How else to see angels. Angels are made of twilight.

 

cruel, cruel summer

--D. A. Powell

either the postagestamp-bright inflorescence of wild mustard

or the drab tassel of prairie smoke, waving its dirty garments

either the low breeze through the cracked window

or houseflies and drawn blinds to spare us the calid sun

one day commands the next to lie down, to scatter:      we're done

with allegiance, devotion, the malicious idea of what's eternal

picture the terrain sunk, return of the inland sea, your spectacle

your metaphor, the scope of this twiggy dominion pulled under

crest and crest, wave and cloud, the thunder blast and burst of swells

this is the sum of us:      brief sneezeweed, brief yellow blaze put out

so little, your departure, one plunk upon the earth's surface,

one drop to bind the dust, a little mud, a field of mud

the swale gradually submerged, gradually forgotten

and that is all that is to be borne of your empirical trope:

first, a congregated light, the brilliance of a meadowland in bloom

and then the image must fail, as we must fail, as we

graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds

don't tell me deluge.      don't tell me heat, too damned much heat

 

from Chronic

--D. A. Powell

were lifted over the valley, its steepling dustdevils

the redwinged blackbirds convened

vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air

 

the profession of absence, of being absented, a lifting skyward

then gone

the moment of flight: another resignation from the sweep of earth

 

jackrabbit, swallowtail, harlequin duck: believe in this refuge

vivid tips of oleander

white and red perimeters where no perimeter should be

 

 

 

               here is another in my long list of asides:

why have I never had a clock that actually gained time?

that apparatus, which measures out the minutes, is our own image

                         forever losing

 

and so the delicate, unfixed condition of love, the treacherous body

the unsettling state of creation and how we have damaged—

isn’t one a suitable lens through which to see another:

               filter the body, filter the mind, filter the resilient land

 

 

 

and by resilient I mean which holds

              which tolerates the inconstant lover, the pitiful treatment

the experiment, the untried & untrue, the last stab at wellness

 

choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure

cataclysmic climate change

or something akin to what’s killing bees—colony collapse

 

more like us than we’d allow, this wondrous swatch of rough

 

 

 

[ Ice Grape ; Beatriz Milhazes (2008) ]

 

The Look

--Carol Ann Duffy

The heron’s the look of the river.

The moon’s the look of the night.

The sky’s the look of forever.

Snow is the look of white.

The bees are the look of the honey.

The wasp is the look of pain.

The clown is the look of funny.

Puddles are the look of rain.

The whale is the look of the ocean.

The grave is the look of the dead.

The wheel is the look of motion.

Blood is the look of red.

The rose is the look of the garden.

The girl is the look of the school.

The snake is the look of the Gorgon.

Ice is the look of cool.

The clouds are the look of the weather.

The hand is the look of the glove.

The bird is the look of the feather.

You are the look of love.

 

You like safe sounds:

the dogs lapping at their bowls;

the pop of a cork on a bottle of plonk

as your mother cooks;

the Match of the Day theme tune

and Doctor Who-oo-oo.

Safe sounds:

your name called, two happy syllables

from the bottom to the top of the house;

your daft ring tone; the low gargle

of hot water in bubbles. Half asleep

in the drifting boat of your bed,

you like to hear the big trees

sound like the sea instead.

--Carol Ann Duffy, from New and Collected Poems for Children

 

 

If you think of the dark

as a black park

and the moon as a bounced ball,

then there’s nothing to be frightened of

at all.

(Except for aliens…)

--from 'Tales of the Expected'; Carol Ann Duffy

 

[ A Horse Frightened by Lightning ; Théodore Géricault ]

 

Summer Silence

--E. E. Cummings

Eruptive lightnings flutter to and fro

Above the heights of immemorial hills;

Thirst-stricken air, dumb-throated, in its woe

Limply down-sagging, its limp body spills

Upon the earth. A panting silence fills

The empty vault of Night with shimmering bars

Of sullen silver, where the lake distils

Its misered bounty.—Hark! No whisper mars

The utter silence of the untranslated stars.

 

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives the truth to summer's lie;

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)

-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind

(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)

-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two,

peels forever out of his grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn't:blow death to was)

-all nothing's only our hugest home;

the most who die, the more we live

--E. E Cummings

 

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

--E. E. Cummings

 

[ The Face of the Sun ; Alan Tellez ]

 

 

A Route of Evanescence,

With a revolving Wheel –

A Resonance of Emerald

A Rush of Cochineal –

And every Blossom on the Bush

Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –

The Mail from Tunis – probably,

An easy Morning’s Ride –

--Emily Dickinson