Archive
After Joan Mitchell’s La Grande Vallee XIV
as if your blue black blur of brush
and paint can conjure swamp
or luminous maple bud,
tree frog croon
as if layers of saturation can restore
the vernal pool that was my all in all
as if your calligraphy of oil and wash
can contain jack-in-the-pulpit
early fern or tad pole swirl
as if the colors, oh your colors
Cezanne blue Van Gogh sun
flower yellow raging across three panels
as if for a while my rough
ecstasy hasn’t dulled to insight.
by Pamela Hart
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Christmas Eve
Two red-tailed hawks tear at opposite ends
of a dead doe, corpse tossed fifteen feet
from the road, meat kept by the cool air,
body opening like bittersweet’s last red
fruit as it clings to the vine.
by Todd Davis
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Monthly So the Moon
Moon with its most voice, size,
has called again water off the near shore,
and sea grass, all combed, points to its exit.
Gulf and green oceans beckon the blood.
And the same cool friendless planet, lonely
for fluids, calls larger on the sea masses,
after which even cupfulls incline to it, glasses
tip their meniscuses and tank cars list
slightly on their tracks.
Even the ospreys about to dive
must respond in a small way, and everything liquid,
we in our blood baths, faintly lean
to the place where water uncovers
the wishful moon, the purpose of its gravity:
a few treasures, hermits, the closest stars.
by Allan Peterson
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Cyclamen
A furious-pink cyclamen
now grows in the green
ceramic cube with no
escape for water. I had
a fuzzy old brain
cactus that couldn’t
survive so long
a wet season,
although I kept it
as if it were alive
sometimes using the pot
for a doorstop in summer.
When I finally let go
and dumped the papery
body into a corner
of the garden
by the rosemary
and the woodpile,
I discovered someone
had mixed the dirt
with styrofoam peanuts.
You could almost see
how the mind works.
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Confession
Forgive me
they were delicious
—William Carlos Williams
Like Williams and his plums, meat
turning to sugar under skin, I confess
my sin: I’ve eaten the apples
that ferment in tall grass, abandoned
when the life fell out of the place.
With the first cold days, at night
they freeze, then thaw a bit by noon,
last warmth of October
drawing these few incorrigible bees
who still bother to venture across
this rotting round globe.
by Todd Davis
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qarrtsiluni 