Archive
Ashes to Ashes, Water Over All
Piseco, August 2007
Accompanied only by
my dog, I bury Dad’s ashes
in the rock garden.
Mom asked for no fuss,
no ceremony at all,
but I invent my own:
rinsing this jar
his ashes came in
with Piseco Lake
water, then pouring it
slowly over the ash
and dirt and mint
green still in displaced
earth—a small shower
that says water we are
and water we shall be.
Dad, who rowed into
and out of the mist
every morning on this
long loved lake, might
as well rest here
as in any supernal
cloud, or marked by
any chiseled stone.
Who was water then
and is water now.
Blood, sperm, tears,
the sweat of fever,
all salted with what
we might as well call
love, and so I do.
by David Graham
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Market Day
Lake Atitlan
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
by Steve Wing
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Far From Any Ocean
Come with me and I will make you
fishers of men. Something I would want to be.
Collect people and hang them
from a stringer, from the back of my boat.
I used to stand in a lake up north,
with my lover hugged up behind
teaching me to cast a fly.
Thick yellow line sings through the air,
light tippet touches down.
Below the surface,
walleye, trout, bass, large and small mouth,
look up through the waters.
I collect green bottle glass from along
shores of great lakes to look back at them.
by Lisa J. Cihlar
Water-Color #8, 3/08
Digital Print
Image, 7 1/4″ x 8″; paper, 8 1/4″ x 11″
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
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Flotsam
I knew the salt of water.
The sea uncivilizes us,
rages in the blood,
suss and slap against the hull,
don’t simmer this down,
don’t set the waves straight.
But up on deck
or ringed along shoreline,
faces bare themselves
to spray
for that sense of the saline
porous stalks
of sea life brushing the land.
Once in the water
we touch
bony bottom,
our breath
globes above us.
by Susan V. Facknitz
Reflections
McKenzie Beach, west coast of Vancouver Island
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
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Fish Face
Deep in sea-rye live murmurs—
tales drifting to shore
about fish that can talk,
promise-making fishes,
wish-granting fishes, even fish
with human faces.
One such fish fetched up
in a net off the west coast one day
and spooked the crew, who calmed
themselves by teasing the youngest
among them. “Look, kid! Here’s
your granny! Or is it your girlfriend?”
The boy blushed, shuffled his feet,
looked out over the ocean.
The fish, who couldn’t talk,
lay dying on the deck. His life
flashed through his memory,
a saga of absurd yearning, a life
spent swimming from sea to sea
looking for faces just like these.
by Diane Gage
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Lost at Sea
The sea wrenched him open, entered him
until he was separate no longer,
sent him on the current-road
to the far meeting of air and water.
As he dissolved into the great ocean
his limbs twined with those of other creatures
to form compound monsters,
combing the deeps with cloudy fingers.
I heard the waves whisper,
but their message was unclear.
Myriad voices murmured stories
washed white as bone.
I tried to hold him with dream-slow hands,
but the tide pulled him onward.
Adrift, shifting, shape-changing, lost to me.
by Nancy Gandhi
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qarrtsiluni 