by Ann Kestner
lifts away
the
rain
that
fell
and
yesterday evaporates.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
3.26.2019
3.33 p.m.
44 degrees
by John Stanizzi
Parchment of earliest spring days over the pond,
ordinance of the heightening sun, and the algae,
needy multiplier, doubled since yesterday, and in the
domain of flowing water the minimal ripples shimmer.
Parchment of earliest spring days over the pond,
ordinance of the heightening sun, and the algae,
needy multiplier, doubled since yesterday, and in the
domain of flowing water the minimal ripples shimmer.
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Yamhill Creek
by Ed Higgins
Bisecting our farm, wild plum, willow
and black berry on either bank
blossoms. Early May evenings
chorus frogs startle the moonrise.
Diurnal coyote too yip down
the stars. Search the field for voles.
Here and there in the dark there’s a
great blue heron croaking its harsh call.
Bisecting our farm, wild plum, willow
and black berry on either bank
blossoms. Early May evenings
chorus frogs startle the moonrise.
Diurnal coyote too yip down
the stars. Search the field for voles.
Here and there in the dark there’s a
great blue heron croaking its harsh call.
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Easter Walk
by Mark A. Murphy
Beyond father and son,
beyond belief and the taste of Simnel
dipped in tea, we pass over
the pack-horse bridge at Eastergate
where sudden waterfalls rush
across the moor. So we draw closer
in wind and sun, past the iron
gated goddess and moss covered oak
as if to reinvent the wheel of fate.
Now our earlier romanticism
gives way to a new sense of being
as the trunks of willow
continue to divide and multiply
along the bottom of the dyke
where we trip over bramble and ivy
through the last of the Easter rain.
Beyond father and son,
beyond belief and the taste of Simnel
dipped in tea, we pass over
the pack-horse bridge at Eastergate
where sudden waterfalls rush
across the moor. So we draw closer
in wind and sun, past the iron
gated goddess and moss covered oak
as if to reinvent the wheel of fate.
Now our earlier romanticism
gives way to a new sense of being
as the trunks of willow
continue to divide and multiply
along the bottom of the dyke
where we trip over bramble and ivy
through the last of the Easter rain.
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Surge Of Green
by Ed Higgins
Already past the harbinger of yellow crocus
pushing aside frost-clinging earth.
Afternoon sunlight, shafts of rising fog
pulled from the barn’s shingled roof.
The smell of warming damp earth everywhere.
Chorus frogs a cacophony at night.
The death weeds of all winter’s dry twiggy
stuff giving way to green again.
Mallards drifting between upshooting cattail.
Already past the harbinger of yellow crocus
pushing aside frost-clinging earth.
Afternoon sunlight, shafts of rising fog
pulled from the barn’s shingled roof.
The smell of warming damp earth everywhere.
Chorus frogs a cacophony at night.
The death weeds of all winter’s dry twiggy
stuff giving way to green again.
Mallards drifting between upshooting cattail.
Autumns by the Ocean
by James Croal Jackson
over dark beds of leaves
twigs and string I was full
of hope and hoping there
a remnant of vacation
a connection to the sea
perhaps the nerves
lost singing
through the night I walked
alone on sand the
dogs came barking
from the Atlantic
drenched and draped
in seaweed and I thought
of familiar love how
unbroken longing forever
intertwines in the bending
gravity of the moon
over dark beds of leaves
twigs and string I was full
of hope and hoping there
a remnant of vacation
a connection to the sea
perhaps the nerves
lost singing
through the night I walked
alone on sand the
dogs came barking
from the Atlantic
drenched and draped
in seaweed and I thought
of familiar love how
unbroken longing forever
intertwines in the bending
gravity of the moon
Murmuration
by Steve Straight
“A failure to realize that a property is emergent,
or supervenient, leads to the fallacy of division.”
––Issam Sinjab, astrophysicist
Two women in an old canoe
at late-winter dusk on the River Shannon,
one filming, one paddling as gradually
a matrix of dark spots roils on the horizon:
birds, starlings, by the thousands, forming
and reforming clusters of swarming shapes,
funnels and ribbons and hourglasses
folding over each other and then swirling high
in the air, still cohesive and without turbulence,
as the women laugh in awe.
It is their simultaneity that dazzles,
how a giant game of Telephone transports
the message to turn or dive with electric speed,
and as the physicists say, without the signal
degrading, in scale-free correlation,
each shift a critical transition
when they move as an intelligent cloud.
What roils them in the gloaming
as they prepare to roost, it turns out,
is usually a peregrine falcon,
the fastest animal on earth coming in low
at the edge and then shooting upward,
its blue-grey back and black head blurred
as the flock reacts as one.
These days we too sense something
coming in fast and low, coming for us
as we turn and turn in our widening gyre
of discord and tumult and strife,
and now the choice is ours.
There is safety in numbers, I suppose––
it might take her but not me––
but will we hear instead what is emerging,
or can, the greater song that says
we are but cells of a giant heart
ready to pump new blood.
“A failure to realize that a property is emergent,
or supervenient, leads to the fallacy of division.”
––Issam Sinjab, astrophysicist
Two women in an old canoe
at late-winter dusk on the River Shannon,
one filming, one paddling as gradually
a matrix of dark spots roils on the horizon:
birds, starlings, by the thousands, forming
and reforming clusters of swarming shapes,
funnels and ribbons and hourglasses
folding over each other and then swirling high
in the air, still cohesive and without turbulence,
as the women laugh in awe.
It is their simultaneity that dazzles,
how a giant game of Telephone transports
the message to turn or dive with electric speed,
and as the physicists say, without the signal
degrading, in scale-free correlation,
each shift a critical transition
when they move as an intelligent cloud.
What roils them in the gloaming
as they prepare to roost, it turns out,
is usually a peregrine falcon,
the fastest animal on earth coming in low
at the edge and then shooting upward,
its blue-grey back and black head blurred
as the flock reacts as one.
These days we too sense something
coming in fast and low, coming for us
as we turn and turn in our widening gyre
of discord and tumult and strife,
and now the choice is ours.
There is safety in numbers, I suppose––
it might take her but not me––
but will we hear instead what is emerging,
or can, the greater song that says
we are but cells of a giant heart
ready to pump new blood.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
3.25.2019
1.28 p.m.
48 degrees
Presentiments in this cold wind that winter and spring have
operated together engendering warm clouds, frigid sunniness;
nascent open water, ice like frosted-glass, milfoil unfurls from the bottom,
debauched invader, raider of oxygen and space, whorling interloper.
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Manila
by Christine Liwag Dixon
the monsoon wails through the branches
of the balete tree;
the birds have taken root on quieter limbs.
the tree trunk hums with the memory
of the divine,
its secrets melancholy and profound.
the monsoon wails through the branches
of the balete tree;
the birds have taken root on quieter limbs.
the tree trunk hums with the memory
of the divine,
its secrets melancholy and profound.
Flood
by James Croal Jackson
The longer I lived in my car
on the road aimless the more I
wanted to lose myself. Everywhere
was a mirror & the only way to go
was into the murk of past &
uncertainty of tomorrow. It was like
pedaling the gas for days in the mud.
Tires spinning, going nowhere.
The same me to greet at each
destination: The Grand Canyon.
Austin. Keystone Lake
in Oklahoma had drowned itself
in a Paul Klee watercolor. I
wanted its depths as my own.
The pole in the lake.
The pole in the trees.
My eyes in the lake.
My eyes in the sky.
The longer I lived in my car
on the road aimless the more I
wanted to lose myself. Everywhere
was a mirror & the only way to go
was into the murk of past &
uncertainty of tomorrow. It was like
pedaling the gas for days in the mud.
Tires spinning, going nowhere.
The same me to greet at each
destination: The Grand Canyon.
Austin. Keystone Lake
in Oklahoma had drowned itself
in a Paul Klee watercolor. I
wanted its depths as my own.
The pole in the lake.
The pole in the trees.
My eyes in the lake.
My eyes in the sky.
Cruising
for Tony Hoagland
by Steve Straight
We’re standing on the top deck of the Apocalypse,
Prestige Level, its wastewater fouling the sea in our wake
as off in the distance the moonlit iceberg of awareness
pokes through the surface of our comprehension,
though ninety percent of it lurks below.
Ten percent is about all we can take
yet still not enough to change our ways,
not enough to link the polar bear stranded on its tiny floe
to the steak, medium-rare, on our bone china plate,
the zooplankton ingesting the molecules of plastic bag
we used yesterday to cart home the romaine lettuce
grown in the sunny concentration camp
of the Salinas Valley,
lobsters scuttling north to cooler water
as longhorned ticks bushwhack their way
into new territory, the heroes of some other story,
while we buy clothing treated with permethrin
or spray our kids with DEET
to think ourselves safe from the viruses.
Down south, the mangroves know all this,
their roots knitted together in a fiber-optic system,
collecting and sharing data from their leaves,
doing their best to excrete excess salt or store it in their tissues,
stabilizing shorelines and taming tsunamis
until it’s all too much, even for experts.
Can you hear the musicians?
The ones asked to soothe all the passengers?
Years from now they will find one of the rosewood violins,
surprisingly pristine, and exhibit it in the Museum of Civilization.
We’re standing on the top deck of the Apocalypse,
Prestige Level, its wastewater fouling the sea in our wake
as off in the distance the moonlit iceberg of awareness
pokes through the surface of our comprehension,
though ninety percent of it lurks below.
Ten percent is about all we can take
yet still not enough to change our ways,
not enough to link the polar bear stranded on its tiny floe
to the steak, medium-rare, on our bone china plate,
the zooplankton ingesting the molecules of plastic bag
we used yesterday to cart home the romaine lettuce
grown in the sunny concentration camp
of the Salinas Valley,
lobsters scuttling north to cooler water
as longhorned ticks bushwhack their way
into new territory, the heroes of some other story,
while we buy clothing treated with permethrin
or spray our kids with DEET
to think ourselves safe from the viruses.
Down south, the mangroves know all this,
their roots knitted together in a fiber-optic system,
collecting and sharing data from their leaves,
doing their best to excrete excess salt or store it in their tissues,
stabilizing shorelines and taming tsunamis
until it’s all too much, even for experts.
Can you hear the musicians?
The ones asked to soothe all the passengers?
Years from now they will find one of the rosewood violins,
surprisingly pristine, and exhibit it in the Museum of Civilization.
Saturday, April 6, 2019
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
2.26.19
4.22 p.m.
27 degrees
by John Stanizzi
Knows desire without an object of desire,
All mind and violence and nothing felt.
He knows he has nothing more to think about.
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.
-Wallace Stevens
-Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion
after Wallace Stevens
Petulance and ego this wind that lashes everything at once,
obstructive and deep-throated, grumbling up from the hills,
nefarious creature buffeting self-portraits into the pond’s surface,
diagrams of this shape-shifting shade, all violence and nothing felt.
Knows desire without an object of desire,
All mind and violence and nothing felt.
He knows he has nothing more to think about.
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.
-Wallace Stevens
-Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion
after Wallace Stevens
Petulance and ego this wind that lashes everything at once,
obstructive and deep-throated, grumbling up from the hills,
nefarious creature buffeting self-portraits into the pond’s surface,
diagrams of this shape-shifting shade, all violence and nothing felt.