Before the Storm

November 2, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

Featured Art: Storm Clouds by John Henry Twachtman

Birds fled. The city fell
quiet. Across
the night the neighbors raised
their glasses & together, gathered
on our porches, forms
in a Japanese landscape, we stared
up. Or was it
Turner the sky resembled? How every
late seascape became
for him, given
to opium & with his father’s
death, depression, a tempest
of motion & color. Clouds
roiling. The oils
of his tiny boats bleeding
out. Only,
he knew, the frame’s gilt edge
splits beauty from terror. Airplanes,
that night, climbed
from the city & steeply, fleeing
too the ruinous
wall of rain, banked
south. Schools, a step
ahead of the looming cataclysm,
closed. Newscasters
leaned forward into the wind & we, raising
our own glasses to the neighbors
drank. Dark
& Stormies. Sazeracs. We imagined
the city flooding. Mudslides
on Foothill Parkway. Prospero, fallen
from his dukedom, does it
all for pleasure he says, every
shipwrecked Milanese aristocrat, every
extravagant clipper cast
up in the pitch & tumult his rough
magic fashioned. That,
we know, is mostly
what the groundlings came for. To fancy
a world they would never see struck
low, & so
close, sometimes, as to feel even
on their faces the great
king’s spit. There is,
in catastrophe, a satisfaction
exceeding sex, psychologists
believe. Before
the storm the city
bristled. Bells
tolled. Before
the last helicopters cleared
Saigon, operatives
burned in a rooftop incinerator
the state’s documents. We watched
from our porches the planes
shudder & mount. On Merritt
Lake, the pelicans, frenzied,
fed.

The Lake

May 1, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Billy Collins

Featured Image: Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay by Fitz Henry Lane, 1863
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

As usual, it was easy to accept the lake
and its surroundings,
to take at face value the colonies of reeds
along the shore, a little platoon of ducks,
a turtle sunning itself on a limb half submerged,
and the big surface of the lake itself,
the water sometimes glassy, other times ruffled.

Why, Henry David Thoreau or anyone
even vaguely familiar with the role
of the picturesque in American
landscape painting of the 19th century
would feel perfectly at home in its presence.

And that is why I felt so relieved
to discover in the midst of all this
a note of skepticism,
a touch of whimsy,
or call it a bit of Dadaist playfulness;
and if not a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde
then surely a sign of the human was apparent

in the casual fuck-you attitude
so perfectly expressed by the anhinga
that was drying its extended wings
in the morning breeze
while perched on a decoy of a Canada goose.

Harping

April 14, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Judy Rowe Michaels

Featured Image: Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade, 1871
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

While most of us are grieving

something—cold spring lost child dead-end
lyrics that won’t resolve,

the spadefoot toad, who bears
a gold lyre-mark on her back,
is crazy-busy with what science calls

explosive breeding. Rain says Go,
and up from culvert cistern over porch and patio across roads
the fraught migration of spadefeet slowly breaches
our borders to breed in our ponds.

Flood of toadlets in just three weeks, pop pop,
with tiny golden harps, how will this
end? We run them down
coming or going, then pronounce them
rare, so we

love them, make posters, poems—
      (Old moss-grown pond—a
      toad jumps in to breed pop pop
      poppoppoppoppop)

We can’t say they’re unnatural, or blame
the job rate bad schools gang wars (unprotected
sex?), but tiny golden harps

seem suspect artsy irresponsible un-American.
All night trill thrills,

while most of us are grieving.

My Life with Pines

November 16, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Tom Wayman

1
In the glow of a fluorescent, I sit leaning
over a table to sort through parts of
a jigsaw puzzle, working hard to recreate
a picture displayed
on the box I purchased
while outside
great pines have moved in the darkness
down the ridge to surround my house, many of the trees
taller than the roof. A fierce wind
causes the pine trunks to sway, their limbs
churning the dark in wild
and pitiless gestures.

2
Pines thrive in arid soil, mostly sand,
little else will grow in. These trees regard cedars
who love the damp, who must be surrounded by relatives,

as gloomy, phlegmatic,
timid. Cedars, according to pines, are simple-minded
about safety, suffusing themselves with water

as protection from fire. Cedars might as well be,
pines jeer, a fern. Whereas pines
only reproduce in the heart of a blaze,
their cones needing the insatiable rage of flames
to climax, open, release.

3
No matter how many nights, months, decades
I pore over my jigsaw
the one piece that remains to be found
is a pine.

Pythagoras

April 16, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bruce Bond

Featured Art: Broken and Restored Multiplication by Suzanne Duchamp

Somewhere beneath the crematorium
of stars, the mystery and the boredom,
the vacuum that every space abhors,
you might stop to listen to no one there
and hear the words of a dead man, a Greek,
who measured nights in increments of music.
The sky then was a calliope of numbers
whose tune was everywhere and therefore far
away as dead men are. No such thing
as solitude among them. It takes a string
of intervals on heaven’s monochord
to pull the sounds from one another, the choir
of which must be silent, surmised, and yet
each ghost note dies into the next to hear it.

If You See Something

March 31, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: Dove in Flight by Pablo Picasso

On my morning walk along a cinder path
that follows the shore of a lake,
I saw a good-size, solitary rabbit,

seven mourning doves who rose to the top of a fence
at my approach,

two anhingas, one drying his extended wings
like a pope on a balcony,
the other not doing anything at all,

also, a loud bird who refused to identify himself,

then ten young ducks in a huddle
by the vegetation near the water,
some sleeping, others preening their feathers,
all not quite old enough to be on their own,

oh, and a squirrel who headed up a tree
when he heard me coming down the path.

The House

September 27, 2013.Reading time 1 minute.

By Brian Swann

Featured Art: The House on the Edge of the Village by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen

Leaves twitch. A wren flits. A rope between trees sags. By the well-head a few stranded dandelions. Rain opens stones so they shine. A crow calls with the voice of a hammer. The rain stops. The sun enters with the voice of a crow. Heat turns day to distraction and the trapped mind wilts. A hawk calls and small mammals dive for cover. Sky goes carillon, dwindles, cooling off until the moon fills windows and stains rooms. A door swings and things go strange as if they had to. If you hear a voice you hear a voice. I walk through the empty house, carefully, a cat’s whisker. When I get to the top floor, over the moonlit roofs I can see the prison and the small zoo. They must be able to see me here where I’m training the self to lose itself, the way the stream ignores the stream.

Snorkeling

June 25, 2013.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Allison Funk

Featured Art: Solar Effect in the Clouds-Ocean by Gustave Le Gray

What if, late in my life,
an old love returned?
I might get carried away

as I did my first time in that otherworld
ablaze with coney
and neon blue tang,

soundless except for the resonance
of my breath, a hypnotic
one-two, now/then, why not

me, you. I must have seen
the stoplight parrotfish
beam red from a grotto,

but, heedless, sped up,
flippers propelling me over coral
resembling Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia

still unfinished after a hundred years.
Remembering my past,
I circled the remains

of countless marine animals.
Fragile memorials, yes,
but not harmless I’d learn:

the thousand mouths of the reef
that open out of hunger,
alive to the careless swimmer

who comes too close.
One who, succumbing to the pull
of the beautiful, swims out

so far she finds herself at the mercy
of surf that flings her
against the stinging ridge.

Cells meeting cells, tentacles, flesh,
she’s left with the mark
of a fiery ring that burns longer

than a slap. Weeks. Months.
A tattoo that may never fade
from the soft underside of her arm.

Recitations

May 23, 2013.Reading time 1 minute.

By J. Estanislao Lopez

Featured Art: The Petite Creuse River by Claude Monet

The Mountain Recites a Poem

The enunciation of one syllable
lasts two thousand years.

The only mode it knows:
confessional. All it has witnessed,

condensed into a single line.
We’ve compiled the research,

and can say with some certainty
that the first word is Above.

2. The River Recites a Poem

Obsessed with revision, the river
never completes a line. No one

attends its readings anymore
as they go on for months.

Each phrase spills out, then
is sucked back in and altered. This

continues until, by the merciful
winter, the river is shushed.

3. The Sky Recites a Poem

The first experimentalist, the sky
reduces every image to abstraction.

Soap dispenser becomes Absolution.
Mandolin string becomes Disquietude.

Its diction of emptiness surrounds the reader
until he is extinguished—This isn’t murder.

This is nothing but the semblance
of control.

Animals

November 24, 2012.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: Leg in Hammock by Edward Weston

One is what one looks at—well, at least partially. —Joseph Brodsky

All morning in my hammock burning
a tight one, poised with pencil and notebook
and seven-week beard, I look to the pines
outside my cabin, seeking inspiration
from the birds and the squirrels
whose singing and foraging, whose
exclamations, no, arguments, reflect
my inner my inner my inner . . .
and every so often my cousin Ricky returns
from hunting rabbits on my four-wheeler
to tell me he’s thought of a new way
to beat off: Anywhere around here to buy
watermelons? Even his camo flannel
can’t conceal that Superdome belly
and I hate to think how long
since anyone’s seen his diminutive dangle
so I tell him in all seriousness, my sympathy
sincere, You might be on to something,
but after he tokes and rides away
I get inspired, realize I should’ve said
Go drive around these country roads, man,
look for signs! and even Ricky would’ve
nodded with a look of feigned profundity
like he’s posing for an author photo
but I let that moment go

Clear and Cold

June 27, 2012.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lisa Ampleman

Featured Image: “The Red Kerchief” by Claude Monet

Though already setting,
the sun in late afternoon

in late December revels
in its power—how it,

though meager, can set
red-brick façades ablaze,

glorify an oak’s moss—
the only green thing—

and later sear far clouds
deep purple, more sky

exposed because the trees
are bare. Meager, too,

what you could give
me, what you called fondness—

but I let it dazzle me for a time.
And, though the room

is darkening, the last light
brightens the metallic edge

of the window screen
before it goes.

Pelicans

June 17, 2012.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Image: “Australian Pelican” by Elizabeth Gould

Last evening, another sunset party:
drinks, laughs, ironies, hidden desires.
All of us tanned and glowing, we exchanged
jokes and gossip, fresh and stale, self-conscious
that something larger was missing
when we turned to best watches, shoes, cigars.

So much time is lost trying to agitate
the envies of others and monitor one’s own—
the thought that crossed my mind as I watched
six pelicans rise and fall with the water’s flux.
The winds had quieted, and just before the sun plunged
below the sea, the pelicans rose in a wind-hung line

and flew off, silent as a council of gods
in the pinkish sky. Palm trees scratched
their cuneiform shadows on the sand.
I wanted to say something about the pelicans,
who I knew, for no known reason, choose to live
their lives as near total mutes, as if they’d decided

simply to be done with the fecklessness of speaking,
but I kept quiet, the light draining from the sky,
the others going inside. I felt like a child in hiding,
alone on the deck, made fearful and alive
by the darkened Gulf, the stretch of beach
now entirely empty, the palm trees,

the sliver of moon rising directly opposite
of where the sun had set. If I had been called
to come in, I would have kept silent.

When It’s That Time for Piranhas

November 2, 2011.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Michael Derrick Hudson

Featured image: Utagawa Hiroshige. Swallow and Wisteria, mid-1840s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Everything has already blossomed: my neighbor’s wisteria
has gone hog-wild across the ragged frontier of
our mutual fence, the soft green tendrils
of it violating international borders

and breaking treaties. Achtung! So let me tell you about

my neighbor’s wife: she’s delicious! And every morning
I hear all the birds in Fort Wayne, Indiana, go

Yippee-yee! Yippee-yee! Which is how spring jibber-jabbers
while her husband blows the leafy detritus

off their depilated lawn. Something’s missing. I want to be
indigenous with her, something somehow prehistoric—

I want her in Brazil. I want a quiver full of spindly arrows
to fetch our breakfast’s blue-tailed skink or

supper’s three-toed sloth. I want ritual scarification, coherent
rites of passage. I want grandpa’s thighbone
whittled down to a splinter

and dangling around my neck.
I want to help her stitch banana leaves, scorch
grubs against a rock. I want her to smile at me like a jaguar,

each incisor filed to a point. I want poisonous frogs, seashell
currency, enemies who make sense, a copper
plug through my lip. I want

a shameless squat. I want mumbo-jumbo witches to shun and
screeching ghosts to appease. I want her to take me

down to the river where we’ll knot and
inch our way across. I want her to trust me to be the lookout

for piranhas. I want to know when it’s that time for piranhas.

In the Season of Early Dark

September 15, 2011.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Elton Glaser

Feature image: Claude Monet. Rocks at Port-Goulphar, Belle-Île, 1886. The Art Institute of Chicago.

1
The wind sassy and half mad,
The clouds knocked up with rain—
Another feral afternoon in the Midwest,
Fall, and the trees like Salome, ready
To ask, when the last leaf drops,
For my unresisting head.

2
I’m going to spring all the little traps
Set by silence
And call it mercy. I’m going to let loose
Every thought caught by its hind legs
And screaming for release.
Out of the jaws and sharp teeth,
The tongue comes, loving
The taste of its own blood, gush of words
Hurt into eloquence.

3
Gray day. Raincoat weather.
Raw wound that would weep over me,
Nasty stuff from so deep inside
It could make the scarecrows gag
Among the stooks and stubble.
Whatever I did to deserve this,
I deserve it.

4
All the numbers add up—
Mortgages, body count, Lincoln pennies
In a plaster pig my grandfather gave me.
And the years, too, though no one
Knows how many, not the saints,
Not the drugged and corrupt. I have these
Fingers to figure with. They tell me
The end is always at hand.

5
Misbegotten month
Rushing from bluster to bare bark.
The geese get out of town.
Even the seedy weeds die back,
Brittle slippage of the unloved.
I stack firewood against the stone wall
And plant the last tulips, bonemeal
In their shallow holes. Lights rise
From the windows and fall
On the dark grass, so black
My footprints sink down to the roots.

A Mile In

August 13, 2011.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Julie Hanson

Selected as winner of the 2011 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Nancy Eimers

Feature image: Claude Lorrain. View of Delphi with a Procession, 1673. The Art Institute of Chicago.

The snow had been with us for awhile
and was dingy and not well lit.
But the sun promised to come out.
The light fog lifting
against the skinny tree trunks
and the grounded limbs they’d lost
and the thick, half-detached vines
would lift off,
dissolved, by the end of our walk.
We’d taken the footbridge
across the creek and followed the bend
away from traffic and toward the west ridge.
We’d gone a mile in,
to where usually I begin to listen to
our progress in the twigs and gravel of the path,
and past this, and past my own
periodic reminders to the dog
to the short, uncomplicated songs
of winter birds. And there,
near the spill of rocks in the creek
where the fog was still passing through branches
and a little farther and to the right
where a stretch of tall grasses
received a wide gift
of sunlight and several cows,
the air that stood still
between the trees and shimmered
over the grasses filled with sound—
a big voice moving through
a hundred thousand habitats—
and it said, “Attention in this area.
The following is a regular monthly
test of the Outdoor Warning System . . .”
It spoke from the west first,
sounding closer than it could be.
And it spoke from the southeast next.
“This is a test,” it said, “only a . . .
“This is a test . . . ” it began again
from somewhere else.
The dog returned to me, cowering.
I’d wondered before
without much curiosity,
where were those speakers housed,
were they towered, did they revolve?
Ordinarily heard in the yard
while I stood pinning laundry to the line,
the broadcast soon plunged and sank
into the noise of passing cars
and blown and rolling garbage cans
and faded like the little ringing
that emanates from construction sites.
But here, it seemed full minutes long
before my breath was back again in my chest,
and my dog’s breath,
steady and rough, was back in hers,
when the voice had left the air
between the trees, as had the fog.
At last a bird sounded from a twig.
At last a squirrel came down
and sent the dog. And then,
made up of other sounds
I could not have singled out,
a normalcy rolled in.
Infinitesimal bits is all it was
—quick beaks breaking up the peat,
the slow collision of a leaf landing, scooting
half an inch along a big flat rock,
a splat of excrement in white,
a flinch, a flap, a flick. But as it came it felt
to be a counter-vigilance. Or like
the sound of consciousness. The is.

A Giant Bird

September 2, 2010.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Kevin Prufer

Its great heart pounded like the distant sea
wounding itself against the cliffs.

We lived in its shade.

Sometimes, my daughter ran her fingers along that part of the breast
that swagged low over our camp.

It’s beautiful, she said, smoothing a feather’s twig-like barbs,
gazing past our mountain toward the burning cities.

What kind of bird is it?
                Some feathers were tawny, others tinged a perfect white.
Is it a sparrow?
                It may be a sparrow.
Is it an owl?
                I can’t see its face.
An eagle? I think it’s an eagle.
                                We often played this game.

Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London

September 1, 2010.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

Oh yes my friend, I’ve been there; the insects battering at
the armored lids of your yellowish eyes

the moment you pecked your way out of that rotten shell
and dug out from your sandpit nets . . .

And I’ve experienced the thud thud thud of your days,
the indigestible monotony

of everything’s spiny orangy-green husk. How the sun
gets daily whiter and hotter and just

a little bit closer. The week spent gobbling down your

own weight’s worth of whatever. One stumpy
footprint after another, tracking the trackless, squelching

across last night’s marsh into a volcano-spattered today
hip-deep in ash and yawning

a muzzleful of sulfur. Swishing through stiff fronds,

we drag an unbearable load of tombstones on our back
and a fat lugubrious tail, shit-smutched and

spiked. The flattening of the razor grass. The forgotten
clutch of eggs. Our shrill yaps

and groans. That tiny gray walnut
for a brain and the fat black tongue tough as a bootsole . . .

They’ve explained us away a dozen times: some passing
meteorite or anther, the rat-like mammals

eating our pitiful young, all kinds
of new weather. Issueless, but far too stupid to be forlorn,

we trundle along the pink quartz shore
to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea.

Disintegration of Purpose at Cocoa Beach, Florida (Part 1)

September 1, 2010.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

A pelican divebombs the same shimmery-shammery silver stripe
of the horizon. The pale yellow and presumably

bloodless crabs scuttle to their holes, terrified by my shadow

all over again. Again! They’ll never figure it out,
but of course every moment for them is nothing but the fretful

expectation of imminent death. They’re expendable. Fecund.

Edible. Fuck ’em. So where’s my hero? My old conquistador
my Castilian grandee terrible with purpose . . .

Señor! Over here, por favor! But what if he did come, feverish

and bedraggled, this Spaniard wading hip-deep through the surf
cumbered by his mildewed ruffles

and waterlogged boots, in silver salt-pitted
spurs and a rust-bucket helmet? He’d spout nonsense, bragging

about the usual claptrap: solid gold wigwams, diamonds bigger
than pumpkins and an obsidian-eyed princess

festooned with raccoon tails. There’d be those outrageous lies,

poison darts tinking off his armor while tramping the Everglades
and living these five hundred years fetched

off death’s front stoop by a few quavering, toothless sips from

the Fountain of Youth. With the point of his cutlass he’d scratch
the beach with treasure maps and schemes, telling tales

of the cannon-shattered fo’c’sle and those desolate, bone-littered
passageways. I’d put up with it for as long

as I could. ¡Hola! History stops here, Señor! Everything does!

Tree Talk

May 28, 2010.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Claire Bateman

Featured Image: Trees by Maurice Prendergast 1918

Everywhere in town you hear:
“The forest’s on the move again”—
our forest!
Not ours, exactly,
but we feel it to be so,
since its visitation
ensnares our limbs
as, at every crosswalk,
neighbors duck and flinch,
weaving carefully through, apparently,
nothing at all—
forgive me, I’ve neglected to describe
our forest’s unparalleled clarity
from pine-tips to underbrush,
its streams, its spiders,
its (presumably) spotted fawns
tremulous, poised for flight—
“Our transparent forest,”
I should have said!
Impossible, of course,
to hide, to hunt, to lose one’s way!
Thus, we are reduced
to uneasy picnics in a vitreous shade
not wholly without shimmer.
Then, just as we’ve begun to settle in,
discerning where to place our feet,
grope for berries,
seek out the heaviness of honeycomb,
with a rustle and groan,
it’s gone,
having abandoned us
to elsewhere bear

its rough and leafy patronage,
its boughs of varying heft,
which our clumsy passings-through
had forced back till they rebounded,
scoring our faces
even as they sprinkled us
with resin-dew
(or, in that woods’ itinerant winter,
mild scatterings of unseen snow).

A Pocket Introduction to Our Universe

May 27, 2010.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Claire Bateman

Featured Image: The Throne of Saturn by Elihu Vedder 1883-1884

What does our universe most like to do?

To contort without any warning
into nothing but corners,
an awkward though not unbeautiful
configuration.

Of what elements is our universe composed?

The first is distance,
of which there are innumerable varieties,
such as the chromatic stutter between
forethought and aftertaste,
and the measureless span between
the transparent and the merely translucent.

The second is otherness,
that of the other
and that of the self,
reciprocal and ever-escalating glories.

What holds things together and apart?

The strong and weak gravitational forces.
Scar tissue.
The Great Universal Loneliness,
from which not even the material realm
has been excluded.

What are some of the forces that pass through flesh and bone?

Neutrinos.
X-rays.
Invisibility itself passes through the body
in immense, inarticulate storms.

November

October 20, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By Richard Cecil

Featured Art: Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) by Claude Monet

November is the time between conviction
and sentencing, when you’re still out on bail.
You’re sort of free, pending the rejection
of your appeal, but you are bound for jail.
There’s no point pleading that your weren’t guilty
of stealing pleasure from warm summer air—
you were caught, grinning, on camera. The penalty
is ninety days in winter’s prison. Unfair!
I only did what everybody does
when tempted irresistibly to strip
wool socks and parkas off and take a dip
in summer heat. You can’t tell bees, “don’t buzz.”
November shrugs in answer to your pleas:
Ninety days for you. Death for the bees.

Yet

October 18, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By Eric Torgersen

Featured Art: The Enchanted Mesa by William Henry Holmes

a voice I haven’t sung from yet
—Bruce Springsteen

Hang him from a tree he hasn’t hung from yet.
Fling him off a bridge no one’s been flung from yet.

Send succor, in whatever dark disguise:
a hornet’s nest he’s not gone running, stung, from yet.

He’d have it be a tower, not a steeple—
the height in him no bell has rung from yet.

Early fall, and not one branch the wind
has not stripped every leaf that clung from yet.

Recess. Winter. Second or third grade.
A frozen pipe he hasn’t freed his tongue from yet.

The drought seems endless. Spring. No drop of rain.
Just parched soil no shoot has sprung from yet.

Find it in some corner of the workshop,
some damp rag no last drop has been wrung from yet?

Probe the dank recesses of the cellar—
not one cask he hasn’t yanked the bung from yet.

Not by wit or rhetoric alone
will Eric find a voice he hasn’t sung from yet.

Horse, Alone, November

October 10, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Peseroff

Featured Art: Prancing Horse by Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault

She’s teaching him
no harm will slither up his legs
like chilly steam above a pond at night,
or plummet from almost leafless trees
when she saddles his pasture-mate
and they swish between the pointed firs
into spectral woods. Left behind,
alone, he paces the golden perimeter
of fence post and electric wire,
a fragment of eternity falling
red on his rolling shoulder
when he jars the ground beneath
the gnomon in a field
a single maple makes.

Indoor Municipal Pool

April 24, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By Alan Shapiro

The circulating disinfectants
make it an unearthly blue
or earth’s blue seen from space,
or what pooled from the steaming
of the planet’s first condensing.
In which case the pumps
and filters could be thermal
vents, and the tiny comet trail
of bubbles rising from the vents
could hold within it—if it isn’t it
already—the first blind chance,
if not the promise of
the hint of the beginning
of what at long last would
emerge into the eye which
being mostly water sees
only water signaling to itself
beyond itself in accidental
wormy quiverings over
the sea floor of the ceiling.

New World

March 15, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Baker

—Yellow gingkoes, awash on the sidewalks.
But we can’t have them. Blue sky like a just-
thrown vase. Bright plain blue side still glowing.
Autumn air. Warm as a bath. We can’t say so.
We did not see the horses nuzzling
in the field, in the muddy pen, in the big acres
hidden by trees in the middle of the financial city,
nor whisper through a night in a booth. In
a room. In no hurry atop sheets of many gone loves.
This was not us, nor will be, nor ever will I
forget you when the broken histories are
told. Expenditure and loss. Collateral and gift.
. . . no where shall Wee Be known. How
many leaves. How much wind in the new world—.

Sparrow

March 5, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Bilgere

On the bricks of the patio
A sparrow is struggling with a used tampon
It half-flew, half-dragged here
From a dumpster across the street.

The tampon resembles a wounded rat.
Those of us enjoying our coffee
And New York Times in the spring morning
Pretend to ignore it.

But all the suns in all the galaxies,
And all the planets around our own paltry star,
Are turning on the same invisible pulleys
That drive the sparrow
To build a cozy little crib
In the eaves under somebody’s gutters,

And to find, sooner the better,
Another sparrow who hears
The same music of the spheres.

You can’t argue with that.

And though some of us on the patio might believe
That what the sparrow is wrestling with
Is the blight man was born for,
The curse Adam fell for,

For the bird
It’s an engineering problem: the tampon’s
Too stubbornly stitched together
For a tiny beak to tear apart,

And too heavy
With human blood to carry off
Into the blue air of the future.

A Moment

February 9, 2009.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Wisława Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

I’m walking on the slope of a hill newly green.
Grass, small flowers in the grass,
just as in a children’s book.
Hazy sky, already turning blue.
A view of other hills spreads out in silence.

As if there had been no Cambrians or Siluries here,
rocks growling at one another,
upthrust abysses, no fiery nights
nor days in clouds of darkness.

As if no plains had moved through here
in feverish delirium,
in icy shivers.

As if only elsewhere had the seas been churning,
tearing apart the edges of the horizon.

It is nine-thirty local time.
Everything is in its place and in genial accord.
In the valley, the small stream as a small stream.
The path as a path from always to ever.

Woods in the guise of woods world without end amen,
and on high, birds in flight as birds in flight.

As far as the eye can see a moment reigns here.
One of those earthly moments
implored to linger.

The Puddle

February 3, 2009.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Wisława Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

I remember well this childhood fear of mine.
I’d step around puddles,
especially the fresh ones, just after it rained.
For one of them might be bottomless,
even if it looked like all the rest.

One step and it would swallow me whole,
I would start ascending downward
and even deeper down,
toward the reflected clouds
and maybe even farther.

Then the puddle would dry,
closing over me,
trapping me forever—but where—
and with a scream that cannot reach the surface.

Only later did I come to understand:
not all misadventures
fit within the rules of nature
and even if they wanted to,
they could not happen.

A Note

February 1, 2009.Reading time 1 minute.

By Wisława Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

Life—the only way,
to grow over with leaves,
catch a breath on the sand,
soar on wings;

to be a dog,
or to pet one;

to tell pain apart
from everything that isn’t pain;

to fit into events,
to vanish in vistas,
to search for the minutest of errors.

It’s an excellent opportunity
to recall for a bit
what was talked about
with the lamp turned off;

and if only once
to trip over a rock,
to get drenched in the rain,
to lose keys in the grass,
to follow a spark on the wind;

always not knowing
something important.

Little Bird

November 8, 2008.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

Featured Art: Seascape by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

One cloud was following another
across a blue and passionless sky.
It was the middle of summer, far enough
from December for a man to feel indifferent
to the memories of cold, not yet close
enough to autumn to be caught up
in all its folderol about death.
Neither cloud looked like a whale
or a weasel, or any kind of fanciful beast.
All morning I’d felt my life dragging me down.
The view from my window refused to lift my heart.
The sight of a blank piece of paper
filled me with sadness. I wanted to set
my life down in a comfortable chair, tell it
to take a long nap, and walk away as if
I were somebody else, somebody without a house
or a family or a job, but somebody who might
soon feel with a pang precisely the absence
of everything I had. A cool breeze lifted
the curtains in the room where I was sitting.
A bird was singing. Had it been singing for long?
Far off there were mountains, but I didn’t
wish to go there. Nor did I yearn
to be standing by a lake, or walking
beside the tumult of the sea.
The little bird kept repeating itself.
I filled a glass with water and watched it tremble.

So Near Yet So Far

November 4, 2008.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Angie Estes

Featured Art: The Holy Family with the infant Saint John by Valerio Castello

At the edge of the apparent
        disk of a celestial body, known

as its limb, is the border
       between light and dark, there

and not. First a gradual dimming,
        then small crescent shapes appear

on the ground under trees as
        the temperature sharply drops

and birds become quiet, the stars,
        visible: when the sun and moon

come face to face, small beads
        of sunlight shine through the valleys

Here Lightning Has Been

November 2, 2008.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Angie Estes

Featured Art: Bathers by Paul Cézanne

buried across the barren plateaus
of Provence, where stone altars
chiseled with FVLGVR CONDITVM
mark the point where lightning entered
the ground. Around each site, a wall
remains to keep the divine
fire of Jupiter’s signature within
the shafts and passageways
of the earth. According to Plutarch,
whoever is touched
by lightning is invested with divine
powers, and anyone slain by
its bolt is equal to the gods, their bodies
not subject to decay because
they have been embalmed
by celestial fire. Light,
when it leaves
the air, is the color of blood
that has entered a vein:

Anderson Inside the Hurricane

October 31, 2008.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stefi Weisburd

Featured Art: A Vagabond Walking Along a Lane by Alphonse Legros

The wind has come to remind us of our wings — Mississippi artist Walter
Anderson, who tied himself to trees in order to experience hurricanes

Lashed to the mast, ears thrashed
             by sirens in the eyewall, Anderson
is the squall’s canvas, ravaged
             by wind that wants to strip
his skin from skull
                          and howl.

      Only yesterday he sank
                             to hands and knees
to understand the guano of green heron, to paint
                        the violet frog. Lying by a quiet
      lagoon, inking a white-throated
                        sparrow, he saw cadmium and red madder happily
flare in foliage. In the slash pines of Horn Island
where imagination fills the space between trees, art
    defers the evil moment. Contour of bark
    or butterfly is ballast; it calms the

gale within him, bulrush pool, always a balm until

    a storm makes land.
                            Then it froths and spits, rain
         needles him, ankles deep in the surge.
         How will he paint the sting
                    of maddened sand, the batter of root
    torn from loam, blue strafed from
                               sky? Titanium whitecaps throttle
the mangrove beach. All around him, palms
                               flash and flinch like broken
             umbrellas in brash light, the shed
                                       in shivers under

         the blotted sun. A locomotive
                  in his ear, wind
                                    wrenches his breath from
                           its palate, whips
         him beyond himself, out
                  of his sleeve of pain, sopping

                                          and so close, so
                                 close to capsizing . . .
                       Something in the cyclone
        cries out.

Something wheels

and sings.

Originally appeared in NOR 4

Travel: Choler

October 21, 2008.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Neil Shepard

Featured Image: Old Sarum by David Lucas

For Robinson Jeffers

We had come to the Great Wall’s end
in the desert of Jiaguyuan. Our tempers flared
across the crumbled battlements, out into the red heat.
There were weeds, thorns, a few hard-
shelled bugs. Love reduced to a black
carapace, under which a stinger,
a biting mouth, a reflex, a poison.

Heat withered our patience. Our bowels,
stung by a virus, made us say words we’d regret—
peevish, pernicious—wo yao, wo yao,
I want, I want, and nothing else.
We both stormed off—“stormed”
could have brought some moisture
to this desert, but no, this storm

was a hot wind, stinging sand
in the face, chipped sandstone
from the last outpost, that would cut
and bury us. Wei guoren. Barbarian.

The Reversal

September 15, 2008.Reading time 1 minute.

By Billy Collins

Featured Image: The Annunciation by George Hitchcock

It’s so beautiful outside today
and we’re all going to die,
especially me,

is an observation that drenches
the pages of every anthology of poetry.

The trees are brilliant in crimson,
and I am one day nearer the grave
would be one way to put it.

Red and white tulips are swaying
in a mild breeze this morning,
and just look at the dark gullies under my eyes
would be another.

So many variations,
you have to wonder how would it be
if the picture were flipped the other way

and poets never tired of declaring
in poem after poem
that the world is a mound of ashes
and that they will never die.

How crummy the flowers look!
How well I feel!
How hideous the mountain range!
How handsome I will always be!
How fine to live forever in the midst
Of such relentless and unspeakable ugliness!
Which brings us to the question:
how much more of that would you have to hear
before you longed for
a bead of dew on the tulip
and that cough that will be your undoing?

Nothing Stays Buried, Hector Flores

March 28, 2008.Reading time 1 minute.

By Andrew Michael Roberts

Featured Art: Daedalus and Icarus by Giulio Romano

Not your sad little sister nor the boy of your youth some doors down who shot himself twice. Not even dirt. It churns for years and surfaces as something alive. We name it old names we know by their taste on our tongues. Humus and bone, a song in the blood. Hector, we’re all descendants of conquistadors and graveyards. If you were thrown a sword, you’d know how to hold it. Know which tombstones to walk behind, whistling. Which mountain to climb and when to take flight. How heavy your tired arms. Hector, look down on us tenderly before crossing over and descending into the desert. Remember us as the sand swallows and sings you. Before the sun takes you, cast your winged shadow across it. We are the grains in your grave. We are buried there with you.

There Was a War

March 27, 2008.Reading time 1 minute.

By Andrew Michael Roberts

Featured Art: I Saw it, plate 44 from The Disasters of War by Francisco de Goya

and it wasn’t ours because we didn’t believe in it, but they shot at us anyway because we stood somewhere in the middle of them killing each other. What could we do but lie down and wait? We lay a long time, thinking, the grass like trees shooting into the sky. Bullets like birds shooting across it. Too many hours of sun in our eyes. We were thinking: if we had guns we’d use them to get the hell out of the middle of this war.

Dunes

March 26, 2008.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Cox

Featured Art: Sand Dunes, Harlech, North Wales by George Elbert Burr

Despite the curvatures adapted each to the other,
The slackening skin that in sleep feels lost without that other’s;
Despite the slatted fencing that marks their yard from others’,
And the offspring at play within, their testament to others;
Despite all the others they have embraced and refused;
Despite all otherness between them
They’ve acknowledged and recused;
They can no longer in mystery come to each other,
With the quickening and total surrender to another
That both empties each and fills the other.
And so they go on, because each goes on, despite the other:
To each their own wind-ironed waters,
To each their own bruised sky and horizon,
Their own shames, their own redemptions,
Awakening to each night’s newly shifted sloping,
Each day by unremitting day’s abiding,
Without need for another day or lover,
They endure side by side, in their time, no other.