by Hilde Weisert

My friend went back to reading Yeats the year

she went back to the farm, claiming the land

as land, leaving a smart, well-dressed career

for dirt. This was her home. She’d planned

how what had grown tobacco now would bear

(a mile below where grinding, snorting bands

of bulldozers pawed the earth and air grew thick)

the fruit suburbanites would pay to pick.

Her father planned it too – their dream. The pair

puttered the rainy fields in a rusty Jeep

and saw green waves of grass turn blue, the air

clear, bushes bloom, and vines run deep.

But they were only up to planting, bushes bare

and squat, when he died – buried on the steep

ancestral hill. She went on, day labor like a prayer

and every midnight climbing on the winding stair

to Yeats – Yeats all she read, night in, night out.

Is reading only Yeats the same as being mad? Abstract,

we feared she’d come to grief, wandering about

like Jane or Aengus, Gaelic fire in her head. We ransacked

our shelves – First Frost, then Wilbur as the antidote,

as beautiful, as deep, but calm. With patient Southern tact,

she’d smile, wait a week, and hand him back; devote

herself anew to Willie B, taking half of what he wrote

by heart, Brown Penny to Cold Heaven. Always finding more.

We thought she’d left us, abandoned for some acres and a book…

But I’ve re-read that year, now see what Yeats’s spell was for:

Working the same hard ground and finding more was what it took.

Stitching intellect to intellect, and soul to soul, ancestral form

would rise and bloom from rows worked, and worked again. Look:

Children in the fields, berry baskets in their arms.

Yeats saved my friend that year, and my friend saved the farm.

by Sam O’Hana

As a quavering leaf is struck down

slabs of iron in miniature, hewn to exactitude

do a double take.

For all their obscure origins, layers of dried ink,

these seriffed chessmen lace their jammy fingers

and support peremptory feet,

a portcullis or cabbage patch of glyphs and breaks.

The expanses of blanched fiber and pits among

the knitted mesh, these blocks learn the details,

and immediately forget. A roller, or sloping hand curates the

rendezvous between sheet and lipsticked hull.

This kiss, this branding is for life, as vivid

and public as when a young man guns his moped

through the streets of a mediterranean village.

It stays with you, because the clarity with which

its presence is sheared into the world.

Moulded metals boast of outliving the trees, the stone

of Roman steps. And the text, just a

record of the keen blood, pressing over

raked horizons, many impressions

left to be made.

by Sam O’Hana

They staggered thirsty over the reefs with a calibrated zeal

that made nude the native hall-dwellers.

A sustained loss from the exploits, the cleaving,

filling of the earth and the graves were dug and recorded

in the collected hours before dawn. These leaves, an almanac

of conciliatory efforts to placate the sacralized grain.

Their fetish commends the trajectory of our traipsing, a winding

foray extensive that sacrifice learns the names of children.

Midday is set aside, from the breathing shores a yanked cry,

echo of the crude, initial gestures, all to rend the silent heat.

Oh gathering into telephonics, which apparatus could unslice these

waves? The deed, a commandment unto collaboration.

Scrape weeds from shards of the humerus and log, etch

or launch by gyroscope, cleansed once by the drinking rain.

by Glen Armstrong

They control the world but defer

to a light bulb’s parallel presence

as object and event.

Their hungry young become ceremonial

daggers when led into churches,

synagogues and mosques.

They would laugh at their own bodies.

They would make nervous

sounds full of lust

and uncertainty if they could

separate thinking from being.

They become invisible when they sleep,

but certain dreams

give them away.

They exist as links of chain,

as reminders of crumbling

cities and banishment.

I have heard they do the devil’s work,

but how could anything godless

possess such able

and delicate hands?

by Glen Armstrong

I understand that your piece of parchment

is an act of war,

that the little sticks you’ve scattered upon it

are a type of language.

You would like me to stop attacking forts;

that is the gist of this dirty flag.

But tell me, Son of Amherst,

who of your people conceived of this communication

broken into little slash marks?

How do your voices reach your gods

snapped apart and imprisoned in such a way?

How can they mix with the clouds?

We will fight, and I might lose,

but allow me this prophecy:

one-hundred years from now

your name will mark a valley of death,

a people perpetually mourning.

Your mightiest medicine woman will hide from you,

her broken incantations never whispered aloud,

but set like beaver traps

that will drive your gifted daughters mad

for countless generations.

by Keetje Kuipers

To explain, to chart, to graph
what has lasted this long and what hasn’t.

To take the temperature, not with the back
of the hand but with a thermometer. One hundred
thermometers. One thousand.

To correlate, categorize. To count
stacks into stacks. To assign significance

—to a woman, a bed, toast spread with jam.

We make meaning faster than we can understand it:

Listen to the body only
long enough to ignore what it says. Discard
each explanation we uncover.

But in resorting to words—

But if it becomes a story—

Seven years without her was a glacier,
a delicacy, an unquantifiable
quantity.

by Keetje Kuipers

Each afternoon heavy clouds form in the north,

and each evening when I take the dogs out, it snows.
Each morning the mice fly invisible under the drifts,

leaving their tracks only where they cross my path.

I ought to be sick of my life, I ought to be too bored
for words. Each day the red-tailed hawk sits

in his tree, cocks his head from side to side, takes

a low pass over the field and returns with a mouse
for his meal. The dogs bark at the deer, and the deer

don’t move until the dogs have stopped. I ought

to be losing my mind with all this familiarity,
with loving every damn thing I’ve come to know.

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She’s meeting a friend for a walk through the museum of fine arts and lunch –errands to run on the way, a bill to pay, she passes the man who is always sitting with his canvas, painting on the corner of a quiet street, fourteen degrees this morning, and he’s there on his stool, dabbing in the bricks of a nondescript apartment building, recycling bins out back, sagging fence in front. His prayer. She takes the train in, and it’s different because although it is the route to work, she is not going to work, not until later. The meeting with the friend makes her ride entirely unlike every other day of the week.

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by Judith Skillman

Toward sunset it bleeds orange, plums,
and wine. The father always at table
with his mug in hand. How long
must a son allow the city to unwind
its long avenues, branching rivers

full of walkers insular with autumn.
It’s true the blade took garlic cloves
from their little white coats,
so pliant, the stems beneath that fat knife
wolfing into the core of the matter.

It’s true there must be a mother somewhere
in the story—her stringy hair, her roast
burning inside the oven. He sees the clock tower
in the square, glances up to find a rim of moon.
At least, for now, the hole’s been bled
of what it holds. As far as a man can walk
the shops stretch, their signs reversed.
Closed for another, longer night.
Withholding exactly that porcelain—
that Jan Becher Karlovy liqueur cup

one needs to clamp between finger
and thumb. He’s learned one lesson.
This wound must be purged each day.
Else the stench of what it carries
emanates from his mouth, and others turn away.

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by Jeff Hardin

I could give
my horizon,

the one I see
on cheekbones,

or I could give
how a gravestone

is armless
and can’t do anything

to hold back
a soul.

And then there are
those doodlings

my child leaves everywhere,
almost-words

in some new language
I have to

lay on my stomach
to read.

If I could give away
the woman’s fingers

sauntering through
the organ’s tones,

I’d also give
my last three steps

in creek shallows,
how cool my feet felt

in silt.
But who wants

wayward things,
the bricklayer’s humming,

the sandcastle’s lean,
the thimble of air,

the two rowboats
side by side

bumping against
one another

as if in sleep?

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