Kindness

I filled my untidy garden with birds.
It was simple. Let me instruct. You buy
A red plastic cylinder crammed with seeds
(Tawny, black, striped), then precariously
Loop it round twigs. Then birds drop from the sky.
Bluetits quarrel, ferociously.

They bring long-tailed tits with their piping cries,
Sparrows who squabble and scrabble the fence,
Then the robin, wild with anger. He flies
At red like an enemy, Where the seeds
Fall deep, a pale carpet, without defence
Shy chaffinches, loud blackbirds feed.

But the youngest cat lies under a bush.
Her almond-shaped eyes squint patient as day.
I can see, already, her silent rush.
Should I scoop up the seeds? Break tangled strings?
How can I send so many birds away?
How can I live without wings?

-- Alison Brackenbury

a field guide to lemon

Demons are smaller than one might expect.
They land on the shoulder, like specks of sulphur,
then climb into the inner ear,
setting up their equipment on collapsible tables.

I can feel one now, glowing like an ember,
his tiny claws scratching and scraping,
his voice like a gramophone, urging me on
to tell you how much I hate you,

but I will ignore him, as you should,
unless you do not believe in demons,
but only in the pleasant things of life,
of which, I am told, there are numerous examples.

-- Tom Jenks

Blackberrying

One of those gorgeous warm September days
perfect for picking blackberries on the Heath.

We're all vagrants snatching at the hedge,
grabbing the plumpest fruit.

Oak leaves colour pink and gold,
acorns bunch - clusters of bright black

elderberries catch the eye,
rosehips bulge, longing to be pulled

but we're only here to take blackberries.
My fingers and mouth bruise

from the juice I surreptitiously
suck and lick away. Bare arms

snag with brambles a dozen times
for each prize, often not worth

the scratch and tear. How stunted
and deformed the berries are!

Sometimes nature doesn't work,
sometimes it takes a pill to jerk the leaden

psyche into overdrive.
Sometimes you have to fumble.

-- Karen Green

Lavender

With a sachet of lavender secreted inside it
the purple bag is plump as a small bird's
breast, echoes your voice, its restful
clarity. When I slide my thumb down
the velvet underside a sense of psalm

fills me and dark cat night sidling in,
fitting the mound of herself to
a human back. I picture tension easing
in the day-to-day shifts we make
with those we're knitted to. Though I'm weak

the emperor purple gloves my skin
awake, rallies the brain's metropolis, sends
pungent messages to the pulsing townships.
For months my braced body's fought
the indiscriminate battalions sent in to rout

any cancerous cell filching a plot
of land but now it's flagging, wants
to hunch in a ditch, weep at its wounds.
Useless to wish frailty was a boiler suit
I could unbutton - it's married to the roots

of my hair, my blood. But this pouch
you chose for me, its insistent coolth,
raises a garden where flowering bushes
are blue-leaved and threaded with bee thrum,
raspberries spill ripeness on my thumbs.

-- Myra Schneider

Sound of a body falling off a bridge

I can tell you there is no word for this
in any language. I've asked

and everyone seems to confirm
its translatability.

Feet shuffling off a stone pillar-
simple, but not easy. A young tree

fracturing under the sudden weight-
exactly how one imagines it.

And somewhere between shuffle and fracture-
the silence of Scott Koch's body

falling off the Normanwood Bridge,
which is also the silence of stars.

~

They write their arc over faces
of stones staring up from riverbed,

and if you were a swarm of mayflies
hatching in the pre-dawn, coal-dark

aubade of a Susquehanna morning,
or if you were a freshman in college

and bought some pot and drove out
with friends to gaze at stars,

you would know stars make
a hell of a racket. Like time, like death,

they scrawl their inscrutable marks
of light.

~

Say you are not a hatch of insects
or one of those kids wrecked and lovely,

their skins' leaf-awkward sheen.
Though if you were, you'd be lost

in a fury of living and dying.

So you'll have to trust the words
for the way his face twitched, went

stone-white, for how unbeautiful
his body comprehended night, words

for a breath untaken, the arrested
air in his lungs.

~

I give them to you piecemeal,
hand over hand, as if in aftermath

we build a city of bridges. I press each
against your mouth. They taste of salt.

They fall into place. They are beginning
to mean less and less. They only do

what they do. For anything else, you'll need
something like a life, or memory-

car tires ticking over a bridge, wheel
of a flower cart knocking cobblestone,

seams, separations.

-- James Hoch

signs

Earlier, a slow child in the vicinity
of a Slow Children sign, a boy
just taking his time, his bookbag
weighing him down, and now --
driving past Caution: Falling
Rock Zone - an actual fallen rock
right in the middle of the Interstate!
I call 911, report it - the danger -
one loose rock suggesting many,
some hard hilltop family of them
finally about to become unglued.

I say the signs have started to come true,
and laugh, but the operator is serious,
only wants to know where, and who.
I give her the where she needs
and drive on, who I am,
I'm sure, of no importance here.

Outside of Frostburg I exit and stop
at Stop, then at red stop again,
remembering those few times
late at night -- because I'm careful
about my braveries -
when I've gunned it,
went right on through.

Truth is, I'd be happy in this world
to be quietly significant
like a good editor.
I'd like to improve Slow Children,
for example, by putting in
that comma where it belongs.

I'm almost home. The increase in Jesus
bumper stickers has been telling me so.
At Finzel near Little Savage in big letters
at the end of a driveway: Beware Dog,
and there he is, the Beware Dog
halfway between the house and the road,
sleeping or waiting, I'll never know.

-- Stephen Dunn

Love poem

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

Ordinary Life

I applied once again for an ordinary life.
I thought I had the skills, the prerequisites,
the training to couple: advanced degrees,
lemon meringue pie, caesar salad,
the ability to fold napkins and flattery
into pleasing shapes.

I unwrapped my placemats and my tablecloths,
all the pretty coverings.
I was a pretty covering.
I spread myself out
on his bed.

I hemmed my edges
I tucked myself in
I pulled myself tight
I smoothed out all my wrinkles.
I wanted to accomodate him.

He said I was too large for him.
Adjustments would be necessary
for me to fit within his life—
just some minor alterations,
he said, as he trimmed me down to size.

My objections just confirmed
my complete unsuitability.
I was so rigid and inflexible,
he complained, as I folded myself up
and packed myself away.

The woman was

the woman was an envelope
I unsealed her
I read her contents

the woman was paper
I drew on her

the woman was chalk
I wrote her name

the woman was a poem
I memorized her lines

the woman was potsherds
I fit her together

the woman was a net
I untangled her
I loosened the stones that were her weights

the woman was a map of skin
I read the dust within her folds

the woman was a dry creek bed
I followed her

the woman was a message
I uncoded her

the woman was a line of wet sand leading to a well
I drank her

the woman was mist
I inhaled her

the woman was a memory
I marked her place