Humidity like gauze tape on the skin.
Butterflies have come to the butterfly bush.
I like the way that sentence walks,

foot-testing the rocks for a solid way across.
Cicadas torque their gear boxes,
and North Carolina is coming about,

its troll motors chuffing and dropping rainbow splatters
on the gray waters upon which we slide.
Always a royal formality stands up

when we try to utter the unutterable.
It was ever thus, those lice-ridden Lords
translating the altar blood of fatted calves.

A cold front is bringing the Pentacost
to the pine tops. There's a shiver in that herd,
ozone sharp as a whiff of hot tin.

You can see the rain coming, cowled,
head down, hiking steady with its crystal
prayer beads worried in wordless prayer.

--Michael Chitwood

Copyright © 2006 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

HINGED EARTH

Although this is not a photograph, the frame
has stopped all motion. There's plenty of time
to consider the view: oak leaves, apples.
We must be in the garden, on earth as it is.
Hinged earth--the snake's jaw as a music box, opens
then shuts. Birds shift in flight, acorns fall;
the sky, the ground, make their small adjustments.
On earth as if at an altar: knees bend, a gill
flaps for air. The wooded canopy over it all
is thought to represent justice. Elsewhere, a dragonfly
spreads its wings on the live pin of its body--
a verb between fluttering nouns. To the left is a cliff:
there's a question of scale. You once put your hand
on the small of my back; we moved like a chord
below an ascending melody, a rare Te Deum in a minor key.

--Mary Cornish

Copyright © 2006 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.