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CONTENTS |
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| James Wright: A Symposium | |
| David Young | "As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor": Location, Location, Location |
| Gail Mazur | "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota": View from a Hammock |
| Angie Estes | "The Last Pieta, in Florence": Where Stone Doesn't Belong |
| Stephen Kuusisto | "A Lament for the Shadows in the Ditches": The Impossible Light of Day |
| Sue Standing | "The Vestal in the Forum": Ravishing Ruins |
| Bruce Beasley | "Venice": Feeding the Glass Swan: James Wright's Lyric Antilyricism |
| Mark Irwin | "Yes, But": Journey with Affirmation and Shadow |
| **** | |
| James Haug |
Diorama |
| Jennifer Atkinson | Under the Sign of Virgo Rossignols, Persian Nightingales |
| Christopher Howell | Gaze |
| Sarah Maclay | The Marina, Early Evening |
| Linda Bierds | Time and Space The Monarchs |
| Ellen Wehle | To Live Triptych in Bed |
| Christopher Buckley | Poem After Lu Yu |
| Bronislaw Maj | Five Poems |
| Elizabeth Antalek | Obaasan Alone |
| Grace Paley | Yes Story |
| Shira Dentz | Spoke |
| Kurt S. Olsson | My Bad Name |
| Carol Potter | Comfort Zone Serenade on Three Strings |
| Betsy Sholl | Reading Back with the Quakers |
| Lisa Beskin | Self Portrait with Fuseli's Imp |
| Nance Van Winkel | Lest You Forget: The Cake Comes Before the Prayers Seme and Semaphore Decked Out |
| Lenore Mayhew | Rabbit Almost Eighty |
| Laurie Blauner | In the Distance, How Can I Tell? |
| Charles O. Hartman | from Morning, Noon and Night |
| D. Nurkse | Grand Bal du Nord Two Small Empires |
| Marianne Boruch | Double Double Little Fugue |
| Jonah Winter | Redemption The Moment The Garden of Crows |
| Helen Conkling | 1933 I Knew an Eccentric |
| Denver Butson | Late Afternoon in the Library Incidental Birds |
| Nancy White | Your Mother Starts Talking Eve (Reprise) |
| Erica Howsare | Woodbook |
| Christopher Davis | Incest A History of the Only War |
| Radmilla Lazic | Ma Soeur |
Deep space. The oblong, twinkleless stars
matte as wax pears. And the astronauts are losing heart,
the heady lisp of auricle and ventricle
fading to a whisper, as muscles shrink to infants' hearts,
or the plum-shaped nubs of swans.
Atrophy, from time in space, even as the space in time
contracts. And how much safer it was--
ascension--at some earlier contraction, each flyer intact,
cupped by a room-size celestial globe
staked to a palace lawn. How much easier, to duck
with the doublets and powdered wigs
through the flap of a trap door and watch on a soot-stained
copper sky the painted constellations, or,
dead-center, a fist of shadowed earth dangling from a ribbon.
All systems go, of course: each moist,
diminishing heart, just sufficient at its terminus to fuel
the arm, the opening hand, to coax
to the lips a fig or pleated straw. Still, how much easier
to drift in a hollow globe, its perpetual
tallow-lit night, while outside with the mazes and spaniels
the day, like an onion, arced up in layers
to the dark heavens. How much safer to enter a time, a space,
when a swan might lift from a palace pond
to cross for an instant--above, below--its outstretched
Cygnus shape, just a membrane
and membrane away. A space in time when such accident
was prophecy, and such singular alignment--
carbon, shadow, membrane, flight--sufficient for the moment.
--Linda Bierds
Because the titmice at the feeder are
all silk and tufted gray, and the cardinals
beautifully paired in their marriage
of subtle and brash, I have to read
the same sentence seven times,
then finally give up and study instead
the suggestions of bright red flashing
as house finches occupy the feeder.
On my lap an essay explaining
Dickinson's deft ironies, elusive
dashes and slants, so dense I have to stop
wanting to get to the end, the bottom
of anything, and just live in the drift
of phrase and clause, until once again
a feathered thing--a nuthatch heading down
a rutted trunk--catches my eye, and I
am torn like an old uneasy treaty,
within my single mind two tribes dwelling,
people of the book, yes, but also others
literate in seed husk, rain slant, cloud.
--Betsy Sholl