by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Rose Red

Just back from the laundromat, Mother, soul and socks both clean, I am feeling rather blessed, drinking wine from far Provence, sitting in my wicker chair on cushions bright as schools of feeding fish. For dinner I ate nothing but young food--scrambled eggs, small round potatoes, the kind they call red bliss. How long have I been waiting for this new life? Free, at last, from history, that hallucination, from the sandy pit of grief. I sink into the tufted cushions of my life and become again the child who watched you set the table every night for dinner until she was old enough to help. Beyond the kitchen window, a rose, red faced, dyes the clouds pink as skin, blushing throat to ankle. Behind the clouds, the universe, all bones and moving stars. I hear an owl and know it's you. I hear a mouse inside the walls and know it's you. I close my eyes. I see a bridge. I walk across it.

From Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press).

American Life in Poetry: Column 018

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Every reader of this column has at one time felt 
the frightening and paralyzing powerlessness of 
being a small child, unable to find a way to 
repair the world. Here the California poet, 
Dan Gerber, steps into memory to capture such a moment.

The Rain Poured Down

My mother weeping
in the dark hallway, in the arms of a man,
not my father,
as I sat at the top of the stairs unnoticed--
my mother weeping and pleading for what I didn't know
then and can still only imagine--
for things to be somehow other than they were,
not knowing what I would change,
for, or to, or why,
only that my mother was weeping
in the arms of a man not me,
and the rain brought down the winter sky
and hid me in the walls that looked on,
indifferent to my mother's weeping,
or mine,
in the rain that brought down the dark afternoon.

Dan Gerber's most recent book is "Trying to Catch the Horses" 
(Michigan State University Press, 1999). 
"The Rain Poured Down" copyright (c) 2005 by Dan Gerber 
and reprinted by permission of the author. 
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, 
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English 
at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not 
accept unsolicited poetry.

******************************

by Susan Elbe

Miracles Enough

Evening, russet as an old penny, drops into our open hands.
A loon cry arcs across wet air,
full of copper and fog.
Here I am, here. Another calls. Here, I am here.
Back and forth they yodel,
flipping the bright coins of their want into the fading light.

Out of the long grass, the moon, enormous, paper-white
rises and breaks tether, weightless as a summer kite.

But we want more. We want miracles,
to hang on the sleeve of heaven and witness miracles.

Deep-sea divers film a cormorant 300 feet down,
a depth where water weighs enough to crush human lungs
and Russians, drilling the Antarctic ice cap,
find Lake Vostock two miles under glacial seal,
its warm and pristine water full of million-year-old microbes.

Even these are not enough. We want myth to manifest itself
beyond our own lives, to revision our beginnings—fish
who flung themselves onto the land and walked,
the wolf who howls inside the skins we wear like gloves,
the hard idiom of stars, eternity’s declension.

We want the hollow bones of birds who fly in water
to be the flutes we've forgotten how to play,
flutes to sing us through the deep and salty dark.

First appeared in Ascent (Vol. 26, Number 3, Spring 2002)

by Robin Chapman

DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS


What’s not changing in time?
The glass in the window pane
sags slowly, the sunlight
streams through the glass, the cat
washes her face with her paw,
the house gathers dust motes,
the geraniums we brought in
before frost take root and flower.
Outside, a wind is blowing the leaves about.
The universe we once thought steady-state
is flying apart. Inside, we are waltzing,
laughing, to the music of the nickelharppe.
And you, reader, anchored by gravity
and oxygen and eye, thinking now
of the sky full of stars, dancing, house repairs–
what strange, unpredictable pattern is yours?

-from Images of a Complex World:
The Art and Poetry of Chaos (R. Chapman &
J.C. Sprott, Singapore: World Scientific, 2005).
First appeared in The Wisconsin Poets' Calendar:
2006.

by Sandy Stark

Going to See the Cranes: for Gretchen Schoff


1

A few conversations, questions,
a book I pressed into your hand,
a note you wrote in return:
I thought this a modest exchange.
I planned to attend another class
you taught when I had time,
to send another poem
when I wrote one.


2

Now, on the day others meet
in your memory,
I go to see the cranes.
In the Baraboo hills the trees blaze
red and yellow and gold
against an October sky
that, as sure as this day is warm,
will bring a cold day tomorrow.
White-bellied birds rush out
from under a bridge
and over ruffled water below.
A row of trees turns
the narrow road into a golden lane,
paved with golden leaves.


3

The sun warms the air
and one large bumblebee,
taking its last, lazy taste of flight.
A sign says the fenced-in field
holds the African crowned cranes.
Instead, I walk to the circular house
at the top of a rise, and then,
as I arrive, the cranes
emerge from their pens,
feathers dripping from their sides,
and something wonderful begins:


from behind a hill,
the clatter of unpenned cranes--
bugler to bugler calls;
cranes in cages reply.
I see their bristled crowns
and downy throats rise;
they spread their enormous wings;
and then I hear them sing.


4

“You send me such lovely things,” you wrote.
I kept that little slip of paper for weeks,
pleased to give you something back.
But today, stopped in my tracks
in a circle of color and sound
I have perhaps found a better way
to thank you, by going to see
the red and gold and black-crowned cranes
who sing on an autumn day.


-published in The Wisconsin Academy Review, Spring 1996

by Judith Strasser

Last Night at the Scottish Retreat

September 28, 2001

No matter that you are leaving
a castle without a moat,
dodgy beef,
sulphurous broccoli,
people still strange
after four weeks
of sharing the loo--
you don’t want to go.

The world has turned
wicked, and though
you were always at risk
in Scotland the mist
obscures the dust
and you think
you are probably safe
so long as you go
no further than Edinburgh.

Home means stories
your friends will tell,
echoes of terror,
and how you won’t
want to admit
thank god there was no TV.

Published in The Ledge, Spring-Summer 2005

by Grace Cavalieri

Even If You Could Lick All The Words,
The Ink Will Never Fade
…John Yau

If you can write one good poem,
one you like, well
you can put any two things together and it’ll work

Two bad people can make a good marriage …
You can wear a backless dress to church
and sit in the front pew,

or plant two pounds of peas
in a one acre plot and not worry.

You can tell your sister to go marry the bum
You have better things to do.

You have written something on your desk that’ll stay there.

From Cuffed Frays (The Argonne House Press, c2001)