John Gould Fletcher

The Silence

There is a silence I carry about with me always; 
A silence perpetual, for it is self-created; 
A silence of heat, of water, of unchecked fruitfulness 
Through which each year the heavy harvests bloom, 
          and burst and fall. 

Deep, matted green silence of my South, 
Often within the push and scorn of great cities, 
I have seen that mile-wide waste of water swaying 
          out to you,
And on its current glimmering, I am going to the 
          sea. 

There is a silence I have achieved: I have walked 
          beyond its threshold; 
I know it is without horizons, boundless, fathomless, 
          perfect. 
And some day maybe, far away,  
I will curl up in it at last and sleep an endless sleep. 

           Aug. 20-27, 1915

Christian Bök

The Great Silence

Prithee, phantom — lend me pity,
while I, blind and weary, tend my
lamplight. Tell me truly, do you
sit before me, like some pilgrim,
waiting mutely in these shadows
for the warrant of my welcome?
Must I quell my heart to harken
for a whisper at my hearthside?
Must I shelter here at midnight,
like a boy who waves his lantern
from the shipmast on the ocean,
hoping that a star might flicker
in reply? Or have I summoned
my assassin, come to see me die?

*

Prithee, phantom — am I foolish
to be pleading for your pardons
while abiding by this gravesite?
Am I ghoulish from my hunger,
longing for a throng of chorists,
when, instead of forests, I scry
only barrens, where no song can
flourish? Am I meant to take my
lesson only from your muteness?
Do you tutor me while songless
in these tundras, where a brutal
hunter seeks, unseen, to slay me
for my flints and tinder? Do you
eye me from an eyrie, like a spy?

*

Prithee, phantom — reassure me
that my grieving has its witness.
Tell me, must I be the first slave
waking in a vacant death camp?
Must I be this frail thing aching
in a broken mousetrap? Dare I
fathom what has yet to smite me,
like some plague or famine, be it
falling moons or blasted atoms —
speak! I sigh, to break this silence,
all these beacons lit to make me
worthy to have earned a greeting.
Do not let me burn, unknowing
if no others hear me say: goodbye.


Author's note: "The Great Silence" is a triptych of blank-verse sonnets, all written in trochaic octameter. The work responds to the Fermi Paradox — a fretful mystery (which notes that, given the age of the galaxy and the likelihood of ubiquitous, biological evolution, an interstellar civilization must have already preceded us, with enough time to visit every star — and yet we see no sign of such a civilization anywhere).

Jacob Riyeff

On the Transformation of a Novel under the Hand and Eye of the Reader 
 
the heart-change time-wrought 
from pages crisp 
square-cut, finger-smooth 
to oil-embraced 
edge-fringe and bent: 
a fragment of life 
a having-read 

                              —Lake Michigan, Bailey’s Harbor


Wisconsin Lunes

       a. east village
 
in cool autumn rains 
buses sigh
down nocturnal streets


       b. simili modo: +ecclesia st. hedwigis+ 
 
blood that is poured out, 
that is wine: 
the running river 


       c. baxter’s hollow lune 
 
marsh marigold fresh 
into bloom 
along the spring run 


       d. lima bog lune 
 
asters in the sedge 
looking out 
petals to water


On Seeing the Glacial Outwash Fan Exposed at Janesville’s Rotary Gardens in Late July 
 
Wonder-filled we, contemplating 
your works this sweat-skinned afternoon. 
Mosses and forbs soiled this hillside 
now cut bare, sands exposed. 
Root hairs splayed in lowering sun 
only now since glacial ice pulled back. 
Maples and walnuts shade with green, 
 
but now erstwhile sea-bottoms will blow  
and chip and fall beneath cherries and elms. 
But face to face: a gift for Sunday 
as I pass thru the town of my birth.


winter morning

fresh snow
              new grooves

Lisa Cooper

After the Flood
            (An anagram-by-letter of Psalm 130, NKJV)

—Oh! A quilt of pied tufts,
a richly lilied hill—

A voice sounded
to subdue the humid deluge;
the Lord split the water,
appointed mirrored moor,
anointed the floral
and verdant domain.

Howls He, “Out you
dry habitat!
Hound, chimp, moth, heifer,
riotous roaming ivy!”

There is wood to hew,
cyan shoreline to shield.
You have dominion of
a cosmic freshness,
a holy bouquet.

The world—an inheritance—
mightily moves,
whirrs with mirth, too.

Hallow, write, the Orderer
the History Orator
to whom we offer our
fire, yes, flame!
Its praise as hymn-waft
orbits stone, ascends to sky.

                                             
                                  We are voyagers, discoverers
                                  of the not-known,
                                  the unrecorded;
                                  we have no map;
                                  possibly we will reach haven,
                                  heaven.
                                          —H.D., from Trilogy

Dan Rattelle

Actæon
     to himself
 
Intact but fragile,
a wild azalea
grows in stone. Obscure
in blue hills, what fire
but its own luster
could illuminate
my steps, populate
this ground with shadows?
 

Wicker Basket

A basketful of wet linen
to be pinned on the line,
bleached in the sun,
ironed, starched,
                       and folded
into the feminine:
 
This twist of willow, chipped
at the rim, knows
the snap of wind, knows grief
as love’s souvenir.
 
Used to collect the summer fruits?
Maybe once
but now it knows its place –
 
Its place beneath the cellar stairs,
filling up slowly,
utilitarian and
adjunct to the machine.

Isabel Chenot

North Fork Tuolumne River, Mid-July

Between the places  
where the least breeze tries
to feather water’s smoothed-out wing

and the sub-lumined seams  
of noon  
where water’s just reflected air  
and hardly moves,

the sun strikes shattered arcs
from fringing trees and rocks—
cross-oscillating rivulets,
white onto green—

plaiting the sheen.
The fringe is soluble,
and it distends, dilates
the bottom of the pool.

While prisms flit,  
skim multi-plumed,  
go dark and gleam—

flickers of fish and mirrored dragonflies  
in iridescent nets.  
Here all that consciousness implies  

is limpid. I can peer down  
at grooves of sky
and stratify  

the flecked silt of mind's watermark.  

Ryan Sliwa

Transitions 
	after Ammons

The sun swings lower
     from its equinoctial arc,   
	again and always again. 
The leaves blanch and desiccate. 

A drought sucks the tension
     from the wheatgrass pulp
and the meadow droops. 

But these stems of wildflowers, 
          rusted by September, 
suspend the last late color: 
   
Yellow clustered nodules, 
          the spindly fur of purple asters, and 				
               the silver dew-soaked tufts of false cotton.

The ineluctable motion is conserved
          and unaccountably gentle.


Amtrak

The rained-on meadow is so far away
From the city station I wait in tonight. 

The cold, manicured air, the false light, 
The pushed mop, and hollow footfall echoing. 
On the platform, grime and odors. 

Sometimes we are very far from what we love. 
These empty tracks run somewhere through the dark.  

The dogwood is alive with cicadas;  
Hydrangeas in the garden shake. 
The storm moves off.   


Anni Circulum 	

The hem of August is   			
Heavy with many rains. 			
The lawn’s edge, the walks,
Burst with weedy growth.					

Every last thing green. 
Tomatoes splitting on the vine. 
A thin line of moss 
At the bottom of the window panes. 

But October will shock again
In yellow and red and bronze.
Again and always autumn, 
Always the gentle ebb.

November will coil up
Air, light, and heat, 
And become another sacrament 
Of the inexorable things.

Monika Cooper

Thirteen Haiku

1.
parade floats idle
in stopped traffic—clusters of
crab apples ripen

2.
goldfinch wets his wings.
the plaster wolf sits still, charmed
by the Saint’s fiddle

3.
floral wilderness—
bunched closed, false dandelions
provide the French knots

4.
distractions at prayer:
tiny wings incandescent
in the blazing night light

5.
kin to the meadow
kind to the milkweed: always
the Monarch returns

6.
a parking lot grill:
flakes of snow kiss the charcoals
and quietly die

7.
the lake is always
here but the water always
has somewhere to go

8.
crystal interlock
of water’s piscine quills: each
little wave, a leap

9.
a rhododendron
drink—and the hummingbird vaults
himself over roofs

10.
one crow bunched in a
waste of cattails—maintains a
hermit’s radius

11.
water’s edge: spreading
my skirt, I spread my shadow
over the baby

12.
sun on the surface:
silent Roman candles in
rapid explosion

13.
Buddha sits under
the orange daylilies with
toddler equipoise