Beets
Burnt
Dreamscape #2: Dear Pinocchio
Equine Character: A Meditation
Force of the Sonogram
Jesus Bread
Learning Curve
Migration
Monologue in a Bar
Onychomancy
Patience
Perfected
Raising Houses
Siri on Lesbian Sex
Sleep in Summer
Swimmers
The First Moons of Sitting Bull
The Glass
The House With Only The Sound
of A Dog Barking Inside
of A Dog Barking Inside
Understanding Dear Alice’s Dilemma
Perfected
Marjorie Stelmach
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
- James Wright
The pond is feathered, grey-backed, moving north.
Nothing can hold it.
The fat little saint in the garden prays only
for a paint-job.
Flickers and downies contend at the feeder.
Is this a world in good order?
A red-winged blackbird grates on the world’s nerves—
another of the saints of repetition.
This is not a day
to ask after the gardener.
If Earth is perfected,
it is in its cycles, its seasons, its relentless
replications,
as Time is perfected in the saint’s plaster leprosy,
the scabbed mud of the shoreline,
the pile of lobbed limbs
in the hollow.
As for the geese, they’ve turned to alchemy,
depositing green tubes underfoot, vials
the winds will powder and carry
down to the water.
Drink, and be whole again.
As light sinks, the waters,
resistant to the world’s thirst, stiffen
beneath a glinting shield.
Still, the deer bend to whatever is on offer.
The saints, too, are making do
with gold.
Hard on a throat, gold.
Who would dare to ask after
the gardener?
The pond is flying north against
all natural law,
dragging the dead,
and whatever is un-rooted, uprooted,
unresolved.
See how the waters have broken
into scales, red in the last light, silver
where the moon
touches, troughs, touches.
With sunrise and the washing
of heaven’s flesh in risen mist, ask:
Is this a world in good order?
Ask again. Tomorrow
is the only answer, every sacred
dying cell of it.
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Blaze up into golden stones.
- James Wright
The pond is feathered, grey-backed, moving north.
Nothing can hold it.
The fat little saint in the garden prays only
for a paint-job.
Flickers and downies contend at the feeder.
Is this a world in good order?
A red-winged blackbird grates on the world’s nerves—
another of the saints of repetition.
This is not a day
to ask after the gardener.
If Earth is perfected,
it is in its cycles, its seasons, its relentless
replications,
as Time is perfected in the saint’s plaster leprosy,
the scabbed mud of the shoreline,
the pile of lobbed limbs
in the hollow.
As for the geese, they’ve turned to alchemy,
depositing green tubes underfoot, vials
the winds will powder and carry
down to the water.
Drink, and be whole again.
As light sinks, the waters,
resistant to the world’s thirst, stiffen
beneath a glinting shield.
Still, the deer bend to whatever is on offer.
The saints, too, are making do
with gold.
Hard on a throat, gold.
Who would dare to ask after
the gardener?
The pond is flying north against
all natural law,
dragging the dead,
and whatever is un-rooted, uprooted,
unresolved.
See how the waters have broken
into scales, red in the last light, silver
where the moon
touches, troughs, touches.
With sunrise and the washing
of heaven’s flesh in risen mist, ask:
Is this a world in good order?
Ask again. Tomorrow
is the only answer, every sacred
dying cell of it.