Midnight Runs Rain

Chirp of cricket rub
bee flower hum song

blackbird red winged
in thin reed lift off

train whistle blows 
weather blue to grey

she remembers his voice -
midnight runs rain.

Debbie Calverley

Void and Compensation (Field Guide)

Page one's a white space for thinking;
even here among the evergreens
beyond the living room and the white noise.

The guide held firmly in the hand means to see—
Through mist and wind made visible by branches,

do you name a thing and lose other options, counterlives?
Are you in turn a season named and filled with music?

Say then the weather changes and takes the singing elsewhere?
Of fidelity and proximity, the latter is a watchword.

A window. A looking out through lenses
that magnify and conjure up an other

in your place or by your side. Two forms. Two matters.
From expectations of pure pop in flowering trees

down to knee-high scrub, with hope and faith
I tried to come to terms with what was common.

I heard and sang back a little brown bird:
Wish-wish, my little clay-color, coo.

I tried to name what I saw and how I felt
and map a purple hurt as presence through winter.

And then that bird was gone. Or the song,
or the singing, and what's left

is a field where birds might happen:
a mind between living room and evergreens,

A blind so we first see without being seen—
not mentioned in books, found only in looking.

Michael Morse

Psalm 20

When you appease my heart, I've nothing left to say,
my agitated words fall fast asleep.

I don't even remember my petty dramas—
your lullaby sings me awake.

Others assure me I imagine this, that to receive you
the wound in my chest must stay fresh.

And that the anguish of others reopens the cut,
and that it's not good to suppress their clamor.

It's not that they're wrong, you come to me this way, too,
but don't let them touch your dawn upon my life,

Those few seconds of dawn when everything is taken with adoration,
and you come back from elsewhere, you return from someone else's darkness.

PATRICE DE LA TOUR DU PIN
translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz

Space Junk

There is a point on every mission
when something must be jettisoned

into the thin, black air.
Nothing likes to be abandoned,

no one likes to be compared.
There is a point when the plan

lifts from our control panels
and shimmers while we go ahead

and stare. How long do we
call the plan the plan after it

disappears? There's no such thing
as a few minutes alone. There's no

such thing as making up your mind
when everything is determined:

the rate of our turning, our distance
from the sun. I followed you here

with my naked eye. You've lost
your white glove. It travels now

like a comet burning up the sky.

LISA OLSTEIN

Poetry

I am being followed by a flock of winged words,
plagued by their black eyes and beaks.
Their tongues are sparks in the blue air
and I have heard their songs so often that I almost
understand the sense beneath the notes.
They make intricate iambic patterns round my head,
a lyric latticework, a tilt of time.
At night they roost along the window ledge,
and though I've nailed my window closed,
my last waking thought is always looking for its rhyme.

Moyra Donaldson

Ripe

I feel the skull behind my ear

photo of you in Hawaii

photo of you in a purple cap

in a lawn chair at the lake

Can a woman go skiing

alone in Tehran?

Debbie Calverley

George Quasha: from “Speaking Animate”

G. Quasha: Axial Drawing – Dakini Series 2012

1                                              words under pressure bleed original sense

The trouble with paradise is you never want to be away from home.

I make what calls me out.
All gone before you know it.

Words may drop passing color yet seeing you here now are born again, and again.
Closing a word in the mouth feels the sound until the tongue can’t stay still.

To unmask is to go silent.
Language makes no promise to communicate.

An articulated sound has it own dream in the ear.
Her presence in the room gives aroma to the syllables I voice.

Now she’s ready to draw eros from foreign bodies.
It starts by focusing on the sounds beyond hearing, still felt.

By she I mean who speaking animate configures.
This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through.

Through thoroughly, as a word weighs.

2                                                          a voice scape landing

They’re playing the perfect music for our movie, Rushing to Meet Anima.
The rhythm’s spacious enough I slip in the back door without a trace.

The drama is gathering soundless. It lives like that.

I never let go of her hand in my other world.

This I learn from you who read me back.

They say ancient Irish saw serpents where there aren’t any.
I descend from there to here where I see what I say even unsounding.

Writing I extinguish my voice but there is calling you hear.

Falling apart is syntactic.
Writing at the edge of collapse is surrender.

Saying depths in a tongue all hands puts the cards on the table over the edge.

Time to stop asserting order where it’s already in waiting.

Write this off as of a poet or one inspired by being written through.

3                                              time has its ins and outs

A sacred grove takes refuge in the voice.

A language hasn’t come through to itself if being inside isn’t self-instructive.
Syllable by syllable earwise spreading orders the cells.

What configures signs, time switching subjects on the line like my life.
It seems the same is saying there were no same.

A journey ever worth taking records itself within your hearing even now.
“I will always have been here before with or without you.”

Gnoaxial poetics, for want of right naming, finds pulse in grammatical drift.

The more she says the more I find configures.
The new singular noun soon plurals.

I’m beginning to recall the forgotten adventure, long since signed for.
The time of our playing recalls us back together.

This very time turns into space in our search for self true north.
Her tone is dissecting the next move out before.

The tense is two timing us.

The experience beyond reportable experience is self sensing.
Real work is indefensible.

4                                               seeing through hearing

Now to dowse the poetics of the poem to come.
We hold these principles to be self evident—in order to be self evidence.

Configuration is parthenogenetic. 
We’re talking fate here. 
High flying biology. Bios mating logos. 
Flowering, percipiently imaginarily auto-erotically speaking. 
It sees and knows what it’s doing not a moment before.

We call back to our other us through the air pressed into sound.
I’m just trapping animal life in its resound here.

Our group gives the dream time.
A date’s charge belongs at heart to anytime.

Our only mythical bird is fleeing the page as we speak.
It makes a very very very fast line out.
Sculpting hands in the saying.

Not every finger is instantly intelligible.
Signing principle, it calls itself, and hands itself over.

5                                              undesigning music

Watching your dancing feet is its own dance.

What if everyone talked funny at once.
I’m willing to avoid special pleading but ignored distractions will have their say.

Sudden behaviors may be of unaccountable origin.
Tongue the surface long enough and you bleed old demons long in exile.

Learn from the dog to dig up old shame, then bury it where you want it.
If you find a guy’s personality be sure to send it back.

Meet you where we know each other.

Beautiful music takes me away rather than throwing me further in.
Clamoring lines cannot disguise the sound of one mind slipping.

The center is holding just fine, yet the periphery is forgetting where it is.

Freudian slips of the hand put your mouth on your money.

Also note paradisal memes at the tip of the slip.

Life goes on … off … on … off.

6                                              scared sacred

What am I hearing with these other ears?

Prepare your mouth with pre-carnal intentions.
Poetry valorizes childhood because children make language.

First language.

It gets you little again to be verbal.

I can’t deny my excitement upon reaching the threshold of carnality.
No more hovering over secondhand bodies.

The heart is the organ of consorting.

Life is intelligent means it knows where it’s going but I don’t.
Fearful asymmetry.

Contacting the word’s core intent to mean itself is poetic insistence.

Logophagi know that certain morphemes are more delicious than others.

No truth behind the poem, only forward in its own before.

Lawnmower Crow and Dog

Irritated cat 
sits silently

Debbie Calverley