The orchestras kept playing. They had a gin fix.
Why in this fog I still see you I can’t say.
With your beard and high darkness around me.
In your small machine many messages
and faces that once let you in.
The ocean drowns time all the time, slowly.
Everyone had a birthday and buried something.
I was coming from one person and into another
when really what are we: some accident.
In this show where we all have a favorite.
What we have is a taste for that thing we can feel,
will not say. Some of us wanted more
and in all the wrong ways too.
There was of course an escape…
in a year, on a street, in some near distant past
when what had us was childish and flame.
And maybe it would have been different
and maybe it would have been this.
Do you remember my hair when I met you?
Much longer. The violins ended it well.
Outside, the city continued to tease us.
Hurricanes came, storms couldn’t please us:
it was all very fast and beautifully made.
You ask why I’m thinking of death
but I’m thinking of you and it’s fleeting.
We were terrible, unrelenting and everywhere then.
All I know is I can’t stop writing about people.
So much happened. I can’t stop writing about love.
ALEX DIMITROV
Pine
She opens her heart, a heart
full of needles
and stands at the sink
pulling flesh from bone.
She waits and watches
the broth for boiling
and wonders if
she'll see him again. He,
the stack of wobbly
coins. He, the train
shaking the rails. The pine
bent heavy with cones
whose boughs
reach down to sweep
the roof this morning as
she opens the door
and casts her hope
on the new snow, but
finds the tracks
on her threshold are stars
from raccoons
last night casing the house.
LAURA VAN PROOYEN
Our House Was on Fire
Looking out at the sea
her heart pangs
to the endless beat of blue.
The tips of her fingers
hold secrets, words like frozen -
her toes remember squishing
into boots, while teeth recall
the chatter of an open mouth
the gasp of inhaling January
all at once
Back home, 'tis the season
of stalled cars, frozen tires
plugged driveways, the way
a sun looks warm but isn't.
She knows looking out at the sea
her heart will pang
to the endless beat of white
always longing for the beat of blue.
- Debbie Calverley
One more in the name of love.
This film, like many others,
claims we'll enjoy life
now that we've come through
difficulties, dangers
so incredibly condensed
that they must be over.
If the hardship
was undergone by others,
we identified with them
and, if the danger was survived
by simpler life forms,
they're included in this moment
when the credits roll
and we don't know
when to stand
RAE ARMANTROUT
