A Tidings of Magpies

after Rilke's Herbsttag by Jeredith Merrin Time, it is time. Summer has been long-stretched-out, full. Go ahead, Fall: shrink down the days and sugar the grapes for late-harvest wine. Anyone still unknown to herself will stay, probably, that way. Anyone unlinked by love will be love- left-out now—waking, mind-pacing up and down up and down, restless as leaf-bits and papers in the street. I believe this will be the last poem and writing I post in a while. Perhaps forever. Who knows. With the rest of the stuff in my life that needs to get done, writing and blogging are becoming yet another task to complete, and not a respite. I have so enjoyed meeting all of you and hearing your voices in the comments, and you may still see me lurking around some rainy Sunday afternoons. Best of life to you all and wishes for all of its blessings to you and yours. I'll be looking for you further on down the road.

by John Lindgren Endings are always more difficult than beginnings. Don't ask me why I remember lying alone in the grass at dusk, gored by the tiny horns of snails, filaments of spider-silk like threads of starlight across my eyes. I was listening to the orange and blue leaves explain my countless lives, so many that I could not make out a single word. Their colors wound each of us in unnameable, and different ways. By day they are the splayed hands of children held up in self-wonderment. At night they are the flutterings of dying birds. Lighting my way with a dandelion I hold in one hand like a sparkler, in the other a jar of fireflies, I make my way through the forking darkness as the leafless trees climb the night like stairs. please note: art by Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on Water

by Julia Kasdorf The window frame catches a draft that smells of dead leaves and wet street, and I wrap arms around my knees, look down on these small breasts, so my spine forms a curve as perfect as the rim of the moon. I want to tell the man sleeping curled as a child beside me that this futon is a raft. The moon and tiny star we call sun are the parents who at last approve of us. For once, we haven't borrowed more than we can return. Stars above our cement backyard are as sharp as those that shine far from Brooklyn, and we are not bound for anything worse than we can imagine, as long as we turn on the kitchen lamp and light a flame under the pot, as long as we sip coffee from beautiful China-blue cups and love the steam of the shower and thrusting our feet into trousers. As long as we walk down our street in sun that ignites red leaves on the maple, we will see faces on the subway and know we may take our places somewhere among them.

Lonely Lake by Joyce Kennedy It was the name given it on our hiking map. Intrigued, we followed a narrow, rising trail flecked with autumn, aspen leaves beneath our feet, young trees leaning across as if to guard the integrity of loneliness. At the end, we found the lake, small jewel shining in space, not obviously frequented, although there was a rickety dock and on it, a battered rowboat and dented canoe. No paddles. We sat, one in rowboat, one in canoe, the loneliness of the lake pared down to bare essentials— shore lined with thick, dark pine, intense and cloudless sky, sun flaring on water's changing surface. A hawk dipped down to startle the peace while two ducks rode the ripples unperturbed. Stunned by beauty, we reached across— boat to canoe, canoe to boat—to touch hands, our own lonely selves connecting as lightly and effortlessly as the dragonfly wing that earlier brushed against my face.

by Sharon Bryan My best lover ever is dead. And the second best. Nothing to do with me, it was years since I'd seen them. Still, they took something with them no one else knows about me, and if I know it, I know only half, like every other line of a poem.

by Katha Pollitt Everywhere I look I see my fate. In the subway. In a stone. On the curb where people wait for the bus in the rain. In a cloud. In a glass of wine. When I go for a walk in the park it's a sycamore leaf. At the office, a dull pencil. In the window of Woolworth's my fate looks back at me through the shrewd eyes of a dusty parakeet. Scrap of newspaper, dime in a handful of change, down what busy street do you hurry this morning, an overcoat among overcoats, with a train to catch, a datebook full of appointments? If I called you by my name would you turn around or vanish round the corner, leaving a faint odor of orange-flower water, tobacco, twilight, snow?

by Katha Pollitt It's better to be a cat than to be a human. Not because of their much-noted grace and beauty— their beauty wins them no added pleasure, grace is only a cat's way of getting without fuss from one place to another— but because they see things as they are. Cats never mistake a saucer of milk for a declaration of passion or the crook of your knees for a permanent address. Observing two cats on a sunporch, you might think of them as a pair of Florentine bravoes awaiting through slitted eyes the least lapse of attention— then slash! the stiletto or alternately as a long-married couple, who hardly notice each other but find it somehow a comfort sharing the couch, the evening news, the cocoa. Both these ideas are wrong. Two cats together are like two strangers cast up by different storms on the same desert island who manage to guard, despite the utter absence of privacy, chocolate, useful domestic articles, reading material, their separate solitudes. They would not dre...

by Pat Schneider Only once in every twenty-four hours the train comes through my town—in the dark, still center of the night. Sometimes I am awake to hear it, its wail a long sound-tunnel back to another time, another place. 1934. Early March in southern Missouri, northern Arkansas. The air cold, the night wind hard in the open doorway of a boxcar headed south toward Louisiana. My mother told me this in the winter of her dying. Always she said my father was just no good—her Ozark accent persisting to the end: a woman warshed and rinched the clothes. A man who didn't treat a woman right was just no good. It was the heart of the Depression, she said. I never did tell this to anyone—I was so ashamed. We wanted to go to see Papa and Mama in the Socialist Colony down in Louisiana, but we didn't have any money. So we rode the rails. One night a man in the boxcar with us said, "If y'all know what's good for you, you'll jump right now....

Letter I To Mrs. Saville, England "...I am already far north of London; and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its broad disc just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There--for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators--there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on ...

Shopping for Homecoming dresses, hither... and yon..

by Lisa Martin-Demoor Memory at its finest lacks corroboration —no photographs, no diaries— nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick. Just because you've got this idea of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires — just because somewhere in your memory there's a rust-coloured pulse taking its place among canola yellow and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures— just because you want to doesn't mean you can build a home for that old, peculiar ghost. Someone tells you you've imagined it, that gash across the ripe belly of summer, and for a year, maybe two, you believe them. Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned, to escape the heat, out the Pontiac's backseat window you just remembered it that way because you preferred the better version. Someone tells you this. But what can they know of faith? To ask you to leave behind this insignificance. This innocence that can't be proved: ...

by Franz Wright What is today's date? Who is the President? How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten? What does "people who live in glass houses" mean? Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false? Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? Name five rivers. What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes? How about some lovely soft Thorazine music? If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him? What should you do if I fall asleep? Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps? What is the moral of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"? What about his Everest shadow? Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations? Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence? Should an odd numb...