A Tidings of Magpies

by Connie Wanek We used to play, long before we bought real houses. A roll of the dice could send a girl to jail. The money was pink, blue, gold as well as green, and we could own a whole railroad or speculate in hotels where others dreaded staying: the cost was extortionary. At last one person would own everything, every teaspoon in the dining car, every spike driven into the planks by immigrants, every crooked mayor. But then, with only the clothes on our backs, we ran outside, laughing.

Your Family’s Farm, Empty by Nick Lantz "Buildings can't want."—Donald Rumsfeld Neither does the ax regret each tree it has bitten, though it leans against the shed like a drunk locked out of his own house. The tractor doesn't moon over the physique of its youth. The dry birdbath makes no plans for the future. What can the barn recall of the day you climbed the ladder into its loft and found a pair of buzzard chicks skulking among the hay bales? Your grandfather shot them with a pistol and kicked them out of the haymow for you to carry to the ditch beyond the field. Does the barn remember those shots exploding inside it like a burst neuron? The weight of those bodies thudding to earth? Can the field remember your feet crossing it, the air heavy with crickets? Does the ditch remember the bones the coyotes gnawed and scattered? You stand here, where the walnut tree was felled, one foot on the smooth disc of...

by Faith Shearin If winter is a house then summer is a window in the bedroom of that house. Sorrow is a river behind the house and happiness is the name of a fish who swims downstream. The unborn child who plays in the fragrant garden is named Mavis: her red hair is made of future and her sleek feet are wet with dreams. The cat who naps in the bedroom has his paws in the sun of summer and his tail in the moonlight of change. You and I spend years walking up and down the dusty stairs of the house. Sometimes we stand in the bedroom and the cat walks towards us like a message. Sometimes we pick dandelions from the garden and watch the white heads blow open in our hands. We are learning to fish in the river of sorrow; we are undressing for a swim. please note: photo art by Keith Woodmancy

( HoneyHaired has left for Greece .) by Thomas R. Smith It's like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust. The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers— all show up at their intended destinations. The theft that could have happened doesn't. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees, and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place. And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

The tragedy is, I still move like the Maybelline dancers...

by Colum McCann "What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence. "Someday the meek might actually want it," he said.

by Seamus Heaney And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightening of flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you'll park or capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

I don't know if many of you have seen this movie. In fact, I forget when it came out--CollegeGrrrl must have been around six or seven and neither of the grrrls remember the movie. But, I do, and I remember being taken aback when I first saw the young actress. She was a ringer for my older daughter, aside from the accent. Glad to have found the videos so I can take a glimpse backwards.

by: W.B. Yeats Went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire a-flame, But something rustled on the floor, And some one called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun. please note: art by Kelly Fearing

nothing to add...

Small Breaths by Eileen Carney Hulme No matter that my heart sinks, sighs, with the weight of skeletons- paths I forgot to follow have slowly sealed rooms go unrecognised for fear of change and I cry at the uncertainty of rainbows. All the daydreams I stole, refusing to give them back are stored as silver dust and each day is a small breath.

Another rainy day in CinCity, and if you are tired of reading this I am equally as tired of writing it. I'd like to say it's a warm spring rain, but it's not. Cold and rainy. CollegeGrrrrl is back in her CollegeTown, missing us after a week up at the lake with her stepdad and a day and a half with all the family together. HoneyHaired Grrrl leaves next week with a group from school for Greece. We need to go shopping for her, but it's a bit hard to get a feel for what their weather will be like. The riots going on there do nothing to motivate TryingVeryHardNotToBeWorried Mom, and think we won't be finding anything in Kevlar at The Gap. Hubby's at work, also missing the lake and being with us, but aside from sitting in the ER and faking a seizure, I don't think I can fix that. *** if you are prone to be offended by inappropriately hilarious hospital humor, please don't watch this. I believe we shall pull on our boots and grab an umbrella to go up to the lo...

Seriously. :>)

what makes us laugh tonight...

by Jane Hirshfield You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

by Katha Pollitt The weather's turned, and the old neighbors creep out from their crammed rooms to blink in the sun, as if surprised to find they've lived through another winter. Though steam heat's left them pale and shrunken like old root vegetables, Mr. and Mrs. Tozzi are already hard at work on their front-yard mini-Sicily: a Virgin Mary birdbath, a thicket of roses, and the only outdoor aloes in Manhattan. It's the old immigrant story, the beautiful babies grown up into foreigners. Nothing's turned out the way they planned as sweethearts in the sinks of Palermo. Still, each waves a dirt-caked hand in geriatric fellowship with Stanley, the former tattoo king of the Merchant Marine, turning the corner with his shaggy collie, who's hardly three but trots arthritically in sympathy. It's only the young who ask if life's worth living, notMrs. Sansanowitz, who for the last hour has been inching her way down the sidewalk, lifting and placing her new aluminu...

by Hayden Carruth For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you had left uneaten for five days and would have left five more before throwing it away. It is early March now. The winter of illness is ending. Across the valley patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms, among fields and knolls and woodlots, like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms in a painting. The cake was stale. But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don't understand, as I don't understand how you can open a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished. So many differences. You a woman, I a man, you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy. Yet how much we love one another. It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult, just the ordinary improbability that occurs over and over, the stupendousness of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. And our poetry, yours short-lined a...

excerpt from The Postmistress by Sarah Blake "...She wanted to push it all back. No time, no town. Nothing but each other's hands and the tempo of their tread. The sky seemed to bowl up and away, curving like a cat. It was a mild morning, as can sometimes happen, as though May had slid in quietly for this January day. There was no wind at all. They walked along, and under the silent morning sky, she imagined she could pull Time like taffy, stretching it longer and longer between her hands until the finest point had been reached, the point just before breaking, and she could live there. A point at the center of time with no going forward, no looking back. Clasped in this way, without speaking, walking into no discernible ending, she could almost believe they tread on time." please note: art by Richard Thorn, Endless Sky

by Jack Gilbert Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he...