A Tidings of Magpies

Horizon of Feet by Philip Dacey "I hate dancers. Well, I don't really hate them, but they're not musicians. They just count beats, oblivious to the music. They wouldn't know a theme if it bit them. They're arithmetician-athletes." We're sitting, cooling off, after racquetball, and I've asked the principal flutist of the New York City Ballet Orchestra, Paul Dunkel, to solo in words, to talk about his work. "Musicians are there to serve the music, not vice-versa, as with dancers. Think of us as the composer's lawyers, and our job's to put forward for our client the best possible case. "But playing for dancers we're little more than drummers in a circus, just there to highlight with sound the dog whose trick it is to run and jump through a flaming hoop: drumroll, rimshot. "Likewise, some composers think they're tailors, writing to order. They make the music fit the dancing. Four extra steps? Then add two bars. I call that mu...

Joy by Julie Cadwallader Staub Who could need more proof than honey— How the bees with such skill and purpose enter flower after flower sing their way home to create and cap the new honey just to get through the flowerless winter. And how the bear with intention and cunning raids the hive shovels pawful after pawful into his happy mouth bats away indignant bees stumbles off in a stupor of satiation and stickiness. And how we humans can't resist its viscosity its taste of clover and wind its metaphorical power: don't we yearn for a land of milk and honey? don't we call our loved ones "honey?" all because bees just do, over and over again, what they were made to do. Oh, who could need more proof than honey to know that our world was meant to be and was meant to be sweet? ***** A foggy morning in CinCity. Temperatures yesterday warmed into the 40's and any memories of The Snowstorm That Stopped a City are tucked in small white mounds under the pine trees in b...

The Hungry Gap-Time by Thomas Lux late August, before the harvest, every one of us worn down by the plow, the hoe, rake, and worry over rain. Chicken Coop confiscated by the rats and the raptors with nary a mouse to hunt. The corn's too green and hard, and the larder's down to dried apples and double-corned cod. We lie on our backs and stare at the blue; our work is done, our bellies flat. The mold on the wheat killed hardly a sheaf. The lambs fatten on the grass, our pigs we set to forage on their own-they'll be back when they whiff the first shucked ears of corn. Albert's counting bushels in his head to see if there's enough to ask Harriet's father for her hand. Harriet's father is thinking about Harriet's mother's bread pudding. The boys and girls splash in the creek, which is low but cold. Soon, soon there will be food again, and from what our hands have done we shall live another year here by the river in the valley above the fault line benea...