A Tidings of Magpies

by Tom Hennen Inside the barn the sheep were standing, pushed close to one another. Some were dozing, some had eyes wide open listening in the dark. Some had no doubt heard of wolves. They looked weary with all the burdens they had to carry, like being thought of as stupid and cowardly, disliked by cowboys for the way they eat grass about an inch into the dirt, the silly look they have just after shearing, of being one of the symbols of the Christian religion. In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were full of light gathered on summer pastures. Above them their white breath was suspended, while far off in the pine woods, night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering, along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes, but the power that moves through the world and makes our hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself. please note: artwork by Robert Bateman

"But by evening the comfortable gloom of December had returned. Nearly all the snow in the treetops had slipped away, and with it the illusion that daylight had somehow been trapped in the canopy above. The woods had reerected themselves. Sunset came and went, and all the color in the natural landscape drained away with it. Blue Christmas bulbs strung along the gables of an old farmhouse, or the orange glow of an incandescent lamp seen through a roadside window at twilight, made it plain how utterly the world had been reduced to black and white. The cold came on a little deeper that night, and in the morning the snow on the woodpile was spiked with frost." from The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

by Dara Wier                              I had been continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results. On most days the children learned how to do something. Time passed around us as something approaching a figure eight might move in order to let all else move or be moved by our large numbers of feelings exponentially on high alert once we let them register. It passed us around. It passed around us like a river around a boulder. Music consisted of light & light came on time. It was impossible for us not to anthropomorphize everything. And yes, watching ice skaters, the kind called figure skaters, the ones who aren't doing anything other than tracking again & again some figure of infinity marked out on ice for them, this never failed to quiet us down & take us some plac...