A Tidings of Magpies

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward    signs painted  Peaches . From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into    the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. There's a cool breeze coming in through the window. The cicadas are singing. I'm 5 minutes away from going for a morn...

by Jane Kenyon From here I see a single red cloud impaled on the Town Hall weather vane. Now the horses are back in their stalls, and the dogs are nowhere in sight that made them run and buck in the brittle morning light. You laughed only once all day-- when the cat ate cucumbers in Chekhov's story...and now you smoke and pace the long hallway downstairs. The cook is roasting meat for the evening meal, and the smell rises to all the rooms. Red-faced skiers stamp past you on their way in; their hunger is Homeric. I know you are thinking of the accident-- of picking the slivered glass from his hair. Just now a truck loaded with hay stopped at the village store to get gas. I wish you would look at the hay-- the beautiful sane and solid bales of hay.

by Jane Kenyon The grasses in the field have toppled, and in places it seems that a large, now absent, animal must have passed the night. The hay will right itself if the day turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully. None of your blustering entrances or exits, doors swinging wildly on their hinges, or your huge unconscious sighs when you read something sad, like Henry Adams's letters from Japan, where he traveled after Clover died. Everything blooming bows down in the rain: white irises, red peonies; and the poppies with their black and secret centers lie shattered on the lawn.  (Brutus, August 2001-July 2015)

by Jim Harrison After days of darkness I didn't understand a second of yellow sunlight here and gone through a hole in clouds as quickly as a flashbulb, an immense memory of a moment of grace withdrawn. It is said that we are here but seconds in cosmic time, twelve and a half billion years, but who is saying this and why? In the Salt Lake City airport eight out of ten were fiddling relentlessly with cell phones. The world is too grand to reshape with babble. Outside the hot sun beat down on clumsy metal birds and an actual ten-million-year-old crow flew by squawking in bemusement. We're doubtless as old as our mothers, thousands of generations waiting for the sunlight.

It just makes me laugh...

by Marilyn Kallet In the dry summer field at nightfall, fireflies rise like sparks. Imagine the presence of ghosts flickering, the ghosts of young friends, your father nearest in the distance. This time they carry no sorrow, no remorse, their presence is so light. Childhood comes to you, memories of your street in lamplight, holding those last moments before bed, capturing lightning-bugs, with a blossom of the hand letting them go. Lightness returns, an airy motion over the ground you remember from Ring Around the Rosie. If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies again, not part of your stories, as unaware of you as sleep, being beautiful and quiet all around you.

by May Swenson The sun is hot, the ocean cool. The waves throw down their snowy heads. I run under their hiss and boom, mine their wild breath. Running the ledge where pipers prod their awls into sand-crab holes, my barefoot tracks their little prints cross on wet slate. Circles of romping water swipe and drag away our evidence. Running and gone, running and gone, the casts of our feet. My twin, my sprinting shadow on yellow shag, wand of summer over my head, it seems that we could run forever while the strong waves crash. But sun takes its belly under. Flashing above magnetic peaks of the ocean's purple heave, the gannet climbs, and turning, turns to a black sword that drops, hilt-down, to the deep. please note: photo from Chariots of Fire  with a wink and a nod to Mr. Bean

Let The Day Go by Grace Paley who needs it I had another day in mind something like this one sunny green the earth just right having suffered the assault of what is called torrential rain the pepper the basil sitting upright in their little boxes waiting I suppose for me also the cosmos the zinnias nearly blooming a year too late forget it let the day go the sweet green day let it take care of itself

by Ingrid Wendt Out of the bunch grass out of the cheat grass a bunch of grass waddles my way. Quill-tips bleached by winter four inches down: crown of glory dark at the roots: a halo catching the sun's final song: No way could such steady oblivion possibly live up to legend, whatever fear I might have had is gone, but still I stop Short on my after-dinner walk, no collision course if I can help it, thinking at first it's the wind, nudging a path out of the field Or one of a covey of tumbleweed lost like those today on the freeway, racing ahead of my car that whole long drive here to the banks of the Snake, to friends so close they know when to leave me alone. As though I were nowhere around, the porcupine shuffles the edge of the road, in five minutes crosses a distance I could have covered in less than one And disappears at last into cattails and rushes, sunset, a vespers of waterbirds, leavin...

by Joyce Sutphen That is not the country for poetry. It has no mountains, its flowers are plain and never poisonous, its gardens are packed into blue mason jars. There are no hedges bordering the roads, the sky flies up from the ditches, loose in every direction. Yet I knew it to be passionate, even in its low rolling hills, where a red tractor pushed through the oat field, cutting down gold straw and beating a stream of grain into the wagon trailing behind in the stubble, I knew it to be melodious in its birch woods, leaves shadowing a stone-strewn river, the path along the bank softened with pine needles, sunlight woven in and out of branches, the many colors of green, solid as a pipe organ's opening chord, I knew it would haunt the memory with its single elm, where a herd of cows found shade in the July heat, their bony tails swinging the tufted bristle left and right over the high ledge of a hip bone, while at the hori...

"The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time." --William Shakespeare, MidSummer's Night's Dream Woke up before dawn to drink coffee and work on school stuff. This week the effects of Methylene Chloride (try to avoid) and Baker's Asthma from flour dust(who knew??) Next on the list, fighting with my computer to attach documents required by the IRB site in order to modify a firefighter study protocol. The computer technology is what gives me the biggest blues. I like my attachments to have color coded paper clips and to fit in my grubby little hands. During the last two days of work at Big Fat Teaching Hospital I saw the usual share of hope and futility. We got a transfer from a smaller community hospital across the way; a large stroke treated successfully with TPA, the "clot buster." This gentleman has no deficits from the stroke and hopefully will not have a subsequent bleeding injury. Nice man who starts each...

by Mark Strand Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow's dust flares into breath. please note: art by Marc Chagall