Robert Cording
Crow Work

I'm watching a crow tug at
the rubbery guts of a road-kill squirrel,
and thinking about
how we say, dust to dust
and sure, all flesh is dust eventually,
but more often than I like to admit,
it'a abloody corpse first.
This morning bodies lay twisted
in blood on the streets of Baghdad,
and even the news photos were too much
to bear. So I got up to take a walk
only to find this crow
living in the hot exhaust,
one moment crow hopping
out of the way of a car, the next
returning to its work,
its dark, reproachful eye keeping me
in the corner of its vision, Perplexed
by that perpetual darkness
of trying to explain
anything, anything at all
about the harm we do each other,
I am staring at a crow, forcing
an emblem out of its obstinacy;
or is it single-mindedness?
I know, I know, it's just a crow
doing what crows do,
but maybe my emblem,
however cheaply made, can force me
to acknowledge the relentless struggle
that's needed to look clear-eyed
and hard at what I find.

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Michelle Demers
The Crossing

After the return of fox sparrows,
spring migration of salamanders,
finger-length, lizard-like,
moving en masse from upland woods
to wetland spawning pools.
Blue-spotted, yellow-spotted,
slug-eating being defying night-sliucked roads
on four-toed feet
by the hundereds to get where they must.
Carnage is inevitable.

Kind souls armed with flashlights
and slickers plan to face darkness and rain
to escort the salamanders to safety.

I think about the "salamander schedule"
and my own. We both risk
unknown dangers. Yet to live bravely
takes a kind of blind trust.
And perhaps it is possible
that a clean hand from above
will gently lift us
and get us to the other side
of the killing highway.

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Lynn Martin
Magnolia

Budded. October. White flame,
Amidst the dark road of our lives,
Planted twenty years ago for the child lost,
Lost the way leaves now loosen themselves
From the limned trees, lost
In aqua alta, the waters
That rise and fall in Venezia,
To carry the great loves
And great griefs of this world.

If ever, the pears would cease to fall.
If ever, roses unpetal themselves into forever.

I'd ask the dead to speak.
I'd ask to hold everyone I've ever loved.
I'd ask the river be a torrent.

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Tony Hoagland
Girl Eating Mango

Beautiful woman,
sitting at a kitchen table,

barely clothed in a little yellow shirt
the way a dream is barely clothed in sleep,

sure, you look like all I want;
But this is not my first trip to a museum.

You look like a beautiful woman
but I now in fact you really are a road

that leads into a tangled wood
where a castle surrounded by thorns

waits on top of a hill.
And even if a man were to make that journey,

even if he were to climb that wall
even if he were to get inside,

what would he find
but his own fear and all the work

that love requires?
And if he failed, what then?

He might have to wait a hundred years
for a woman somewhere far away

to give up her life as a work of art
and walk into the muddy woods

in search of him.
Even if she made that journey,
she would be older when she arrived;

there would be lines around her eyes.
She would step out of the forest

and stand facing stone walls.
And then she would have to climb.

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