by Mark Cox

Last night, like a match tossed off
onto the lawn, it bloomed and disappeared.
I kept smoking.  And my dog kept

nosing the damp summer grass, one eye
on a door he knew was sure to open.
I thought:

Another friend is dead,
another body I would recognize anywhere
has slipped into the clothing

of a busy street.
Still,
It’s difficult to miss some things.

Tonight, I hesitate again at the porch,
cup my hand around the dog’s ear,
and looking up, fail

to specify exactly what is gone.
I lift his head and make him look
at how the one cloud is so strangely

and unevenly lit —
as if the moon were just a big city —
but everything that amazes me

cuts no shit with him.
What an odd coincidence, him and me,
and that star that fell,

and all the ones that didn’t,
each of us looking past the other
at nothing in particular.

by B.Z. Niditch

Into your creaking office
with ivy toned wisdom
carrying Catullus
but fearing thirst and hell
you were defenseless
in a wizened gray sweater
crazy and cold
muttering about
the withered evergreen
the nut job Hitler
sullen Berryman
and an ambulance
to McLean’s hospital
on the way.

Outside your window
snowflakes quiver
you recite in Japanese
asking for Tate and sake
in your changing face
and I’m trembling
to share a few lines
from my wrinkled notebook
and wounded sensibility
a circle of deep affection
yields a beauteous shadow
across the room.

by B.Z. Niditch

Night travels the field
among a hundred days,
your bed enters darkness
on a bridge of departure
from a poor man
working dreams
against tomorrow,
the heated sky opens
beneath an indifferent sun,
unlocking a map of clouds
from a Peruvian cosmogony.

Your nightmares enlighten
the shadows of corpses
along vast mountainsides
no doubt, the earth
photographs your long face
among the pine leaves
trampling over your grave,
petals fall on meadows
pressed by your doorway
granting hours of eternity
from those who wont forget.

by Patrick Dillon

I see they’ve put a new McSorley in the ground
along with all the McBrides and Hanrahans
the Smiths and Smythes, as though in the spring
something good might come of it
planting an empty bulb inside a box.
And yet something must be done with them
to those who gave life to trousers and brown coats.
A wind scrapes the Earth.
Hydrangeas fall on hard times.
To leave them haphazard where they fell
usually alone, sometimes in a chair
plunged into the soup
to have so many of these monuments at the side of the road
would make a mockery of us.  And all our History.
It would be hard to know where to go or what to do.
We cannot sell them.  We do not eat them.
They cut the legs off art.  In sunnier climes
our fathers might be stacked in concrete casks
six or seven storeys high.
Here there’s nothing for it but to plant them out in rows
new villages of words and pots and stone
so that we may stand alone and be open to the wind.
There’s not much dancing can be got from these puppets
however well bright bones and jaws might drag
and dangle in a tango.  I suppose you’d say
they took a step and vanished in our eyes.
They go to where the jive was spun and jigs aplenty
and well turned calves and old at twenty.
We talk of corms and crocuses.
What we hide is how we take their place.
It is an old gavotte and we will honour it.