By Richard Ryal

duties turned your skin from opal to moonstone,
your sweat into morning mist, so make me
a drum face to your beater, confess your litany of shove tides,
follow the sluicing that pulls a river against its bed,
sea to sand, tides to land’s stubborn devotion

beauty resembles nothing but itself so please don’t paint it over,
I love the way the room wants to leave with you,
the mirror tries to memorize you for the coming dark
coming home from a raucous storm,
we shake each other rainless, dancing and
suddenly feathered, not cautious, no,
the spirit is wailing, the flesh weed,
we sniff the spice maker’s kitchen again

bitter is not always sour but when we finish I wonder
why our oils turn stale so fast, affection’s vinegar,
why pushing up and out against a vacuum, our sheets
too quickly cool and the room we leave
watches us slip into the hall to another room

the Book of Balances is firm, go long,
work never ends but it lays the best ballast
for the future’s keel and always life’s mandate
is to keep the keel in the current

we need new measures for age, no more weights or lengths,
just the best we’ll leave behind with our histories
forgotten at last, our legacies ascribed to no author
but lasting in a way we couldn’t

we can’t renounce the wheels that sped us here,
the wine aches for the mouth, we know the pull,
we move lightly but even birds leave footprints

By Richard Ryal

though the dead go gray fast, they bring new green
and anyone who lives into the years of sturdy aches
and grays will agree, time travels at its own choice of speeds,
the falling man and the watching children
live in an acceleration the other bystanders can’t feel

a convocation of erasers in reach, I purge old lists
written on a map, rub the sheet into a linen pelt,
into the half–awake beach we found on this map
on that trip among the weeds that cracked the road

my other old map, obscured by lists and circles,
has birthed a rose window of complexity
from countless angles of folds, my eraser feathers the paper
into the disarray of meadow grass

The Book of Flux is certain, death keeps health
from strangling on the day’s trailing vines,
rolls up the road behind us so we don’t carry
more than allows us to dance

we need a new species of vehicles to lift us
where we need to go instead of our intended harbors,
our mistakes at last a virtue, each a boost in the tide,
the certainty of being more than we thought

I don’t want evening whiskey anymore, only its elation
like when it was a new pleasure,
rousing the drowsy bright in my veins, my comforts
soothe me with reliable restraint but
danger is its own delicious pleasure just as every
contradiction makes sense at the time
when succumbing to temptation is certain

By Richard Ryal

I have her not because I deserve her but because
fate is indifferent on every battleground
so we who don’t deserve our rewards
collect them anyway
but I’m still smoke too thin to cast a shadow in the sun
and someday she’ll see that

this window mentions the underside of a rowboat
pulled from the canal onto my neighbor’s backyard,
the boat’s owner never tried to protect
the hull’s histories of paint and the canal’s brine
unsettled most of the boat’s aesthetic argument
about red, yellow, blue

the Book of Loss insists, mourn briefly,
new life already filled this void
so keep up, the future arrives relentless
and you keep calling it the present

we need new coins that escape the fatigue
of grasp and release, resist our impulses,
arrive embossed with trees and oceans,
not faces of the famous,
silent in the pocket but singing when spent

I try to erase my shadow with candles in all corners,
mask my reflection with a yellow blindfold,
delete daylight with unnecessary tasks
but I can’t cancel the bully pull of tides and
moon phases, the lean of gravity on my waking eyes,
the rain against my walking

By Thomas Feeny

A graceless half twirl,
a fumbled attempt to cup
in her open palm
the million beads of water
this fountain’s sun–touched spray
daily flings into the Tuscan air

Newly deplaned and at once caught up
in Italy’s magic, she taxies straight
to the piazza, tips the cabbie,
and paying no mind to the pair of
languid carabinieri lounging nearby,
sheds all attire, tossing silk & satin
onto the fresh spring grass.

Then with arms aloft, in a world
fragrant with unknown promise,
Rayette lifts her sweet Alabama face
to the Mediterranean sun
and plunges in — a splash
to shatter the waters’ pearled surface.

The five–foot–five Calabrese
whom before God, family, and friends
she would wed in his tiny mountain town
some six months later
— a demure changeling dolled up in lace —

has sworn to his bevy of cousins
that the ivory feet of his beloved
only served to purify
the ancient fountain’s nervous waters.