by Rev. Joseph R. McKenna

Oh I will be there when that special week
In May comes ’round, and all the apple trees
Give out their cotton candy blossoms: pink
and white and look like you could eat them
For desert. Each year I’m fooled because before
The week is ended they are only petals on the ground.

Okay, the petals fall but tiny fruit
Begins to form from them, and when fall comes
We’ll be eating apples . . . and cherries. But can I make a lament
Why is there always such great haste to get on
With the fruit? To hurry on to fall . . . to autumn.
I’m in the autumn of my life now and it’s okay
There are things that can be said about it that are nice.
But why couldn’t the cotton candy hang around . . .
Just a bit longer?

by Linda Aldrich

To break off edges of ice with my foot
hastened spring — the more cracked loose
from the continent of hard, the better I felt,
the quicker my release from rubber boots
and leggings, where my white asparagus
body lay inside a starched dress and prickly
petticoat, stuffed into snow pants, jacket, scarf:
a thick, zipped package making its way
to third grade for the love of Miss Carson
and her many colorful shoes, for the perfection
of her cursive s’s cresting on the idea of beach,

but mostly for her rocks and minerals
on the long table covered with butcher paper —
village of density and striation, igneous
and metamorphic, petrified wood, slippery
soapstone, garnets tumbled from sediment,
and in a cup, obsidian tears shot from fire.

When spring came, I dug up drab stones
like dirty potatoes from under the swings,
smashed them to brightness with my father’s
hammer, and put them on her desk before the bell.
After the pledge of allegiance, after she took
attendance, finally, finally, “Who brought me
this lovely quartz?  And mica!  Class, did you know
people used to make windows from mica?
Are these from you?” she said, smiling her wide way
into me, and she would never know how my dense
universe fractured into whorls of light, pumices
of moon.  Geodes I would come to know later,
how summer’s embers bed down inside us.

by Linda Aldrich

The spider outside my cabin window stares at me.
I think that’s an eye.  I can’t tell which way is up.
Another day at the arts retreat, and I have nothing
to show, but my spider is deep into her work,
a complex net woven when my back was turned,
the sun lighting filaments three feet across,
a delicate sail of threads catching the breeze,
filigree of gold, where she hangs in the middle
like a proud bobbin.

Yesterday I visited the studio of a woman who uses
white extension cords to make intricate patterns,
the plug ends bunched tightly together as though
looking into the center of a peony bloom,
or a clutch of baby robins, beaks open,
beckoning, the long cords wound round
and through a hoop in a pattern of nest-building
or the matrix of longing surrounding a heart.

I watch my vigilant spider inspect her web,
make repairs, shore it up.  She assumes fragility
in a world where threads loosen, ties break.
The woman who creates art out of things
taken for granted walks across the wide lawn
to her studio with a basket on her arm.
It’s the last month of summer.  The late
afternoon sun glows like a winter lantern.

by Ellen Taylor

We saw a juvenile moose this morning
standing by the side of the road,
as if waiting for a bus, bored,
watching the cars pass.

He leaned on one hip,
turned his head towards
the traffic, calm as a pedestrian
waiting for the light to change.
My studded snow tires must have
surprised him — he stepped
aside, then nodded his head
as if to say, “Hey, those are only legal
until May,” then he turned
on his haunches,
flicked his stubby tail
and sauntered away.