by Richard Taylor

Mendelssohn is coming down the road
on a bicycle and not with a violin
but with a whistle, though he wonders
would a violin keep up with his feet’s
frenzied pedaling, the hill’s lift and its dive,
the wind’s thin hum in the spokes.

Light fingers of air steal his hair flat back
for wheeling into the earth’s pent up
hell-bent melody.

He wants to whistle the universe close,
and he lifts his arms like the handlebars
wide, rides with no hands, conducts
the wind lest it turn lazy, the clouds
lest they rest in the trees.

A crescent curve through vast cornfields
turns the belligerent wind to his back
till his bicycle fills like a wishful kite
with gusts of amorous blue.

Over Sawyer’s flats to the beach at last,
the cycling boy and his whistle slow, the wheels
concede, lean quiet by the bath house door.

Ripples tripping the water go shy,
the breeze pauses to listen: a concerto in e-minor
leaps from the boy’s whistle
into Mendelssohn’s ear.

by Richard Foerster

Begin again: cup the faucet’s allegretto in your hands,
try to lather it into light while your eyes stay clamped.

It’s how day’s melody starts — dumb, disordered, blind.
Let the basin gather the milky notes that fall away.

Don’t fret if the room brims with the babble of discordant
yesterdays: the boy still stumbling through those staves,

their sharps and rests, the keys that never unlock
any sense.  Scrub at the dead cells till your liturgy’s done.

Then shut the spigots, listen as the water funnels to its coda,
then wipe away the mirror’s last illusion cast across your face.

Stare into the lucky accident of the silence you’ve achieved,
the score laid out, as yet without notation.

by Patricia Smith Ranzoni

Next Spring, Or,
If February Wouldn’t Pass,

we could pretend you haven’t gone.
That the phone will bring your sound soon.

If we don’t finish Christmas, leaving
the string of cards over the arch,
their cardinals won’t have flown either
nor their snowmen sunk.

If we don’t exchange last gifts,
the few we could do this time,
don’t toast with the brandied pear,
Christmas and you might still be here.  No?

If the red of hearts could stay, the tier
of Valentine sweets, and the miniature potted rose,
could February stay would you?

But the plant’s shiny-red wrap
spreads wings as if readying to go,
reflective of your long liftoff.

If February just wouldn’t pass. . . .

but the raccoons and minks
wouldn’t be courting through the snow,
coyotes and foxes singing their love,
sap rising in everything live.

                        You, not off
                        becoming your own next Spring.

by Bruce Pratt

Saw case clutched in my swollen hand,
peavey, thermos, slung over my shoulder,
I trudge homeward from the far field,
traversing pasture and stream bed,
regarded by dark, cow-curious eyes,
afternoon yawning toward evening.

Maple, birch, and beech saplings
encroaching on the field’s edge
felled, hauled away, pasture opened
to the sweep of the sun and wind,
leggy trunks, spindly twigs chipped
to fertilize new mushroom beds.

Knowledge one is not born to
fires the blood, my mind marveling
that this work, once done by hand,
began with the rose of dawn,
ended when evening’s darkness
sealed out the last western light,
or fatigue conquered human will.

Aching in aging joint and muscle,
this loud work but tame labor
to the clearing a hundred years ago,
when men plodded in waning light
toward their kitchen’s lonely lamp,
milked cows, washed, and supped,

then bent again by lantern or candle,
to hone axes, saws, knives, and scythes,
as night gathered, children slumbered,
loons called across the spring darkness,
before laying down their wearied bones,
in order to shoulder the task again.