by Bruce Pratt

All this October day I am a tacking human sloop,
in eye-dusted, hair-taunting wind,
bell-banging tongues of spindrift yawing
in corrupted yawps of cawing crows,
a soft sun peaked in parching shadow,
and I gulp the distance journeyed
from finger stiff mittens and head high drifts,
crowding sword-pointed pickets,
to this creaky-jointed spume of memories
more heroic than they were.

All another October running day, I reposed in shriven leaves,
beneath white clots of child-drawn clouds,
dreaming shelves of summer-prisoned bell jars of
stewed rhubarb, tart crabapple jams,
that cradled sneezy whiffs of dead summer
sterilized in blanched bean and pea,
with bursts of sugar cached in stripped kernels
of sweet corn and August’s reluctant raspberries,
to be savored when February’s drift tunneling gales
howled through clapboard and lath.

All that October day rasping in ragweed riots,
gasping and wheezing in goldenrod hack,
I sprinted the road home from school, coat trailing from
my waist in frost-killing afternoon sun,
my shadow a deranged, scuttling crab, geese veeing
south in sky bullying banter and squawk,
passing grasshopper-singing fields and autumn’s shriveled brooks
whose trout had darted downstream into the
dream-spackled river of deep, rock-cooled pools.

All that October day racing through leaf-shedding orchards,
sneakers squashing shrunken, bee-gored drops,
keening the dead summer as the sirens of awakening ache
surged and pestered my ears, and nascent scents
of the whispered promises of coitus cauled in my child’s wonder,
I tumbled boy-over-dog spent into the frost-browned grass,
nosing the earth for her musk, a child seeking an engorged nipple,
delirious penitent’s pain delicious in its alien tang,
an afternoon of a day of no end and chilling night and
call of barred owl and clacking branches.

All that October day I did not consider final things, unable
to yet imagine the flash of a perfectly sinewed thigh,
a memory locked later in a feral, sun-scoured, morning field
quaking like Abraham’s hammering heart,
skeins of carping disquietude unable to hobble the rising sap,
slaying fear in prayerful equivocation, birthing
an eternal addiction, born in bone, fired in flesh,
flaring, untempered, and unrepentant,
generous, annealing wandering hearts in flawless purpose.

All this October day ambling up the eye-cauterizing ridge
past the fulcrum of four score and ten,
up nearer to the cloud bereft sky, a middle-aged gait
and thoughts rumpling into snarls of questions that
the child can afford to store in the place where things to
be done later are laid down for a nap,
until the Gnostic wind flutes into the ear the sound of
footfalls, swish of scything grass, and
memory punishes the heart like a sandstorm.

by Jim Bishop

Still, for the homely and the glorious alike, the time comes.
For the children in dark doorways, seen in passing, their
shadowy keepers glimpsed through curtained windows.
For the famous and infamous at the height of their acclaim,
their names even now on our lips.  For the holy, the hidden,
the profane.  The magnificent and mysterious animal forms,
the wild birds in spectacular migration, even the dog there
dreaming on the carpet, who we call by name. The time comes.

                                                             And now, myself an elder,

to have arrived amongst such as these: dragonflies
along the stream the likes of which I’ve ridden ecstatically,
terrifyingly, in a dream.  This beast at my feet who crushes
bones in his jaws, takes offered treats with such delicate
restraint from my hand.  And the little girl the other day,
her mother waiting her turn to be served, who twirled and
twirled behind her for the sheer dizzy joy of it.  I feel near
swooning myself at times into the exquisite unfolding of a
backyard lily yes so gloriously arrayed that passes in a single
day. Remind myself, attend.  Attend.

by Jim Bishop

Night Comes On
Now I look for her always, I’m lost in this calling
     I’m tied to the threads of some prayer
                            Night Comes On, Leonard Cohen

                                     -1-

Maybe he chanced to look up in that suspended moment
before the dark closes in and saw then something like
heartache something lovely as our simple word for it

soft blue, pearl and pink, at the horizon above the
wooded hills, a thin bank of purple cloud. dusk, we say,
dusk, the final soft k barely vocalized, after which, silence: nightfall.

                                     -2-

true a kind of night had fallen had befallen him
without warning along the way should he not have
felt the darkness gathering not heard the music

fade the music he had taken as his own as much his story
as the threads he’d thought were woven fast into a single
strand say he had lost sight somehow

of the darkening around him say an unkind silence more
an absence unbeknownst till then had set in till it dawned
on him at last, he was lost.

                                     -3-

Lost. how the word itself closes in becomes its own dark
night the trees in extravagant motion, no moonlight through
the creaking branches where, in thrall to Daddy’s long collapse,

protective pronouns fall away it’s me not he who trembles to
declare myself a spirit with my mother’s voice, the voice of
Eros really, life itself, breaks in, taking her language from a song.

Go back, go back, she says, Go back to the world.

by Claire Millikin

In the years of his marriage cracking up
he’d live in our house seasonally.
He’d live there in winter, we in summer.

At the end of each spring, returning
from a series of temporary teaching gigs
in the house we’d find beers filling the fridge;
sleeping pills stacked in kitchen cabinets;
cigarette cartons decolletagé in hallway closet.

He’d shrug, stow his gear in the garage.
Say his wife kicked him out again,
it wasn’t right the way she treated him.

The house hurt in his care, bed legs popped from frames,
curtains torn and stained, towels ripped apart
until I could no longer mend them.
Starting over each summer,
with our small stash of salary buying
back all that could not be fixed.

At last, we told him, don’t come back.
He threatened to kill her,
then disappeared.  I thought of the sleeping pills
box on box, some from doctors, some drugstores —
Unisom, Nyquil, Tylenol PM — typical stuff.
At last he shored up at his mother’s

and he’d no longer speak to us.  Down the hill at the foot
of the house the harbor rocked, slow water, flat
as a fallen door, a sign posted immemorial
Boats Cast No Wake

Now no wake, this is the story of a house
caught in human ways.

The fishermen push out just before dawn.
I see them through the window
of my insomnia, a seasonal affliction.