by Jacqueline Moore

Middle Ground at Katahdin
— “For the mountain madness is on me.”
                                            Marsden Hartley

He thought he’d escaped
his highs and lows,
his volcanoes & potholes,
& pigments of excrement.
The fleshpots.

He went on a pilgrimage to
Katahdin, squeezing joy
straight from a tube,
a shot of fox red,
a splash of viridian green,
hard blues, jigsaw ice
choking a pond with lilies.

I can’t keep up with his
new-found color,
don’t trust his Mary-
had-a-little-lamb cloud,
his end-of-life buildup
of pyramid engorged
in kindergarten blues,
his mountain goddess
brooding in the background,
feeding her pond,
strangling her pines
in reflection.

Did he enter the mountain
with no passageway to the sea?
Or did she enter him,
driving him like a crazed loon
into glacial waters,

strangling him in lily pads,
washing him up beyond
his own water line?

I hope he laughed
as he frogged his way back
to the middle ground,
pond by pond.

by Jacqueline Moore

Cat on the Wing
— Om mane padme hum

Mistress of the wind
and prayer flags,
hunted for her hide

cat-on-the-wing
with her Bodhisattva face
and moonlight tail

cruising the ridge lines,
spraying her pee
on our prayer flags

dropping her scat
fresh as moon petals
in our dooryard

eating our sheep
our goat-kids
scattering bones

crouching behind
our stupa,
flanks quivering

as we mortals, heavy
with the weight
of being-in-the-world

sink in snowdrifts
as she leaps
over the peaks

looking down at us,
our stupas,
our fields of barley

smiling her yogin smile
as we set the bait
in our pitfall trap.

by J.E. Mason

I crouch in the eye
Of the long-legged horse, ready
To rope a chalk-white wind.                              (Uffington)

These caroling stones
Dance in muscular desire
Across the plangent earth, skyward,
These five thousand years.                                 (Avebury)

By summer’s end, how can it be
This dew pond
Would not rise and vanish?                               (Litton Cheney)

by Leslie Moore

No moose at Moosehead Lake today, but a bullfrog takes
our measure as we cook breakfast at Mudbrook Camp.

Silent, predatory, his eyes break the surface of the lake:
white-rimmed, almond-shaped, horizontal.

Beneath the speckled nub of his nose, a green, elastic lip
stretches to his ears.  His lower lip juts, pale and petulant.

Under his watchful stare, we boil water on our camp stove,
poke embers in the fire, pick melon out of a tupperware dish.

Where are the tea bags?  The oatmeal’s not here.  I can’t find,
a spoon.  Damnit!  I forgot my pills!  No, here they are!

The bullfrog flicks his gaze to a dragonfly hovering overhead.
With a graceful grand jeté he leaps from the water, showing

the length of his leopard-spotted legs, opening his mouth,
and uncoiling his spit sticky tongue to snatch breakfast out of mid-air.

Voilà!
He splashes down and stuffs the gauzy wings into his mouth.