by Carolyn Locke

Six days after you stepped foot on the path,
l look across Eagle Lake to Sargent Mountain
and all the hills between, try to imagine
what could’ve happened to you that day.

No doubt the wilderness called you,
as it called us today, into the bitter cold,
the biting wind, and thick gray clouds
promising snow by dark. No doubt

you believed in your own invincibility
as we all must if we’re to keep going.
And so what was your undoing?
Ice on a steep slope? A tall

and a broken limb? Heart failure?
Or did you merely lose your way?
A last phone call from the mountaintop, then
silence as snow fell through the long night.

You disappeared without a trace.
I want to believe in your final hours
you had no regrets, want to believe
you were where you wanted — even

needed — to be, and that you came
to rest peacefully beneath the snow.
Far ahead of me on the trail and so small
against these mountains he loves,

my husband disappears in the swirling snow.
With a catch in my throat, I tell myself
once more, Everyone deserves to live
and die on his own terms.

by A.M. Juster

Weeks later he emerged from honeysuckle
and baby-blue hydrangeas like a soldier
fresh from the front, unwilling to relive
the butchery no witness glorifies;
he loomed where porchlight was diluting gloom.

I could not shrug this off as some bad dream.
I saw his eyes were blank and full-moon bright
before I noticed tendrils, long and lush,
that dangled from his ears and mangled mouth.
I rifled through my memory to find
some cure or consolation.
All that time
we stared in airless silence, then I knew
that I could will this night to end, and did,
and sent him to unjust oblivion.

by Gene Grabiner

Brueghel’s “The Fall of Icarus”

It’s not that the plowman
or the shepherd
or the angler are
unaware of the splash,
of the legs going under.
In Brueghel, his plunge into the sea
seems incidental.
The plowman continues his furrows,
working downhill through the
deep foreshortened distance.
Resting on his staff
the shepherd stares skyward with
his back to the bay.
Still fishing,
with bait bucket or beer nearby,
the angler
is not startled
by the oddity
of this splash.
The wind is up in the bay,
sailors hard at work make ready.
We think that those on the galleon
have seen the emergency. Yet
no rescue boats put out.
The myth of the drowning has become
the drowning of the myth: a
splash into a silent sea.

by Vyt Bakaitis

is not an
exacting
language

but a gasp
that holds
to no clue

before a just
coaxing summons
brings on

exception
to every
set rule

*
My verbs don’t have
the dignity to make
a move my nerves
don’t dare show
or make jokes
even after the
laughs I can’t
join in
words are about
and can’t hold to
the essential thing

*
A push for a pulse
from here to there
a blindspot thrust
the moment’s trepidation
quivering before it goes
for all you know to show
You
free of a breath’s lease

*
High as the sky
is the place I remember

the wild wave struck before we could rally against it
so even losing count of the few of us there all before
we could think to prepare we might possibly be survivors
since we had our minds set and not a moment to hang on to

what could we care to welcome

the house no longer standing

a mudhole wipeout

though the sky helps
widen the highway
striving for air

*
After Parmenides my head wasn’t spinning when

I

started
stubborn as a mule but I saw the wheels had a

light

the color
in bands reeling backwards entrancing circles

overwhelm
my longing straining to stay on track so that

I

wished I knew

where I was heading a blinding resplendence grinding my ears
swells an arousing fresh allure the young girls just drop
their filtering veils to a glowing ember in winter as if
daylight isn’t sure the darkness can yield any light

I’m framed inside behind mighty doors
the terms being dealt favor could swing
either way so melt the keys to seal off
a whole new lifeline before its history
opens to reveal

a dream young as the storming moment

a voice beyond the reach of years

*
By the loose ribbon her hair makes
whoever might dare to claim her

will need to redeem her

though she said that and

it seemed to be true

the waiting was more than

a full measure of home