by Lucien Stryk

Sunup.  A noisy rumor simmers
in the leaves over dark whispers
of an iffy past.  The chorus quickens

as a fossil hunter unmasks yesterdays,
unsettling the archivist revising
history.  Shoving war’s blood

and bone under a meadow of poppies
unfolding to live honey seekers.
These things happened, as hungry

birds swooped out of flaming trees,
and mother vole suckled her young
away from the eyes of tomorrow.

by Lucien Stryk

Snow settles into cubist folds,
fleeces wind-shoveled debris
over mountain, village, town.

Sends creatures snuggling into
hiding.  Badgers hunkering
like homeless in their corners —

sleep bitter days away.  Snow
glazes orchards, wastelands
in a frosty spill of sun.

Nips fingers, toes, triggers
tooth-shudders down the spine.
Wind petering to a thaw, as ice

melts in septic rivers, coots,
ducks, herons, red-beaked
black swans, sail into martyrdom.

by Dan Stryk

The reversed flow rumbles, swelling,
up the river . . .

The north wind pushes south, now,
down its banks . . .

The fish, bewildered, hang in darkness
under thrashed

reeds, beating fins.  Clouds thud east,
on past the

blackened sunrise.  Leaves spin circles
through the

whirling pools.  While ducks bunched,
anxious, under

creaking bridge-slats, bounce their harsh
cries off the

foam-slapped piles . . .
There’s a great

noise past our own clamped windows,
also.  Water

rising swiftly through our uncaulked cellar
floor.  The

rain falls harder, harder.  Mists against
the glass

obscure.  And now pure silence as the power
fades . . .  As never

felt before.  But still no Word, no Word
from High or

down below, on why things “known” might
End this way,

                            or ever were at all?

by Dan Stryk

The sky, on this late afternoon, spreads milky rose,
then fades, above low hills,
to chalky cloud — pale whisper of hydrangea
in late summer.  We’re driving under
metal girders of the bridge over the deep-flowing Ohio
on our yearly visit to aged
parents in the North.  And wordlessly lift eyes
to that dark steel against the sky —
                     its massive poles
and finer crossbars.
Protean
shapes, as we drive on, like those we’ve — oh so often —
tried to clasp before fleet visions, that might
hold us, disappear!
Only to be left
with dimming colors on the canvas or flat words
upon the page, lingering like mists
of a fled dream,
the keen forms of first vision
now obscured . . .

There is great pain, we’ve come to know,
in failing to see movingly, yet yearning
for such ardor to return — to glow
like a lone comet
before eyes which remain lifted to the skies
through barren years.
And so we learn to live
for that which moves us momentarily
in winter,
even the smeared memory
of what we hoped to seal in vital line, but once more
failed to will into completeness —
once more

rendered vaguely

on the canvas stretched before us,
or the white page that, alone,

will never fade.