by Roger Camp

How a photographer landed on the valet at L’Opera
for Len Matsuk

I was told by someone
who was standing in line
valet ticket extended,

as it turned out, for infinity,
that the body fell
four stories.

L’Opera going dark
the lunch crowd pouring out
before the yellow tape

and chalk were marked.
The police
jumping to conclusions

by concluding he had jumped.
Only later did they learn
the jumper was a photographer

who liked high places
scouting sites in advance
for his photographs.

No one knows
how he slipped
or why

not having looked
if the view
offered an image so extraordinary

to be worth his life.

by Mimi White

Would like to sing,
but the sea ran across the road.

People are eating,
others driving in the rain.

Tomorrow the news,
but today the car drives

round and round
Jamaica Pond, The Hebrew Home,

past the place where Mother died.
Names are rivers

in the wilderness,
streams on old maps:

Umpqua, Bitterroot
as if naming could slow the rain.

“Where’s my cane?”
Here’s the door

we blow through,
wind-driven, not yet sad,

and neither of us new.
Dad sings, “Cat scan, dog scan,

zebra scan, too.”  Taps his side,
“Here’s my wallet.  Take my cap.

Last time they burned a hole
through Lincoln’s head.”

by Mimi White

Amazed a tree could grow in the sky,
shoots about to burst,
supple, tender.

Sleep had sealed lost prayers,
sibilant, forgotten words
from childhood.

Then the sound of rain,
galaxies of sound,
scribbled on dark slates,
entered the map
of my brain open
to what has no name,

a crescendo of lost dots,
shadows at the dinner table,
mother in the kitchen,
father on a long, long walk

and the quick tale
of memory squeezing
through the keyhole.

by Mimi White

The eternal route
past the lake
where you learned to swim
as a child

where you fished
with your brothers for hornpout
whose whisker -like barbells
felt like hooks

where you skated
in the deep end
over waters
that swallowed
a car whole

Beyond that world
in the woods
on barren islands
living in other lands

you got lost
inside the small
rooms of your life

Still there is happiness
in not knowing where you are

There is the white porcelain of memory
There is the blue sky