by Stephen Ellis

Spontaneous beauty
like ancient folk songs
drift down from

the far north,
like the light rain that
cools the genius

living in the roots of
trees, where desire is
locked to the earth

and gnaws at
the heart of things,
giving us confidence

that the future is secure
just because leaves
and flowers and fruit

simply can’t help but
appear when the weather
surrenders her warmth

and love unfurls itself
in protest against
the poverty of having been

held in suspension
by memory and hope
and the silence of

minutes, hours and days
spent doing minor things,
until the time of

naming the petals of
each new blossom,
the time of endless

intercourse, eye to eye,
and the time of wild
dancing finally came.

by Stephen Ellis

There’s a red
glow, moving west
from China, and now

the last moments
at the luminous
horizon, as dusk

settles in, with its
gold and tangerine
streaks, liquid

bronze and then
black night, that
bursts in upon

the love of beauty
to which my soul
clings like skin

to its body.  Your
absence is only
the strain of having

felt so close to
the fire’s center,
a heart full of

dark orchids
that know what it’s
like to live,

and how to survive
what marks us
as different from

the others, even as
we join their ultimate
human effort, its

glamour and the tenacity
of working our
way to oblivion.

by Matthew Caley

“What wind so blew that
a hammock netted a man?”
Anon.

Two silver birches
bear the burden, which after
all is only some
diamond-shapes of air defined
by diamond-shaped hemp or twine

a man might fall through
somewhat strained, to the hard ground,
the up-ended sky,
the garden more of a slum
— fallen plums, rhubarb-ditches,

guy-ropes, trashed hutches —
to swing between states — high, low —
as if borne by the mind, fill-

ing a space he has
left behind, bearing no weight,
parched ground, hard-cut slants of light.

by Matthew Caley

Having left M’Lady
half-naked and panting, as her husband mounted the stairs,
I vaulted the balustrade
— preferred exit of unrepentant sinners —
dropped down to find myself in a parallel universe.

Suddenly I was a swarthy lad
exiled to New Caledonia, following the trade
of bounty hunter, each scalp a privy purse
waist-deep in hill country, fern and furze.

*

Thus my discovery of the buffalo skinners
below a little knoll, through spruce and sumac, in a clearing
hunkering down to scrape the skins
with their long-bladed knives — by the jangle of their spurs,
the latter betraying their position —
was relatively easy.
More difficult to furnish them with lives

or take them away.  Just beyond their hearing
I lay in a gulch of arch-backed ferns
each one bearing a glutinous snail with an occipital horn.
They were putting bits of buffalo into a pot —
a tongue, an ear
and boiling the foulest brew.  One hummed My Darling
     Clementine.  I shot
him through the left eye

the other through the oesophagus, a lasso of arterial blood veering across the forest floor.  One pine swayed, like a woman,
imperceptibly.

*

Like a woman, persistent as a melody
that lingers on the mind, a fear not allayed,
someone whose arm-span tests the width of the sun
yet is still not wide enough to steer the course

of stars.  I want to fall prey to some sensational malady
one that would prove material for several Appalachian ballads,
so sad they would fill the deepest hole within us
each one including set-piece pines, some buffalo skinners.