by Marcia F. Brown

i. i.   think   u.u. would have loved
            this texting     tweeting
like a broken bird     scattering

the chaff   (what nooneneedstoknow —
mothers/fathers/ loves gone riding)

cramming     nospaces        your gorgeous stuff:
            silver–frosted–cherries     sex        rooms
love has left empty   (140 characters would be a surfeit)

                               God, those handsome
women! poets    brilliant
men    birthing
           bohemia in Greenwich Village    soused
in the morningbath    soused
           walking–Washington–Square & soused
at–the–club

                               &why wouldn’t they be\
having survived that first big one?   u.u.
           by a fluke: rucked in nightly    bread&water
inthebrig for bad behavior   mustard
gas& misery   away away         punishment
           your savior

           oh but wouldn’t u.u. & your pals
have loved to dance with wordgames
           till the balloonman whistles
                                            far and wee

till WAY TO GO:     instant
           hemorrhage in the lively brain     thud
while washing up from splitting wood
           headed down to supper with lovely Marion     anyone

old and sick   would be green
           for such an ending

                                but what i want to know
is what are u     wordstruck boy
                                                    creating now?

by John Blair

We whistle tunes while
God’s work gets done above us
in trees locked in screes

of bagworm silk
and dead leaves, streetlights smeared
into glowing rictal

happiness across
the sidewalks. The woman who
always watches us

as we walk by yawns
or screams, soundless in a frame
of glasspaned light.

Maybe something,
some old pain dropped silk–tickle
at her feet like half–

lizard offerings
of cat love, has called her night
after relentless night

to the one window
that opens onto our sad
march into alone

unwinding between
a summer’s worth of dry yards,
to wail like Meister

Eckhart that every
creature is a word of God,
and it’s not that she

wants us to care or
change a thing, but that no one
can leave a story

unturned, can stuff it
like the sweat–bee buzz of self
inside to hunker,

sunburnt chromium
in the high–savage heat
of feline midnight,

where some faltered pair
of strolling shades slips clockwork
by in self–conscious

silence on the leaf–
strewn stage of her anchorite
attention, God’s words

sung sotto voce
but with feeling, fading soft
into the darkness.

by John Blair

     There was in every hollow
     A hundred wrymouthed wisps.
                         Dafydd ap Gwilym (trans. Wirt Sikes, 1340)

And so we are strange
news, and justified. Milton’s
Satan came unctuous

to Eve crested fair
with joy like wandering fire
to lead her tempted

home, to fly–specked bulbs
and skin flaking into dirt
and generations.

Our lights are not so
bright or so compelling, more
ignis fatuus than

morning star, more soot
than burning lamp in the short
night of our long souls,

more, to our cold shame,
chrome plating and grease–spark
than light–of–the–world,

lit with low wattage
wanting, old news, bad checks, lies
about how bright we burn

and in what quick fires.

by John Blair

Much there is that is
unbeautiful, much there is
that rubs the eye raw

like sand and knuckles.
In some farflung plane
of penury we’ll

squat in the purest
pain of perception for what
we’ve witnessed. Brushes

will be dipped into
the cups of our coddled eyes
to make sparks and stars

and all the happy colors
of Jesus on the tumbled
walls of our humbled

city. They will kiss
us blind and leave us wanting,
because nothing else

is enough to save
us from things like this blister
of pink morning light

crawling el otro
lado over the fields near
Matamoros where

narcotraficantes
killed a boy and strung baling
wire through the rattle

jewelry of his spine
so as to yank it ripe–snake
from the grave for luck,

clean of its rank boy
meat and charmed with surrender.
The cornfields stutter

a wild new chorus
of contingency, each day
opening in pure

heartfelt relief.
The sound is the meaning of
everything the world

can mean, a hot blond
susurrus of so what, so
what, new grief just like

the old grief, losses
like locusts clinging to one
leaf or another,

the marginal love
of beautiful things piling
like winddrift against

fenceposts blacktapping
from one side of our open
eyes to the other,

where the lonesome motes
float like the cares of the dead
polished into stars

and strung pearls of bone.