by Diane Wald

i am broken.
and my fissures have not been repaired with gold,
you can trace your finger along my faults,
and cut your fingers on me if you try.

i consulted a psychic,
but now i am annoyed
at the way she rooted around
in my labyrinths of time.

it might have happened anyway, who knows,
without the rain dance, the qijong, the meditations,

but i have absorbed the light, and now i know
that no one color is ever enough.

i shall be cremated in a paper dress
with some of my white ribs showing,
i’ll request a paper crinoline as well
in case there is dancing.

i might look out from my last bouquet of flames
and cry out like a marigold,
oh ganges take my hand.

by Diane Wald

i wasn’t aware
that kind of ruination could happen

his twin had died when they were born
but it took him a year to tell me

then again i’d always known:
white heart, white wind

the truth more interesting
than the burned violet

spiderwebs bound the birdhouse
the Japanese maple started to die

i heard verdi on the victrola
in placebo girl’s house

and winced for all of us dancing
through broken glass
on our fading planet

by Diane Wakoski

When the night taps on glass
and, in the dark, I brush past down comforters,
          puffy as birds fluffed and huddled
          away from a storm,
to see who’s there, I find
no one but myself, an aging woman, small
as a finch. Shivering, I put on a heavy
white Irish sweater that I’ve mended and mended to keep
its comfort whole, and though outside I know that the sunflowers are bending almost to the earth with autumn
so that I also need wool socks, soft as gardenias,
on my bare feet before I descend
the stairs, it’s not the fatigue
of sleep disturbance that I carry with me.
It’s anticipation.
Like the lightning clusters of gypsy peppers
ripening in their late season pots, I feel tight,
ready. Tonight, something called me down these stairs
to find an old book, on my shelves since college.
I think that if it weren’t
for Wilbur’s title,
“Love Calls Us To Things of This World,”
the poem would never
have stayed in my mind. At times like this I think I understand
what my education has been all about:
ordering the mind so that it is clear
enough to hear Beauty’s voice, and perhaps
to remember it.
Love has always called me.
When Creeley says, “O Love, where are you leading me,”
I trust that he really knows the answer. A rhetorical question,
with infinite replies. Creeley is warning

that poetry/love takes you to
divine and dangerously beautiful
places.

          As Wilbur experienced it briefly in the clean sheets
          flapping on the clothesline in Italy;
          as it nudged D. H. Lawrence in Sicily forcing him
          belatedly to realize the divine presence
          of the venomous gold snake;
          as it transformed killing into new birth
          in Kinnell’s eskimo spirit hibernating in
          the trophy bearskin;
          as it nudged Jack Gilbert
          finding the hairs of dead Michiko tangled
          in the earth of a potted plant;
          as it touched Gary Snyder, bathing communally
          with his wife and children in their outdoor sauna.

Waking to night tapping, or the voice,
inhuman, of our old house creaking in the cold
sometimes gives me a
sense of knowing, that like all of them,
I have been in the presence
of Beauty.
Waking to it.
          Unlike the frequent insomnia that tears me ragged
                    and reveals my emptiness
                              many nights       when the details
          of my life seen like stained ribbons of old cloth,
                    banal as TV news,
                              or tainted with stupidity.
When I know Beauty
has deserted me.

I do not listen for angels
or think that I might ever actually
hear them. What I hear is the soft turning of pages,
the clink of my cup of steaming Assam tea
against its huge saucer, the hard edge of my mind
drawing a line that extends like a wireless cable into an eternity
where I imagine that if I have been quiet enough,
or slept with an empty enough mind,
I can visit.

Tonight I’ve heard the voice of a fifties poem saying, “Love
calls us
to things of this world”
so clearly in my ear that I could not remain
lying there
in the inner warmth of my marriage,
cuddled, cosseted,
a woman whose old angers
have died, sometimes now a peaceful woman, aging.
Instead, the sound on the glass,
the swish of linen, my padded body
all combine to make me say “I’m ready,
I’m ready.” Even though I should have asked,
“who is calling?”

by George Quasha

1                                           on the pale trail of the pores on fire

Speaking with chilies in your mouth produces gustatory sweating. Think wild of
stones.

The poem finds itself resisting reading.
Heat back. Return to the sensible center’s facing the flame.

If there’s one sure thing it’s imbalance in denial.
Reading suffers the ledge to tone down silence.

2                                                            optimizing the inaccessible

Suck on her braid to abrade the tongue.
She teaches me to sit in landslide glory.

Lift your lips off the words and they run straight to me, she said. Maxims magnify
unsayable into optimal minimal.

And if the long–sought free point can’t access beyond ?
The hand writing races the line to end before bending back.

3                                      as one sense dulled the heart grew wider

Surfing surfaces like licking lips backtrack to tell their tale. There’s no reading
the same line twice.

Turning tables torque like facing faces.
Relax, there’s not much danger of a counterfeit free point.

Swallowing between words may yet sweat out the endorphins. Delphine
hormones predict the titillated tissue.

4                                                                     fire burns where it is

Look, the edgy boulder is contemplating its swivel.
And rolling stones release their tones.

The same line differs from itself to protect you from your mind. Pray for
spontaneous opinion combustion.

Her focusing mouth speaks hereunder steaming up the gaze. Dolphins, words, the
hot thought hearing the clearing cracks.