by George Quasha

1                                                                           last first words

We walk together like a field of fireflies.
It gives the ear back to itself.
Hard to beat being heard.
No word for this thing between us, feeling afield.

Mark the opening eye.
The words I leave out rip me apart.
The mystery is the core violating itself, blurted the absent voice.

Time’s recovering, I’m here to quit the garden for good.

Reading poetry suffers it to speak.
Violation is not what you think, unless it is.

2                                                    wanting it all in every line

Things done for themselves are the only things done for all.

Just walking by she multiplies in futures [flash].
I’m the one in the middle longing to be the many.
Put eye inside the empty letter and she looks back at you.
Voyeurism’s the illusion I’m not looking at myself.

Exhaust the wisdom impulse before it exhausts paradise.

3                                                            further otherness

Today’s the day I rewrite my biography.
Pen slips on the slopes of sorrow.

I can’t help believing in one thing after another.
Sounds good to me sounds true enough.
And then. And then.

4                                                                  no place else to learn

A blurt’s a site of first breath.
This only sounds this way.
We wave through each other to approach.
And flex and flex.

Optimal includes bottom.

The world’s singing to itself again through our dog.
The tremor in the voice lets the knower out.
Poetry is the state stating.
Says: Say what keeps saying what it is.

5                                                                 unsearching

You didn’t know it but it let you know it.
A form is what knows to take place before you.
It gives the eye back to itself.
Seeing marks.

Let’s meet in the dark where you read through yourself.
Juliet, the verbal scent.

Names get a life to be spoken.
And so I makes my ascent into present.
Poetry says it better than it sounds.
If I don’t mean what I say at least it means me back.

The only things done for all are the ones done once for themselves.

6                                                                             being first again

I barely feel myself hanging together.
She knows to call me by my calling.
It takes a life to be known.
To tone.
Like things fall free alike.

The underline rhythmic is over and out. Over and out.

7                                              pre names the program to optimize

Hearing marks.
Speak in the first person on earth.

She sets my system on merge.
Meanwhile I call from a verge, Don’t strand me on the grounds of sound.
I can say nothing I can’t hear.

The vision’s the body seeing through itself.
The poem even now is hearing itself.

Frog pond in the dark’s bounding across from here.

by Dan Gerber

My life’s companions, showing their age —
spines peeled back, bindings frayed — stacks

of brittle leaves, kept with tape and rubber bands,
though what they’ve said and have to say still

renews the world behind my eyes,
and in a cloud that shadows me

with lightning, music, consolation —
sometimes peace and pure

delight in a darkness,
through which Sappho, Hui Neng,

or the night’s soft wind bring
fuel to a lamp that flickers

and fades, and flickers,
and glows.

by Dan Gerber

Natania Darvath’s
Songs of the Auvergne in my minds ear
while the daylight ghost
of a waning quarter–moon
drifts just above the reach
of a coastal live–oak
on the high ridge of the canyon
where a single coyote is watching.

Meanwhile some more–challenged being —
throttling a bi–winged Howland Honey Bee —
is pulling serious, low–level G’s
in a steep bank against the blue
before climbing,
popping and burbling,
into a hammerhead turn, I believe

and, for a moment, imagine
the pilot’s speed–warped view
of the day down here
where the moon is falling
into the wildness of the oak’s dark hair,
and the coyote,
a few yards down slope now,
still watching.

by Dan Gerber

A hundred quail on the grass outside my window,
and the dogs are a little upset,
and at least one hundred doves —
band–tailed pigeons — in the tree above,
and one crow complaining for all he’s worth,
about the world as it is right now.

                        &

I had a conversation with a coyote,
ambling along the road at dusk
while I was driving home last night.
I rolled down the window
and asked what kind of a day he’d had,
and he just shrugged.
Or I thought he shrugged.

                        &

Later, as I walked
near a thicket of brooding young oaks,
a startled owl flew up
through the paler darkness of moonlight,
and the trailing feathers
of one of its wings
brushed my busy life into silence.