by Maisie Houghton

Early summer,
driving to leafy, lonely Vermont
In a car of childhood,
my mother somehow senses
I am unwell, a mild complaint
yet still she stops by the roadside.

She wants me
to think of something else
other than my snail of self.
The slow purr of the motor halts;
she parks deftly — as befits her.
Sun seesaws through white birches.
There is miraculously a brook and thickest green:
Solomon’s Seal, skunk cabbage and a patch of ferns.

She spreads out the tendrils of a fern,
smoothing them on her skirt.
Its fronds curl and brown
ever so slightly under her touch.

Perhaps, she suggests,
her voice low and coaxing,
I could trace it,
watch it spread and grow on the page of the book
I had once given her and which now
I will want her to keep forever.

by Maisie Houghton

I love words.
It is a pleasure to say
mellifluous, fountain pen, recondite.
But there are certain ones
whose meaning I forget:
otiose, fecund, fungible.
These glint as mica in rocky shale.
I write them down, look them up,
then forget again.

Two hard ones which often drift away:
Venal and venial.
Venal claims one is open to bribery
such as putting your hand in the cookie jar,
living high off the hog,
having it all
without paying up.

The other is a sin
which one can easily commit,
slight and pardonable
says Oxford English
like sliding over the truth
or turning your back on someone you love.

by Doug Anderson

I might as well play soccer with a trilobite.
I am the last of my species,
would not have made it thus far
had I not been held in other memories.
I was a child once, lay on my belly
and watched crawfish build their mansions of mud,
set fire to dry grass
with old folks’ magnifiers, shook the family Bible
to see what ghosts fell out,
played with my mother’s giant squid —
that red rubber thing with the long hose
that hung from the shower nozzle
and attacked my floating bathtub boats
only to be saved at the last minute by Audie Murphy.
I know you know what I mean,
suspended as you are between your last breath
and a glass of absinthe with Breton.
We were baby bombs: born the same year,
dropped into the white sands of Los Alamos
in a white blast too loud to hear too bright to see.
Of course we would have understood blue boobies.
Of course we projected color
onto all those black and white newsreels.
For some surrealism is nothing more
than seeing what is minus the frame of understanding.
But your passing makes me lonely.
I fear waking up one day and all who knew me
will be gone and I will wander into
that great cotillion of strangers, strange myself,
a native of a world whose road signs are written
in a language I don’t understand —
everyone young, and myself fading, transparent,
they look through me at each other, I am gone.

by Doug Anderson

Hafiz, help me, where have you written
that as an old man lightning would singe my beard
and fling me down, a rag on the grass.
This is not fair.  My heart will not take it.
Why not burn me up while you’re at it?
I am all spirit now, fly into that dog
and make him mad as I.  See him howling?
Or is that me love-stunned and without dignity,
hair ripped out by the roots from this unasked-for storm?
Why didn’t you let me love this way as a young man?
All right, I was too stupid.  I agree.  So be it.
I’ll get up now and try to find my way home.
Someone has left her heart lit for me not to stumble.