Featured Poet: September 1998

In a dust like winter

the trees move
to make a music like voices;
the wind etches
the surface of the pond,
like the application of a fine hand
approaching its unavoidable margin.
Sometimes what is written isn't everything,
what goes beyond thinking is what we haven't seen.
Sometimes clear is the best color,
the face a leaf of sound.
There are times when there is nothing,
when naming what has gone before
is like counting a small thing twice.

In Plain Sight

It always happens.
Somethings passes through a perfect sky
causing the color to become absorbed.
And there's no reason for it—
weather, perhaps,
collaboration,
efficiency, or
bad intentions.
Next, the sky is no longer blue;
it is colored by this seemingly small thing,
or whatever else it implies.
It is unavoidable
once it has happened
the sky is something else. Then
even the clouds are disfigured by it,
or they are gone.
You are never quite sure whether or not it was even visible; except
this thing
It is always passing through...

In one corner of somewhere

a girl is opening like a Japanese flower--
the pale innuendoes of her yellow dress
blossoming around the slight stem of leg--
the small gestures,
the hands that move like art.
She wants to tell you everything--
but she'd prefer to leave you
outside of love--
to give you another portion of something you don't understand.
When she pauses it's like peeling an orange
on an alternate plain.
When she moves
the world around her moves
in heavy grace.