I Dreamed Again
~ Anne Michaels
I dreamed again you were alive, and woke
certain it was your voice
love is whisky, it is milk,
it is water don’t ever, you said in the dream,
think I’ve gone
I woke a little more, a moment or two,
then remembered. Memory makes it so. Keeps you
under the trees.
So I did not turn on the lamp
but lay until I felt again your warmth with mine
heard your voice in my hair
I lay there a long time,
forgetting
Friendship
~ Dinah Maria Craik
Oh, the comfort —
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person —
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
Fiction
~ Keith Leonard
If I get the story right,
my mother’s grief
will melt back into sand—
just enough for a shoreline
the size of her driveway.
We could hold our shoes
by their heels without talking.
In this version, I know
the password to leaven
the latch of fingers
wrapped around aluminum.
I hold a compact mirror
up to her nose to see the fog
of the living. If I get the story
right, a fog will settle
over the shore and there
will be no other place to look
but at each other.
The Source
~ Joshua Mehigan
Water is the least environmentally impactful
beverage and bottled water is the most environmentally
responsible packaged drink choice.
—INTERNATIONAL BOTTLED WATER ASSOCIATION
Far from these woods and this river, far from the Source,
in a made place not easy to comprehend,
harder than woods and river but much less hard,
where sky and grass are priceless or must be shared,
and shade is rectilinear and smooth;
where the scourge teems upward in tall elaborate mounds,
and doom seeps outward, settling a dull gray crust
over what once were woods and river like these;
in the back of a double-locked shelter in a room where salt
and bread are kept safe from the rain, from rats and starlings,
in a humming iron chest that holds inside it
fresh weather like that of a day between fall and winter;
on a crowded shelf of that chest stands a vessel pressed
from molecules of degraded plantlife and creatures;
and there, in that thin vessel—that is where
the creature, exiled forever from the Source,
further and further cut off from woods and river,
keeps for itself eight handfuls of the river.
It opens the door of the chest. It stands and drinks.
The once-living bottle is see-through like the contents,
the label of vegetable fiber the color of envy.
Pine Tree Ode
~ Sharon Olds
I was sitting on the top stones of a wall—can you
get even closer to the tree, he said, so I went
inches from the trunk of the tallest of the ones
we’d been standing among like small children
among the legs of the grown-ups.
Now, the side of my face was almost
against the bark, intimate,
I could see where its growing had pulled its surface
open, into wooden lozenges, like
stretch marks, I could not feel it breathe
but I felt it alive beside me, a huge
ant running down, and stopping, and turning
its feelers, in the air, between us, and then
walking so fast it seemed to be pouring back
up. Then I looked, up, along
the branchless stem, into the canopy,
to the needles fanning out in bunches
eating the sun. And the length of it seemed like
bravery, like strong will,
a single, whole, note, like a tenor’s
cry, sustained, as if a tree were
a spurt from the earth, a heart’s gush.
And the ants flowed from ground to sky,
sky to ground. I don’t know where the ants
had been, or their ancestors had been, the noon
the tornado came through, wall of water
a hundred and thirty miles an hour,
solid ferocious grey static.
The tree stood. And now I sat up straight
beside it, feeling my way back
through species, and species, toward the pine, and toward
the ones we both descended from, the
fern, the green cell—the sun,
the star-stuff we are made of.
Listen to Sharon Olds read this poem: http://bit.ly/2IGvc5N
