1
The Search
All my life I have glided through the skies
in search of another to share my journey.
A kindred spirit who understood and shared my passion for life.
I would always come home alone to find you,
my friend waiting to listen and share in my adventures.
Your joyful attention touched me as
I weaved the fabric of my journeys before your eyes.
You always understood and held dear my heart’s content.
Then one day as I alighted upon my perch,
I turned to look in the eyes of my constant,
loving friend and finally realized my life’s search had come to its
completion.
The light lay upon your face, and I knew it was you I had searched for
so long.
All my life I soared to great heights to find you.
So high I could have touched the hands of God.
All the while he had put you within my reach, a warm and gentle
caress.
In a place I never thought to look,
Home.
My love, my friend come with me and share in this flight I have called
life.
See for yourself all that I have shared with you these many days.
Feel for yourself the sweet caress of the wind upon your cheek,
and know I will always love you and be by your side.
Daniel A. Cahill
2
Winter (Winter Solstice)
the birch’s bare limbs
a graceful winter cripple
embraces the cold
early morning moon
carries the silence so gracefully
in her sickle
I try to force the words
but they are cramped with cold
and curled like a bulb
--until the spring
Elizabeth Van Ness
Spring (Fishing Season)
ripples recede from the bank
the heron watches
his breakfast move on
six straight days of rain
sky, smoke on sand on pearl
swallows
rumble of traffic
the white birch bends in the gloom
toward to river
Elizabeth Van Ness
3
Summer (Memorial Day)
(for John Squier)
do you know that I love you
when you go out into the light
of Main Street
to do battle against
the veil of forgetfulness
armed only with your camcorder
and your stubborn smile
my big orange cat
comes to my arms
with the wild still clinging
to his fur in dew
and small leaves
the tourists veer from the river
follow the rapids of route 44
they are always going to Kohl’s
Elizabeth Van Ness
Autumn (Halloween)
(for David Leff)
lamp posts curve question marks
the brick walk buckles
the people still come
ghosts walking on Main
Samuel Watkinson Collins
Seth Norton and Charles Blair
acorns explode beneath my bike tires
winter is on my tail
Elizabeth Van Ness
4
Standing Stones at Callinish
Outer Hebrides, Scotland
This must be another top to the world.
Twisting roads open out to a vista
that touches the entire sky.
Purple gray clouds swirl with the winds
over mica sand.
I come here to touch something
or have something touch me,
come to see the thirteen tall slabs
of silver rock that rest under
the full summer moon.
To see the moon glide, as the stories say,
across the hills that look like
a woman’s body sleeping.
If you position yourself just right
the moon will roll for you along the hill tops
and come to center itself
above the standing stones at Callinish.
On the shortest night, the moon stands still,
a sign from those who placed the stones.
Purified by the light, I lean on the tallest,
in that moment, they bless me, the wind whipping
through my hair,
my face against the purple sky.
Sherri Bedingfield
5
Universe Undone
Our lives are forever altered by the chaos they've created.
The world with which we are familiar and comfortable has been
shattered before our eyes.
Pieces of our existence spread across the universe with absolute
disregard.
What have they done?
Still we must believe all will fit together once again.
The holy sparks of humanity shall be restored for all mankind and
eternity.
Judy Gomby
6
Wounded Bird
Part 1
A swallow can fly miles, from treetop to ocean cliff,
The wind's undertow buoyantly gliding her
To a resting place warm with possibility.
She is free, lifted higher by duty and family,
Not a thought outside of weather and wind,
Acceptance and choice safely within her span.
But then, jolted in flight,
Her heart pumped deep
And she is transformed,
The unknown and unfamiliar
In that very moment,
A broken wing reclaiming
Something lost and ancient
Spiraling deep and desperate
Into the habitat of hidden.
Some species heal their wings
In solitude, licking and lying
In a nest of thin twigs
Healing from within
Until they can fly again,
To and from home.
But other species do not heal
And they tuck that wing
Underneath themselves,
Landlocked and less,
The natural order
Injured inside and out.
That species will push on
Practicing, praying, pretending
That wings are but a crutch;
7
Meanwhile hoping that reverse gravity
May rocket them up and open them wide,
Heedfully whole to fly again.
Part 2 (My Side)
I fly from necessity
Hovering over leafy trees and endless water,
Following an inestimable path from home
Only to return again,
Where I’ll find my roots and rhythm
Deeply tucked in grainy sand.
I do not question why I do this-This destiny of family and fate-What I cannot fathom I will not change.
My twelve feather tail and meager wing span
Weigh in below two ounces,
Not enough for my survival
And yet I maneuver and endure,
I doggedly sing my song
And tuck my broken wing
Under my expanding and rapid chest
Until I know if
I might fly again.
If I should die here
Unable to lift myself beyond this place
I will fly anyway
Straight to this indomitable future
Where I will be an African River Martin
tending and fending
Reaching still and always,
Weightless in my belief
That I was born for just this moment.
Karen Jasper
8
Turning Tide
Past the rock of our foundation, locking surge
between two faces pulsing ‘til a quiet comes,
we traded places, there at the end, sitting on
your bed,
you and I, mother and daughter. Cradling you, I
rocked a beat, metronomed a rhythm seeded from
my core.
Cheek to cheek, we swayed back and forth back
and forth in hummed melody, ebbed and flowed
a droned embedded lullaby, submerged decades
awaiting release to surface, cresting back to you.
Joan Hofmann
9
Limbo with Baklava
No 44-year-old man’s feet
should be so pink and tender
and vulnerable
curled like something unformed
newly born
little fishes
little beans
The ventilator’s click and clack
try to persuade of life and breath
and almost humanity, or nearly.
Mechanical thrust, inhale;
suck of exhale
His lungs are ghosts
his heart a reptile’s, three
chambered and perforated.
How did it get to this, friends
ask, hoping for a promise of
personal safety
A soulful atheist
held by Hail Marys
and the fierce
feral prayers
of Sunday School 7 year olds.
What does he owe?
His wife calls him Rasputin, herself
a cockroach
who endures anything,
unlovely, despised, insistent
on life, on will
on the thin wire of breath
She doesn’t believe in angels
bribes ICU nurses
with Godiva chocolates and homemade baklava.
Even non-believers make offerings
to the gods
10
Will he remain forever
unwilling prey
of a spiderweb of lines,
PICs, tubes
a moist mummy dreaming
of Switzerland
and the cool smooth hounds
of memory?
If he saves the hounds, will he awaken
or die?
His wife smokes
in the shunned corner outside the hospital
bundled against the swarm of snow,
angry Arctic locusts
icy fog swallows her forward
and her backward
They would choose any arrest
other than cardiac.
Virginia Shreve
11
March, Dark in Promise
Gnarled laurel twists
Back upon itself, writhes
From rock like striking snakes,
Fossilized.
Spring will rise with venom.
Great gray boulders erupt
Like the humped backs
Of buried whales
Too long landlocked.
A swallowed song rumbles.
Virginia Shreve
12
A Good Moment
Surged air mid her and chair,
chin lifts, she buoys toward him
in regal exult flash exposed
to hit the shooter’s eye.
Her face, her whole, leans
tonal in his gaze: I am that I am.
There, just where neck turns
to shoulder, that craned curve glints
to dark concave nest in the hollow
of the chamber of his eye.
Joan Hofmann
13
Because It Was Dusk
Because it was dusk, the swallows had risen to cross-hatch the sky,
devouring what had emerged from tiny buggy husks.
Bats were rustling behind the clotted, cobwebbed shutters, Awaiting
their turn to swoop and feast.
because it was Labor Day,
there was confusion in the sky,
warm, grey clouds descending into the burned treetops the sun sunk
too low, and water that hung in the air made my blue jeans cling, I
needed to pull them from my thighs so I could breathe.
Because it was August 30th,
Because there was the sliding sun thinking itself the moon through the
clouds, the children could still pedal their bicycles up the sidewalk
after dinner.
There was light enough for me to ogle the butterfly bushes grown over
the picture windows on the 50's ranch style houses.
I hadn't known the bushes came in white
and I plotted where to get one and where to plant it.
Because it was dusk and humid
because he worked on this holiday,
because geese had started to fly, calling encouragement through the
flock, I drove alone into the filthy garage, stashed the uneaten
calamata pizza in the basement refrigerator, and stepped outside the
sliding glass door to stare at the shirred surface of the blue pool.
Barbara Rau
14
Untitled
Let us praise the unimpeded skin
Freckled and marked or white as milk, or dark as caves
Inside and out, the loveliness
Of the perfect young or the damaged old
Soul-nothing-against the tender sheath of flesh,
This, the flank of thigh, the restless curve of breast
Fat, resplendent belly,
Annealed, but not, cold and hot
The necessary cot to cradle the soul's soul in.
Perhaps, Paradise waits for you,
But it will disappoint, it will not raise you
Thrust you suddenly, flash you up out of your eyes,
So that when you raise your forearm, your palm trembles,
Your hips shudder, the body's present to itself,
Oh to keep that living body, taut, alloy of string and web and
gorgeous surface
Oh, how beloved, how beloved is its covering comfort.
Rebecca Cantor
15
Witness
Twisted and wizened by time, buffeted with wind and tattooed with
lichen, muscular apple trees stand in soldierly columns on a grassy
crest. Like troops holding the high ground they watch over rows of
lumpy, granite-scarred ridges thick with oaks and dotted with new
houses. The old orchard owns a Realtor’s million dollar view.
Two screeching girls run beneath limbs heavy with Macs, Baldwins,
Macouns, Winesaps, Cortlands and Staymans, their cheeks reddened
like the glistening fruit hanging with the promise of Christmas
ornaments. Among the Ida reds and Empires a tall, white-haired man
dried as jerky stretches into branches he climbed as a boy, grasping for
the jewel just beyond reach.
As saplings, the trees were sentinels for a view quilted with hayfields
and corn, patched with woodlots and rocky pasture where silos
towered like castle keeps and Jerseys lowed. In time they watched an
invasion of weedy hemlocks, hickories and pines grow tall with the
fickle flux of human intentions that left stone walls threading
pointlessly through woods.
Street signs threatening like epitaphs, Apple Lane and Orchard Avenue
almost encircle this orderly island with its unbroken cycle of bud,
flower and fruit. Down slope the land is parceled into lots, devoured
by concrete foundations and driveways and covered with roofs of
asphalt shingles. The hillside’s final crop comes with the good fortune
that brings customers closer.
The tiring routines of prunings, sprayings, mowings, and chasing
hungry deer stirs a schoolteacher’s passion, holds him tightly in the
grip of their gravity and keeps bulldozers distant. A weekend stubble
glisters on his cheeks as he weighs my bag of Romes and Rhode Island
Greenings soon to be sliced between crusts. Each October we meet,
steeping in the sweet smell of fresh cut grass and pungent ripening,
where he takes in more than cash and I get more than apples.
David K. Leff
16
Looks Can Be Deceiving
Looks can be deceiving….
I was attracted to this drawing of what appeared to be a small
bungalow. Could it be a cottage at the shore or a retreat in the country
woods? But there is no porch to sit on and enjoy the outside ambiance.
Hmmm…. What goes on here?
Something must be happening on the inside.
I check with the artist of this drawing and find out that it’s a picture of
the art studio of Daniel Chester French. After looking him up online, I
discover that he lived from 1850 to 1931, sculpted Abraham Lincoln for
the Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Minute Man in Concord, MA
and hundreds of other statues, monuments and memorials. Big, huge
things went on in this studio, literally - an impressive body of work
through a lifetime.
Can buildings be compared to human beings? We are each small when
compared to the ‘big picture’. We can appear so quiet and unassuming
on the outside, but we each possess a possibility for wonderful creative
energy and potential coming from the inside.
I love metaphors. …
Beverly Tuller
17
How to Rinse a Day Away
Don’t boil over.
Hop in.
Feel the clean soap grasp at your body then lose its hold
to fall through the deep drain within.
Let the warm water cool your head, your day is over.
You do not need a massage or shrink or drug
or pistol or poison or ledge.
For there is no oil
or dirt
or mud
or stain
or wound
or scab
that can’t be washed away.
Jeff Bender
18
Old Friends
Terraced on a hillside the houses stand like people posed on tiered
bleachers for a portrait. Gable to gable and glassily peering at each
other from across the street, they’ve passed tens of thousand of days
together. Rain lashed, wind battered, snowed-in and sun blistered,
they recall horses tethered to porch railings, long-silenced factory
triphammers rattling their windows, the knock of the ice man, and
lively step of daily milk deliveries.
They mark time in layers of rough alligatored paint, hollows worn in
stone steps, newel posts polished by generations of palms, floors
scuffed by the ebb and flow of feet. Walls remember sobbing babies
and childish giggles, the last phlegm choked cough of a cancer-wasted
man and his wife’s shrieking. They’ve witnessed spouses with raised
voices driving angry words like nails and the delicious, breathless
moans of love-making.
Almost a century older than any inhabitant could ever hope to be, the
houses take in a succession of families, sheltering them like orphans.
Landlords and banks be damned, all that the time-worn dwellings
demand is a seeming immortality granted by residents who devotedly
build homes by painting clapboards, shingling roofs, repointing
chimney bricks, and glazing windows.
David K. Leff
19
The Girl with the Turquoise Toes
The girl with the turquoise toes
Watch her there she goes!
She planted a flower
Which nurtured her power.
She only hears the angels sing
So much happiness she does bring.
Not afraid of the night
She’s surrounded by the light.
The girl with the turquoise toes
Watch her there she goes!
With the pen she makes words rhyme.
This is her time to shine.
She holds the brush
And feels the rush.
She took a chance and
Discovered her very special dance.
The girl with the turquoise toes
Watch her there she goes!
Once hiding under cover
Now she is like no other.
She glitters, she shimmers
Knowing the light will never get dimmer.
A firefly in the sky
No longer asking why?
The girl with the turquoise toes
Watch her there she goes!
Janet Louise Neu
20
Ice
sound
of a frozen forest
sound
of being under water
sound
of ripples fading away
into satin silence
where the stone was dropped
into the pond
sound
followed by the last shovel full
slid onto the mound
sound
of space left
in the room
with you gone
not
going
but
gone
for
good
for
ever
for
a
l
w
a
y
s
Bonnie Enes
21
The Teaching Bones
She would lament this continued desecration of beings. He
knew that. Used up, handled by thousands of students memorizing
their Latin names, praying for a passing grade. Destined to be poured
into dumpsters and carted to land fill mountain, too treated with
varnish to even be a source of calcium for the living. Drawers full,
sorted according to type, yellow labels curling with age,
compartmentalized. Severed. And so he brought them home to her.
He was right to do this. And now, on a cool August morning,
under a metal sky, she brings them here, to hold between us.
I stand on the front porch watching her walk down the path.
Like a Dakini from the Charnal grounds, she carries a crystal vase
spilling over with the beautiful bones. Thin and elegant hand bones of
frogs. Who knew what mystery frog flesh held within? Fibulas, tibias,
and metatarsals of cats mingle with the thin, shell-like arc of scapulas,
so transparent, light moves through them illuminating the vase. If I
had second sight, would I see behind her a throng of Spirit cats, high
tails waving, ghostly frogs sitting atop their crowns. Come for, if not
resurrection, reparation.
We light the fire and make smoke with mugwort and sage,
saying prayers and blessings over these bones so long forgotten. We
begin to speak of those who are ill, dying, suffering, we speak of human
cruelty. Talking quietly, murmuring almost, our bodies lean toward
each other as we try to conjure some divine balm for the suffering.
Allan steps out of the house to share that his mother will come
under the care of hospice. Yes, it is like that this morning. We fold her
into our prayers.
We carry the bones to the car, where we place the vase into a
box and secure it with the seatbelt, attending to them as we would a
child. As women do, we lean our hips against the cool metal telling last
minute stories, finishing off the ragged edges before we bite through
the thread of the morning’s weaving.
Nora Jamieson
22
My Sky is Yellow
It was conditional love,
a “my way or the highway” kind of love.
The fabric of the marriage was tattered.
Warp and weft were giving way.
Gaping holes could no longer be denied and
I was beginning to show.
I started to paint.
I think he hated that I painted
and I know he didn’t like that I put my paints and brushes on the oak
trestle
by the kitchen window.
He never said “pretty landscape”
or “nice birch trees”
just : “why is your sky yellow?”
Jane Irene Johnson
23
AIR AND WATER
Rain muted the light of that late day
October’s end
and the wood still thick
with gray green vines over its paths.
The swamp still awake,
it breathed and listened.
A pale hawk hunted the pond,
tiny fish grabbed bubbles of air on its surface.
We walked the path for the first time together
charmed and charged,
something had opened between us.
Sherri Bedingfield
24
Spice-Bush Swamp
It's not only where we walked,
the swamp with hanging vines and hawks
suddenly perched on branches.
It's what we talked about on that walk,
how reflections held other worlds,
other perceptions, and the ripples
of leaves falling on water
changed the nature of that water,
and how mythical primeval beings
manifested in the stillness of the forest.
Walking with you was like walking
through my soul's many gates,
and the resurrection begun,
and the healing. The wholeness
of life was a tidal dream
and we were sleepers awakened
floating in a wandering stream.
The vines were snakes
and the orchids waiting
and the hot wet air met
water as we walked
where few walk.
In the back of my mind late that night
is a day of orchids and hawks
and oncoming storms and talk,
a tangled grove where spirits meet
and walk, a stream deeper than sky
where amid the ghosts of orchids
a hawk takes flight, and so do we.
And so do we.
Tom Nicotera
25
6-5-4-3-2-1-0
twilight rain
gray sky sighs
faintly plays quiet
refrain cries slightly
delays night’s daily
stay
midnight sky
stretches languidly
gently curls
itself around itself
in silent feline slumber
endless mirage
black appears crystal blue
to sleep safely the stars
knots that tie night’s cloak together
night, an old man’s
beard resting on
the breast of mountains
forever is
an eyeblink
velvet cloud shrouded evening
(finger point: eclipsed moon)
Priscilla Newcomb
26
Allegory of Faith
I watch as words pierce stone,
sharp syllables slice
through the marble veil
she carved;
refuge from doubt,
shielding pain.
Chunks of marble scatter on the floor
as she breaks herself onto me.
Staring straight ahead
shoe button eyes mock my query.
Who, what, where, when,
recollections still caustic
cut clean and deep
frozen in time
sculpted by fear.
Faith struck blind now leads us
down a path of redemption.
Joan Pavlinsky
27
Frances Prays to the Angels
“Frances Prays to the Angels” is a collaborative piece created by poet
Annie Barrett with photographers Margaret Stewart and Eric
Allegretti. The piece consists of four handwritten notecards and
envelopes. The notecards are illustrated with images by the
photographers, and the envelopes have postage stamps, likewise
created by the photographers, for this piece.
The text of the notes conveys a surreal narrative of the beauty and
danger of obsession.
Annie Barrett will read from the letters.
28
Calabash
Like Christmas!
she said it was, that first time the foliage fell to frost
and revealed the calabashgreen and curled 'round the base of the plants
like foundlings in a nursery rhyme,
like sleeping inspirations.
With names and forms to set her dreaming,
like "Crown of Thorns", and the practical "Loofa",
homey "Tobacco Box", and exotic "Maranka"plump bottles, slim dippers, whole globes and serpents,
long, warty, sleek or flat,
they conspire to move her intervening hand.
In the studio-porch of her old farmhouse in this low winter sun,
she practices her personal brand of alchemyslips a curving incision along summer tendril's shadow,
paints a daub of indigo, ochre or oxblood, as the fruit directs,
appraises the form, and listening carefully,
applies a stone, a feather, and a buffing of beeswax.
Kent McCoy
29
The Artist’s Studio
I enter a place that’s like being nowhere and everywhere. Titanium
white, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, burnt sienna - names on the
tubes of paint lined up next to a bunch of brushes fanned out atop a
messy table. A wooden easel stands near the table directly under a
skylight. I shouldn’t be touching the artist’s stuff – I feel bad, guilty,
like I’ve introduced original sin to a sacred place. But I know I’m not
going to put down the tubes or this little trowel-like tool. I’m still
holding them when he walks in. I move out of his way to a corner
stool. He walks to the table twists the cap off several tubes and
squeezes a quarter size wad of white then blue then yellow then red on
to a paper plate caked with several inches of paint. His face is
otherworldly. No signs of imposed demands. No lines – yet he’s 64 or
65? He sinks his brush into several islands of paint, approaches the
canvas, swabs it then jabs it several times, rocks back on his heels and
looks at the green-gray shape. I’m exhilarated by the speed.
Recognizable images emerge – a road, a mountain. Now the road is
wet with rain – now he adds the yellow dividing line – the road is wide
at the bottom and narrow at the top –making it recede into distant
mountains. Each new change gives me a surge of pleasure - like the
discovery of the road’s perspective – of seeing something emerge
where a few minutes ago there was nothing. I’m stimulated yet
relaxed. I begin to catalogue his movements: they’re purposeful and
purposeless. Five brush strokes later one mountain is gone - in it’s
place sky. His breathing has changed. My breathing changes too. A
car honks just outside the studio door and I jerk. There’s no change in
his motion or his breathing. He’s gone. Gone to that place I want to
be. Untethered from time. I look at my watch; two hours have passed
since I entered his studio.
Leesa Lawson
30
maggie and milly and molly and may
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
e.e. cummings