Apologies for Sex in Old Age

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie.

—Shakespeare

I lie absently on the ashes of everything, and any fire remaining heads toward cooling like the Universe itself, the Cosmos aging, Space/Time, as engaging as it is, fueling its own demise by expanding into blackness, blankness, and cold, dying by slow degrees in illimitable skies, human technologies at last truly forecasting where eternity lies.

Ashes of my youth are like ashes of dreams: it’s in my memory, your memory, that they exist at all, and since nothing past will be once more, it’s best to go on repeating love, unseating a law, needing a win, kneading a sin, greeting sex’s succor that will never be again.

Penny K Johnson To shatter one-on-top-the-other

We are not there when ice seals the lake We are not there when snow hushes the ice In spring, sediment will begin to churn. sediment begins to heat imperceptibly fish swivel through the roofed water again

We will not feel the shallows heat beneath the ice We will not witness the length of crystals shearing evolving into another kind of candle and these candles collecting in a parade.

Until, wind comes strong to unmoor the candles and drives them up onto the shore where they tinkle against each other, and melt under the sun.

Martha Kaplan

Tracks Vein the Earth

Somewhere a coyote slinks through scablands of the inland west, might be a trickster, might wreak havoc, might be the one who stole fire from the house of pain, might make changes, shake things up. Might be just a plain coyote who trots down a summer road, looks back at you, shrugs you off, leads you to gravel path in a forest of pines and scrubs where blackberries thrive.

There. A raven croaks above a northern lake, just a bird, or Raven, the trickster, sometimes walks around looking human, sexy; he'll steal your wife, maybe she'll like him better. He watches, flies over mountains, knows how to dance.

Once children marked out paths between houses, or through wild places that are no more. Their footprints tamped down the land, kept the paths alive. Sometimes tracings show in uneven tarmac, or a break in concrete. The earth remembers more than surface wrecked by machines that tore up the paths. When asphalt bolts, tree roots are speaking.

Last night a shadow as large as a wolf moved like an arrow under the moon down the middle of an icy street. Something haunting, something wild drew me to it. I watched it pass under a streetlight and saw the hump of huge racoon. When it was gone, I felt the void. I feel it still.

Sarah Kersey

Winter Eulogy

The gray dress of the sky flutters, stutters, lifts in the bleak dawn. In winter, we weigh our respite in sunsets, moments of gold tracing November, as if to say, “here lies the yellow bursts of morning.” It feels like we’ll never find our way back, but this winter is merely a biding of time, busy-work for God and his off-duty angels. I call this pale season the year’s annual funeral, and spring the earth’s resurrection. I get more religious in the dark of it all. It’s always the poet’s job to provide the eulogy. I say: may the color of the world sleep gently beneath this gray riot.

Nancy Knowles On Earth as It Is

What moves downriver catechizes us: desire is written in the human heart.

Our births migrating without a compass, we shipwreck here, bide only to depart, our fruitful waste compounding, our upstart cadavers salting this once fertile land.

Somewhere I read of rain. Could we withstand the flood and on this bank revive our root, we might a better husbandry command, arriving home bare soul, barefoot.

Relic

You don’t ever let go of the thread

—William Stafford

All these years I’ve been wondering what to do with this box of pears.

Cool them with warm winds from a Japanese fan?

Shine on them softest lights from a red winged Tiffany lamp?

Strike them with pins from a pin cushion and watch them dive down like arrows hitting their mark?

Or cover them with all of my body my body a paperweight a blanket of blue night and stars a landing point that says hold on— whatever you do don’t let go.

Eric le Fatte

Boston Basin

As dusk comes beneath Torment, Forbidden, and Boston Peak, a pair of scarce black bears forage upper slopes for berries. Shadows also fall on marmots, who whistle epilogues among rocks. We witness the last of the innocent sun bleed through a haze of smoke to the west. We realize celestial objects are blameless as fire and martyred ice. Dozens of waterfalls drop from receding glaciers, with voices that won't be silenced, while headlamps of climbers inch down those glaciers in descents that suggest their lights were cut off from the stars.

Sherri Levine

Last Year’s Leaves

A walk in the woods, whiff of spring damp dirt and pine. Ice still on the ground but in the sun

I feel like I am walking on a giant sponge.

Mushrooms sprout, clustering white caps blue ink trumpets, slit gills, fleshy spores, beautiful ugly fungus flowers.

I crouch underfoot and lift last year’s leaves— lying crisp and brittle, still intact

I don’t have to dig deep to feel the rich dark earth in my fist home of worms, bugs, and slugs, Isn’t it a comfort to be part of something seemingly whole?

Walking through last year’s leaves, through darkness of illness, loss, and grief

I arise as a tightly wound fiddlehead now unfurled, a space alien plant, shooting toward the sky.

David McElroy