For a long time I watched his ship departing

until the flag at the stern vanished, eaten by the gray horizon.

Then the gulls came, then the stars. I began to live between visions

of reunion and the truth shifting like tides against the dunes.

Under a tent of yaupons I built a hut of driftwood, using sea oats

for a threshold and the emptied halves of mollusk shells for the roof.

Butterflies traversed the shore. When I held the ocean’s shell

to my ear we were one

vessel speaking to another vessel

about the rapture of the void.

Beneath the bed
Of course I didn’t realize it

At the time & in fact
Didn’t know for years

Until one day a standard
Khaki book mailer

Arrived & within it
An old

Stained cassette tape
Simply labeled in black marker

“Him / Me / September 1975″
& as I listened I knew something

Had been asked of me
Across the years & loneliness

To which I simply responded
With the same barely audible

Silence that I had chosen then

- David St. John

bread.
It’s tough

and mostly
tasteless

stuff.
You chew

and chew.
It’s said

to be good
for you, but

it only fills.
Swallow it,

it swells.
And it must

be mildly
sodiate,

for its last
effect is just

like its first:
thirst. Take

birth, for
instance:

nine whole
months

a baby
keeps mum.

Take spring:
up north,

all time’s
a sandwich

between thick
white crusts

of wintering.
Take anything

that bakes,
brews, builds,

or makes
appointments

more than a
few days out.

Take worry
and doubt.

And what’s
hurry but a

hurried wait?
Every day

we wait for
night; every

night we wait
for morning.

Take warning.
Take endings,

especially
endings made

unnecessarily
(or, worse,

by excess
drivel or a

swiveling
syntax,

superficially)
delayed:

the wait
is what

a writer
spends

his brief
and bitter

tenure on
this breath-

taking, heart-
breaking

earth
making

every
ending

worth.

– Todd Boss

Would that there were some other way.

– D. A. Powell

The things you said were said so perfectly
at times, sometimes I feel like Porphyry,
devoted one fed by your rarified thoughts.
All that’s real is spiritual, so you sought
to split the barrier between degrees

of being. You wanted union with the One,
were said to attain this end on four occasions.
Fountain the soul can rise toward illustrates
the things you said

about the One’s good spreading, and man akin to it,
emanation and return. This doctrine
glossed the Trinity, and to thank you I submit
these lines, which being ex nihilo shine
divinely beyond Nature, or so I interpret
the things you said.

Birds graze the tassels,
sparrowing actually, or mocking,
their colors worth
nothing unless I pin
their wings
in the field.
Speaking of field:
the Russians say
life is a walk across an open one
where mules are buried,
and men.
The soil remembers
a forest that marched right through.
In time-lapse.
In the filtered light
a camera peels from wheat.
I see soldiers’ hands, too,
grazing the tassels.
If you think you’re here
with me, feeling the field
on you, chained to it
like a peasant,
aging like good wine and cheese,
you are.
Having noticed the sparrows,
you notice the flies.
Having heard a bell,
you see some cows,
together on an upland slope.

There, where stones populate
the underneath, splay
rain as it blends & stops
being rain, raises the river,
water into water, stone
into soil, too slick to stand
or walk, too wide to freeze
or span, to cross you must
swim, the current a visible
instance of movement:
you’d enter the water here &
if not pulled under
would emerge so far down-
stream the crossing’d require
another journey entirely,
on foot, over uncertain terrain,
over what, through ownership,
through deed, is called property,
thus encroachment, thus trespass.
The mind, though, can cross,
along with the eye (where it can see).
The body, my dear, counts for
so little — nothing, really — here.

So we’ve moved out of the years.
I am finally back upstream
and, but for their holiday grins
on every bookcase, the boys
were never born, it was a dream.
Here is where my past begins

in a garret beside a bridge,
woken by birds pecking moss
from the dark. The river’s clear.
It will not turn to sludge
till it reaches you and the mess
of streets I hated, endured

only because you were there.
My windows are full of leaves.
There are mountains in my skylight.
Perhaps you would like it here.
It is the same river—it moves,
perhaps, towards the same light.

If you were there when I woke
With my barbed wire, with my scars
You would avert your green gaze
I would feel the chill of regret.

Though you said something else
In sunlight, over wine.

I saw a cross on a tall rock
And a black boat danced on light
Someone waved, was it you,
A brown arm between white sails.

Old women know
That more go away
Than will ever return
Than the morning has scars.

In the wind as it blows
Wet sand against the panes
On the water that sings
In the fire as it dies
In blue sheets warmed by
Someone sleeping alone
On an empty park bench
When they lock up the square
You are still there

Brown arm green gaze black boat blown sand barbed wire.