Poems by Elizabeth McLagan 

A Feather Falls from the Wing

     of Light                            
                                    

Today, someone has left like a letter
addressed to a white forest which goes on
           
trailing its blue sleepless shadows. Snow
lips, snow eyes, snow pillows. Like ripples
                 
on an overcast ocean, belts of fog
above a blue core. What is it to lie down
                  
in sleep and lie down again into the sleep
of death? Is there a dream to usher
            
the spirit across – a white hand stretched out?
Once, I lay down in snow, flakes striking
              
the tent like sparks or hard rain, except
it was lightest powder falling all night
     
into the bowl of the lake. Was your death
such a night, warm and unmeasured?
   
A snowshoe hare passed by, ghost moons
drifted into the lungs of trees. Like needles
  
falling, like scratches on a glass plate. The light
went ashy. The ink glittered before it dried.                
                                                                                                

       (from The Bitter Oleander Volume 12 Number 2, 
       Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award Winner 2006)
                 

Skunk Cabbage
             

There are days, whole days when
the fingernails feel they are not changing.
     
And the hands fall asleep, wake up weary
in the dark like a child, and the alders,
    
part whip, part scrawl, chatter like the night
birds, asleep except for the light in the lake
    
of the dream, all muscle, all rope pulling
the heart like a balloon deeper down. Maybe
   
the morning is asking a question: two buttery
palms praying around the candle of green corn,
    
the leaves split into yellows and blues,
the afterimage an orange cataract, the room
    
a little warmer now and slick with rain, the child
asleep who dreams you don’t know her.

(from The Bitter Oleander Volume 12 Number 2)

Poems by Leigh Faulkner
           
  

With No Ice in the Gulf  

         
With no ice in the gulf, the grey seals whelped on land,
only to have the young carried away by storm surge
and drowned or washed of all scent, so they were
rejected and starved, 

while their milk-bloated mothers roamed the beaches
in primitive agony. This isn’t bronze or marble or oil
or even words.
When I was a child, I was mystified by the words 

arced across the wall above the pulpit:
The beauty of holiness.
Later, I learned the Keatsean alternative
and was satisfied for a time; but now  

I distrust claims of beauty––accept instead the truth
of death in all its forms,
except those that bear the signs
of careless sanctification and beatification.

The Setting February Sun
    

The setting February sun fires the dry rice stubble,
and for a brief time the shinkansen casts a golden wake
over the villages and up the hillsides;
I might have been back on the Tantramar,                      

waiting for another ghazal to find shape
in the wind-matted, frost-brittle marsh grass
and cattails; or I might have been
on the breakwater in Ierapetra,             

again stunned by the power of the Libyan Sea
and its rainbow of thunder suffusing the slopes
to Mount Dikti, kindling the rise of golden eagles
and something dark, hidden from time, itself, 

behind the beating of copper shields.
Or I might have been, yet again,
the child caught in the old man’s words,
believing that things are always as they appear.

A Poem by Derek Sheffield

    

  
A Revised Account of the West 

     
They never rode into any sunsets,
didn’t slowly melt themselves
like witches into puddles,
or burst, man and horse fused
in one fell buck, one myth of ash
gone to the sinking mound. 
              
They rode instead toward gaseous
fusion, in the direction of
the photosphere as their shadows
reached back with charred arms, barely
touching the still, pointed boots
aimed crosswise at the edge of town.           
    
They rode away from the doors
of saloons that opened to a twisting
dance of rock and sand
where no bright tunes played
and no feather boa
dangled from a slender neck.          
     
Some minor character
like me, leans against
this here fir tree in the rain,
this second-growth green, and puts it
like this, a side-mouth spit
as the solar wind rips at my hat.
  

   

Online Poems – Robert Bly

  

The Dead Seal
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?t=46001

The Cat in the Kitchen, Snowbanks North of the House, The Buried Train
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bly/onlinepoems.htm

Surprised by Evening, Waking from Sleep, Poem in Three Parts, Snowfall in the Afternoon, In a Train, Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter, Watering the Horse, After a Long Busyness, Counting Small-Boned Bodies, Looking into a Face, The Hermit, Insect Heads, Passing an Orchard by Train, Driving My Parents Home at Christmas, For My Son Noah Ten Years Old, At Mid-Ocean, In Rainy September
http://magics.l166.4everdns.com/waiwen/bly.htm

   
  

  
Poems by Christopher Howell