May 2017
The Child in Wonder Falling on Grass
by Donna Johnson
Spring’s early heat turns you to dervish.
Your knees soiled green from tumbles,
with wild screams you protest mother’s firm grip.
Then, minutes later you sleep, curled in her lap.
Smells of coming rain, mud, and wild onion
surround you, while farther, only inches
in the great scheme, expands the black unbreathable,
which astronauts say smells like burning tungsten.
This year, the black drop of Venus will mar
the perfect sphere of our small dense star.
A middling yellow one among millions similar,
It warms your skin, the grass, the dirt below the grass,
as it absorbs the remnants of supernovas
bursting their whipped cores.
From Selvage by Donna Johnson (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon) 2013.
Donna Johnson is the author of Selvage published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems and reviews have been published in Birmingham Poetry Review, Blue Unicorn, Cafe Review, Green Mountains Review, Perihelion, and other journals. She won Cutbank magazine’s annual poetry contest and was a finalist for the Patricia Dobler Award.
April 2017
Homage, Orby Head
by Susan Edwards Richmond
When I can go no farther, and the maps are all
blue, I count the birds at the end of the world:
swooped down from their russet watch-towers, long,
low lines of silhouette stoop to the waves,
piebald buoys bob in the lea of rocks,
plump-bellied gourds with red waders on troll
the bricky stone. Arms clasp over pulled up
knees, salted by the wet perimeter
of light. Gathering in the past, shapes stream by,
great auk, Labrador duck, and Eskimo
curlew in venerated waves, all plucked,
bloodied, and damned. Shingles crack in the tide’s
ruddy contusions. We have everything
to lose, and have again and again.
after Seamus Heaney
“Homage, Orby Head” appears in Susan Edwards Richmond’s new book, Before We Were Birds, published by Adastra Press.
Susan will be reading from Before We Were Birds at the 6 Bridges Gallery, 77 Main Street, Maynard, on Thursday, April 13, at 7:30 p.m. Come early and enjoy Gail Erwin’s show, Niche, Cyanotypes and Constructions, in the gallery, as well as the work of Jane McKinnon Johnstone. Hope to see you there!
March 2017
The Snow Storm
by Marie Howe
I walked down towards the river, and the deer had left tracks
deep as half my arm, that ended in a perfect hoof
and the shump shump sound my boots made walking made the silence loud.
And when I turned back towards the great house
I walked beside the deer tracks again.
And when I came near the feeder: little tracks of the birds on the surface
of the snow I'd broken through.
Put your finger here, and see my hands, then bring your hand and put it in my side.
I put my hand down into the deer track
and touched the bottom of an invisible hoof.
Then my finger in the little mark of the jay.
Reprinted from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe. Copyright © 2008 by Marie Howe. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Marie Howe will be in Acton this month to receive the 17th Annual Robert Creeley Award! She will read from her work at a free public reading at 7:30 p.m. at the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School auditorium, 36 Charter Road, Acton. Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio is a sponsor of this event.
Marie Howe is the author of three books of poetry: The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, The Good Thief, and What the Living Do. She is also the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing From the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Find a full bio of Marie Howe at www.robertcreeleyfoundation.org
February 2017
Butedale Rite
by Karla Lynn Merrifield
When the ice thaws & the first floes
leave for their long passage down channel
all the ghost salmon return in a spring
ritual to the site where white water
falls into the cove & shadow of commerce
in the red flesh of their brethren falls
on their ghostly silver bodies, on all
the hollow memories of their lost species.
It is a celebration of demise—
not theirs—but that of the hungriest ones,
those alien creatures with machinery,
tin cans, solder, steam, a greedy streak,
a killing instinct, shamelessness.
The ghost salmon return to the shambles
& the silence, to the clean scents
of rotting wood & rusting steel,
the long, slow fade of human sanctimony.
The ghost salmon return & return & return
until a new tide turns, bringing
again their living kind from the sea
to this native place, their place on earth.
—from Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing)
Karla Linn Merrifield, a National Park Artist-in-Residence, has 12 books to her credit; the newest is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada. She is assistant editor and book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. Give her name a Google to read more and visit her at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.
January 2017
Alex Therien’s Chickadees
by Charles Weld
Alek Therien said that they lit on his coat just like flies
when he stopped chopping wood to eat his lunch of cold potato
in the snow. One thing he had in common with his friend Thoreau—
at least, when describing chickadees—was penchant for hyperbole.
Talking large, my uncle called it in a letter he wrote that same decade.
After many, cold hours in the woods, during which Thoreau surveyed
the changes that a hard freeze had made, he wrote each chickadee
warmed him as a bright fire constantly burning. Thrice, not twice,
warmed would be his adage about wood’s heat. Chopping and
sawing heat first; burning, second; and, at times, these woodlot titmice
whose charity is unrehearsed. One advances, shies,
and advances again before picking a seed from my wife’s flat hand,
less bold than those that crossed Therien’s clearing to demand
supper from Thoreau as he cut across a neighbor’s cut-over land.
Charles Weld lives in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Pudding House published a chapbook of his poems, Country I Would Settle In in 2004. Kattywompus Press published a second chapbook, Who Cooks For You? in 2012. Charles Weld works as an administrator in a non-profit agency that supports youth with mental health needs.
December 2016
Pass Creek
by Tom Sexton
The lamp we leave near the door to light
the cabin if we arrive after dark
hissed and flared before it caught.
When it did, I thought I saw blossoms
on the leafless tree outside the window.
I was both amazed and oddly comforted
to find that they were only moths
that had come to rest on the half-dead tree.
When was it that I first began to long
for the sound of Pass Creek beneath deep snow
and the endless blue of unobstructed glaciers,
for wind that bends me like a sapling
and for those few December days when light
touches its coat of many colors to the hills?
—from For the Sake of the Light (University of Alaska Press, 2009)
Tom Sexton served as Alaska's poet laureate from 1994 until 2000. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry. Tom now spends every other winter in Eastport, Maine, with his wife of fifty years, Sharyn, and their Irish Terrier, Murphy.
November 2016
The Act of Sweeping
by L. R. Berger
Clay Sculpture, Jane Kaufman
A woman is sweeping her porch
as if life depended on it,
dowsing for counsel
through the press
of an old broom, through
some small sure act
she can be certain
does no harm.
Wind rouses, loosening leaves
from even the stiffest branches,
and sets the tiny
green boat on the bay
rocking like our wavering
scales of justice.
She could be paddling
herself across. Wind
sweeps the porch. A crow
who walked the plank
bobs on one quivering
wrist of pine—
springs off, as if to dive,
but rises.
—from The Unexpected Aviary (Deerbrook Editions, 2003)
L.R.Berger’s collection of poems, The Unexpected Aviary, received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. She’s been the grateful recipient of fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN New England Discovery Award, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, Wellspring, and The American Academy in Rome. With Kamal Boullatta, she assisted in the translation from the Arabic of “Beginnings” by Adonis (Pyramid Atlantic Press). She lives and writes in New Hampshire within earshot of the Contoocook River.
October 2016
The Design of Autumn
by Janisse Ray
Any day the hawks, circling
overhead, will be gone. Perhaps today
their last. The trees throw off
bushels of paper money, collecting
in the weeds. The leaves are loud
when the wind comes off the hill.
Who can lie down at the time of
ripe fruit, of decadence, before
blackness? No matter how rich
we become, or old, or unable,
won‘t some part of us desire to weave
a basket in which to forage
the last of the grapes? Or, start
moving toward the valleys of deer?
I go wandering greedily
amid all the falling-down.
—from A House of Branches (Wind Publications, 2010)
Janisse Ray lives in the coastal plains of southeast Georgia, where she farms, studies nature, and writes. She is the author of the poetry collection, A House of Branches, and three books of literary nonfiction, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land.
September 2016
Learning to Swim in the Millpond
by Sarah Brownsberger
The surface is gold and slick
with algae, weightless
oil sallowing your skin;
you see it when water striders
leave tracks with their spider feet.
Underwater is silver
with sediment and weed rot,
metal shavings dancing
round the magnet of your hand,
round your ankles lily stems and
cold currents over hollows where
snapping turtles lurk,
your hair in slow motion
in shafts of sun
from a sky like old glass.
You perch on a stone, watching
bubblets rise from your gooseflesh arms,
dragonflies dart and shy, a crow
croaks from the elm and suddenly
you hear the rush in the sluiceway.
Once my brother and I sank a raft
in waterliles; a shout sounded
from the bank as we thrashed
to a rush-hidden island, a boulder,
where we waited to be rescued
like Moses in the basket,
waited very still because
aside us lay a coil of fresh dark stripes,
a snake that blinked but did not
budge, happy on warm granite.
Sarah Brownsberger’s poems have recently appeared in Poetry East, Commonweal, and WomenArts Quarterly and have previously appeared in The Hudson Review, Field, OnEarth, Salamander, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her essay “Poetry, Hunger, and Electric Lights: Lessons from Iceland on Poetry and its Audience” appeared in the September, 2015, Cambridge Quarterly (UK). Her Icelandic-English translations include Sigfús Bjartmarsson’s bestiary Raptorhood (Uppheimar, 2007) and Harpa Árnadóttir’s artist’s diary June (Crymogea, 2011).
August 2016
When the Answer Is Touch
by Terry House
The next time
You are stumped –
The four fingers
Of one hand held up,
Your waiting thumb
Slumped across your palm,
Unticked -
Consider then
The worrisome itch
And the rush of ferns
Against your shins;
Consider the wind-whipped slap,
The drenching splash, and
The sudden, summer storm
That stung you in its wrath.
Consider the constriction
Of your throat.
You won’t forget again.
“When the Answer Is Touch” was created especially for the 2016 Plein Air Poetry Walk at Old Frog Pond Farm in response to the prompt: SPLASH! Come to the farm to hear Terry House and 18 other poets read their original work in the settings in which they were composed on Sunday, September 11 2016 at 2 p.m..
Terry House is an educator, freelance arts reviewer, and Vice President of the Robert Creeley Foundation.
July 2016
Last Sunday in July
by Lynne Viti
Sun, then not-sun, clouds
then not-clouds,
warm, then not-warm.
This slender land can’t
make up its mind.
Cool breezes,
fungi of every color erupt–
red, colonies of chocolate brown,
or white, something you might
find in your salad.
Not much to do save
listen to Bill Evans ply the piano,
wrestle with the crossword,
turn off the phone.
Lynne Viti is a senior lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Paterson Review, Mountain Gazette, The LongLeaf Pine, Amuse-Bouche, Silver Birch Press, These Fragile Lilacs, Damfino Journal, In-Flight Literary Magazine, Blognostics, A New Ulster, The Journal of Applied Poetics, The Lost Country, Irish Literary Review, and in a curated exhibit at Boston City Hall. She won an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest, and an award in the 2015 Summer Poetry Contest of The Song Is... She blogs at https://stillinschool.wordpress.com.
June 2016
Custody of the Eyes
Gerard Manley Hopkins
by Jeffrey Harrison
To look at the world
with devotion,
giving all of himself
to what was given,
sometimes gave him
so much pleasure
he thought it must be
a sin, distracting him
from his devotion
to God. Therefore
the eyes had to be
taken into custody
like a pair of criminals,
kept in the flesh-and-
bone cell of the head,
their gaze cast down
in penitence,
the eyes themselves
watched over
to prevent them from
looking at anything
more than was needed
to get through the day.
For weeks or months
at a time, and once
for half a year,
he denied himself
the beauty he knew
more acutely than others,
as if reducing each thing—
flower, stone, bird—
to a single word,
stripping it of the
singularity
he loved to describe
in rushing phrases
that spilled down
his journal’s pages.
But when the penance
ended, his sight
flew out
into the open sky
and over the fields,
innocently coming
to rest on each self-
expressing element
of creation
with such delight
and gratitude
he couldn’t keep
the words from
pouring out of him.
from Into Daylight, by Jeffrey Harrison, Tupelo Press, 2014
Jeffrey Harrison is the author of five books of poetry, including Incomplete Knowledge, runner-up for the Poets’ Prize in 2008, and Into Daylight, published by Tupelo Press in 2014 as the winner of the Dorset Prize and selected by the Massachusetts Center for the Book as a Must-Read Book for 2015. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, his poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies.