Looking Back
Remembering that long hot summer
When the truth hit home like the
Brick that struck you at the anti-
Johnson rally that long forgotten
Summer of love
They have boarded up the windows
Of the house we once shared
Abandoned like us
Waiting for the calendar
To stop its mad spinning
The bones brittle as fish
Remembering the clenched fist
Salutes the all-day marches the
Women carrying their young
On their backs the silent rage
In the young men's eyes
Now only severed nightmares
A bad dream dressed in disguise
Lost visions running like watercolors
From a cheap canvas
Our words old photographs fading
With time
No longer the warrior
No longer the samurai swinging
His blade into the flesh of night.
–
A.D. Winans
First Poem for You
I love to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can't see them. I'm sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
to me, taking you until we're spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They'll last until
you're seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
–
Kim Addonizio
Alchemy
Consequence and its heavy metals strive toward transformation
while imprecisely, a silent pine resonates with lake.
Among the assurances of proximity and place, she floats out,
weightless, over the lake's flat gaze. Heavy arms repeated and relieved.
Birds shape themselves to wind. The trees shift,
shimmering as snow sifts its silences.
Shadows send their slender semiselves out like wishes
that have not yet learned to lift. I sit doubled beside the pine.
A woman pleads with me from within the lake: Leave—
Listening to her is like eating a peach right down to the pit.
Everything green folds to gold and starts again.
Leaden is the death that does not find its way forward.
Harmony must first have been an opposition that stumbled
into agreement slightly above the departure.
–
Sage Cohen
Nature and Psychology
The years line up like arrows,
pointing us toward somewhere else.
The days shine like paintings.
Perspective gives us near and far.
The poem began in a cafe
on Cole Street where you played
your guitar and I wrote
everything down because I believed
that truth could be conquered
with words. I had nothing to offer
but my future. You despised death
and exalted it, having lost more
than you were willing to give.
Ocean and coast cannot resolve
their attraction. It is this contradiction
that holds the world together.
The sky is a eulogy.
It holds everything. It holds nothing.
The tides recoil. Then they reach.
We're washed up on the shore.
–
Sage Cohen
I Find Myself European Still
I find myself European, still
watching the bodies in Colonel Chabert
pile up in the dark on my blue T.V.
It makes you think how true it is: we have
no monopoly on pain—a holocaust
for farmboys means more meat;
the axis of the universe won't tilt
if Pakistan disappears, or Germany
or us. Disgust for humanity
isn't my gift; when softness leaves the body
so do I. But empowerment, it doesn't seem to fit
when the horseflesh smashes against the line
and it's us the ciphers, the privates, the hooves.
So hide me somewhere with bread and a name
and call it courage, prudence if you like,
call it listening to the world
underwater, where you hear the first soft music
of the grave.
Death is the quietness
of death, which is to say
it's silent where we're most alive,
the air itself can bury us
But give us, for a while, just a little weight
to keep from falling upward through the stars.
–
Rodney Koeneke
