Love, Death, and the Seasons

In California they hardly have them.
You could be dreaming. Somehow
You always have these ragged clouds,
This hard blue air that humms,
These huge, wet, smelly trees that warp and shed.
Somehow there are all these people and all these cars
And all this energy and ennui together.
Oh, people commit suicide or retire to France and die there
(or to upstate New York) and everyone’s cool
about the pains between lovers and the wrench
of time and moral aches and old age.
Yet the experienced get to know when the trees change,
To look before sunrise for ice on the puddle
To see constancy in the changed grades of sex,
To see the knowledge of black whited out in these young places.

(c) 1980 Roxanne Rhodes

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convalescence

i'm walking in sun
light the air is may
wine: lilac and iris.

back out toward the barn, wild
strawberries everywhere
i look. i am alone

on these green days, hang
like a glider, intoxicated
to my legs. i know

the lay of this land:
on my own i am flawless
as birds, my feet

successful in space after space
all day.

(c) 1980 Gloria Still

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Hillside Home

I ran through fields
on the east ridge
and watched the shadow
of the west ridge
creep across the valley
to the house in between,
its windows glowing
in the near dark.
I ran for miles that day,
the cool autumn air slipping
like silence around me,
the sun going down
the house coming closer,
cars, cooing pigeons
roosting in the barn,
the blat of a calf against
the dark.

(c) 1980 W. O. Boggs

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Mourning Dove

In the morning the dove’s coo
Brought me back to the night’s dream

I had given up trying to remember,
And another dream had seemed lost

In an instant the coo sounds deep
Into the night

And I see again with an inner smile
The football player kick off;

A dove with folded wings goes
Sailing into the air, sharply bankingbr> To the left

Still alive, its beak becomes stuck in
The minute mesh of a chain link fence

A referee comes over and extracts
The dying dove from the fence

He gives it to the line judge.

(c) 1980 Ronald Smits

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grandma and the snow falling in the mountains

it hasn't stopped snowing
since 9 last night

& through the woods
grandma tossing flour to the magpies

icicles hang from the roof
of the small cabin grandma's silver
gray hair combed down to a point on her back

it is still snowing
& over the bridge

the little red house up the mountain a white
roof full and the earth meeting
with more white

the snow hasn't stopped coming
down the mountain

the snow thick
dense grandma's fat
fingers pointing everywhere her children

the woodpile is in the grip of snow
falling
a green ribbon is gone
under the snowfall

tinsel strands measure the wind
too thin too silver
grandma's breath on the tongue
too cold to melt

(c) 1980 Bonnie Maurer