Issue 2.10

Nocturne It is dark now and my living room is the stern cabin of an ancient ship. Two candles swing in the hurricanes under the bulkheads, as through the gallery the wake divides, both right and sinister. History upon history rolls behind under moonlight. The north wind bulges gale-force about the house. The window panes shake, and the town around me is a fleet of foundering boats, battered, adrift upon a hillside, migrant rafts among them made absurd by hay rolls bobbing as mines in a bay risen with snowmelt.

In the Blade of Time This is my time, my chance, my hope, my timelessness and timeliness in one, when I want to be here and there where the sea begins and the land ends, or birds' songs start fresh green lawn; I’m the sun that lifts a rose flower, or the rain that drowns a high harvest; the wind that scatters and sows seeds, the delightful hand that shares food. My present, past and future are dreams, the conflux of life and death in a womb; my beginning, end, another beginning the face of a future without maps, the start of joy and sorrow in a sling. I’m stuck in the middle of one life, still as a sea; floating as a river, I await my time at the shrinking of a tide when the clock of the apocalypse ticks for death to holla from the top of a tree. I dangle between hope and despair, between destruction and construction; I make, remake and unmake life, create, desecrate and uncreate death, yet I cannot build the wings to fly; but in my head, all things are possible and impossible in equal degrees. When leaves fall, I whisper to the wind; when storms fall on the branches of trees, I lend them breath so they can dream, and their dreams, when they are green, are boundless like the breadth of the sea. And now that we live in the deeds we yield, there’s time to make these seeds a gift.

The Battle Is Long Lost It would rise between the toes of dinosaurs: horsetail, pernicious rhizome creeping, speeding, spreading, inexorable, nine feet below. A tiny fragment will launch a new invasion. Horsetail, pernicious rhizome creeping— only rock and Roundup divert its path. A tiny fragment will launch a new invasion. Fear the supreme leader of nature’s thugs. Only rock and Roundup divert its path: dead men’s fingers too mild a term. Fear the supreme leader of nature’s thugs. You will go mad fighting equisetum. Dead men’s fingers too mild a term. It would rise between the toes of dinosaurs. You will go mad fighting equisetum— speeding, spreading, inexorable, nine feet below.

Counsel for a Cavalier It is just a dream; not so much changed. One night you were fevered, legs cold as if ferried on a block of ice. No hawk visited you but a midge, and a moth so weak it could have been a flake of ash. You stood atop a tenement blinded by the sun and saw only black woods, nothing in detail, though if you could—you say if you could walk into that forest you’d find your cold, bright lady warmed by the embrace of a boar. Find another woman, then; find yourself a new jacket and a new job and forget about it, if you think you are the only one with outsized desires. Forget about the university, your whims of travel—dull is the key when the door is obsolete. When the road at last rends your transmission into junk, and you push by baby strollers, dancing beggars and the obese to pass a popular bistro, appraising the myriad youthful faces as delicate as porcelain, you’ll be just another cuckold dreamer, too harried to know yourself, even by the scent of flesh and herbs.