Lake Echo, Dear

Is the woman in the pool of light
really reading or just staring
at what is written

Is the man walking in the soft rain
naked or is it the rain
that makes his shirt transparent

The boy in the iron cot
is he asleep or still
fingering the springs underneath

Did you honestly believe
three lives could be complete

The bottle of green liquid
on the sill is it real

The bottle on the peeling sill
is it filled with green

Or is the liquid an illusion
of fullness

How summer’s children turn
into fish and rain softens men

How the elements of summer
nights bid us to get down with each other
on the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful
whether or not
it will change the world one drop

-C. D. Wright, 2002

where you are planted

he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing. southern trees
as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees.

fuchsia, lavender, white, light pink, purple : crape myrtle bouquets burst
open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bark : my favorite southern trees.

one hundred degrees in the shade : we settle into still pools of humidity, moss-
dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees.

the maples in our front yard flew in spring on helicopter wings. in fall, we
splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees.

frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly
plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees.

i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i :
it’s part of what makes me evie : i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

-Evie Shockley, 2011

Black Earth

Openly, yes,
---------With the naturalness
---------Of the hippopotamus or the alligator
When it climbs out on the bank to experience the

Sun, I do these
Things which I do, which please
---------No one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
---------Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

In view was a
Renaissance; shall I say
---------The contrary? The sediment of the river which
---------Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used

To it, it may
Remain there; do away
---------With it and I am myself done away with, for the
---------Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was

There to begin
With. This elephant skin
---------Which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of
---------The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light

Can filter—cut
Into checkers by rut
---------Upon rut of unpreventable experience—
---------It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the

Hairy toed. Black
But beautiful, my back
---------Is full of the history of power. Of power? What
---------Is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never

Be cut into
By a wooden spear; through-
---------Out childhood to the present time, the unity of
---------Life and death has been expressed by the circumference

Described by my
Trunk; nevertheless, I
---------Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after
---------All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it

Has its centre
Well nurtured—we know
---------Where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where ?
---------My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of

The wind. I see
And I hear, unlike the
---------Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made
---------To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear,

That tree trunk without
Roots, accustomed to shout
---------Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact
---------By who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that

Spiritual
Brother to the coral
---------Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light
---------Becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to

The I of each,
A kind of fretful speech
---------Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is?
---------Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that

Phenomenon
The above formation,
---------Translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely—
---------That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first

Time, a substance
Needful as an instance
---------Of the indestructibility of matter; it
---------Has looked at the electricity and at the earth-

Quake and is still
Here; the name means thick. Will
---------Depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no
---------Beautiful element of unreason under it?

-Marianne Moore, 1918

For me, this post is a mile marker, a little green rectangle along the highway that tells you you're halfway between someplace and someplace else. I've seen it on the horizon for a little bit; you could say I've been waiting. It's kind of a silly thing, but this is the post that brings the place: sk tag up to 83, which means it pulls ahead of the place: ma one. There's no clean correlation between the number of posts and the time I've been in a place, but here's the truth: Saskatoon is the place I've lived the longest since I graduated college two years ago. In less than a month, it'll be a year since my car and I crossed through Portal (North Dakota) into North Portal (Saskatchewan), a year since I moved into my shoebox of an apartment. I slept on the floor that first night and ate the trail mix leftover from my drive. I had no Canadian money (let it never be said that I know what I'm doing. I was miles past North Portal when I realized I'd forgotten to change any cash.).

17 September 1914

The astonishing reality of things
Is my discovery every day
Each thing is what it is,
And it's hard to explain to someone how happy this makes me,
And how much this suffices me.

All it takes to be complete is to exist.

I've written quite a few poems,
I'll no doubt write many more,
And this is what every poem of mine says,
And all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is a different way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at stone.
I don't start thinking about whether it exists.
I don't get sidetracked, calling it my sister.
I like it for being a stone,
I like it because it feels nothing,
I like it because it's not related to me in any way.

At other times I hear the wind blow,
And I feel that it is worth being born just to hear the wind blow.

I don't know what people will think when they read this,
But I feel it must be right because I think it without any effort
Or any idea of what people who hear me will think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it the way my words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet,
And it surprised me, for I didn't think
I could be called anything.
I'm not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, the value isn't mine
It belongs to my poems.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

-Fernando Pessoa, 1914

August

This world so
golden so un-
reachable this
August morning
with its hills
its tawny stub-
ble fields its
full-crowned
trees its sin-
gle scarlet
branches arch-
ing overhead
as desperate
music pours
from the
speakers is
reason enough
to live almost
although it's
hard acknowl-
edging that this
is what it
gives us: sim-
ple being
depthless mir-
rored imma-
nence daylong
and here for
the taking.

I want the
world to an-
swer back the
way the song
wants—shared
joy and shared
grief shared
adoration
spilling into
the unrepen-
tant void. And
today it al-
most does: sun-
struck seren-
ity and self-
content im-
mense impervi-
ous beauty
distant pres-
ent godly evi-
dence—as in
the near far
hills the
first most
gaudy leaves
the rough down
gold or russet
no hint of
gray yet on
your untouch-
able cheek.

-Jonathan Galassi, 2012