Verse:
Westerfield, C W Pratt, Anne Porter, William C Hilton, Nancy G
C. W. Pratt Fibonacci Sequence Stars, as we see them at least, refuse to keep their distances, prefer company, declare themselves chairs, bears, dippers, sweet milky highways. So the hermit...
...We come out over a valley dense with trailers, where suddenly the showers fuse with sunlight And a frail rainbow shines...
...Fine for triangles, circles, Losses running only from here to there, But the edges of the world crack In friendship's end...
...William C. Hilton Lines of Parting The geometry of poets simply won't do...
...Next we look down into a small ravine Brimmed with eddying swallows, And pass a few wire crosses twined with plastic flowers Set in a mountain graveyard under tawny cliffs...
...As we cross the Rockies and Sangre de Cristo mountains Wary or drugged or sleeping, To each of us in our sprawling disarray Out of the stabbed heart of the mountain-maker A freshet pours...
...So the hermit is sustained, isn't he, in dark privacy by die invisible strings by which he dangles from die high hand of his God...
...Here a blind Indian with whitened eyes Climbs into the bus, And after him a woman, sister, mistress, wife, They alone know...
...Nancy G. Westerfield Tabula Rasa Your own name still attaches to you, Is here charted at the head of your hospital Bed, though mis evening you respond to it Slowly, as your way to the outside Begins to erase, along with notions Of time and space, weather, our Workaday lives...
...but no well-wishing Salvaged you, How we sit awkwardly Bedside, not knowing how to make love understood By the thing that erases you to all bet its pain, The white slate, unwritten, mat has taken your ptace...
...Found one poet who got it right: A Canadian goose on the cold river, Barking lone eulogy Into the morning sup for a dead mate...
...Then we stop at a gas-pump in an adobe town Where the young men are drinking beer and talking Around a broken car...
...I'm dull," you say Self-deprecatuigly, thin hands laced, arms Addicted to morphine...
...Time curves around love's dying And poets disappear in The universal expansion and Lies of entropy old geometers didn't know I abandoned the lying literature...
...The passion of all singleness to keep in touch...
...Anne Porter From Denver to Albuquerque Green is the bride of water, we see them always together Along gold-bearing creeks in these high western mountains...
...On the grimy wall of the washroom someone has printed: LOVE IS AMONG US...
...How you wanted out of this body's bouse When it began to crumble and burn With you in it...
...Collapses in Euclidian theorem And addled proofs...
...They share the meal they brought with them And fall asleep in one another's arms...
...So many bees stinging night's flesh...
...Waves of rock surge above us to bare inaccessible heights Stained with their lofty grape-blue shadows, White bluebells, coral bells and wild white poppies Bloom fearless on the ledges...
...Your skull, shaved, And unshaven beard tell us the growth Of what inside your forcecupped eyes listens Instead of you, gradually erasing our names And kinship, confusing our faces, your past...
...Barking only at some part Of a design it knew itself To be no more a part of...
Vol. 110 • August 1983 • No. 14
