Poetry
Houston, Beth & Pratt, Charles W.
Beth Houston Lullaby When the smoldering moon is tossing and turning in violent clouds, you wake on panting bedsprings in a sweat, cold to the bone, a voice conjuring the ghost not of something...
...Now you can sleep...
...Settle down in your lacy gownthe one I gave you...
...Charles W. Pratt November: Sparing Ihe Old Apples Cracked urns of air, broken-winged umbrellas...
...Beth Houston Lullaby When the smoldering moon is tossing and turning in violent clouds, you wake on panting bedsprings in a sweat, cold to the bone, a voice conjuring the ghost not of something dead hut too alive...
...Lock the door, brush ihe ash from your hands...
...The ribbons of dust, the spells of blood I wrote to haunt you...
...Black seabirds drying angular wings on a rock- One with a hole through its trunk, another half-withered As if it had suffered a paralytic stroke- I should cut them down, the orchard textbooks tell me, As a developer clearcuts tenements block by block...
...And 1 put my chainsaw away for another November As if having endured conveyed some right to endure...
...I beckon you the closet of mice...
...In your breathing I embody the question I have come to answer...
...And put in semidwarfs like his high-rent condominiums: More apples the acre, easier to prune, spray, pick...
...in the shadow who rises and walks in her dreams...
...who twists the cold doorknob, calling my name...
...From the wings "I" a dark owl I watch you lnok out to nothing luit leaves of ash, cold as wind, but reach in...
...Like fugitives turned to stone for looking back One last time at the place they must leave forever, Or lords of an anden rdgime condemned to the axe...
...There they stand, fixed in impossible postures...
...and your hand burns...
...The branch against the window is the struck match that set my body on fireOctober, my birth and eclipse...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 18
