Love is this but not that

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R u s t   I s s u e s

Laurel Grove Cemetery

Savannah, Georgia

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Love gives all its reasons

as if they were terms for peace.

Love is this but not that

that but not this.

Love as it always was.

But there is no peace in the mountain

cleft where the fruit bats scatter

from the light.

There is no peace in the hollow when

the heat snuff's night's blue candle.

The outline of brown leaves on

the beach is the wind's body.

A crow is squawking at the sun

as if the screech itself is dawn.

Let me hear every perfect note.

How I loved that jasper morning.

= Jonathan Wells =

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Happy Wednesday

To hold our dreams

 

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C a r o l i n a   B l u e

Main Street

Ridge Spring, South Carolina

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When I have sung my songs to you I’ll sing no more
T’would be a sacrilege to sing at another door
We’ve worked so hard to hold our dreams just you and I
I could not share them all again I’d rather die
With just the thought that I had loved so well so true
That I could never sing again
That I could never never sing again except to you!

= Ernest Charles =

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Happy Thursday

Everything is settled now

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S a n d w i c h   A n y o n e

Main Street

North, South Carolina

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Rain tomorrow, but tonight the sky is clear, the stars shine.
Still, the rain’s coming,
maybe enough to drown the seeds.
There’s a wind from the sea pushing the clouds;
before you see them, you feel the wind.
Better look at the fields now,
see how they look before they’re flooded.
A full moon. Yesterday a sheep escaped into the woods,
and not just any sheep -- the ram, the whole future.
If we see him again, we’ll see his bones.
The grass shudders a little; maybe the wind passed through it.
And the new leaves of the olives shudder in the same way.
Mice in the fields. Where the fox hunts,
tomorrow there’ll be blood in the grass.
But the storm -- the storm will wash it away.
In one window, there’s a boy sitting.
He’s been sent to bed -- too early,
in his opinion. So he sits at the window --
Everything is settled now.
Where you are now is where you’ll sleep, where you’ll wake up in the morning.
The mountain stands like a beacon, to remind the night that the earth exists,
that it mustn’t be forgotten.
Above the sea, the clouds form as the wind rises,
dispersing them, giving them a sense of purpose.
Tomorrow the dawn won’t come.
The sky won’t go back to being the sky of day; it will go on as night,
except the stars will fade and vanish as the storm arrives,
lasting perhaps ten hours all together.
But the world as it was cannot return.
One by one, the lights of the village houses dim
and the mountain shines in the darkness with reflected light.
No sound. Only cats scuffling in doorways.
They smell the wind: time to make more cats.
Later, they prowl the streets, but the smell of the wind stalks them.
It’s the same in the fields, confused by the smell of blood,
though for now only the wind rises; stars turn the field silver.
This far from the sea and still we know these signs.
The night is an open book.
But the world beyond the night remains a mystery.

= Louise Gluck =

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Happy Wednesday

Under a sky fast-blue

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W e   C o t t o n   T o   T h a t

Between Swansea and North

Orangeburg County, South Carolina

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The insect was yellow with crumpled-black banded legs
          and shellacked back that would outlast us
          and wistful eyes from what I could discern on that trail between

               fields,
and we laid him out in the open air under a sky fast-blue with change,

               wedging
          a leaf beneath his triple-belted belly so he didn’t rest on plain dirt,
          and we placed two cloverblooms by his head and he was old
you said, could tell by how definite the stripes were, how complete
          the patterns bold and dark, almost engraved,
and he was beautiful in that pasture of thirty-three cows and we drank
          milk in the blaring heat and ate the cake you’d made. We were
          the only humans there -- unholy-seeming things with two legs,

               dismal histories --
drinking and eating around his elegant husk,
          and from the furze, fellow insects rose, a frenzied static around

               our bodies,
while he remained in situ an unremitting yellow, the color more
          vivid, louder now that he was a remnant. Was color the purpose

               here?

Yellow had alerted us to him, and we took care
          with leaf and clover to make his bed.
The insect’s gold our togetherness, its death from which we fed.

= Alessandra Lynch =

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Happy Tuesday

Figure up

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O n e   H u n d r e d   P e r c e n t   C o t t o n

Near North

Orangeburg County, South Carolina

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The song
sparrow puts all his
saying
into one
repeated song:
what

variations, subtleties
he manages,
to encompass denser
meanings, I’m
too coarse
to catch: it’s

one song, an over-reach
from which
all possibilities,
like filaments,
depend:
killing,

nesting, dying,
sun or cloud,
figure up
and become
song -- simple, hard:
removed.

= A.R. Ammons =

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Happy Monday