I am prepared now to force clarity upon you. — Louise Glück
Is that you coming through the garden now, the glories and the weeds, in your old cotton dress, your ragged straw hat? Have you come perhaps as supplicant? Or benefactress? You misunderstand our needs. The sun of course is indifferent. We lick our red lips in vain, cracked and dry. We wither. But your old watering spout is beside the point. There’s a kind of love beyond the light rain, the sprinkling. I speak for us all. I am prepared to force clarity upon you: Come nearer now. Whisper in our ears. Hold us gently, the way you have held new life, the small hands of your child.
1913, 50th Reunion
A year before the Great One, the war to end all wars. The thin lines now of blue and grey in a stillness where nothing stirred but memory. Pickett’s men, the few, came slowly through the wheat on canes, crutches, wheelchairs. An old rebel yell here and there, and the Union boys, tattered and limping, echoed a reply. But no fusillade, no cannons. Only ragged warriors in the warm summer air. Only friends now holding one another closely. Never again, they vowed. Never. As the locusts whirred and the pines seemed to lean in silent prayer.
First Battle of Bull Run, 1861
Green boys on both sides, green as the first sprigs of summer, not knowing the air yet, the sudden glare of sunlight. Not knowing the whir of rifle balls, the buzz like cicadas. And all day then streams running roots to red. Buckets of arms and legs. How wrong they were about war. How wrong about the fields, the fallen moon, the terror. Nothing human now, only shadows everywhere, stepping stones for the night. The cold wind. Nothing, nothing answered their prayers. A mother. A wife. Nothing there but darkness. Far away the starlight flickered, faded, disappeared. Dying all at once in the acrid air.
Give me the unfilled space between hunger and the morsel it can’t quite reach. — Stephen Dunn
Because fire is relentless, we cannot imagine its patience and delicatesse. Its circumspection. Only that desperate lust, the way it surges and strains. How the wind is its enforcer, the bearer of burning news. How the grass crackles in its grave. But imagine something. cooler in the shadows. A secret kind of wood as well. The kind that fire has watched from afar, desperately in love. Approaching slowly, because love is fire. Their vows are like tinder, the purity of conviction, her gown hanging its ashes in the air, the holy cloud of smoke unfurled around her face. The lovers entangled, rising in flame, the sear, the sudden sacrament of desire.
Dictionaries are the graveyards of language. — Simon Dentith
Not unlike that famous Remington, the one of the weary bronc- buster, wearier bronc. Both worn in the saddle. Tired and spent. Exhausted. And you said: Let them loose! in your cloud of Western words, free, frenetic, ranging wild across my ears. Something in the air. Brambles, tumbling sagebrush. Dust devils. A summer sandstorm of every syllable. And I said: Say it again! just as all the Appaloosas reared and rushed like desert jinn, surging and unstoppable, in the charging ions of the air.
You will not know it as such. It will even come casually, perhaps as a sunset’s setting punctuation or a lily’s evening robe. The quietude and assurance of tomorrow. A promise, a small guarantee, it seems. Taken for granted. Continuity. A calling of dreams then, a kind of weariness, the silence of a life. Something passing in the dark. Something gone. And there, there on your desk, the scatter, diaspora. Remnants in moonlight. Scraps at the edge of dawn. A few lines waiting their turn, their completion, like hands reaching out, grasping, finding nothing, nothing now but night.
John Valentine teaches philosophy at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. His poems have appeared in various journals, including The Sewanee Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, The Adirondack Review and Rock Salt Plum Review. He has had five chapbooks published with Pudding House Publications and one chapbook with Big Table Publishing.