Issue 3.4

Berries after Rain A mid-summer day, @tabthe hillside a wilderness of quiet ripening in paths of wild raspberry and red clover, @tabbuttered light plumping still centers, like tiny lakes we’d put our boat into, water cupping us @tabas we lifted our paddles and floated soundless as the loon dipping for minnows. @tabAs I reach into showering thickets, berry basket strapped at my waist, I seek solace @tabin my own slow pace, picking one berry, and the next, until the light grows @tabtired and I stop reaching, and silence finds me.

Ode to Periwinkle Blue Oh, moon-soaked indigo, violet edge of night, mist-laced flecks of cherry, shoreline of white sand where we’d gather the small snails, brother, their whisper of myrtle and beach at first light. Salt on your purple-blue lips, as you plucked the small mollusks from rock crevices, your flannel coat tinted with cornflower and chickweed, now a vision of celestial blue, cooling touch of lavender, portal of calm. We once sailed beneath the pearl of a seabird’s wing, steering us to the island where we never felt alone. I hear the distant gong of the bell buoy as I leave the cove, my bucket clinking with tiny whorls carrying crosswinds inside their shells to guide me, as the wide blue of your periwinkle eyes once smoothed each wave that emptied over our bow.

At Rosslyn Chapel *Even more disturbing are the fat pendants at the springings that point diagonally downwards.* @tab—Colin McWilliam, *Lothian: Except Edinburgh* Where the vaulting ribs come down the pillars @tabspaced along the retro-choir’s @tabfinal wall—(the Lady Chapel at @tabRosslyn, east of the altar): there, the flourishing codas of the arches @tabcome out nuzzling in a turgid @tabbid for the empty shade, begin to raise their pendant forms: oblique, too full of rearing life for pendency; lifting their heads, like buds, between a drooping @tab@taband attention to the light. The Gothic stalactite, an image @tabintimate with stone— a mineral form—has here become @tabswollen, @tab@tabas with blood or sap; or else they are nubs of new horns on a young (and sacrificial) beast; *e.g.*, the one that dyes the Bandusian spring in the ode of Horace. @tabMusical nine, they cluster, coming in threes from the rib-groined vault, reviving (as it seems) the Ephesians’ @tabidols of Diana, in the fierce exuberance of this fructifying stone. Florid push, will it seem? or @tab@tab@tab@tab@tab@tab@tabcreaturely excitation,— @tabunder the foliage set above, like @tabshaggy fur, like fern;——elastic @tabenergy, @tab@tabtumescing to this poise. Inquisitive, @tab@tabor making bold? Ever, and never, about to perk up, to expand, they are caught just here: to look you in the face. As if they blushed—without colouring,—colour of pale sand, @tab@taband stony cold; but vitally extroverted, vitally sprung to this vulnerable assertion into space. And would they glow in the palm of a gentle hand?

Landscapes in Consequence *After A. Wyeth* The crimson barn on the hilltop among the daisies and cool weather hung above the fireplace for years. It was Ruthie’s World, my mother’s world—her own commission for the woman undreamed: enjambed, propped on her hands in the grass among submission and strokes of brown and gray foreclosure.

A Late Arrival I’ve come to this new place alone. It’s dark, no moon. Over the inn’s porch loom the shapes of trees, as do the snow-covered roofs covering rooms where strangers sleep. Their cars, crusted as relics, freeze to the road. My flat, echoless knocks summon no one to let me in. Nearby in this valley, a river whispers over unseen rocks, or is that breeze? Or some spring feeding the dark with rumor of a buried river flowing full through eras of stone far below this one night, this iced acre? Years ago, a long summer road delivered me to the edge of another river. A ferry waited. Its pilot, a tall man smoking, the current slow in his eyes, made me wait a long while— then lowered the ramp with a clang that sounded off the bluff on the far side, where in humid trees and haze another state sloped to the bank. I eased my car into place on the deck and climbed out to watch the river laze and curl through the dusk. A relief to float free of the road, to hear the water well and gently slap the boat. For hundreds of miles, no one knew my name. Crossing state lines, buoyed between one place and another, was home enough, the river drift a friend enough. Stranded elsewhere now, I knock again on the shut door— knock and knock, until the bolt’s tongue clucks free, the weather-warped door scrapes the jamb, and the one I’ve come to see opens wide the house, offering all the light a traveler could need. I pause on the threshold, reluctant to leave that old river rumor again. Then, as one must, I go in.