INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Duane Locke
Elisavietta Ritchie
Sam Cornish
Alan Britt
Shutta Crum
Joseph McNair
Geoffrey Philip
Lazlo Slomovits
Gerald Clark
Chris Lord
Coleman Barks
Marisella Veiga
Joanie Freeman
Dave Etter
Steve Barfield
scharCbear
Michael D. Long
Karyn M. Wolven
Running Cub
Silvia Scheibli
Fred Wolven
Our continuing research into what mind
is, soul, love
and deep being, spirit, memory,
and the inner sun that make everything radiant,
has brought this: the other night before sleeping I saw
behind my closed eyes--what
retina records those images--a huge, hillside
cat stretched across, or sliding over, the curves of a
river, another and another,
the same cat with different riverscapes. Now reading
Raymond Carver's collected poems, All of Us, p. 31, "As my
body flies over water, as
my soul,
poised like a cat, hovers--then leaps into sleep."
Not a precise connection, but close enough to let me feel
the brush of what gives art
and
dream, not to mention moments. Sleep and curl
inside a compassionate, image-generating, interpenetrative,
electro-magnetic field
of green
riverwater catfur and rounded mountains. We are
talking this phenomenon in a line of connected porches
curving along a gentle slant.
Students are seated waiting for a teacher to start
the lecture. He's paging through his book. As I walk
through, he nods to me, then
begins.
LIGHT ON LEAVES
With the light in the tree above Jittery Joe's, I am
wondering about energy
exchange: the sun gives itself wholly to the
tree and us all, but the leaves on this side get additional
nighttime attention
from artificial light, whose power derives from
water falling sixty feet off a dam to turn a turbine.
I don't know how any of this
works, least of all chlorophyll, what out of
sunlight and earthen minerals and magical moisture makes
oak leaves by the bushel basket.
Some exchange not unlike this must go on between
people: the enlightened ones and the near-to and the goofy
joyful ones and those that dance
their ignorance with those that laugh melodious
and other who play like roots in the dirt. The various
flavors of lightedness take human
form and compose their waking motions to enjoy the
music of conversation. This is a pecan, its double trunk
growing through a seam in the
cement. And, of course, it's like us in the nearly
constant noise of fivepointed traffic, how we live so fierce
and shamed and free, too busy,
and lovingly bent over with our nut-bearing gift.
Coleman Barks, Athens, Georgia