A Farmer Searches . . .

digital photoart: ralph murre

A Farmer Searches for His Livestock

During a Snow Storm

by Linda Blaskey

He imagines them huddled

together by now, long

eyelashes rimed with ice.

Their hoof prints blown over

making it hard to track

them. Guernseys and Jerseys.

Like his grandfather,

only Guernseys and Jerseys.

Sure, there are others

that produce more,

the brash-colored Holstein,

the Norwegian Red, but it’s the muted tones

of his girls, their dark points,

that stir something in him. 

He loves to slide his hand

along their warm flanks,

feel the contour, like he loves

to run his hand over his wife’s hip

as she lies on her side in their bed.

He thinks of this as he trudges

through drifts, whistling, calling,

listening for the lead cow’s bell. 

A crow sits on a fence post, its caw

like a knell.  Its dark eye

watches him pass as snow sifts down.

~ first published in The Delmarva Review

Sagittarius

artwork: ralph murre

Sagittarius

by Jean Feraca

I take you in (O happy dagger!)

Gorge on you, motherhoard

My plunder

There is no bottom to this well

No quelling

This huge hunger

I thought you were the sea swelling

I thought I was Aphrodite rising from your foam

Who is this monster rides you flat out, flailing

Knees, thighs

Dug in

Goading your thunder?

This must be the underworld we forge

Your colossal legs floundering

Through ungulate water, the air

Roaring, we sink

Into a stew

Thick as sulphur we are galloping through

Brays, bellows, a hullabaloo

Erupts

From the inside -- It's bedlam

I'm queen of, rampant

Bared

I snort, shudder

Boil up like a brew, a screamer

Pluming over.  Arched

Taut

Ready to leap

Out of time

To be

Released, the flint that flies

One-eyed

Into dawn.

~ first published in Crossing the Great Divide

  (Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters)

Night Music

venus & jupiter align - digital art: ralph murre

Night Music

by Pat Tompkins

The quarter moon rests in telephone wires,

a twilight clef sign. Jupiter aligns

with Venus, sounding solo notes.

With the sun offstage, other stars emerge

playing the music of the spheres.

Windows open, a car passes

an airborne song. Radio waving,

I slow dance in the high school gym

fifteen again for an instant,

but that tune’s now light-years distant.

~ first published in Astropoetica

Blissing on the Season's First Snowfall

photo: sharon auberle

Blissing on the Season’s First Snowfall

by Charles Rossiter

I light a morning candle

and lift my cup of espresso

the hiss of the old radiator

purrs to me like a friendly cat

I lift my cup of espresso

and wish a silent wish

blissing on the season’s first snowfall

listening to the hiss of the old radiator

the kiss of morning espresso steam

rising to disappear in pearly air

outside, snow falls silent as a stalking cat

the candle flickers in columns of warm

air rising, I lift my cup of espresso

to the single silent wish, to always

and forever to this much love my life.

~ first published in the Paterson Literary Review

The Naturalist

street art (detail) colonia del sacramento, uraguay

The Naturalist

by Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

                                    breaks a twig off a tree living in a brick-

                                    lined plot on a city street.  She slaps

                                    the twig across a brownstone's iron gate,

                                    absorbs the rumble back to bone.

                                    She hears birdsongs among taxi horns, adds

                                    a grunt, a hum, silence; she spots a cat

                                    on a stoop, pets it in passing; she swerves

                                    around dog feces, jumps a grating; she

                                    eyes the sky, like a Sybil ...

                                                            To burst, rot, rust, all in its turn,

                                                            by overripening or contrivance, back to

                                                            animal, mineral, vegetable.  Ancient game.

                                                            All the same.  Innocence doesn't

                                                            matter.  Ignorance doesn't matter.  Greed

                                                            doesn't matter.  Survive

                                                            matters, measured by unattended clocks.

                                                            Not meant, not mean

                                                            just are, here

                                    ... interpreting signs

                                    tickling arm hairs, scraping the edge of a nail.

                                    And with cat, gate, feces, twig,

                                    she dies a little

                                    in the natural order of things,

                                    ikon of the unsponsored,

                                    as natural as things get.

                                    ~ first published in Lynx Eye

a day trip to Miami

self-portrait: rembrandt van rijn (detail)

a day trip to Miami

by Norman J. Olson

first floating

like some weightless

mirage, five miles

up… then riding the bus

to South Beach… it occurred

to

me that Rembrandt

would have

enjoyed the faces

of businessmen

etched against the bright daylight

of the airplane window…

would have understood the woman with tangled hair…

and the damp pastel

decay of Miami…

would have wanted

to draw

the wrinkled face, the gray

hair and old blue eyes,

reflected

in the dirty glass

of the Miami Dade

Metrobus

window…

~ first published in Poetry Repairs

The Power in My Mother's Arms

The Power in My Mother’s Arms

by Florence Weinberger

My mother stretched dough thin,

thinner, to its splitting edge.

All that certainty gripped her

wrist, while she sieved

bread crumbs through her fingers,

nuts, sugar, apples, lemon rind,

laying down family legends

like seams in a rock; then

she rolled it all up

the sweet length of the dining room table.

Beaten egg glazed the top, and still

aroma to come, cooling and slicing.

I didn't mind her watching me

eat; I'd give back the heat of my

need gladly, fuel to keep the cycle

elemental, if you've watched birds feed

their young.

To every celebration, she matched a flavor,

giving us memory,

giving exile the bite of bitter herbs.

God's word drifted in fragrant soups,

vigor in the wine she made

herself, clear and original.

                   My mother's death

changed the alchemy of food.

                              Holidays run together now

like ungrooved rivers.  I forget

what they are for.  I buy bakery goods.

They look dead

under the blue lights.

I don't do anything the way she taught me.

I don't look like her and I don't sound

like her, but I stand like her.

There must be rituals

that sever what harms

our connection to the past and lets us

keep the rest.

If not, let me invent one

from old scents and ceremonies.

Let me fashion prayer from a

piece of dough, roll it out,

cut in the shape of my mother,

plump, soft, flour-dusted,

the way I once played cook with clay.

Let me keep the cold healing properties

of female images,

their power

to hold fire.

Let me bake her likeness in vessels

made of earth and water.

Let me bless the flames

that turn her skin gold,

her eyes dark as raisins.

Let me bless the long wait at the oven door.

Let me bless the first warm dangerous taste of love.

Let me eat.

~ first published in Women and Aging (Calyx)

coquette

digital art: ralph murre

stripped bare

she closes the blinds

to the leafless tree

  . . . Jeffrey Winke                         

~ previously published in coquette (Distant Thunder Press)

In the Moon When Lakes Start to Freeze,

photo: ralph murre

In the Moon When Lakes Start to Freeze,

We Drive to Door County

by Mary Jo Balistreri

The golden bronze death of red oaks

            arches over the road

as we drive into tunnel

upon tunnel

of illumination        Country hymns

                                         Carry Me Down By The River

                                                                  Whispering Hope in my ear

open onto field upon field of cornstalks

            marsh grass       weathered red barns       stone silos

A flock of starlings block out the sun

Gulls assume the sky’s

 

                                    white

                                                space  

Vista after vista changes before us

            trees                russet and burgundy

sumac             color of dried blood

evergreens      so blue they are black

Snow’s slate gray sky wavers over morning

A few flakes drift

Green Bay waters     leap

                           fall back

Limestone bluffs stand still

As day darkens toward night

            those we have lost

appear along the roadside of our minds

            two small boys wave    

      parents                  grandparents

            friends from long ago

We carry them forward even as they vanish

            into the blur of distance

Carry them with us

            to another harvest

~ first published in Quill & Parchment

Ode to the Pond at Giverny

cover art: lena anderson

Ode to the Pond at Giverny

by Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll

Beside her willowed bank, the painter never moves his easel.

For hours he regards her: frame of boughs, Japanese

bridge, tousled grass on her shoulder, long sun and sultry drift

of clouds wavering her mien. Mesmerized, he seeks the light—it shifts,

sidles, skips across her brow, his brush pursues as time

transforms her countenance.  Closer, closer he bends his eye,

until bridge, bank, branch, clouded blue

all blur, and he woos

the very photons of light that kiss her face.

Attend: within their waves,

         he finds grace.

~ first published in Caesura

The Lovers at Eighty

artwork: ralph murre

The Lovers at Eighty

by Marilyn Taylor

Fluted light from the window finds her

sleepless in the double bed, her eyes

measuring the chevron angle his knees make

under the coverlet.  She is trying to recall

the last time they made love.  It must have been

in shadows like these, the morning his hands

took their final tour along her shoulders and down

over the pearls of her vertebrae

to the cool dunes of her hips, his fingers

executing solemn little figures

of farewell.  Strange—it’s not so much

the long engagement as the disengagement

of their bodies that fills the hollow

curve of memory behind her eyes—

how the moist, lovestrung delicacy

with which they let each other go

had made a sound like taffeta

while decades flowed across them like a veil.

~ first published in the Indiana Review

Venom

artwork: ralph murre

Venom

by Robert Walton

The rattlesnake's severed head rested

Like a spent bullet

Against

My grandfather's boot.

Desert dust

Coated that boot

With years of layers,

None from a trail. 

He nudged the head,

Tipped it with his toe

Until the fangs pointed up.

I shivered,

But I liked those fangs.

Children respect

Clear intentions

And nothing's as pure as

Venom. 

~ first published at Fictionique 

Dissolve

photoart: ralph murre

                                Dissolve

                                by Margot Peters

                                Switch off lights,

                                out invades in

                                fence grids our floor

                                fir branches tickle my knee

                                our birdbath sits down to dinner

                                lamps on, Aunt Marie’s

                                portrait hangs in sky

                                wicker rocks in a goldfish pond

                                our candles wink in neighbor windows

                                reminding, reminding

                                how effortlessly mirror becomes

                                window, window mirror

                                and what flimsy armor

                                wall    glass    skin.

                               

                                ~  first published in Verse Wisconsin

RE / VERSE Post # 400

   Today, in honor of this being Little Eagle's 400th post on RE / VERSE, we're looking all the way back to post #1, and repeating it here.  Our first re-run and still one of this editor's all-time favorite poems, we very proudly present . . .

artwork: ralph murre

THE FACE OF MY FATHER

by Michael Koehler

As I lather his face, his skin,
in the concentrated kitchen light, is dark and slick
as old onion skin. I am amazed at my gentleness.
An infrequent shaver, prone to stubble and beards,
my hands are now sure, the blade steady.
He sits with a towel wrapped around his scarred bony chest,
head on the back of the chair,
eyes closed.
As I scrape a three day growth off his face
and into the bowl of water on the table,
I remember the times he trusted me.
I was not always this focused, not always this true.
The house is quiet,
only his breathing and the rasp of the razor.
I notice how sparse his hair, how blue his skin.
His eyes are huge behind their lids, and I wonder
when the time comes, will I be able to put coins over them.
Done, I pat his face dry. He snores softly.
I bend down over him, like a father over his son's crib,
cup his face in my hands, memorize it with my fingers.
If he wakes I'll say "smooth as a baby's butt"
because that is what he will expect from me.

~ first printed in UA-Huntsville’s POEM and simultaneously, in
Notes From Skinner’s Elbow (Wolfsong Publications)