A Poetry Special Douglas Lake Legand By Donna Doyle We are taking the long way home, road I have had no reason to travel since my great grandfather died, leaving his lakefront cabin, innocently, to drunken grandsons who discussed property value, mournfully, while he lay as quiet in his casket as he lived in his life. Nothing but feeling looks familiar, so I describe places that can no longer be seen. Small store, minnow-filled soda cooler out front, inside, hot hamburgers served slippery with mayonnaise, eaten spinning on red vinyl barstools. A few miles further the cabin, windowsills lined with old glass bottles, feathers, rocks, arrowheads and driftwood, walls papered with carefully clipped National Geographic photos, rows of recycled milk cartons containing hooks, lures and floats he did not need for I had seen him kneel on the dock, catch a fast-flopping catfish bare-handed, breath slow and steady like a line cast far out over water. From this view, everything swallows me whole, lake landscape echoing his name for me -- sister, sister - and, I am a fish, lifted by my great-grandfather's hands, held high, gills fanning fruitlessly, until your arms pull me close, returning me, slowly, to water. Homecoming By Donna Doyle There are many paths. Here by water's edge goldenrod bows, bees suck some last sweetness, your dog pants like a tired preacher. When Canada geese fly overhead, their shadow touching your shoulder fills you with something you waited for all your life in childhood churches. Stray hymns and verses hum in your head, words heavy with sorrow, surrender and following. You do not know how souls can be scheduled for revival and homecoming, why yours rose up suddenly in geese shadow. Many are called, few are chosen. If you were chosen for anything it is for this: Following your dog's lead. Loving what cannot be named. Thanking geese. Shaking the Linens By Laura Still Mammaw didn't just make the beds, all the sheets came off and we snapped them between us, the cool air easing through the screens with morning sounds of chickens and sniffing hounds prowling for breakfast scraps. I hear the whip, smell line-dried white cotton as I pull the comforter over the dark crumpled Percale of my own guilty bed and tumbleweeds of dust gossip in nasty whispers beneath. Pivot Point By Marybeth Boyanton Ocular aberration or some trick of light, that horizon stuns: chance deception, raw color smack on blue! A crimson flame of trees burns bold, but without smoke or circumstance. No haze, no mythic mists impede this rare brilliance and immediacy, and what cerulean! Surely only autumn or Cezanne would dare paint the sky with such outrageous objectivity! Oh bright clarity, so sharp the eye seems pierced-one second vivifies in glinting, hard-edged glory the tinctured evidence of what just was, just what the month ahead belies. Blood and copper slash the line between the fading earth and space, to mark the ritual red-letting that's now come, announce the year's arterial drain, the greying and the loss of grace. What's left? Dark's already rolling in. It's gone now, but that instant held it all- and bated breath. At the pivot point, late afternoon atmospherics arrayed in valediction the full vivacity of fall. Fall Talisman By Judy Loest
An acorn, missing its cap, falls,
dull click to the dry hard ground, rolls in my hand, light as a pearl, satin smooth as varnished mahogany and perfectly round but for pointed nib, pale button of cork stuffed in its crown like an eraser worn down. This nut this autumn meat, compact, dense and portable as a prayer can fill a pocket of hope, break open, sing like the sound of a word as it falls on the page like a seed to the earth, take root, begin.
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