Judith Skillman: Five Poems
The Pleiades
You would be the flock of doves
that came close to no man
but hovered forever
near the horizon,
close to red eye of the bull.
It would be you who knew best
how to shun Orion—
warrior with the stunning belt of nebula.
You ushered in the sailing season
while the solstice moon floated
into that corner
of sky still reserved [...]
Rodger Moody: Three Poems
Two Cents
I was fifteen and loitering at the swimming pool
when she drove up, middle-aged and frumpy,
asking all the boys if they’d like to make a little
pocket money. It was summer and hay bales
were resting in the fields, heavy enough.
I couldn’t see the end of the week
or work gloves and scratched forearms.
I couldn’t [...]
Clearing
By Daniel Bowman Jr.
Today I’m clearing limbs
from last night’s storm.
The morning sun is so calm
it’s as if it never happened.
The buffalo have relaxed.
The pigs look happy.
A small goat has freed himself
and will need to be retrieved.
The ride
from the ranch to the farm
is hot and dusty.
When we cross the creek,
the dog knows what to do.
It’s just [...]
Downingsville Road, Vermont
By Mil Norman-Risch
Me alone, fields on each side,
walking wrong, somehow,
on a road at night.
Silence, except shoeshuffle on gravel;
I have to make things out by contrast as I go:
Fence, field, barn, gate. What’s whitest here is road.
A far off porchlamp layers light as waves,
The hayfield’s stalktips crest and angle,
Swelling, then dimming, into nowhere.
I pass [...]
John Leax: Two Poems
The Woods
The woods is not itself, independent, free
of history. It is a wildness in the heart
of culture, a wildness shaped by human
hand, by insect, water, wind, and time.
A ragged square bound by road, pasture, field
and sprawl of houses crawling up the hill
from town, it lives because we chose to give
a name to [...]
By Barbara Wuest
The barn air reeks of manure.
But how sweet the silage, corn,
barley and wheat ground into
feed for the bare-eyed milk cows.
They stare dumbly; I stare back.
They know nothing, know too much.
A row of brown-furred bodies,
they serve the people like troops.
Old soldiers with udders hanging
full of thick, yellowish juice.
Louie, the farmer, chews grain,
testing for firmness, [...]
Wheatlands
By Judith Skillman
To travel is to dream of wheat,
passing over and under the drape
and pleat of hill and valley, darts taken in
when floodwaters passed over the earth.
To dream is to revel in scenery,
to be nourished by land—its crop tarnished
by harvest, like the stubble on a man’s face
that makes the face handsome to a woman.
To sleep [...]
