TWO POEMS, TWO POETS
ED ROBERSON
White-Out
Their wings are
being flapped like loose
canvas sail
by the wind,
not them always
at the ropes of muscle
flying not in control
against the white
blizzard off the lake.
*
Snow thunder
has the sharp profanity to it
that cuts through.
Its scrap of
blanched silence like a glider—
torn from just after
the deep shock—
pilots the gulls
seamlessly back into land.
*
Everything has one
some thing that can shut it up,
a showing
that can sit what shows off down,
even this storm—
gets its face slapped with the eye
at the center: there is no
thing that doesn’t have what comes after
change it.
DAN BEACHY-QUICK
Anniversary
This wind also alters, also utters,
This cloud of gnats gathering in translucent
Bodies the sun, almost mine, this morning’s
Thoughts, feeding on the light that fills them,
A prism with a wing, this wind that breathes
The germ into the tree also blows the seed,
Also breaks the limb, also blasts from stem the leaf
That bodied the breeze into song, that song
Almost mine, verging on destruction, my mind
That assembles in the sunlit gnats an altar
That also darkens, also disrupts, this song, this wind
Divorcing itself of current: then a stillness
Deeper than no motion, where clouds plummet
Into pillars that hold up or open the sky,
And the grass is this audacity, standing up.
*
both from Chicago Review 53.4 & 54.1 (2008)
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