Poetry

The Opposing Concepts of Spontaneity and Expediency in Improvisation

By Hayden Carruth

Spring 1985

Who has not thought of Johann Sebastian Bach—and please pronounce
That good man's good name in German, whether you can or not—seated
At the keyboard of who cares what delubrum in the splendor of his isolation
Within the church of sound? The structure mounts, towers upon towers,

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The Shore of Ashkelon

By Yehuda Amichai, Translated by Chana Bloch

Autumn 1996

Here at the shore of Ashkelon we arrived at
the end of memory
like rivers that reach the sea.

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The Night Your Dress Lifted

By Stuart Dybek

Spring 1984

There was a burst
of static
on radios
all over the city

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My Mother Died on Shavuot

By Yehuda Amichai, Translated by Chana Bloch

Autumn 1996

My mother died on Shavuot, at the end of
the Counting of the Omer.
Her oldest brother died in 1916; he fell in the war.

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Sleepers

By Stuart Dybek

Spring 1984

A sleeper
purifies a room.

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Because the Dream Is My Tenderest Arm

By Tess Gallagher

Autumn 1995

absence is a margin of strongholds. I go out
and I go out. Love is sequence and
condition: one of the few winter nights

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Incidence of Flight

By Richard Eberhart

Spring 1975

I spring joy out of my rib cage
Like a flash of pigeons flying North
South here in Mississippi, Florida

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The Cats

By Linda Bierds

Winter 2004

Gregor Mendel, 1857 Up the monastery walls, the brewery's yeast-scent huffles. And the dusty cat, stretched high over warm stones, swings its blunt snout this way and that, yeast-ward and monk-ward, from release to salvation. In the bright sun he [...]

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