OFF-SEASON
Alison Hawthorne Deming
At first the day sprawled out,
a beach without footprints. So I walked it.
Waves strained the sand and receded
leaving rock crabs, razor clams and whelks.
Walking out was all expectation.
Gulls feasted along the tidelines
until I got close. How far could I go
disrupting their feeding with my progress
to nowhere? I spotted a cloud-colored flag
mounted on a driftwood pole sunk in sand.
That's my mark, I decided, though what blond
occasion it signified I couldn't decide.
Directions to a party in the dunes?
Lovers leaving a token of their truce? Closer,
I saw how the wind spoke the flag's language,
silk tattering to execute an ideal.
How could something broken look so happy,
I wondered, walking back through the clutter
go gull tracks, easing the new idea home.
Kinds of Sleep
Judith Barrington
There is the sleep of the black boots
standing, pigeon-toed in the closet,
exhausted from all the purposeful striding.
There is the sleep of the red silk tie,
looped like a dead snake over the hook
no longer knotted and butch
There is the sleep of the moon
above her threadbare mat of cloud
her half-open eye glinting at my nakedness
and there is the swift, sleepless river which dreams
and dreams from the women who hold each other
on its names, not yet dreaming for themselves.
Sonnt 18
Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in the shade,
When eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
