summer ending, the poems keep coming

September and still
sails in the distance
working boats, dark islands and
lighter water
crickets on the wind and
everything, flying away

Gary Lawless

*************

The poet as tree

You see her climbing the duck backed hills,
a shallow root system holding her tight to the ground.
Her sapwood darkened with age, face shadowed
in the sun-sifted air, pen a dark-leafed blade.

She picks berries, considers the swaddled islands,
the thick neck of land that pierces the sea.
She holds sway over hollowed shadows,
dead leaves huddled in shade, a confusion

of starflowers and ferns. Beneath her inner bark, deep
in the heartwood, phloem sap moves from sugar source
to sugar sink, thoughts rise, viscous, wild shibboleths,
hybrid words, archaisms, portmanteaus,

reports, glad news, rumors, remembrances
climbing along the pithy transfer tubes,
to nurture the branches, to swell emerging leaves,
She forms a colony, a forest

of poets all branched and blooming,
the wind calling from their coarse
and hooked teeth. Meaning swells.
They drop word seeds on the ground.


Judy Kaber
(after visiting Beech Hill with Kathleen Ellis and a group of poets)

**********

May 12 - In The Mist

A scene from "Wuthering Heights" -
misty barrens,
unseen sparrow singing


Kristen Lindquist