Poetry For Today.

Rain On Water - Deborah Van Auten

All afternoon rain streams down on the lake

until a break in the black clouds

draws me out of the house

into the rocking waves.

I dive through layers of darkness, layers of light,

and when I come up for air,

the sky echoes the underwater world,

speaking the unspoken,

not a warning, or god-like, “It shall be!”–

more a wind-driven, earth-embracing word–

and I swim to meet it,

from the lake into the sky.

Next to this the body is nothing,

and the mind less than the body,

and only the country of the heart

is equal to what I know.

A Kind of Pleasure - Michael Hettich

Your sleep is like a staircase carved into a mountain

covered in spring snow beneath which tiny buds

are starting to stir, in that darkness they can feel

will be melting soon. You are walking up those cold stairs

with bare feet that hardly touch down, and feel

that dream-snow as a kind of pleasure.

And beyond the tree line, up ahead, others wait

also barefoot, where the sky is the thinnest wisp of blue.

Love could be something like that empty blue

beyond which, out of sight now, clouds must be moving.

Love could be the spring creeks starting to flow

underneath that snow, or those stirring flowers

as you leap, still barefoot, hoping to fly

for a moment down the mountain, to tumble in the wet

spring snow. Trout shiver to thaw the icy lakes.

The hibernating animals are starting to wake.

Your body is more like a gesture than a thing.

More like a song than a gesture.

Mr. Standby - Billy Green

it was evening when

you smiled and took a

shower in my bathroom,

when I gagged inside my head

at the sight of a joint

among your three cigarettes.

it is now dusk,

after three weeks of my

standing on this pedestal,

and your silence

is blocking my

view of the

northern sky.