Founder's Focus

Dread wakes me and so, yes,
I welcome the white, ruled as I am
by the body. In monochrome, in stasis,
the part that wants to be dead
is one with the bloodless snow. These months
have piled up, the drifts rise higher
than the windows, the layers
make a readable strata. Six inches of powder
over the rotten sleety stuff from February’s
brief thaw, and under that, a packed twelve inches.
I too take on an aspect of knowing.
But outside the body’s chart, tell me,
is the self knowable, with limited but mutable
variations, finally an understanding
at the bottom of it all?

Among the withheld trees, the snow
has taken on the aspect of a tunnel
and as I walk, the past closes. Behind me,
the house I loved, its animals and children.
But this cold wants nothing of regret.
When I wake, it’s no waking
to the redeemable blue of sky, the new markings
on bark and limb– only the pale light,
a calm caught in translucence,
a world under glass.

Excerpt from Shhh
By Michael Waters:

 

 

 

The language that remains unspoken, often
for years, till the shuddering rhythm of the Accord

helps to shape a stanza you revise aloud
in splendid isolation, becomes another version of goodbye

still less eloquent than Miles’ muted “Shhh” on FM
& arriving much too late to make leaving easier for either.

“If I love you,” wrote Goethe, “what business is it of yours?”
So the spondees that propel your dented shell this evening

begin to dissipate in the never-imagined future-without-her
like gasoline fumes floating from your fingers,

while those smoky solos––how she clasped you within her!––
resonate like the muffled clamor of orgasm, chords

blown beyond improvisation, beyond prosody, till
you surrender destination, your stress-laden vocabulary,

to the tires’ susurration on the sodden leaves, & the slow,
unbroken seeping-upward of the combo.

Shhh.

March Visiting Artists and Writers:

David Gates

Tom Bills

Julian Lethbridge

Lauren Ewing

Majorie Portnow

Charles Bock