April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.*
We're down the rabbit hole. Time has hopped an hour, the sun is in our beady eye and we can't tell the hero from the fool. Or maybe it's just the one.
What mad nonsense are you incubating like a baby chick about to crack?
Rave to us: threepoets2017@gmail.com
*Edna St. VIncent Millay
1 - Austin Anderson
1
scattered robins
flying the hip high ivy
grown fence to draw
my sight south
to the aspen, the firedrop
crowned house finch singing—
is every bird
call a song, every cloud
caught in the canyon a mist
or a fog, some
thunderhead lost
between a waterfall
& a lake. is every
fallen samara flightless
or every fish meat,
every deer game.
a stone held
by a girl who doesn’t know
the word for it
but drops
it & dusts
her hands:
is every stone
then of the earth
& dust
leaving us
to wash
ourselves & carve
out the wrinkles
of our eyes. is the rain
ever just water;
is there ever a drop
whose crystal
slips the ridge
of a nose & is
then not rain
& not water,
not sweat: but some
intercourse of the sky,
some rest descended—
a broken light
beaming the rippled crests
in a puddle; a wind
wrapping the fledgling
maple & stirring up the pine
needles in the grass; daffodil
trumpets sounding yellow
like the instant
around indigo
mountain silhouettes &
a blue-losing dawn.
is every breath
a composite: some sediment
layered salts, some howls
whose moon
waxes bone
white & starred
silver & croaking
& riverfoam
dragging reeds
along driftwood;
some mix of wet
dirt & sage, & the silence
between calling crickets
