To the fourth floor ascends 
the world's slowest elevator, 
through violin makers, 
costumers, and MDs specializing 
in repetitive motion disorders, 
to the place where music is made possible, 
but not made. 
 
She has come to restring a bow for her doctoral 
recital; the tall gnome who guards the secrets 
tells her its tip has cracked. 
Worse comes to worse, I say, you buy a new one. 
$10,000, she says, for a new one. 
 
Cases of bows swing on a pivot. 
Octagonal and round sticks, their backs 
bent over heat to form a concave curve, 
rest in brackets. Around them floats dust, 
horsehair, heat, leavings from Brazilian pernambuco. 
Each has its ebony frog, inlaid with mother of pearl, 
ivory tip, leather grip, maker's mark. 
 
As I look, the shop fills with elves and sprites 
that dance in the late afternoon sun--
 it swims through the dusty window in golden streams 
the color of weak green tea or late harvest hay-- 
to the shivered longing of one held note.

                                            -LAUREL PETERSON

                                                 Poet Lore 

PAYING THE ELF TRIBUTE

When they bought the summer house,
he found it first:
a hollowed out tree trunk
five feet into the forest
that stretched like a rubber band
around their ring of meadow.

It’s an elf house, he told her,
his only daughter,
his only child.
We must pay tribute
to keep mischief away.

Every year,
when school spilled out its charges,
and father and daughter were both freed
to move into the warm, secret days
and hushed, cool nights of the mountains,
they would make their way
five feet into the forest
to leave a shard of sea-rubbed glass,
a branch of silvered wildflowers,
a petrified charm tied on silk ribbon
at the elf house door.

The year her old cat died,
she left its collar
—to keep the new kitten safe, she told him.

The night she graduated high school,
a boy she loved died;
the highway and alcohol
loved him more than she could.
In college, a friend slid off an icy road.
Later, her grandparents, one by one.
For each, the elves received tribute, memorial.
After each came new love, a child.

Then came her father’s cancer,
the long, slow descent into absence.
He had retired by then
to the summer house made year round.
How was one to know what elves needed
as recompense for this?

She left husband and child to care
for each other, took charge
of swabbing pus from wounds,
washing his sheets of blood and vomit,
prying truth from doctors.
Every so often, she would slip
to the forest’s edge
to leave a talisman
in the small pile of tokens
that represented a life:
a 1945 penny, his Navy wings,
the gold pen she’d given him
when he turned forty, and
in one final desperate act,
as he lay evaporated almost to bone,
his wedding band from the mother
who had died before her daughter could know her.

He slipped away that night.
Perhaps that was the elves’ gift
for the ring. In the morning,
when she went to retrieve it,
angry at their treachery,
in the pile of fading glitter, sheen and decay,
it alone was gone
into the warm, dark heart
of the forest.

-Laurel Peterson
Prairie Winds

POCKETWATCH, c. 1905

Round, etched rose gold,
too heavy for any modern
Tawainese-sewn pocket,
your gift weights my palm,
a drill-punched circle of heavy heart,
ticking just slower than time.

It arrived after the towers collapsed
and my lover’s wife had died
and I had won him
in a terrible lottery
that left me holding the ticket,
stunned and silent and so afraid
that time had already run through my illicit
fingers, slippery, gelatinous.
Could I lose him twice
to grief?

You watch across the reflective mirage of distance,
wondering, warm like the heavy inevitable tomorrow,
like the parentheses I know
I’ll find under my pillow
when I’m changing the sheets,
the future I won
and can never possess.

My shameful inadequacy to love sufficiently
slopes away in pathetic disorder:
a mountainside littered
with glass and gravel.

The watch ticks—
that’s my life passing.
What do I do with my longing?
Its impractical desires bend
in all directions at once,
a sparkler fizzling in the night air.

-Laurel Peterson
The Texas Review

			THE MIRACLE	Index

I woke up this light June morning praising the world--
sun pouring down
through the green-lit trees,
hills lofting their heads
into fresh-tinted blue,
clouds on their long white journeys
nowhere--

At breakfast, in the soft slant light
of morning,
heads of my children shine
like the children of gods.
Half shyly I glance at them,
admiring with what ease they lift their hands--
how their mouths open and speak.

Milk in the beaded glasses, white and tall--
Bread crumbling in my hands--

When the meal is through
I walk through the glowing rooms,
feasting on lights and shadows--
clear moving depths, gashes of mote-thick gold,
enchantments of hallways blossoming
into farther rooms--
then pass outside
into day.

The scent-rich breezes touch me with rippling fingers.
I walk on green blades of grass
that curl beneath my feet,
touch the bark of trees,
bend down and cup in my hands
furry backs of flowers,
moist-glittering, cool.

The air is alive with blackbirds, grosbeaks, jays,
sun-speckled whistlings.
Wherever I walk the moist earth heaves beneath me--
The sun follows me--
Poised on the brimming edge of my own body
I could overflow
and like some fountain spill
into this curling world of living green--

to feed dark roots,
to melt into the secret hearts of stones.

-Paul Petrie
Michigan Quarterly Review

			A VISION OF HORSES AND MULES	Index

Learn to think like a horse
her trainer had said. She went
into the pasture at noon,
when her horses lay down to sleep
without fear of coyotes,
without fear. They sensed her
but did not mind as she stretched
out beside them with the June
heat's broad strong hand
flattening her into the grass.

But now, she said, I am studying
mules. Her trainer told her
horses forget everything by
and by. Mules never forget.
Carry your intention carefully,
a brimming bowl of water.
Mule skinner, I called her
and from my childhood I saw
a tin of Boraxo my father used
to clean grease from his hands.

Twenty-mule teams crossed
the Death Valley of our bath
room, little black mules along
the bottom of the tin, the driver
in his wagon, the whip cracking
a wicked S in the air. I'm a mule:
stubborn, dragging heavy grudges,
joys and lost friends from the alkaline
mines of my past across the bleak
present to some future use.

-Marge Piercy
Ploughshares

			AS FROM A QUIVER OF ARROWS	Index

			IMPROPER ELEGY	Index

The circuitry of frost on the kitchen window
and the thought that hums inside it

A cold night, a dead night.
Snowfalls shower of data in the yard

the freezing corpseflowers, pasteflowers,
the blooms that nod and sleep on their stems

until each petal dies gratefully into the windowbox
I dont know what to do

with the doomed, the chilled over and gone,
but drink until my fingers become twigs

and, like twigs, snap.



Someone cut a hole in my head and poured a poison
in,
so the kitchen becomes

the sum of all its information: The onion,
asleep in its paper skin, the wine, the knives

that smile in the drawer. The refrigerator hums
and loves the winter weather, the snow

and flowers that make a deathbed of it,
woolflowers, hatflowers, the dying fisted rose.

A pulse of information.



A drink would be perfect right now,
and another, to take me out the back door

and into the snow
where Id stand in my slippers and watch

pills fall from the sky. The cold air undoes
the throat and makes me blink. A wind coughs

in the trees. What have I done with my time?
You have been dead a year now

so I hardly think about you anymore.
Lookthe houselights are glowing.

They glow like angry little screens.
 

-KEVIN PRUFER
BOULEVARD
 

______________________________


PRAYER


Youll find me in a suitcase. Youll find me in a
car.
Lord, unbend my legs. Lord, lift me so I see.
The red moon in winter is the memory of candles,
the sky like church windows the sun nods through.
Lord, youll find me in a dead car. Ill be gone in
the trunk,
birds around my head and a mouthful of glass.
Birds that spin the head, Lord, and blood on my
chin.
Am I ugly like this, hands roped at the back? My
eyes
closed tight? Touch my face with your palm,
with your rough old hands that worked too hard
A car in the field where the weeds grow high,
the trunk closed tight so no air gets in. Unknot
me,
lift me to a glassy sky. Your lovely mallet arms
I cant describe the arms that you must have.
 

-KEVIN PRUFER
FIELD

___________________________________________



APPLE TREES AND SWEET

The little death in the apples core says Darling,
says Sweetheart, all wrapped around its juice.
A slick breeze sways the tree, unpastes the leaves.
Oh, ticket the pick-up windshields with apple
leaves,
kiss the boys in the trucks with chlorophyll and
veins.

The world is falling falling like gluey twigs.
The bees devour the flowers or sting them
into rot while high on a branch, the little death
in the apples core says, Sweet, says, Touch me
and Ill fall. All around, thin boys in trucks

idle at stop lights or look blankly toward the
trees.
Cover their trucks with leaves and falling apples,
splatter them with rot and seed and flesh.
The boys grow sleepy. Their engines growl
while the death in every apple explodes its core.

-KEVIN PRUFER
COURT GREEN
 

			WATER MUSIC after John Ashbery	Index

 

I can do what I want to do, but I want to stay
here, said someone’s girlfriend, draped as
a piece of real technology.   Yes, she nearly
danced as a river, following one arm to the
estuary’s break; or pasting a quilt of refractive
light upon many square inches of her body.
A scarfskin map lies infinite, and a river
turns like mercury in the mind:  it shines
there as folklore, as floodgate, as copper foil
for beach-glass.  This is why we say Her name
is Rio, and why I’m learning love requires
a trawl-net, an act of free will.  Someone
is singing at the dark end of the street,
the velvet of her voice covered over.

                                -Christina Pugh
                                New Orleans Review 
                                                                                                      

ORNATURE

To trim away the shrapnel,
the surgeon sliced a sliver of her skull.
Now, when she lifts her hair
to show the shape, it’s moony:
a figure-eight has flown
the convex bone, therewith
some beauty to inscribe: 
blood forms rubies;
you eat the Host for food.
The beautiful girl says
she’ll always be a soldier.  
She’d had a two percent chance
of waking from the coma.
“Someone has to be that
two percent,” she says
with a smile. “Why not me?”
--And, sackcloth or silk,
the husk did open.  We decorate
her friends at the end of May.


                          -Christina Pugh
                          Southwest Review

 

                                                                                                                          
SEEING IN                                                                                                                                           

I’m grateful for the way my eye travels--
or skirts, looping over canvas, hillsides smooth
and spackled as walls; I’m grateful for the farmhouse
troweled on green foundations, its replica
half-vanished in the grass, my eye cutting spirals

on the surface:  school figures, early morning ice;
I’m grateful that oils compound and shimmer
in museum light, but only when I lean in closer
and rest my eye mothlike on a slip of blue burning
under brown, accreted like bow strokes

trellising a fugue, or andante moving 
with the urgency of paradox; I’m grateful for unrest
under colors, for all I need to rove
to see, for fields of vision populous as fields.

                                            -Christina Pugh
                                            Poetry Northwest

			AMOROUS FRIENDSHIP	Index

Well, hasn't it been one long, "monstrous,
returned, but unrequited love affair,"
as I predicted once, in the words of Yeats,
yearning for spring, with winter in the air?
No, not an affair, and unrequited? Hell,
hardly dreamt of, really. Call it friendship
and forget the amore--this, as I recall,
was your advice. Sound, but I defended
my choice of words. Affair here represented
not sex, but desire--mine--and hurt in the heart
perceiving, again and again, something as ended,
whereas friends need have no fear in being apart
and do not phone for weeks and yet stay calm,
undisturbed by music that's not on.

-Belle Randall
Poetry 

			BEFORE I HAD A NAME	Index

The first voices to reach my ears-- still bloodwet, crumpled,
half-clogged in birth-grease as my head rocked in the harbor of thighs,
eyes slits in the shock of first light, arms

pinned flipper-like writhing

among slick walls too constricted for even the first scald of air--,
the first voices I heard after knowing
only the weather of blood-thrum,

the seasons of breathing,

the rush of core fluids gurgling like cavewater over stones,
were the voices debating my decapitation and dismemberment.

For I, though I was a 10-month baby, I was slow in coming,
huge blue galleon stalled between the shifting stones,
pelvic bones of my mother.
I was in trouble before I had a name, receiving instruction in how
no trouble is ever one's own, always is shared by another.
My mother lay helplessly glowing with sweat and exhaustion,
the great moonbelly contracting and squeezing for life, hers, mine,
as wise men conversed by a table set with the tools of our undoing.

So these were the voices, desperately hushed, deliberate,
and this my first brush with air, breath-taking, benumbing,
glove-pale hands outstretched, gaudy with the blood of my birth.
Masked faces glared, remote eyes hardening against me
among the low moans and sharp yips of my mother
as I, strangling, I, burning blue,
was trying to suck the great emptiness--
birth-whale beached in the heavy coat of being
caving in these lungs that wanted to
open expansive in the light
of this other world, this sphere before knowing,
where everything was luminous in robes of loose mist,
even the scalpels decisively angled in hands so close--,
when the great thrust came that shoved me clear
and I fell, delivered into their hands, at last.

-William Pitt Root
Rattapallax

The fairies are dancing all over the world
         In the dreams of the President
                   they are dancing
   although he dares not mention this at cabinet meetings
In the baby blood of the brandnew
       they are dancing O most rapturously
  and over the graves of the fathers and mothers
                  who are dead
and around the heads of the mothers and fathers who are not dead
         in celebration of the sons and daughters
               they've given the earth
The fairies are dancing in the paws and muzzles
         of dogs larking in the broad field next to the church
The fairies have always danced in the blood of the untamed
               in the muscular horned goat
             and the shining snake
     in the blood of Henry Thoreau
             and most certainly Emily Dickinson
And they skip in the blood of the marine recruit
       in his barracks at night
               his bones aching with fatigue and loneliness
        and pure dreams of women
                        and his goodbuddy in the next bunk
They are most lovely in the eyes of the black kid
          trucking in front of the jukebox
               at the local pizzeria
more timorous in the eyes of his white friend
        whose hips are a bit more calcified
with hereditary denunciation of the fairies
        May the fairies swivel his hips
On sap green evenings in early summer
             the fairies danced under the moon in country places
      danced among native american teepees
and hung in the rough hair of buffalos racing across the prairies
                and are dancing still
                      most hidden
                     and everywhere
in some, only in the eyes
        in others a reach of the arm
            a sudden yelp of joy
reveals their presence
The fairies are dancing from coast to coast
       all over deadmiddle America
               they're bumping and grinding on the Kremlin walls
          the tap of their feet is eroding all the walls
                   all over the world as they dance
In the way of the western world
             the fairies' dance has become small
       a bleating, crabbed jerkiness
but there for all that,
      a bit of healthy green in the dead wood
                 that spreads an invisible green fire
         around and around the globe
encircling it in its dance
          of intimacy with the  secret of all living things
The fairies are dancing even in the Pope's nose
              and in the heart of the most stubborn macho
      who will not and will not
                and the fairies will
                          most insistently
        because he will not
In the Pentagon the fairies are dancing
            under the scrambled egg hats
   of those who see no reason why youths should live to old age
The fairies bide their time and wait
      They dance in invisible circlets of joy
         around and around and over the planet
they are the green rings unseen by spaceships
      their breath is the earth of the first spring evening
They explode in the black buds of deadwood  winter
               Welcome them with open arms
      They are allies courting in the bloodstream
          welcome them and dance with them

                                                        - Michael Rumaker