Divorced from their meanings,

some words have lovely sound.

Poo,

with its soft plosive puh,

the same oo as in moon,

a word poets are fond of.

Chlamydia

could be a beautiful vine

with violet petals unfurling

around the kitchen bay window.

Balaclava

might refer to the delicate,

pale collar bones

of a water nymph.

Bergen-Belsen

could be generic for sanctuary,

a garden with no corpse flowers,

no odor of decay.

Bashar Hafez al-Assad

could be the name of a saint,

Saint of the underdog, of lost

buttons, of broken crockery.

____________________________

Dayna Patterson is Poetry Editor at Psaltery & Lyre. For more, go here.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons by Doronenko, 2012, of an abandoned Jewish Cemetery in Trstin.

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Dayna Patterson is Poetry Editor at Psaltery & Lyre. For more, and information about where else to find her work, go here.

Photo by JRLibby, 2012 via Wikimedia Commons.

As I walk on a warm evening,
an invisible strand of spider silk
lands across my neck.

Another snags my elbow.
I brush at them,
but they are tricky to unhook.

Where is the spider
who set this clever snare?
I’m not near a tree or pole

or any structure for that matter.
This spider has cast his line far
into the river of open air,

hoping for a yellow hopper,
which he will reel in
and roast over a cookfire.

The smell of his catch will waft
through the grass to make his neighbors’
pinhole mouths water.

After a fine meal, he’ll lie down
in a hammock of homespun
and stare at the sparking stars,

each one a tantalizing firefly.

_________________________________

Dayna recently moved to the Northwest from Texas. She is the mother of two and Poetry Editor for Psaltery & Lyre. Her chapbooks, Loose Threads and Mothering, are available from Flutter Press. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in BlazeVOX, Borderline, Clover, Decades Review, Dialogue, Flutter Poetry Journal, Front Porch Review, North American Review, Segullah, and Sunstone, among others.

Photo by James Lindsey, 2003 via Wikimedia Commons.

Innocence splintered when I watched the tree branch fall.
Sleeping in tight corners,
the wind, the rain, the mourning trees
all spoke my name as they cried out.

But in those sounds—the creaking, the whining and pounding,
the whistling of the wind between leaves and branches—

There was clarity, the possibility of death
so that we may all sing laments neither for us, nor for our souls,
but for the nature which, through language, we have left.

And I left it, staying within safety, if there was any to be had,
understanding the difference I, a product of selection, shared.

But in passing, in seeing the destruction and its forms,
I returned to the woods, to the breath of what we know and saw
fear in my own eyes,
in the frailty of nature, and of myself, to a birth of civility.

________________________________________________________________________
Chris A. Peck, currently resides in Provo, Utah with his wife and two boys. He is attending Utah Valley University working towards a degree in English education and philosophy after a long failed stint in the sciences. He is an avid cyclist and loves the outdoors. He has recently published in Warp and Weave as well as with the Utah Valley University Philosophy Conference.

Photo is in the public domain.

In the city,
glass-skinned buildings
like bitmapped mountains
pulse with interior stars.

Streets flow with headlights
like lambent corpuscles
navigating a maze
of webbed capillaries.

My neighborhood crawls
with progeny enough
to fascinate any ant farm gazer.

My house clings to earth
like mudded swallow’s nest,
bright as bowerbird canopy
strewn with colored nothings.

My children, too,
push over the edge
like wild, young larks
falling into flight.

_______________________________
Merrijane earned a B.A. in English at BYU. She then served for 18 months in the Washington, D.C. North mission at the LDS Temple Visitors’ Center. After returning, she married Jason Rice, and together they are raising a family of four boys in Kaysville. Currently, she works for Deseret Mutual in the Media Development department as a technical writer and editor. See more of her work here, and of course at WIZ.

“Birds of Tanzania” (2010) by Nevit Dilmen via Wikimedia Commons.

In Spring the gardener finds out death–
What fruit tree limbs did not overwinter.
Some stems twig and bud and bloom,
Some stems splinter.

I lost a limb some seasons back
From my own flesh–my firstborn daughter.
Time healed the break, but I still lack
The apples of her laughter.

__________________________________________________

Adam Greenwood lives with his wife and children in central New Mexico near the ranch his great-grandfather lost in the Great Depression. He is a member of the www.jrganymede.com blog. His oldest daughter, Betsey Pearl, died of cancer in the spring of 2005.

Fuchi bowl (Japanese)

This is a rewrite of an earlier post published here on WIZ.

One dark night in January of 2010 Mark and I made a last minute run to the only grocery store within 22 miles. On our return trip home, I drove with the SUV’s highbeams on, because we live on a rural road where, even in winter, we’re likely to come across a wide variety of animals on the pavement, anything from cats, rabbits, deer, mice, coyotes, and foxes to neighbors’ loose horses and cattle. In spring and summer, the variety of animal-on-road is even wider.

As we arced along a curve, the vehicle’s lights splashed against something moving on the road. A small cottontail had emerged from cover, probably looking for something to eat at the road’s edges where the unusually heavy and long-lingering snow had melted back from the asphalt’s edges.

“A bunny,” I said. The rabbit hopped straight for us and I slowed down. As the vehicle edged to a stop, we saw another flash in the headlights, high up in the air to our right. A great horned owl dropped out of the darkness into the swath of our headlights, swinging its talons out toward the rabbit, working its wings to correct its aim.

“Whoa!” we both said, surprised by the sudden drama. The cottontail feinted right, seemingly away from the owl but still heading toward the car. The owl hesitated midair, quite possibly blinded by our headlights, then tumbled to the ground a good two feet off its away-running target. For a moment, the bird sat on the roadside, staring after the rabbit. It looked like it was considering giving chase but, glancing at us, seemed to decide the risk wasn’t worth it. The opportunity had passed. With another flash of wings, the big bird lifted away into the darkness above the highbeams.

I don’t remember who said it, but one of us exclaimed, “Wow, that was something!” I asked, “Is the bunny under our car?” It would be a grief if the rabbit, having escaped the owl, suffered death beneath our tires. Mark grabbed a Maglite and slid out to look. “No bunnies under the car,” he said, getting back in, and we drove the very short distance home. “A bunny lived a little longer and an owl possibly went hungry because we were there,” I said to Mark.

Many of us have had similar experiences of happening to be somewhere then seeing that our being there affected some outcome, perhaps powerfully. This observation effect, if I might borrow a phrase from quantum mechanics, is a very common phenomenon that occurs more than we might realize. Sometimes just choosing to walk outside your door is enough to trigger an event or series of events and engage you in the flow of experience. Sometimes your involvement in an incident occurs only in your witnessing it, witnessing being no small thing, since, one way or another, witnessing an event affects it.

Example. One day I was waking home from the BYU campus when a commotion in a hedgerow caught my attention. I heard small birds’ panicked shrieking, then a kestrel flew out of the hedge clutching a sparrow in its talons. The image of the silhouette of that sparrow rising toward its end, head hanging limp, beak slightly open, has stayed with me for over thirty years. While I think that drama was well on its way before I arrived on the scene, my being there to witness it became part of the event and it entered my life. My telling of it now expands its occurrence.

Here’s an example of my more direct yet unintentional involvement in a similar experience. After we moved to our home in southeastern Utah, I walked out my front door one morning in a routine act of departure. A flock of juncos rummaging the yard for seeds took to the air at the sight of me. Perhaps because they’d invested their attention in me and/or were caught up in reading each other’s movements, they didn’t see the mid-sized hawk arrowing toward them ‘til too late. The hawk struck one junco in flight, knocked it senseless then seized it in its talons as it floundered against the ground. It all happened too quickly for me to even be able to identify what kind of hawk had benefited from my unintentional assistance. Lesson (still being) learned. I’m grateful that I was aware enough to see what happened; many times, I’m not.

Back when I lived along the Wasatch Front, I went on my morning walk one day along a route that took me past an elementary school. As I started up the hill, ahead of me on the opposite side of the street I saw a boy of eight or nine chucking rocks at a girl following him that I’d guess was kindergarten age or maybe in first grade. As I processed what was going on, the boy pegged her a good one on the leg. The girl’s face contorted. She sat down on the sidewalk, grabbed her leg, and began crying. The boy picked up another rock. “Hey!” I yelled from half a block away. “Stop it!”

The boy turned, saw me, dropped the rock. Unsure of what to do or what I was going to do, he stood, fidgeting, ‘til I’d walked past. After I’d walked up the road a bit, I turned to see what course of action he’d chosen. He’d crossed the road, leaving the girl sitting in a sulk on the sidewalk where he’d stoned her. I don’t enjoy giving orders, but the moment seemed to require it. “Go back and help her cross the street,” I said. Obediently, the boy turned back, helped the girl up, led her to the corner and across the street.

The obvious effects of my “happen stance”—of my happening to be present and aware at that moment and of my involving myself—was that the boy stopped throwing rocks at the girl for the time being then saw to her safety as he helped her cross the street and led her to the school. The less obvious effects? Who can say. But they include the impact the incident made upon me, including changing me, and that now include the effects that carry forward into whatever meaning the telling of the story gives rise to.

This is a beautiful, terrible, endless, destructive, creative, full-bodied participatory world, where events echo and continue to unfold moment to moment. Where they arise in language, such as in the telling of these stories, they likewise “happen,” engaging readers in the continuity of events by their choice to read these words today. In this way, human language is every bit as active as any other action and not merely passive expression or the diluted by-product of an action. Nor is it a cage to capture experience. Language is. It does.

Many are the times I’ve gone out into the environment that’s traditionally called Nature, become involved, and, surprise and confusion stripping me of favorite, comfortable clothing of suppositions, found myself standing naked in the eye of the universe, wondering, “What just happened?” I might not have learned much during the experience itself, but as I considered my actions afterward, I took another happen stance—that of self-examination, of witnessing the movements of my body and mind across the landscape of an event and then choosing differently. Such after-the-fact choices might only affect the outcome of the enlivening event by how they change me. Yet potential for those effects to continue through me exists in how I word them when I recount the event later.

The incident of the cottontail and the owl is carried forward in these words—has given rise to them, in fact.

Is life just too much, or what?

Anyway, it’s always more than we think we know.

In my part of the spring world, the arrival of the vernal equinox has not felt much different from the arrival of the autumnal equinox. The green flame is burning unusually low for this time of year. Winds have been abrasive and cold. Usually, the Big Green is well on its way by now, but only the dandelions are turning it up.

So I was wondering–how is spring coming along where you are? (For those of you who are moving into spring, that is.) I thought that it might be fun to give and receive reports of spring’s arrival in the form of haiku. That is, any excuse seems good for starting a haiku chain. Tracking spring’s approach–like news stations track Santa Claus’s progression toward their position–lends itself especially well to a sequence of meditative post-it notes.

What is a haiku? A haiku is a classical Japanese poetical form, usually 17 syllables all in a single line in Japanese, but I understand that there are longer and shorter forms.  In English, a haiku often takes the form of one short line of 5 syllables, a long line of 7 syllables, then another short line of 5 syllables, but there are many paths–pick what pleases you.  Often, haiku mention the season under scrutiny–in this case spring, obviously.  If you wish to learn more about haiku, you can go here or here.

For this chain, I’ll post an opener that I brought up out of Crossfire Canyon yesterday when I went down to look for spring there. Imagine my surprise to see that not even the wild buckwheat are bucking up yet. They’re usually the first flower to bloom, after stork’s bill. Then, the wild phlox.

But yesterday, nada.

Or only slightly more than nada.

After I post my haiku, the chain is open for business. Simply post your haiku in the comments below the post. You can riff off the previous haiku or totally cowboy it. Those of you who aren’t springing it up but are actually falling–don’t feel left out. Remind us that hemispheres have minds of their own. Just have fun.

Me:

Spring flickers low in
root embers and cold pith, in
rare red sparks of ant.

Go!

The boy on his way to school
Saw the earth eating a dog.
Black and brown, warm and sleek,
A lolling grin so like its kind:
It was killed by a car and
Fell among the roadside weeds
Without notice and was still.
How long did the earth dance on
Before the boy saw its muscles parsed
Away in trails of stench–a week?
Two weeks?  With moon and sun
Rushing to keep pace, the stars sliding
Out of her way, their milky bouquet
Stretched across the ballroom of night,
This boy peddled to and fro past
Those teeth grinning whiter now
That the earth had nibbled away,
Taking in the dog, one sip at a time.
He had heard stories how the earth
Will one day disgorge
Her long meal of the dead,
And later wished he had taken
A tooth or something to
Summon the dog when it rises.

_____________________________________
Will Reger was born and raised in the St. Louis, Missouri area. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois and currently teaches history at Illinois State University. He lives in Champaign, Illinois, with his wife and two youngest children. He began writing poetry in the 7th grade and never quite stopped. He also plays the Native American Flute. He has recently had poems published in Fire in the Pasture and songs/cycles (and, of course, here on WIZ).

Photo: “Infrared Road Dog” by Mike Lewinski via Wikimedia Commons, 2012.