Do you love me?

Do you love me?
Robert Wrigley

She's twelve and she's asking the dog,
who does, but who speaks
in tongues, whose feints and gyrations
are themselves parts of speech.

They're on the back porch
and I don't really mean to be taking this in
but once I've heard I can't stop listening. Again
and again she asks, and the good dog

sits and wiggles, leaps and licks.
Imagine never asking. Imagine why:
so sure you wouldn't dare, or couldn't care
less. I wonder if the dog's guileless brown eyes

can lie, if the perfect canine lack of abstractions
might not be a bit like the picture books
she "read" as a child, before her parents' lips
shaped the daily miracle of speech

and kisses, and the words were not lead
and weighed only air, and did not mean
so meanly. "Do you love me?" she says
and says, until the dog, sensing perhaps

its own awful speechlessness, tries to bolt,
but she holds it by the collar and will not
let go, until, having come closer,
I hear the rest of it. I hear it all.

She's got the dog's furry jowls in her hands,
she's speaking precisely
into its laid-back, quivering ears:
"Say it," she hisses, "say it to me."

Meditation on a Grapefruit

Meditation on a Grapefruit

Craig Arnold

To wake when all is possible

before the agitations of the day

have gripped you

                    To come to the kitchen

and peel a little basketball

for breakfast

              To tear the husk

like cotton padding        a cloud of oil

misting out of its pinprick pores

clean and sharp as pepper

                             To ease

each pale pink section out of its case

so carefully       without breaking

a single pearly cell

                    To slide each piece

into a cold blue china bowl

the juice pooling       until the whole

fruit is divided from its skin

and only then to eat

                  so sweet

                            a discipline

precisely pointless       a devout

involvement of the hands and senses

a pause     a little emptiness

each year harder to live within

each year harder to live without

Idiot Psalm 12

BY SCOTT CAIRNS

A psalm of Isaak, amid uncommon darkness

O Being both far distant and most near,

             O Lover embracing all unlovable, O Tender

             Tether binding us together, and binding, yea

             and tenderly, Your Person to ourselves,

Being both beyond our ken, and kindred, One

             whose dire energies invest such clay as ours

             with patent animation, O Secret One secreting

             life anew into our every tissue moribund,

             afresh unto our stale and stalling craft,

grant in this obscurity a little light.

From Blossoms

From Blossoms

Li-Young Li

From blossoms come
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
come nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

Oh, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

and that will be heaven

and that will be heaven

Evangeline Patterson

and that will be heaven
at last      the first unclouded
seeing

to stand like the sunflower
turned full face to the sun       drenched
with light       in the centre
held        while the circling planets
hum with utter joy

seeing and knowing
at last      in every particle
seen and known      and not turning
away

never turning away
again