{ Mark Terrill: A Poem for Uncertainties. }

A Poem for Uncertainties
by Mark Terrill

I gave the waitress in the café a fifty & she gave me my change got sidetracked
& left the fifty on the counter all alone with me & my conscience & I had to
dig so deep down into my frail moral fiber that it hurt & I came back up
emboldened with a spontaneous resolution to just do good & motioned toward
the fifty & the waitress looked down & shook her head & smiled & picked up
the money & put it away & then out on the street I told you what happened
that I almost earned us an extra fifty euros which we certainly could have used
but instead got caught up in a tangle of virtue & you said that I’d done the right
thing & that good things would come my way & I said *yeah *but you have to
take them for the interchange to be complete & we laughed & walked on down
the sidewalk & suddenly I saw the whole world as a giant garden of crass uncertainties
with a knot where my heart used to be & coffee & beer where the
blood used to flow & the wavering contingencies stacked up end to end reaching
up past the highest tower of cumulus hovering above the vast city of
Hamburg & it scared me but I got brave & went on.

{ Steve Scafidi: The Sublime. }

The Sublime
by Steve Scafidi

For Larry Levis

And what good is a dream finally? It breaks your head open
and cello music pours out of a stranger’s window and the most
gorgeous woman you ever loved says to hit the road and you do
see them—that stranger and this woman. Kissing everywhere.

In the trees. On boats. In the kitchen cupboards. The fog
of daily life never lifts and the checkbook needs proper
calculations and the dog would like supper please and now
without warning the dream returns. It breaks your head open.

You lie there for a week and no one finds you until the dog
having lost its dignity finally eats and when there is no more
howls. It howls. And you are a missing person, a passage
of shit quivered into the dirt. A good boy. A terrible dream

someone picks up with a plastic bag wrapped in his hand
to throw away and you are thrown away. You do it every day.
Waking too early, driving to work, working and returning.
Reading poems of great beauty and crying at the movies.

Touching the hair of your niece who laughs at water. Flying
over cornfields so close and so openly that when you wake
there is silk in your beard. Your arms are tired and hang
at your sides like the wings of a migratory bird who is about

to die. And what good is a dream finally? It breaks your heart
and you stand in the lush dark of the moment after twilight
ends and begin to sing and nothing makes sense to you
and you sing louder for a while, then awkwardly sit down

where you are. And the stars overhead shine a little—no more
or less than usual—and whether it is daylight and they are invisible
or whether it is night and they are the embers of a blacksmith’s
fire, they shine and you are grateful. That love is like a hammer.

{ Eavan Boland: Quarantine. }

Quarantine
by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.