Maureen Thorson

ALT Time BY JOHN WIENERS Why is it eternity lasts a moment a moment eternity? Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls at dawn? I hear voices rustle in the leaves after they are gone. New mice burst into life. Small raccoons bear tiny chains around their wrists.

ALT He Had a Terrible Childhood BY JULIEN STRONG my mother tells me, and proceeds to elaborate at gruesome length. But don't all gods and heroes get off to a rocky start? Young Theseus thrashed in his fish shack, Zeus sent abroad to avoid being lunch for his dad. I am twelve and obsessed with Greek myths. I won't repeat the gory details of my mother's story here, but the gist is, faced with the madness of monsters who were his parents, the god in our basement made his mind a labyrinth and retreated inside it, where he invented everything but the way out. I felt it the first time I met him, shying away from him as a horse does a broken bridge. Though in time I learned to cross it—home was on the other side: my mother, shelter, bed. Do you think I shouldn't have married him? she asked me once. It must have been my senior year of high school. I kept silent. Like Cassandra I had a knack for sight yet there was nothing I could have said.

ALT Yes, the Fish Music A trout-colored wind blows through my eyes, through my fingers, and I remember how the trout used to hide from the dinosaurs when they came to drink at the river. The trout hid in subways, castles and automobiles. They waited patiently for the dinosaurs to go away.

ALT Leaves BY URSULA K. LE GUIN Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.

ALT Sunflower Sonnet Number One But if I tell you how my heart swings wide enough to motivate flirtations with the trees or how the happiness of pasion freaks inside me, will you then believe the faithful, yearning freeze on random, fast explosions that I place upon my lust? Or must I say the streets are bare unless it is your door I face unless they are your eyes that, rare as tulips on a cold night, trick my mind to oranges and yellow flames around a seed as deep as anyone may find in magic? What do you need? I’ll give you that, I hope, and more But don't you be the one to choose me: poor.

ALT A Question of Weather "Hot enough for you?" If another raspy-voiced stranger asks this question of me, I shall throw my dirty sweatshirt in his face. Just like that. Or throw this cool tropical drink in the waitress's pretty face. Of course, it is hot enough. The lantana's bright blossoms radiate a tropical glory beneath a sun that beams and beams. Oh happy entity. My God, the last time birds sang like this I was thirteen. My limbs ached. And every gland shivered in anticipation. I want this sour taste on my tongue to leave. If only my companions could greet the heat with different words. Words as generous, kindly, dazzling as the sun. We humans sweat. We try to make contact. But, once the gargantuan lawn mower stops, the birds utter a conspiracy of voices. A secret about to be broken. And every dance I know itches my feet.

ALT PURE KNIGHT OPENING “Free Me,” said Robert Knight, but nobody did & his dissolving Paramounts irked the Dot & put him on ice for 4 1/2 years—long enough to get a degree in chemical engineering. Knight knew the alchemy of love, so why not the sex of chemistry? After the Rising Sons released his “Everlasting Love,” he was eclipsed by a Love Affair with his own damn song & went back to research at Tennessee State. Octane rings & aromatic compounds. Some say “poor Bobby Knight, just a one-hit wonder,” but what a hit, what sub-lime wonder. "Blessed are the Lonely," up on that mountain, a stoned philosopher—Bobby Knight just laughs in his gold house that used to be lead.

ALT UNICORN This is the animal that never was. Not knowing that, they loved it anyway: its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny— right down to the still light of its gaze. It never was. And yet such was their love the pure beast arose; they had cleared the space. And in the stable of its nothingness it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof. They fed it, then, not with hay or corn, but with the chance that it might come to pass. All this gave the creature such a power its brow put out a horn; one single horn. It grew inside a maiden's looking-glass then one day walked out, and passed into her.

ALT A script born of fingertips keeps etching its lament on walls. I find it in old notebooks, in suspicious texts. It's the call of Tasseli again— chariots that crossed a savannah that was once ocean; the charioteer aims his arrow, his horses gallop on. Their hooves are trotting inside my blood. A cadence pulling me toward others, to steal into their knowing, to live the before, to cross toward beyond. Paths everywhere, without return. Soul upon soul, atom to atom, vapor-strung.

ALT The Fish BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS Although you hide in the ebb and flow Of the pale tide when the moon has set, The people of coming days will know About the casting out of my net, And how you have leaped times out of mind Over the little silver cords, And think that you were hard and unkind, And blame you with many bitter words.

ALT THE HILL It is sometime since I have been to what it was had once turned me backwards, and made my head into a cruel instrument. It is simple to confess. Then done, to walk away, walk away, to come again. But that form, I must answer, is dead in me, completely, and I will not allow it to reappear— Saith perversity, the willful, the magnanimous cruelty, which is in me like a hill.

ALT IN HARBOR A young man, twenty-eight years of age, Emes arrived at this little Syrian harbor on a tenion vessel with the intention of learning to be a perfume seller. But during the voyage he fell ill; and as soon as he disembarked, he died. His burial, the very poorest, took place here. A few hours before he died, he murmured something about “home,” about “very old parents." But who they were nobody knew, nor which his country in the vast panhellenic world. It is better so. For in this way, though he lies dead in this little harbor, his parents will always go on hoping he is alive.

ALT A Bitterness I believe you did not have a happy life. I believe you were cheated. I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery. I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression. I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling. I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger. I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all. I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness. I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged. Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides.

ALT The greatest poverty is not to live in Poughkeepsie, to wear a fleece blanket against a diner's air -conditioning, to ride a motorcycle shirtlessly and helmetlessly along a sidewalk beneath blighted maples: how long till you succumb to the accidental nature of nature, your own nature, spaces to fill in later: a naked torso over an engine, a folk song of fire escapes and bottlecaps: you can't live here and I can't leave, but you can come down for a weekend of inaccurate impulses amid an overperfumed mall's bodily distortions, the rough housing of foggy suburbs and the mutually assured ruin of every qualified sense

ALT Tiptoe Lightning BY ELIZABETH WILLIS Tragedy saunters to the pit, swinging its depth charge. If you had X-ray vision you could watch these bones climbing the Mountain Vainglorious without quite touching the ground. Let's ruin our letters, erase all foreign prospect. So many expeditions are but fictive inflections, the garbled ambition of someone stepping up with, like, something less lovely than the legs of Rome. Thumb power instead of "timber:" The answer from above the stage rattles our windows, a modern letter sent from antiquity, its blurred flourish abundantly gutted.

ALT Twilight BY RAE ARMANTROUT Where there's smoke there are mirrors and a dry ice machine, industrial quality fans. If I’ve learned anything about the present moment * But who doesn't love a flame, the way one leaps into being full-fledged, then leans over to chat * Already the light is retrospective, sourceless, is losing itself though the trees are clearly limned.

ALT Sonnet 55: Not marble nor the gilded monuments BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the Judgement that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

ALT Allegory of Love Love jerked me up by my hair and told me I was its slave. It was 6 a.m., I didn't even know. Ouch, I saíd. Ir pressed down on me. I searched around to give it something. My expensive shirt was on the floor. But my mortal body was the only currency. So we made love che way other men subordinate beasts or submit to tyranny. It held on to my wrists. It didn't let me shave. I'm going to have you forever, it told me. You can have me for a while, I said.