witness for the Unconsumed
11 night we struggled to make love:
e path ended in the swarming salal,

Picture hanging on the wall at 5 o’clock in the morning

e viperous dancing at vine maples, agerstruck windtalls;
aught in this forest tangle, impenetrable to even the eye,

orced to go back where we had come from,
llow the arid trail back to the highway
a catch a ride down
rum this Cascade Mountain valley
-t absorbed the winding innocence
1 our night.

> 11 night we struggled to make love:

nd when the morning entered

ur bodies were found dismembered

and and root, butt and head, clumps or hair

cattered all over the glaring interior.
tried to gather this lite together,

ried to divine the meaning oi our disarray,

ut lite would not relent, the coerced

~ eaning continued to drain emptily

rom our fantasy.

could use a woman I had said.
no then in sell-decisive laughter I recognized
my isolation in the raritied atmosphere
where the dillicult air was taken so lightly.
.y desire had lost the place of its beauty
became the stone holding the shape
of dissolution in the stone creek.

et in this shaled time, compelled to scratch the source,

I discovered in the Send that slaked my thirst,
the uselessuess of any life I designed.
y only course was to wait:lar the abiding water-seed
that would ﬂow over me imperishably sustained
at the core of the thunder-egg.

here in the riverbed we partake
of the fruitless and consummate an elemental
union that arises tram nothing, passes into nothing,
but leaves the patterns of air
reﬂective with the etchings oi green light,
we listen to the waterfall spilling
into the head or this veiled alpine lake-—
the sound at winter losing its hold
on the sides of Snowgrass Mountain:
the dissipation of the Compact of time and cold—A
e interior landscape grows progressively
the same in the shimmering enstasy
of the cosmic stasis.

ong ago in that longer winter night
our bodies {tailed at each other
and ﬁnished in bloodless dismemberment.
hen another me Joins with another you
' (still the same), the blood will now
and the glare will be surrendered like the sun
in the roseate clouds of dusk.

h, the sky, this aweful sky!
Tonight as we lie in the breath
of all the mountain beings
he stars begin to explode
in quiescent violence,
falling like snow on our bodies;
no we sleep on and on
under the mantle oi a delicate
emptiness never to be consumed.

S T. Wellman

Technology?
Soaring, is the advancement of the brain
So tar up it leaves a gap-
For the heart remains the same.
Janet Hamilton

Headlights splashed on the wet road
Through the misty night
47 were driven across the Mississippi
with the sun that was always rising
in hot pursuit
Above the thunderclouds
The road was empty
And the Midnight Special hurtled on
Moving like a phantom
Towards its destination
Sleeping ears of corn were unaroused
By the silence '
undisturbed by the precise movement
That carried it past the point of return
There was no time lett to think.
Nothing matters out in the heartlands
But your own two hands
And keeping warm.

Marty Iker

Alterwork

A couple beers can kill
When you’re tired

And I iust worked up

A thirteen-hour sweat,

So I stopped in here to rest
And wash my pains away
In the foam.

Got to move now,
But my body don’t want to go
And I got six miles at night to walk
Before I reach home.
Marty lker

Cats walk oozing their way through
thin cracks In your wall
0! fear Crumbling mortor
falls... You appear, naked
before us, then slowly climb
into an empty womb to hide.
We wait lor your rebirth.
Lynn McMahon

They think that you play {or them,
shoulders hunched over and head fallen
under the weight of the music

played through the metal mouth-piece
that lips kiss; notes sent to the ground
ior those who ride the subways

to hear.

Notes bounce {rom the ground and
wave the grass in the iield

[or those who stand in the wind

can only hear

that he does not play for them.

Notes ﬁrst in the soul

and then in the mind; now they
are the same. “All Blues"

played not for the woman

you never loved, but to

darkness of the night seen
through subway windows

of time when nothing was real and
notes somehow too soit and the
words even smaller ever to be heard
or written.

The tools.

They think that you play for them.

They hunch over their shoulders,

close their eyes,

how their heads

and sway in the embryotic sea of notes
you play How can they see or understand
when they think that you play {or her?

But why do you not sleep at night?
The sound oi the stop light changing
and the tootsteps on the grass echo
through your thoughts. “All Blues” is a
woman which you do not understand,
You give her your love

in the only way you can.

But she can not hear

and you do not understand.

But they think that you play for her.
But they think that you play for them.

Sandy Rikoon
Jim McMam'c

Rain makes me sad-—-l cry

Seems like all the tears of the world are
Falling on my head....Gray skies,
Thunderclaps, Lightening, Silence...
Drip, Dripping

Softly, Louder, LOUDER,

Pounding Hales into my mind.

snow Son, pure, glistening whiteness...
neaumul capturing oi light and color
Yet so white, so clean...
I run, 1 leap, l laugh
Bouncing, Tearing around,
In circles i go, like a small dog

or a happy child...
I dance...
I hit my face upwards,
And yearn tor the cold wetness
to touch my cheeks,
i look on peaceiully
As the snow...
Silently, Gently, Simply,
”adorns.

Lynn McMahon

 

