To A Power

They checked out, ate The Big Slam at Denny's, and drove off, wanting to make it across the Badlands before the protection of the world wore out and the sun came.

They knew where they were going; they knew what they had to do. The world was not altogether round in those there parts, and they knew they were rapidly approaching the discontinuity.

They had previously told their friends at home, in their departments, they would be way way gone way for a way way while, not to be seen expected to be seen at a time expected any time again. It's because they knew no one would understand, then. They had been chosen, they would have been chosen, on the other hand, if they could understand what they knew, what they had to do.

They drove off over the wide Dakota sun, and they never hurried. In the fourth dimension mathematics is let to engulf your life, and they were not like their friends at home. The reason was the same reason. It was a sweep through hot Dakota wheat on a sweet Dakota day, no way a run under Arizona sun in an Arizona way. A pagan, mysterious, number-eight-spirited way. So surely didn't they mean to be anything, any way but the way they were.

They knew what they had to do. It is because they were not like their friends at home that details are lacking. It is because of the aim for their friends at home that we must lack them. They were so much geniuses, they were, but it was not a religion they followed.

They laughed and joked in the car, because the theorems of the fourth dimension fixed their course arbitrarily well. The other uncertain term in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle cancels out. Ha calls their voice. Always calls their voice. Always comes Ha their voice calling. In no uncertain terms. Because they had been chosen, and it was because they would know where where they were going that they were chosen, they had that positive-dimensional freedom. It was because they were so much geniuses that they knew of the fourth dimension. And it was because because they knew what because was, not first false second true, philosophically, deeply, spiritually, inferentially, archetypically, connectedly, associatedly, understoodly, comprehendedly, overrunly. So they laughed.

They were following the ideas of their progenitor, the one of the baseball machine and the color cubes, prehumously telling the world that the sun would come, posthumously followed in time by the ones who came, over still Dakota sun in its own way way far away. The one who saw the fourth dimension but was special. The ones who saw the fourth dimension and were smart (in time, followed) still list their ears, careful list their ears, careful drive still their ears listing. Two apiece. Ha. So they laughed, but they were soon approaching the discontinuity.

They because understand the fourth dimension, way way back leaving their cities and grand unions, smelted crossing the fingers of an arch-smith who is not God, or chipped crossing the crankshafts by (an arch-clock) who is not Father Time, or whatever way went the world wildly away they wanted not to know or care, weened not to know or care themselves, because the world is not mathematical, even in four dimensions, and unless you control your soul so that it is.

They were mathematicians, harning they had intuitive grasp of the nature of four-dimensional space and the figures embedded within. That is theral they must reach the discontinuity across the Badlands that judicious Dakota day, because the protection of the world would wear out, and the sun would come. Ha. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. That is theral they must go on a journey that is analogous sen a religious one, without religion. Their mystical, bahogenary understanding represents solely an extreme form of standard, universitative knowledge.

They understood this thus in this way, however incomprehensible it may sporn. They knew that there is no one fourth dimension but three-dimensional space is a cross-section of four-dimensional space and that cross-section is arbitrary, and lating to their predecessor and their knowledge and their universitation they could have that four-dimensional understanding that sporns incomprehensible, and they did and they had, always. So they laughed incomprehensible to the discontinuity, a vortex skell four dimensions, over the hyperbolic part of the world, over the sun, crossing outside their friends' world.

They knew where they had come to; they knew what they hqd to do. But since it was a process it must be described by a di¶ferential equation and so—Ø

They got to the town on the other side of the Badlands; was there ever any doubt? The mathematicians carefully decreased the separations of their variable wrenches and twisted flowers off the trees, collecting them as naturalists in a burlap sack, therefore, which crossed the sun wouldn't come.

Lawrence D.

Daybreak at Macchu Picchu

Wall of darkness stands
Light seeps over ancient cliffs
A prisoner...
                 free
...to the clear air
It pours down the mountainside
Ruins soaked in...
                light
...that travels a path by memory
Filling the Incan temples.
It drips into every crevice between...
                stones
...laid long in the past by mysterious hands,
By a people lost to time.

They leave us their history in piled stones
Each locked to the next,
Pieces of a massive puzzle
Packed so tightly
That no paper, no light, no air
May pass through the thread-fine meeting places.
Walls built so strong
That the smallest stone may hold the largest
On its smooth back
And never shudder from the burden.

Those builders leave us traces:
Lining the busy and colorful Cusco streets,
Perched high on the cliffs of Pisac,
Spreading steps on the Andes mountainside.
Sacsawaman,
Ollantaytambo,
Their skill crowns a mountain with...
                Macchu Picchu,
...the highest of the Incan Empire,
Which snaked up through Chile
And over the Ecuadorian border.
They who were the last in the line of many great peoples:
The Wari,
The Chimu,
The Incas,
Sculpting their gold,
Building their temples,
Leaving only hints of a heritage,
Their answers left for the sun to reveal.

Christina Porter

Ode to the Writer from Stratford

With what genius was it that his time was spent
bowed o'er wild words that tamed to his demands,
and of the blankéd pallor of the parchment
chiseling works of splendor with his ink-stained hands?
What divine touch allowed to him the power
to form verse with such a quick and skillful pen
that every seed he planted came to flower,
and each bud a golden blossom housed within?
Oh I would that such a gift as his were mine,
that the brilliance of this poet so renowned
could invent itself in my own humble line
and do justice to these praises I expound,
yet I would not hope to prove a better bard
than this man whose craft I have so long admir'd.

Micaela M.

Pomegranate Tree

There was once a woman who lived in the city,
who planted a tree in a window pot.
And she sprayed the leaves
and watered the roots
and whispered secrets to the seedling tree
and the tree grew tall on the city air and filled the pot and breathed in deep.
And it listened long to the secret words that the woman whispered in its wooden ears.
In its long, slow, inevitable tree kind of understanding, it understood the things
         she told it.
It would sit up late at night, the knots on its dark trunk welling up with shadows, and
         stare down at the street and the all-night garage, and think about the things
         it had been told by the woman.
And the patterns of rivulets in its umber bark grew deep and complex,
and its branches spread like fingers.
And the woman married and conceived and grew plump with child.
The tree watched her from its knotty trunk, walking about and whispering to her
         tummy, not to him.
But in its long, slow, inevitable tree kind of understanding, it had really expected
         this to happen.
Had it been a person it might have reacted resentfully, even violently, withered sulkily
         or dropped a branch on the infant as soon as it was born.
This was the way it thought humans might act, or at any rate an exaggeration of the
         way in which humans act.
Of course, humans didn't drop branches.
Being a tree, it simply stood in the window pot, roots sprawled over the ledge,
         branches across the ceiling, listening to the mother whispering, and
         listening to the unborn baby whispering,
Because it heard everything, if rather quietly, in its wooden ears.
And the baby was born
and spoke in jangled syllables
and sucked on mommy's nipple
and cried formless words.
And the tree, in its long, slow, inevitable tree kind of understanding, understood
        the infant words.
And it listened wooden-eared.
And the child turned three,
and ran about naked before her bath in the room where the tree sat in its pot. And she screamed because mommy was tickling her.
And she turned six,
and she danced around the tree and sang to it, and doubled over with laughter, because the tree sounded so funny when it sang back.
She turned eleven and the moon spoke to her,
and the tree heard the moon talking to the daughter of the woman, speaking of blood.
And in its long, slow, inevitable tree kind of understanding, it understood a great
        many things from the moon talk, about magic and menstruation.
The girl turned sixteen.
And she drank vodka in the room where the tree hunched against the ceiling.
She held parties.
And one night she awoke her mother crying, asking her why the tree in the window
        pot didn't talk to her anymore.
And the woman did not know what to say.
"It talked less and. . . less. . . and. . . I. . .don't. . ."
Her voice was shuddering.
Her mother held her, not knowing what to do,
hoping she had just had a nightmare,
knowing that she had not.
And the tree, standing at the other end of the hall and across the living room, heard
        the mother holding the daughter and heard the daughter crying.
And in its wooden heart it wondered.
And it was unsure.
And looking for answers, it looked down,
looked down on the street,
and stretched its branches out across the whole city till it looked down on every street,
        on everyone, and it listened.

And the tree looked out over everything
and everyone,
stared in at every window,
watched people dressing and dining,
watched them walking, bathing, putting on make-up,
watched them drinking, waking, breaking down, being born,
sleeping, skating, making love.
He watched a baker kneading bread, his strong hands deep in the dough.
He watched a limo-driver's daughter going out to buy bread and watching the strong
        hands of the baker kneading the dough.
He watched the drunken banker eyeing the girl in the bakery.
He watched the vagabond singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" while he wanders
        his endless, open streets.
He watched the people who live in houses and the people who live in flats and the
        people who live all squeezed together in one-room apartments and the people
        who live in boxes.
He saw them in their temples and at their zoos and in their movie theaters.
He heard them talking of avant-garde theater, of recipes for blueberry pie, of stock
        market prices.
He heard them say: "How are you?" "How old are you?" "You shouldn't speak to
        him." "I tried, I tried." "Why didn't you just tell me?" "I missed you."
         "I love you."
He heard them say: "It's all a matter of perspective." "I hate the way he draws."
        "You're right." "How can you tell?" "Fuck you, you lousy piece of shit."
         He heard them say: "Leave me alone." "Grow up." "That's brilliant." "I'm
        sorry." "Hello? Who's this?" "There's nothing left." "I liked Bulworth."
He loomed over the city.
And the tree understood the things he saw,
but amongst the images and words that floated up from down below,
there were some things that moved too quickly, flitted too fast,
which eluded that long, slow, inevitable, tree kind of understanding.
And there came a day, after some years, when the daughter left home and slipped off
        into the world,
and the man, the father of the child, went out,
and the sun dipped.
And the woman sat down at the wooden table in the parallelogram of orange light, in
        the room where the tree branches wrapped about the walls and the roots dug
        into the floor.
And sitting there, she could see her hair, gold in the light of late afternoon.
She breathed a sigh that summed up all the past nineteen years, and pushed them
        aside, and returned to solitude.
And she turned to the tree trunk rising from the broken window pot, to the dark eyes
        and wooden ears in its bark, which ran with black lines like river beds.
"And you?" she whispered to the tree.
"And you?" she whispered to the tree.
"I've seen a lot," it said, "for a tree in nineteen years."
"That's because you're in a window pot."
"I've seen rivers, streets stretching hundreds of blocks, and followed them backwards
        to naked children playing in an exploded fire hydrant.
I saw the 8012th gravestone added to the cemetery that stretches nearly a mile on the
        edge of the city.
I've seen—"
"I never finished whispering to you," she said. "I've seen"
"I still have more to tell you," she said.
"I've seen"
"I still have more to tell you," she said.
"I know," said it,
"in all the time I watched and all the things I saw, I looked for the secrets that you never
        had a chance to tell me, and I could not find a single one."
And the woman whispered to the tree.
And the sun sank, and it was a quiet city night with no one home but the woman
         and tree.
She whispered to the tree.
And the all-night garage glowed blue-white and stayed awake when the other eyes in
        the city blinked shut, and the street below turned pitch black.
She whispered to the tree.
And she finished whispering.
And the tree was silent.
For the woman's words were dark and strange—for she too had grown in those
        nineteen years—
and there are thing which a tree cannot fathom.
There are things too fast and ephemeral for that long slow kind of understanding,
too fickle and harsh and incomplete
and it thought of the night it had heard the girl crying because it had stopped speaking
        to her,
and it faltered,
and it felt empty.

But this was a tree planted in a window pot,
and it had seen things strange for a tree to see and lived up high where the wind is fast
        and every falling leaf and every broken twig falls down a hundred feet.
And the next afternoon the woman awoke at the foot of the tree to find a pomegranate
        hanging from every branch.
She did not remember it being a pomegranate tree when she planted it there, but then
        when she planted it, it didn't whisper back.
"I want to love not like a tree, always still and rooted and brown and slow and brown.
        I want drops of scarlet, fast and red and uncontrolled, like your whisper,"
said the pomegranate tree.
So the woman picked a pomegranate.

Max Bean

Cloud

Orphan, waif, detached and isolated
From his tribe of rivers,
From his sister ice.
Alone and cold and lost,
Defeated by the vastness of the plane
Of blue in which he flies,
Losing traces of himself
And bestowing them, like silver ribbons, to the sky.

He is made of crystal grief,
And when he cries it rains,
And when he weeps it pours,
And when he dies the sun comes out of hiding.

Anna K.

Ry R.

The Actor's Wife

She goes every night each week
and watches him kiss her: the fingers
that shared every inch
of her body creeping
up the actress's spine. Yes,
it is great drama (one of
the greatest of all time, to say the least) and yes,
the reviews were marvelous, he
surpassed all expectations, but
she watches (her cuticles dry, skin thinning) only
for the caress, sees him only
(does the actress feel that callus
on his finger) when bodies and lips collide. She comes
every night, and cheers so loudly
that the seat almost shakes beneath her, but
she remembers as his fingers
trace the upstage breast
how last month, before the previews, before
the curtain rose to reveal him,
he touched her that way, throwing
her loosely to the bed, making her skin
into velvet, letting his lines (she knows them now
and mouths them as he says them) spill
out of him onto her, running
through the lines in her face; she recalls
as the scene climaxes, theater
twisted in his fingers, and yes,
the audience swoons at its grandeur—how, toes quivering
with the fullness of his body,
she thought there could be nothing more romantic.

Gemma C.

The Sacrifice

He held the jar tightly to his chest, arms wrapped around his sides as if in a straitjacket. He was smothering the glass as if to suppress the movement that existed inside it. He would cautiously release his hold for a moment and bend his head down to peer through the glass at his prisoner. Then, as if delightedly frightened by what he had seen, he would clutch it to him again, pressing it against the sweaty T-shirt. He looked from side to side to see if anyone was watching him. Then, content with his solitude, he placed the jar on his left palm and brought it up to eye level and then beyond. His arm outstretched, the two o'clock sun glinted and made his captive more radiant.

The sounds of the insects beat together in one harmonious pulse which made the tall field grass quiver. They were pleading with him to release her. Had he been aware of their wishes he would have been compliant. But his mind could only hold one thing at a time. At this moment all he knew was fascination—a wild fascination, woven by innocence and strengthened by curiosity.

Its wings were soft and ornate, like a mother's peachy ear. Colors that tickled his eyes and brought a smile to his lips. Its firm little body was suspended between those magnificent shimmering wings. They beat against the side of the jar making a surprisingly violent sound. His clammy, thick fingers gripped the base of the jar, and he shook it from side to side with increasing excitement. Her body was tossed and turned, thrown against the walls of her cell. He paused for a moment and watched her flutter around drunkenly, trying to regain her bearing. Her movements were thick and laborious; she hovered near the bottom of the jar. He shook the jar again. Her body made a ping-pong sound as it was jolted from side to side. Again he stopped to inspect what had happened. He pressed his eye against the glass in order to observe her. She was lying on the floor. Beauty torn and battered, her body seemed to heave, and then all energy was directed towards a wing sticking straight up. It quivered and sputtered and gave up. He watched her defeated stillness. Slowly, he unscrewed the lid of the jar. It came away with ease. He tipped the jar upside down and the broken body plummeted to the ground from whence she came.

Damon G.

Rock Creek Drainage

Side of the trail,
flat plain by the river.
Floods in the spring.
Low brush and Lodge Pole pine.
Dust rises where our boots track
the dark mud on the river sand.
Leaves a trail of steps and wet dirt.
Polaskis and two-man cross-cut saws,
set them down by the tree
and wipe the hot perspiration.
Angled cut, drawn half-way through
to the heart wood, center of the tree.
Braced stance,
the handle cuts against hard calluses.
Pull with back and legs,
arms a solid grip bend at the end of each stroke.
Then ride the saw back through
the dusty powdered wood.
Keep it straight, sight along the bark
and with the second cut, that
wedge of tree, knocked out with
5-lb round-headed sledge,
falls off.
The rear cut now.
Leave an inch or two of wood
holding it up.
Take the double-bit ax and knock
the support out.
It breaks through tree tops, hung up
by its upper branches on
shattered saplings,
the tip across the trail.
Splintered wood in concentric cylinders
sprouts up jagged from the stump.
Long afternoon spent balanced
on the fallen tree.
With the ax, walk its
length, sturdy your feet,
and lean down, trimming branches
suspended above the dusty earth.
Measure out the abutments and
stringers, 13' and then again, two 6' sections.
Stripped of bark, glistening,
peeled raw and young
the wet wood of the timbers.
Drag over the rutted and rooted trail to
the trickle of stream.
Between the step and
the slow cool water.
Lower into the trench and
wedge with rocks and dirt.
Bring the others over in the morning, on the way
out cut the tip off the tree that
stuck into the trail and toss it,
scrapwood,
into the brush.

Danny S.

Benet K.