by Julia H. Fonte

sing with streams,
mingle with meadows
and surround a marsh
with silence.
Understory still sleeps
in the earth’s attic beneath a quilt
of soggy leaves.
My woodland is nurtured
by whatever the skies bestow
and by what it sucks through its roots,
like a child with a straw,
as I saunter on paths worn over two hundred years.
Before that, this lushness was pathless,
though light feet may have passed through
without a thought
of ownership.
My woods are not mine after all.
They are ancient and independent,
allowing me to live
exactly as I wish.

by Carol Milkuhn

these stones, piled into a wall by
a nineteenth-century farmer,
reach out with lichen-covered hands
eager to shake mine, extend a welcome
to a lone hiker in their woods—
so long has it been since they felt anything
warm-blooded, living, anything
that could remind them of that farmer,
of his calloused, roughened fingers
that coaxed them out of the mud, cradled them
into crevices, graced them with purpose—
only to abandon all, fields, farm—
even this wall,
not understanding that the land remembers,
shares secrets, confides
                      in vowels of stone.

by Nancy Gordon

With only one full afternoon
to explore the Chicago Art Institute
I looked for the Impressionists room
and, on my way to that array,
found Picasso’s Old Guitarist.
 
Stunned, I could not leave him.
He filled my eyes
as Wallace Stevens filled my mind. 
“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, 
You do not play things as they are.’ “
“The man replied. ‘Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar.’ “
But the guitar was brown.
All else was blue–the man,
the setting, his arm reaching down.
I got no further that afternoon
than The Old Guitarist and his tune.
And I wondered, as I looked and listened,
spellbound, if we ever know how things are
except as they’re played on our own guitars,
in whatever colors we choose and play
to celebrate our motley tunes.

by Matthew Dickerson

Glacier National Park

These mountains are melting away,
oozing outward. Rivers of flowing fire
and ice. Floods of water, green with flour
of glaciers we remember from yesterday,
carving canyons that grow down,
from jagged peaks wearing round
as rain falls, ever drawn to the seas.
While my eyes move up past trees,
scaling slopes, like the morning mist
that lifts and melts when kissed
by rising sun, or like hikers seeking views
where trunks give way to grass and moss
and moss to rock and stone, foretelling loss
or leading toward the cloudless blues.