LYNNE MCMAHON
House
This is our future now, or caretaking present
in what will be the continual present,
white clapboards, green shutters, brick stoop,
and what will let us take it in?
To walk around in it? Undo balustrade, century,
dusk penumbra of the goats
and peacocks whose domain this was,
cypress cypress tuliptree and redbud.
The noisy children behind our noisy children
peeled back.
Noumenal shimmering prophetic dream house,
the dream's a scaffold of such
reality squirrels run up and down the ribs of it
and over the stone sleepers
beneath. Tomorrow they will still be stone.
The bricks' impress
will still say Missouri. Beautiful susurrus
Missouri, caught boat
of all our imaginings. Like likenesses
the real of faith.
CAROL MOLDAW
After A Long Journey
Now you've ridden both elephant and camel;
now you've worn the sackcloth of remorse,
carried the assassin's sap-sticky blade,
the suppliant's lamp of sesame oil, and now
you've planted the warrior's leaf-tipped spear
in front of my mud hut, reclaiming your stake
