Time is a Game Only Children Play Well


Mary Ellen Mark

Oasis
-- by Dana Goodyear

We found (like the deserting) spacious calm,
drank a pair of Arnold Palmers underneath a palm.
Went for massage and mud, lacquer, love,
overheated minerals, a stimulating rub.
Then -- as if it could be used, as if for art --
I place a grain of doubt in your open-pored heart,
and watched what had been small dilate
and everything else evaporate.

Reiteration
-- by Dana Goodyear

Friday we ate quiche the color of the eclipsed moon.
We had to guess ingredients: Charlie knew
the raspberry by its inimitable seeds.
I, dull-wit, tasted only carrot
and a false idea of cream. Fall is coming on
and I'm up to my old tricks again.
Redundant conversations on Atlantic Ocean rocks,
watching the waves go the grey of sore-eyed
waking dawn. I have never gotten sick of salt--
the flavor worn into my wind rough skin
and I want to turn suddenly old
so I am stiff and sharp and permanent
a gesture: bony, unadorned,
a branch of the hydrangea tree.

Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf:
A Borges Adaption
-- by Brad Leithauser

I wonder, sometimes, rummaging among
My motivations, why I've taken up—
Even as my night came down, and with no hope
Of mastery—the harsh Anglo-Saxon tongue.
Depleted by the years, my memory
Lets slip each uselessly repeated phrase,
And so it is with life itself—my days
Weaving, unweaving their worn history.
It must be (so I tell myself) the soul
Surmises, in its own inscrutable way,
Its immortality and how the whole
Of our existence lies within its sway—
How, far beyond my fears, and this, my writing,
The universe, inexhaustible, is waiting.