Image Marriages

Happy the tree that scarcely feels a thing! And happier still the nothing-feeling stone! No pain exceeds the pain that living brings; and grief attends the conscious life alone. To be, yet not to know. No path ahead. The fear of having been, and future fright . . . The dread of knowing soon we will be dead but only after suffering through the night what we can’t grasp, nor hardly can we guess; the flesh that tempts us like a grape or plum, the tomb that waits for us with wreathes; and yes, not knowing where we’re heading, even less knowing whence we come. Robert Schechter from String Poet translated from the Spanish of Rubén Darío LO FATAL Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo, y más la piedra dura porque ésa ya no siente, pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente. Ser, y no saber nada, y ser sin rumbo cierto, y el temor de haber sido y un futuro terror... ¡Y el espanto seguro de estar mañana muerto,...

Each day at ten o’clock he leaves his house, drives seven miles, then turns to go into the county nursing home to see his spouse who’s seated at a table with a view — green hillsides and a garden filled with flowers. “She slept well,” the aide says, a hopeful thing, as night-time usually gives birth to hours of restless labyrinthine wanderings. He sits beside her chair and reaches out to gently stroke her fragile vein-lined hand, sensing that one day soon he’ll be without this one he loves and strives to understand, then counts the wrinkles on her aged face, each one to him an ornament of grace. Sharon Fish Mooney from String Poet Undulating Wood, Regina Valluzzi

Lift the stone and you will find me, cleave the wood and I am there; in the stillness of the water, in the earth and in the air. In the light of winter evening when the trees stretch gaunt and bare, in the dark when moon is hidden, I am there, oh I am there. In the heartbeat, in the bloodstream, in the muscle, fibre, cell, I am pulsing, I am quickening... I am in decay as well; In the rankness of the garden unattended, run to seed, I am dwelling, glorifying every creature, every weed. In the cancer, in the warhead, in the evil, pain, despair, in the dying, and destruction, you will find me, I am there. Richard Skinner Boots,  Sarah E Coulson

my father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give, singing each morning out of each night my father moved through depths of height this motionless forgetful where turned at his glance to shining here; that if (so timid air is firm) under his eyes would stir and squirm newly as from unburied which floats the first who, his april touch drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates woke dreamers to their ghostly roots and should some why completely weep my father’s fingers brought her sleep: vainly no smallest voice might cry for he could feel the mountains grow. Lifting the valleys of the sea my father moved through griefs of joy; praising a forehead called the moon singing desire into begin joy was his song and joy so pure a heart of star by him could steer and pure so now and now so yes the wrists of twilight would rejoice keen as midsummer’s keen beyond conceiving mind of sun will stand, so strictly (over utmost him so hugely...