Original Errata

Original Errata

He thought He had made himself perfectly clear:
Let there be lust.

But where there's a will, there's a way
to misunderstand, to make tragic
puzzles of shame and fruit
from lovely ambiguities He had always felt.
No wonder He receded
farther than the stars, farther
than the white room of Emily Dickinson.

He'd had such hopes for the garden:
a slow eureka of tongues in understated moonlight,
rosy virtuosities at dawn, even the pink
loneliness at noon the right hand heals.

Thus, He greeted the first tenants
of the flesh, then paused beside the pear.

He wanted to confide a brazen sweetness ---
the short, slippery slope
He had made for them
into love.


Lynn Powell

a few simple things

what to make of a diminished thing?

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.


Robert Frost