Why's everybody actin funny?
Why's everybody look so strange?
Why's everybody look so nasty?
What do I want with all these things?


Mark Rothko, 1957 #20

Progress Report
-- by Leonard Nathan

The trees won't talk; but we've got information
To get the truth. Old omens of the air
Mean Birds are hungry, here as everywhere,
And speak, if forced to, in the present tense.
This took eternity and some expense
To verify. Gods, never really there,
Reduce to heros dying for a share
In prospects disconnected and immense.

Symbols, like homespun drugs, were handy things,
But facts are good as guns. And then there's you --
No priestess circled by sacramental wings
From Cythera, but a girl well suited to the act;
And what's to be done with nature? Nothing new.
We'll dream in symbols, wake up cold in fact.

The Potato Eaters
-- by Leonard Nathan

Sometimes, the naked taste of potato
reminds me of being poor.

The first bites are gratitude,
the rest, contented boredom.

The little kitchen still flickers
like a candle-lit room in a folktale.

Never again was my father so angry,
my mother so still as she set the table,

or I so much at home.

The Visitors of Night
-- by Frank Stanford

This bed I thought was my past
Is really a monk in a garden

Hets dressed in white
Holding a gourd of water
Because I have forgotten Tangle Eye
And Dylan Thomas
The swarthy goose
And the moon in the pennyroyal
With its gut full of shiners
And the skeleton keys to my room
And the snapshots of my land

It seems like dusk
The voice and curls
left in the strange clothes
Roaming the forty acres of my closet

In the bow wood mountains some boats
Stray as dogs go down in the fields
Shadows yet in the land of the living

When the shade clean leaves you
To your rewards
Bad luck and trouble
Come breaking the laws and trysts
Of love and gravity

So have respect for the dead my dear
And watch your heart like a juke box

Death coming low with its cold set of tools
But you can't jimmy love

--- in memory of Christopher Tercy (1973 - Dec. 24, 2006) RIP.