From the digital fountains to the analog mountains,
let the mirror express the room


Jitka Hanzlova, Dancing, 2002


Sad for an unbrave world
-- by Jack Micheline

I never wanted to be a poet.
I just wanted to be a human being.
Anyone who wants to be a poet is out of his mind.
Either you are one or you're not.
Most poets are not poets.
To be a real artist is a unique and valuable asset to this planet.


Over Coffee
-- by Carlos Martinez

Here is the best of everything – you sitting in a chair
at a table in a café at the back of a bookstore where

the dust motes glide through the air as easily as wrens
and crowds bustle up and down the aisles looking for

the latest self-help books, the most recent diet guide
while you and I sip coffee and tea and eat

freshly-baked scones and the children
suburban mothers tow along behind them

make noise as their rubber-soled shoes drag across
scuffed linoleum. In front of me, the leather-bound anthology of

contemporary poetry you bought for me, my hands
resting on its front cover, which is as warm as flesh.

Your hair is so blond it sheds light, this dim corner
illumined by it and I am so much dazzled, I cast

my eyes down to where the scratched tabletop reflects it.
Wrong is what people say, those who have never sat

at a table in a café at the back of a bookstore where
rain’s driven crowds inside to browse

rows of books, where I am
a tongue-tied middle-aged man

whose gray-haired head
plays moon to yours.


If Death is Kind
-- by Sara Teasdale

Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.

We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.


Somewhere there is a simple life
-- by Anna Akhmatova

translated from Russian by Judith Hemschemeyer

Somewhere there is a simple life and a world,
Transparent, warm and joyful. . .
There at evening a neighbor talks with a girl
Across the fence, and only the bees can hear
This most tender murmuring of all.

But we live ceremoniously and with difficulty
And we observe the rites of our bitter meetings,
When suddenly the reckless wind
Breaks off a sentence just begun --

But not for anything would we exchange this splendid
Granite city of fame and calamity,
The wide rivers of glistening ice,
The sunless, gloomy gardens,
And, barely audible, the Muse's voice.