Ray Johnson
Karl Benjamin
Ann Woo
Going North in Winter
The sound of pines in the wind.
And to think you’re the only person on earth
isn’t hard, at the end
of the long journey nowhere.
Yet in the end I have come to
love this room and be the one
looking out on snowfields, blank
scores of wire fence in the deepening
snow, the wind through them a passage
of remembered music, bare
unbeckoning branches
with never a ghost
of a deciduous rustling,
the stilled river
with the sheet over its face-
going north in winter.
And it’s all right
to glance out the window:
the fear will grow less
or more intense, but
it will always be there. Unseen
it’s a palpable force,
isn’t it. Like electricity
which can be employed,
as has been pointed out,
to kill you in a chair
or light your room.
But I’m through with that now.
I reach over and switch on the dark.
It’s all right to pronounce a few words
when you’re by yourself, and feel a little joy.
Franz Wright
Anne Truitt
Chris Steele-Perkins
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Mark Strand
