October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
In the river, crosscurrents. Under a stand of trees at the bank, ice shelves are covered with twigs and grass. From the bridgerail we ask about the age of the river in the sun, lovely for its alluvial deposit of memory in us, song sung blue. A poor creation is my dreaming if I do not learn from the dazzling dress of nature and the sudden wind at streambanks. An inner conversation like rain coming down in us is us, from age sixteen and forward. And these things are crosscurrents, memories of our married love and sirens raspberry, cranberry, vivid.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Cool door, never changing your view that beauty is density. Your slanted window glitters more when dry leaves blow down around you, admitting more light into your chamber. Bless the dance that never breaks down, the detonation of finishing for awhile with the ongoing. Bless the tree of words that also loses something in winter and therefore admits more light. The chords break off on the carillon, but their delicate structures, their delicate music makes a marathon of our good days, an unbroken lustre. I etch a mountain shadow. It is my tribute, and I do studies of the rock.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Be steady in the fire-river of scholarship and the dead will hear. Life and death, photographic negative, photographic positive. Some daughters live; some were alive and are now memories, but the configuration of them touches an eternity. In the wild, we all love in unison. The snowstorm like shredded coconut has hit the city. In this moment, we hear a word from Sibyl. She has a formula in mind to stop the clock. She and Heather share these rich understandings. I shall write them down in this English of mine and find a great home in my unnamed need.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
In ordinary language there is fracturing we can hear, serious dischord in the lyre, like hammering that makes gold foil. It will be a lasting name in the moon, in the paint-by-enamel autumn, that shall tarnish the memory. Close your eyes, move about in the real, and pass your days blessed and wrapped up with chimes. The clock of your life has brass all over it even as your sundial stands in the cold wind. You could denote the breakdown of good days and be the answerer standing on the edge of your blood, merely writing of trees.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Silence requires effort, an effort to give mystical language a musical intelligence. We’ll go bathe in the Hungarian woods where there are unisons in the branches. We are one thing the cosmos is doing in the heat and solidity of this moment. All sentences end, and you can’t stop the clock, not even for Heather. Shall I write this down, that I have thought of trying to hammer words into posterity, enchantments of rhythm and your nearness, a root sound, a detonation in song, a penny falling from the clouds? How black and Protestant is my autumn–moving, intrinsically Cherokee.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
The silence of the snow is as mystical as our daughter, who lives for the woods and her words and sentences. Her voice is a lyre. She lives in each sentence and has found the rhythm of rivers, perhaps even the sound of butterflies, those very children of heaven that crown a meadow’s greenery. Sound off now, every corner of nature, for her–Cassie. Who has painted. The entire forest. With touches and smiles. Create glittering music every morning to soothe the troubles that bury us in treble-tarnish. Sit with me at the edge where heat is concealed, Cassandra.
