The Road by Muriel Rukeyser

The Road

 

These are roads to take when you think of your country

and interested bring down the maps again,

phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,

 

reading the papers with morning inquiry.

Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light

chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights

 

indicate future of road, your wish pursuing

past the junction, the fork, the suburban station,

well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.

 

Past your tall central city’s influence,

outside its body: traffic, penumbral crowds,

are centers removed and strong, fighting for good reason.

 

These roads will take you into your own country.

Select the mountains, follow rivers back,

travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where

 

the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace,

iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down

into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel.

 

Pillars and fairway; spa; White Sulphur Springs.

Airport. Gay blank rich faces wishing to add

history to ballrooms, tradition to the first tee.

 

The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded with pine

in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring,

crosscut by snow, wind at the hill’s shoulder.

 

The land is fierce here, steep, braced against snow,

rivers and spring. king coal hotel, Lookout,

and swinging the vicious bend, New River Gorge.

 

Now the photographer unpacks camera and case,

surveying the deep country, follows discovery

viewing on groundglass an inverted image.

 

John Marshall named the rock (steep pines, a drop

he reckoned in 1812, called) Marshall’s Pillar,

but later, Hawk’s Nest. Here is your road, tying

 

you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.

Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river

cutting fast and direct into the town.

 

White Dog by Carl Phillips

White Dog

 

First snow—I release her into it—

I know, released, she won't come back.

This is different from letting what,

 

already, we count as lost go. It is nothing

like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what

losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes:

 

I love her.

Released, she seems for a moment as if

some part of me that, almost,

 

I wouldn't mind

understanding better, is that

not love? She seems a part of me,

 

and then she seems entirely like what she is:

a white dog,

less white suddenly, against the snow,

 

who won't come back. I know that; and, knowing it,

I release her. It's as if I release her

because I know.

Under Limestone by Richie Hofmann

Under Limestone

 

It rained in fluted torrents,

the earth smelled of manure.

It was like desire

entering and possessing you quietly.

We undressed.

The sun through the windows made shapes

on the couch I lay face down on.

Our jeans were soaked

and wrinkled on the radiator, our socks heavy.

Then your eyes were opening a little.

Then you could hear the mopeds starting up again.

When it was dry enough, we found a small bistro

where we had prosecco and fries,

and took pictures of one another in our damp clothes

under trees and buildings

of the hated regime.

The Kurdish Musician by Mimi Khalvati

The Kurdish Musician

 

She is swaddled in pink, sky-blue and veiled

in a gold hejab that with every chime

of her santoor dangles its fringe where trailed

 

on her cheeks hang coins that bob in time

to her nods, throb in a pause, sway to tremor

and echo. Poised on thumbs, twin hammers mime

 

a flurry of wings, two thin furred tongues that stammer

at strings, streaming a swarm of rising notes

not through field and hedgerow, blossom and clover,

 

but through space and stars to the huge black throats

of gully and scarp where all music is stilled,

hived in a dome, as she is, rapt, remote,

 

impervious to the here and now, hands filled

with flightpaths winging home. Through her who knows

what trails might meet or where pollen has spilled

 

strange hybrids take, scrub thrive or desert rose;

groundcover prove alive, on five dark grounds

now train its greening shoots? Or who’d suppose

 

in a London sky, pink, sky-blue, that has wound

itself in the sun’s hejab, in fold on fold

veiled its own dark grounds, she too could be found,

head in the clouds, while ours are fringed with gold?