Poetry
You Want Your Truths Told of You by E. Travis Lane
You want your truths told of you—
those wavery lines!
Each pencil mark's a fiddlehead
unfolding to an island of wild fern,
of alders, grass, of willow trees,
of sharp dams in the silty sand
where a barefoot girl stands
to watch a cattle barge
rock, like a cradle in the wind.
She can not tell them where she stands,
her nude toes turning blue as clams
in the murky water where it chafes
the green facts into islands—
shoals, reefs, whirlpools, naked trees
scoured by the ice.
Her plain nouns bell their inner folds
like a coiled spring uncoiling
or like eggs
that tremble in her hand and beat
their shells with razor bills and spread
out wings.
Their shadows cast on the millstream float
on spinning water for all time,
never entirely truthful.
The Poem Called Syntax by Fred Wah
We live on the edge of a lake called Echo.
I love this notion that noise makes itself,
so the lake holds all noise in its depths
and when the dog barks it gets it from the lake.
About nine thousand feet above these lakes (all lakes)
there is a geometry of sound, something like Plato's cave of noise.
It is from that construct the dog's bark takes shape,
a resounding of an earlier bark conditioned by the alpine.
History and physics. Acoustic paradigms in a bog of algae.
When I tell all my cousins and friends about this
they'll come to live on the shores of this lake and clean it up.
From the balconies of their summer homes they'll ask a lot of questions.
