[Erik Olson]

These are tough acts to follow, no doubt. Yet I fancy this Kyrielle is sufficiently dark anyway.

Birds cease to fly, dark has begun
that waits no more for any sun,
that wrests warm life from fingertip:
Death, with his finger to his lip.

The dark world where the race shall die
leers in at windows, turning spy,
hisses in shivering winds that nip.
Death, with his finger to his lip

mutes all the voice, benumbs the breath,
the wayfarer succumbs to death
upon the tail-end of the trip,
Death, with his finger to his lip.
s

[Michael Cantor]

The River Children Come of Age

Those first years we lived above the river,
Christ, we were insatiable,
screwing our heads off in the kitchen,
on that floor you stenciled yellow,
and gave no thought to children
or the future, or the dead;

and, indeed, the dead
in time came to the river,
and the ghosts of children,
demanding and insatiable,
calling for that yellow
kitchen

within this new six-burner steel kitchen
where everything that lives is dead,
and a silent cat stares through slits of yellow,
and its owners fear the river;
and only the night is insatiable,
and there are no children;

and the friends who laughed like children
as we caressed each other’s spouses in the kitchen,
six of us, one Christmas night, stoned and insatiable,
they are all dead, those others, dead;
the last one buried somewhere upstate near a river
last October, on a day the red and yellow

leaves made crazy patterns like that yellow,
red and green linguini we hungry children
hung to dry above the river
in a whirling, smoke-filled kitchen;
the lights of passing barges glinting off the dead,
flat, cold and bottomless water, insatiable

for everything that one time seemed insatiable;
and eventually the skin will yellow
and the nerves below the knees feel dead,
and we are again children,
huddled in the kitchen,
shades pulled against the river

as a low, late sun tints the kitchen chrome and yellow;
slanting off the river, crying that the dead
are all insatiable; and that there are no children.

[Ann Drysdale]

Too well-crafted to be depressing, Michael. It gives a little too much delight.

[Michael Cantor]

Too well crafted? Oh, I can fix that.

[Ken Brownlow]

Michael, don't un-craft this part


for everything that one time seemed insatiable;
and eventually the skin will yellow
and the nerves below the knees feel dead,
and we are again children,
huddled in the kitchen,
shades pulled against the river

it's depressingly good

[Ken Brownlow]

If bad is sad
then this poem's
a tragedy

[Erik Olson]

Scourge

I am myself my own havoc and pain,
look on all sides for some respite in vain.
d