Poetry of Issue # 60                        Page 4
About Us Subscribe FAQ Guidelines Links Contact Us Click Here for page 1 Click Here for page 2    Click Here for page 3	TWO CHILDREN ARE THREATENED BY A NIGHTINGALE," PAINTING BY MAX ERNST "At nightfall, at the outskirts of a city, two children were threatened by a nightingale." -Poem by the artist l In the foreground, a robed girl stands by a gate, holds a large kitchen knife. In the blue sky a bird wheels, an adult flies a child to safety. Or abducts the child. Wielding her knife, girl turns from a body. On the right: a kind of bam, cleaver framed above the doorknob. (In the distance an equestrian figure tops a triumphal arch and rides beside a dome.) Or is a plane hovering over intricate linkings that draw present to past, glory to simplicity, murder to rescue? Look through the day where sky charges toward you. Between sky and barn, doorknob fits a spool. The spool, blue and brown, is rolling up sky with earth. Bird, serene, would escape the scene. ll I, too, would escape it. Who falls from the sky? Not Icarus. He died, seeking height. He was an idealist. He thought air was benign. It was benign. Now as bewildered children we look up at raptorial clouds, at adults who would seize our lives. High-fech "proficiency disappears pain into coordinates on small screens. lll If I held my infant as we hid in a cellar would my arms melt a shield around it? Should I-like the adult abducting/saving the child-- steal their children? IV I shall revise the painting into a livable domain. The girl holds the kitchen knife but does not use it-- nor does she wish to. She will replace it in a drawer. Her sibling is napping. The adult is flying a child to amuse it. The nightingale    is not threatening, it has been misinterpreted. The flying adult and child    coast on the notes of the bird whose sound lifts them higher.    They will travel as far as they wish and return, exhilarated.       D. H. Melhem _________________________________________	SHOCK AND AWE We gathered on church grounds, in front. Darkness as cars passed, sometimes beeping. St. John's Episcopal Church, medieval edifice, shadow-colored tall aspiring spire. We stood with friends, strangers. No shouting, no singing; just our lighted candles the night before war. Across Albany Avenue, we saw a woman at her upstairs window holding a lighted candle, too; creating one small echo, joining.                               Shirley Powell _____________________________________________ KANSAS STATE FAIR A man passing by with cotton candy said, "He's the reason you're there!" to some Union Gospel Mission volunteers. Next door, in the Republican booth, Senator Dole signed copies of his autobiography. Outside in the late summer sun, vendors placed cups of root beer at the far corners of their counters to divert a sudden infestation of bees. It was one of our last fairs together. We had even stopped holding hands along the midway. I wandered into the karaoke tent and watched teenaged girls in peasant dresses squeal while a fleshy young man sang "Amarillo by Morning." You stood alone in the agriculture building, your eyes tearing before a likeness of Ike and Mamie sculpted in butter.                      Vince Corvaia	WAITING Koans, mantras, yantras, becoming the Buddha as the last leaves come down, my head full of Brooklyn Heights and Hyde Park, Chicago, somewhere back around 1870, waiting for Edison and Ford, World War I, the Muted Twenties, Kokoshka, Schbnberg, Berg, The Swan of Tuonella, waiting to be born.         Hugh Fox ____________________________________ BLUE CONVEYANCE for Ralph Humphrey The day rises blue, all blue and nothng else, filling the space behind and between things, even the space that is not me nor you, the space that appears to be empty, it too is blue. Other colors only become an end point for our sight: black birds, red cars, a yellow house, green hills, brown shoes, gray cement, and distract us from the veil of blue sky between even our fingers, our eyelashes, and our parted lips. Blue things like teapots, dinner plates, bluebirds and mailboxes double back air and light in resonant waves of blue becoming electric. When the death ship comes to collect my soul I wish to ride the pure white sails clear into the cobalt blue that must continue frorever, deep, deep plumb of the depths, the blue behind the blue that is bluer yet, and disappear into that sky full of nothing but itself.                          Guy Reed