Poetry's as resistant to definition as a cloud might be to wearing a cape of concrete. So it might be useful to think of the poem as a kind of passport, taking you to places you would not be able to visit otherwise. Poet as guide, poem as means of transport, the best words in the best order, which could account for why these odd little cracked diamonds, paper scraps, are the very things that, when nothing else will do, are, in fact the only things that will do.

The challenge is to be articulate about what can't be said and to pick the very best words, the fewest words, the right words. Who do we write to? Ourselves, the silence, you. That's the main reason I'm so grateful for my job as a writing teacher at UNH. For the past 26 years, my students and I have remained united in building invisible bridges over imaginary rivers, working together in the joy of finding the best words, the alchemy of order and music, exploring the world with deep curiosity and full feeling.

Do you worry that you will not understand what is written here? I have never stopped worrying. It's a fear instilled as early as grammar school, maybe even in the classroom Chris Forhan '87G conjures in "Third Grade." With hands folded and "hearts bleached clean by contrition" how do we shift from literal knowing, from fact-based, logical thinking into a kind of river-drift dreaming? It's a matter of accepting that you might not understand, trusting imagination, reading until the river's soaked so far into you there's no need to say what it means and you're left feeling rinsed, enriched, reoriented to a world that's a good deal more interesting than it was before you started.

These wonderfully varied poems will take you "away from/the self-denying self," into a stone's interior to witness its secret marvels. They'll allow you to keep company with a child learning the wild joy of playing drums with his father until his father quits for "a real job." Other poems will carry you into an elegant adagio for what's missing, give you an elegiac testament to the true cost of war. You'll receive a love poem in Paris, a trip to Colombia where a night watchman's life is rich with music, moon, and good coffee while the wealthy people he guards live sterile lives behind protective walls, and finally, an exuberant praise song for the mistakes we all make. Who were these poems meant to reach? Tossed from the side of the river where the writer lives, traveling the water, safely, a very great distance... they were meant to reach you.

Vistas of Vision

A little nothing notices how easily
we slip away from what mothers us:
morning glories, the soft-spun cocoons
we dream in and the eerie cry of the hawk.

To be wise is to be borne away from
the self-denying-self, it is to listen
to children whose voices swirl like spin art
inside us: all color without the hue
and nuance of sorrow.

The sky breathes its message—
do not weep for what is lost in you,
but gather up the ashes to place
inside the hidden sanctuary of the soul.

Now is the time to move into the calligraphy
and choreography of blossom which brings
vistas of vision and visitations with mystery.

Elizabeth Kirschner '79G, who teaches at Boston College, has published Twenty Colors, Postal Routes and Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees. She has collaborated on several occasions with composers who have set her lyrics to music, and has she has set her own poetry to Robert Schumann's "Dichterliebe," which will premiere nationally and internationally this season. "Vistas of Vision" is part of a manuscript entitled, Surrender to Light.

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;

Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

Charles Simic, UNH professor of English, was born in Yugoslavia and moved to the United States in 1953. His first full-length collection, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. Since then he has published more than 60 books of poetry and essays, including The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000 and a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. "Stone" is from his book Dismantling the Silence (1971).

Lucky

I'm late, need to pay, but he's ahead of me,
ordering ice cream for his dog. No chocolate.
The waitress suggests vanilla with just a tiny bit of fudge.
No chocolate, he says again. The exchange goes on like this
for a long time. Finally they settle on strawberry.

Now he wants a coffee, one sugar, no milk so he'll have
something to drink while the dog's eating. The bill
comes to three dollars. He empties a pocket,
gliding quarter after quarter across the counter,
savoring the slow slide of each cool coin.

By now, I'm so late there's no chance I'll get to where
I thought I was supposed to be so I give up and ask
What kind of dog? He takes his time in turning
to answer, Pit bull. A leashless pause.
And part Borzoi. A rescue. Her first trip downtown.

I wanted to get her something special so she'd know
it's safe among strangers. He's in his sixties
and handsome in the way that distant mountains
seem both beautiful and private. Now, late
is starting to feel like right on time. Grateful, I stop

outside to watch him drink, with such pleasure,
hot coffee in ninety degree weather. Gently,
he leans over to steady the paper cup of ice cream
for his dog, Lucky. Her tail's tucked between her legs
and I see in the way she looks up

that in her life before this there was never
the smallest pleasure without punishment.
She's afraid anyone, even the man holding the cup,
might start kicking her again. Except it all
tastes so rich and sweet and cool that she can't help

but give herself to the goodness of it with the almost
unbearable joy the abandoned feel when someone
kind finally turns to them, sees them,
really sees them and says, You. It's you
I have been waiting for all this time.

Mekeel McBride, UNH professor of English, has published five books, most recently The Deepest Part of the River. The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, she has been a Radcliffe Institute fellow and a MacDowell Colony resident, and has taught at Wheaton, Harvard and Princeton. "Lucky" is from her new book, Dog Star Delicatessen: New and Selected Poems, due out in 2006.

Portal

          In our hallucination, the children are instructed
in the ways of finding shelter
          when the rain of our bombs comes down
on their small villages and schools. The children
          can identify our planes
and what our planes can do to them. They
          sleep the sleep of weary warriors,
beaten down and left for nothing in their lonely deaths
          that come so slowly you would wish your own heart empty of blood.
I watched people gather in the streets
          to stop the war that is the war against ourselves, and against the children
who practice finding our planes before they're touched up
          into dust nobody sees, but that makes a sound like the vanquished.

Bruce Weigl '75 is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently The Unraveling Strangeness. He has translated three books of poetry from Vietnamese and Romanian and has edited or co-edited three collections of criticism, most recently Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry. Weigl's poetry has been translated into nine languages, and his awards include the Pushcart Prize (twice), the Academy of American Poets, Breadloaf and Yaddo Foundation fellowships, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. In 2003, he chaired the judging panel for the National Book Award in Poetry. "Portal" is from his book, Declension in the Village of Chung Loung (2005).

Rudiments

Thursdays... The sticks wild birds fluttering
over skins they beat life back into,
my father squeezing off buzz rolls rising
into a carol of Zildjians... I remember
my first contact, how the snare snapped off concrete.
Snug in the belly of our home, I learned
the flams and paradiddles, and even
with my reckless ratamacues, his discipline
was quiet and repetitive, the same
as it was that fall when he went cold turkey,
quit the club gigs and went back to night school
to secure his "real" job— the Thursdays
coming and going on into winter, basement
growing cold and damp, the whole house hushed.

James Rioux '92 earned an M.F.A. from Georgia State University, where he received the Gerard Manley Hopkins Award for poetry. His poems and reviews have appeared in many publications. Rioux teaches writing at UNH and lives in Exeter, N.H., with his wife, Amanda. "Rudiments" is from Fistfuls of the Invisible, due out this fall from Penhallow Press.

Third Grade

Our hands are folded before us on our desks.
Our hearts are bleached clean by contrition.
Sister Marie is standing in back of us. Her hair is hidden.
Our lunch pails are in the cloakroom. Our coats on hooks.
The alphabet is perfect. It smirks above the blackboard.
God is perfect. Our pictures of Him are tacked to the wall.
Bill is in his body, pale and gangly. Al is in his freckled body.
Delores is in her red-haired body. Phil, Kelly, Nate,
Erin in her thin, tall body. Jim, Sister Marie. My body
is in a white shirt, a little ink-blot on the pocket.
And outside: rain, iron, and silence.

Chris Forhan '87G is the author of Forgive Us Our Happiness and The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, which have won several awards. He has won a Pushcart Prize and has been a Yaddo Foundation resident and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference fellow. Forhan teaches at Auburn University and at Warren Wilson College; he and his wife, Elizabeth Green, live in Alabama. "Third Grade" first appeared in the magazine Prairie Schooner in Spring 2005.

Missing

like paper cut-outs the part cut out
the part left behind to hold its shape

like shadows on the floor the seemingly distinct
forms of things not there

like the deceptive edge of sight where fog
conspires to be wall like the other side

where things again emerge smeared smudged
with some fine ash like the dust of moths

on your hands however much you meant
to leave no trace your fingerprints

all over everything fugitive with the powder
wings are poorer without

Alice B. Fogel '85G, author of Elemental and I Love this Dark World, has received a National Education Association fellowship and a New England Poet's Society prize, among other awards. She has taught poetry at UNH and elsewhere and has a custom clothing business called Lyric Couture. She and her husband, Mark Edson '86G, and their three children live off the grid in Acworth, N.H. "Missing" first appeared in Frisk Magazine.

Under the Colombian Moon

Lysa James '90G is a member of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts' Artists in Education Program and has taught writing at UNH and elsewhere. She has published in national literary journals and is included in an anthology of New Hampshire poetry, Under the Legislature of the Stars. Her manuscript, "In All the Benevolent Directions," is presently a finalist in the National Poetry Series Open Competition of 2005. "Under the Colombian Moon" first appeared in the journal Red Brick Review.

I Read Your Poem About Falling In Love

with the swimming Parisian girl
then realized you meant me

and that her long wet arms
cutting the glass river

waves of the Seine were my
glistening arms and her powerful

shoulders emerging at the stone steps
were my sea-goddess shoulders

and you were clever to mention
her raven hair and olive skin

which concealed beautifully
how you once traced a crescent moon

at the pale bloodless hollow
of my throat with a rose. And

in the St. Eve hotel where you
and she whispered and teased

and watched the white party boats drift
like unopened love notes

under the stone bridges blurred
by spitting snow, it was tears

wasn't it? You meant tears
didn't you? And you knew

I'd recognize the lost
brown dog at the end

half drowned and dragging
his tattered red leash

over the moss-slick cobblestones—
knew that it would touch me

like seaweed and silt; like missing
sailors shouting from a distance halved

by twisted sextants, silver grief.

Elizabeth Edwards '93G, author of The Chronic Liar Buys a Canary, has won several awards, most recently a National Endowment for the Arts/Maine Arts Commission poetry fellowship. She teaches poetry at Emerson College and is the editorial director at Calypso Communications in Portsmouth, N.H. She lives in Kittery, Maine.

Rethinking Regret

Let's thank our mistakes, let's bless them
for their humanity, their terribly weak chins.
We should offer them our gratitude and admiration
for giving us our clefts and scarring us with
embarrassment, the hot flash of confession.
Thank you, transgressions! for making us so right
in our imperfections. Less flawed, we might have
turned away, feeling too fit, our desires looking
for better directions. Without them, we might have
passed the place where one of us stood, watching
someone else walk away, and followed them,
while our perfect mistake walked straight towards us,
walked right into our cluttered, ordered lives
that could have been closed but were not,
that could have been asleep, but instead
stayed up, all night, forgetting the pill,
the good book, the necessary eight hours,
and lay there—in the middle of the bed—
keeping the heart awake—open and stunned,
stunning. How unhappy perfection must be
over there on the shelf without a crack, without
this critical break—this falling—this sudden, thrilling draft.

Elaine Sexton '76 was working full time in magazine publishing when she enrolled in graduate school at Sarah Lawrence and earned a M.F.A. in poetry in 2000. Her first book, Sleuth, was published in 2003. She lives in Manhattan. "Rethinking Regret" is from Sleuth, copyright © 2003 by Elaine Sexton. Reprinted with permission of New Issues Press, Western Michigan University.

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