by Molly Tenenbaum

There Will be Beauty

But it won’t be these green slants of water, grass in the river canyon, won’t
be the waterbirds swooping the grass. Already isn’t the brimming,

already isn’t solid with homeward fish. Even now, and despite,
it is sometimes a dam, even now, sunset and glory of arches.

There will be beauty, but not these birds, their own senses
inside them, cool swallows of air, how it tastes to them,

summer’s thick brack. Beauty, and it might remain
these shapes of brown hill, and the shadows, like rags,

of clouds ranging the slopes. Absent the birds, it won’t be the sips
in the birds, or how, on the twigs of their legs,

it feels, a breaking line of water. Nor their ride down the air
to this valley’s flats and draws, their skid and white wake,

their rise, settle, rise, no rest, no rest
of return. There will be beauty of movement, already is,

of billow, cling, float,
beauty of speck, of longing, already,

beauty of rocks. Of a washed
and washed stick. Of suspense, of the sun

expanding, of soon, a white dwarf. Beauty of remnant, of cooling. We
want to say something of our lives under these scrolling clouds, over

the yellows, in the brown ditches—Did we live, were we ever
inside ourselves, sipping? Were we beauty, drawing spark from splinter,

orange from iron, each of us thatching the roofs of our burning decisions?
Never knew how, still learning how, but we loved beauty, tried to become it

were grateful to all of it, and if it was going, if it was already—
Did we miss it? No, I  just saw it. Did you dream it? Swear, I saw it—

we still time our time by it, still looking up to it, wishing the heat
would hurry through beauty of thirst, beauty

where birds with no field must keep flying. Beauty of gases,
the sun swirling closer, wish we could see it, could have the eyes

of ourselves without ourselves, the earth encompassed, beauty
of eon, of mineral, of creatures millennia gone.

There Can’t Even Be a Cat in the room

Mary Ruefle, on the solitude needed for writing poems

A cat is always in the room.
A loaf, a rotary phone, a dictionary,
dim on the stand in the corner.
The room with a coiled breathing center,
tiny sneeze like salt over the shoulder.  

Always entering the room, the weather report
of the cat, bushel of mist, brush of pine, always
the refrain, where have you been. A walking cat
blurs the bottom edge of every scene. 

Audible in the room, a delicate thirst tapping the surface.
In the air layer nearest the floor, stink of little dried meats.
Always a hunch, on the rug by the couch,
what’s under there, something far back, something deep down— 

On the windowsill, alert for movement,
watching opposite apartments, watching the park, river,
alert for movement, chasing it into the corner, patting it,
eating the spider.

Stamped on the dark, a cat’s silhouette.
A cat’s face over the hole where sleep’s breath comes out,
a cat asleep on the neck of sleep, sleep
with cat’s weight on its chest, sleep turning over
as the weight lifts.

And stuck in the chair-arm like a mending pin,
white crescent of a claw’s discarded sheath.
A cat is always in the room, inhabiting the shapes.
Bread, book, lamp. A paw, having stepped
in the paintwater jar, always smearing the periphery.

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Molly Tenenbaum’s books include Mytheria (Two Sylvias Press 2017), The Cupboard Artist, Now, By a Thread, and, with artist Ellen Zeigler, Exercises to Free the Tongue. Molly’s banjo recordings are Instead of a Pony  and Goose & Gander. She teaches at North Seattle College and Dusty Strings Music School.