Lisa Compo

ALT RECURRING DREAM Cranbrook is entirely different but it is still Cranbrook. The walk to the boathouse has been fenced off for a while, just like in life. Mad geese root in the muck: you used to make people laugh! Some art just doesn’t age well, and then there is entropy itself. Then a tiny door in the sure world makes you a hermit, and everyone hates a hermit. At the end of the war it became another glacier scrape, full of serviceberry and mallow and cold ivies who blister the skin; and under this a thousand mammoths and their ordinary stories, and the pull of one moon, still. The dream begins a scene in a distant movie of how I meet myself, hello, hello. The camera is shaking because someone behind it is laughing.

ALT PETITION Let our hurt offer compassion for the hurt we find in the world. The world is torn and the tears are wider and deeper than any of ours. The world is the whole world — nowhere to go for help. And we are, too. I pray to the world for the world.

ALT THERE WERE SOME SUMMERS There were some summers like this: The blue barn steaming, some cowbirds dozing with their heads on each other’s shoulders, the electric fences humming low in the mid-August heat . . . So calm the slow sweat existing in half-fictive memory: a boy wandering from house, to hayloft, to coop, past a dump where a saddle rots on a sawhorse, through the still forest of a cornfield, to a pasture talking to himself or the bored, baleful Holsteins nodding beneath the round shade of catalpa, the boy walking his trail toward the brook in a deep but mediocre gully, through skunk cabbage and popweed, down sandbanks (a descending quarter-acre Sahara), the boy wandering, thinking nothing, thinking: Sweatbox, sweatbox, the boy on his way toward a minnow whose slight beard tells the subtleties of the current, holding there, in water cold enough to break your ankles.