Editorial Board
George Wallace / Patti Tana / R B Weber

The dying have their own language.
It knows only present tense
and with its passive voice
makes a case for the subjective.
Its verbs cannot be conjugated -
clauses, diagrammed.

It is hidden
between the long sigh
and the brief puff of lips
in the foreign syntax
or irregular pulse.
Its inflections are
the gossamer of breath
and spikes of pumping muscle.

The dying have their own language.
It lives within the lexicon of silence.
We borrow from its pages
at dawn and dusk
as the world spins
its nights and days
beyond idiom.

It's rhythms
are both faint and heavy.
Now not now.
Now not now.
Nothing is plural.

The dying have their own language.
They have stolen it
word by word
from their gods
who have stolen it
word by word
from the living who
word by wordless word
have learned it
by heart.

Across the grass, wind of the prairies
whispers over the sweet blanket of the West.
Mountains glitter in wild conversation
reared against the deafening
blue of Western sky -

spare air, crystalline space,
I like the idea of living where man's history is short.
Blood has been shed,
but not as much, the Earth not drenched
like Europe.

Rivers run cleaner, the Image looms larger
where there are not so many
made in it. Bright heaven rests on those Tetons,
closer than Michaelangelo's ceiling.

I come across huge accidents of history
shaped like snowballs by the steep
Arctic horizon rolling, sliding down,
down, ever more snow, more size
a white jeopardy suspended like a moon
over the future.

And below, the people happy in their homes
name their happiness
with words
like Sweet Pasture, Sassafras,
Yellowstone and Black Butte.

A privet branch buzzing with bees.
The cat on the table washing his hind foot.
Sparrows chirping under clouds that dissolve
the sky. The tide falling down the bulkheads.
Beyond the channel a lawnmower chattering.
Chimes jingling in a wind that wanders
like a drunken woman looking for a door.
This evening I sit in.

My swim begins with an upright leaving,
the hard land for the forgiveness of sand,
the sand for the resistance of water,
the slowing wade before the planing dive
arms outstretched for the face down slide.

A breaststroke ending in a frog-like kick
that glides me to a finless fish sinking
into the liquid world to rise again
in a dead man's float, a release of breath,
then oar-armed stroke to air-in and thrust-kick

in blind repetition of forever
until I roll to my back, arms branched,
wave-swayed, the water-blurred clouds overhead
as adrift and weightless and unthinking
in the sky as I am in the water.

The universe is not all,
not everything.

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