David Heidenstam

Rough Guides

Oxford: Day tripper

Dreaming by the river, you watch
A meadow on the other bank
Littered untidily with geese
Sitting half-hidden in the grass;
Until your human lawlessness
Explodes them into sudden fear,
And, rising into the grey sky,
They pattern some perfection there.

 

View of a cathedral city from its heath land

Beneath a sun a city lies.
Round it cars move. The band of colours
Curves and loops
Beneath the light. Towards a sky
A stone spire rises.
Over all histories hang
All faceless futures.

 

Watermarks

Land low-lying against the sea
Is mean enough when uninhabited
But people make it meaner still
Each grey home reeking compromise
As the slack beach reeks decay.
Elsewhere
Sheer seas
May pound the heads
And man incur that majesty
But here, in sand and silt,
The mind stays small
Inexorably diminished by
This stagnant dwelling between opposites.

David Heidenstam grew up in Norfolk, UK, in the 1950s. He has a ‘sort of retrospective blog’ at davidheidenstam.com/footloose He recently published Tales for my dog: 80 microfictions from humour to horror, and In the Beginning…, a stage play set in the Garden of Eden

Norbert Hirschhorn

Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning

Summer aubade, the sun beginning to crown
from the ocean, spreading a muted ray
of light across the bay. The only sound ‒
a trochaic call of the salt marsh cuckoo.
It is said whatever you’re doing then,
you’ll do it again and again. He calls,
come back, come back, come back to bed.
It was the same yesterday.

Ah, sweetness, how can it be the same again?

The grandfather clock chimes the half hour
slicing the solitude in the air,
reminding her of day’s deeds to be done:
dog to walk, breakfast to make, poems to write,
watch the sun pass overhead.

Norbert Hirschhorn is a public health physician, commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero,” and proud to follow in the tradition of physician-poets. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published six collections, the most recent a bilingual Arabic-English co-translated with Syrian physician-poet Fouad M. Fouad, Once Upon a Time in Aleppo (Hippocrates Press) of the latter’s poems.

Tom Montag

from
The Woman in an Imaginary Painting

In ten minutes
how much the light
can change. Art lies

to us because
it lies outside
of time. So this

moment was not
this, but many
distilled to this.

**

It was a stiffening
of his desire she noticed
as he painted her.

We know this: the blush at
her throat, the blossoming
roses on her breasts, her

slightly turning away from us.
You read what you can from
the signs given. He and

she were in the room
alone together and they
won’t tell us. We have to

imagine what he said
and what she said and later
the awkwardness as she dressed.

Tom Montag’s books of poetry include:  Selected Poems 1982-2013;  and Seventy at Seventy. His poem ‘Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain’ has been permanently incorpor-ated into the design of the Milwaukee Convention Center. He blogs at The Middle-westerner. With David
Graham he recently co-edited Local News: Poetry About Small
Towns.