STEVEN CROSS

'I have avoided poetry'

I have avoided poetry
      like homeowners who avoid
      dark shadows where roaches
crawl.

I cringe when I think of whispery
     feet scuttling through my brain,
     so I lock
similes in simile motels
where they stick and twitch.

Once,
one caught in a flash of neon
stared at me with antennae waving, then
disappeared into the walls
where 100 wait.

I believe
it is a conspiracy.
The walls silently chewed,
will spew them out.
10,000 black bugs
swarming like metaphors
in a pool of poetry.

copyright 2002 Steven Cross

HANS BEIHL

Window

The blue spruce outside her window
Senses her indecision,
The final approach to a turning point;

The sediment of unmet expectations,
Fallen fences of desire and need,
Rusted entanglements of truth and lies,
The contradictions, the compromises--
All now weighing heavy on her mind;

How much should one endure
Before giving up?

Seeing it there, tall and aloof
Shouldered against
Slick towers of steel and glass,
And the drivers stuck in traffic,
Impatient to fill their lives up,
Desperately wishing
They were somewhere else--

How she envies its pure simplicity!
Quietly drinking the sun,
Serenely greening its needle gown,
Taking in
Only what the wind and rain allow,
Without complaint--
Never beyond the limits of its thrust--
A virtue of trees,
Of every living thing--

Except us--

Stuck at the surface of time and space,
Barely aware of who and why we are,
We find that nothing is ever enough--
Like children hurling rocks skyward
And watching them fall to the ground--

Our restlessness, it seems, is sewn
In the deepest fabric of our thought:
We are designed--condemned
To always push
Beyond our conscious bounds--
To yearn for what is not,
And bear the knowledge
Of a line that can't be crossed;

And then suddenly it becomes clear,
She realizes,
What a part of her knew all along--
Her anger was not directed toward him,
But toward herself for being human,
Being flawed--
Her judgment had been too harsh;

Hope and love--and all their illusions--
Though always short of completion
Are the only way we have
To transcend our imperfections
To make sense of what does not--
To fumble with our Gordian knot.

copyright 2002 HANS BEIHL