Afterword

I will wait just inside the door to the underworld for you. That gray-black stone tile thick with dust, just before the sudden descent (rollercoaster angle) is where I will crouch and breathe on my hands for warmth. I will wait for you, so that we will go down together, to introduce each other as a good man and a good woman among the milling souls of the recently dead. I think they will greet us as people always do when thrust together into a situation strange, worrisome, but calm enough and free enough from signs of peril that panic does not seem a natural response. I think they will welcome us, and ask us what we think, and if we have any news from the world above. And they will already know the answer before it leaves our lips: No, sorry, it doesn't look like the government's going to send relief anytime soon. The living world, like a howling blizzard, will cease to seem like a thing to return to, and we'll all begin exploring the uncharted lanes of what comes next. We will move down the subterranean mountain (whose mountain? I've heard this before) carrying the coals of a future hearth to where existence opens, the plains of the waiting flowers.

But I digress...

Any previous statements I may have made about not turning this into another chock-full-of-poetry journal should be summarily trashed. I know I won't be able to make it to Chicory tomorrow, but I do have a poem to share:



Cryptozoology by Mark Sniadecki


You were such a delicate
creature - deer come down
to the tranquil pondside
glade

- carried poetry
in gold strands of spider-
web laced in your
womanly antlers.

You left behind
evidence like bedded down
tufts of grass
and odd shed skins -

Then one day
I accidentally dressed
in huntsman's gear
- crashed aloud,
clumsy in the cattails -

and now I hold only
this tintype
of slender legs dis-
appearing between
trees I cannot uproot.

The Seal

I have the original graphic (slightly larger/sharper) if anyone wants a copy.

The Ballad of Allison Loan

She was some kind of regent
like an orphanage queen;
her blessings had been overcast.
They took her away
in a wagon ash-gray
and a janitor emptied her past.

For seventeen years
she amassed birthday candles
until on a midsummer's night:
a god with a hammer
and one eye for cold steel
layed her out with a peregrine light.

I met her in Texas
in bars rimmed with salt;
I nursed back her last dying coal.
There were tinfoil stars
in the heavenly vault
but none of them paid at the pole.

Where Thursday's wind took her
I know second-hand;
where the alley dogs hunch in the rain.
Some stone carver paying
his granddaughter's rent
will chip out her final refrain.