harry callahan

I am slowly disappearing
from this house.
The several blue pen notches
in the doorway; four feet,
then five,
thinly whitewashed
to grey.

My sisters find me
in the yard, furiously
photographing our memories
before fall.
They are losing me,
too.
Their sisterhood dilates beyond me,
their foreign tongue
leaves me to
my camera.

So I snap
The thinning woods,
our playhouse slowly shrinking
from the sky,
and the gardens.

They are my mother's madness sowed
into ivy terraces, soured rosebushes,
leaning willows.

I shoot Olivia's round cheeks
half-hidden by vines.
She knows she grew here, too,
she and I and the leaves, all
burst from the same
hysteria.









cb fall '07

unknown

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other:then
laugh,leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph


And death i think is no parenthesis




ee cummings