Prologue

Each new year presents the possibility of new ideas and new beginnings. While the term prologue is defined as an introduction to a work, we interpret prologue as part of the cycle of life: birth, life, death, reintroduction. The poems selected this month return us to a blank slate where we can fill the page with fresh insight and experience.

Untitled 

by Sudie Nostrand

Put this body on
and visit earth

like a child
in the corner of a garden

let into a tremendous place
of bewildering beauty.

Here, they tell her,
whatever she imagines

will come to be.
They give her awesome power

to co-create the universe
if she can only remember.

Restored to Blue 

by Eleanor Wilner

Inadvertence, when the mind, distracted by sun
playing in the leaves, slips, destroys the work.
As if the work were meant to stay, the days
not on a string that each night cuts, and only
memory, which fades, and other bits of matter
carrying order in their cells (give or take a broken
chain or two, a mutant moment in a copy-cat
world)—only these remain. While what we are,
the lived-in days, the irreplaceables we love,
these-like the famous cloud, though painted
by a master’s hand (long gone)—are wiped away
by solvent time, an endless surf, a changing shore.

So much for restoration’s care, the delicate brush,
restraint in the retouching, all the shoring up,
the dutifully kept files that one day soon will fill
recycle bins–such things are everyday and are
not news. So look away, or look: today the sky
is cloudless as a canvas used exclusively for blue,
and filling in the blanks seems nothing more
than sport, a game to leave behind, a way to keep
the mind from knowing that the blanks,
though time and time filled in, return: a cloudless sky
we’re meant to read as happiness, and so we do. 

Slowly the Truth Dawns 

by Olav H. Hauge
Translated by Robert Hedin 

To rise, and know
your heart sinks
dark and heavy,
hardening like stone…

Slowly the sea lifts its waves,
slowly the trees turn red in the gorge,
slowly the fires begin to lap in hell,
slowly the truth dawns…

Still and living nature 

 by Paola Loreto

And then there’s this water with a color
I can’t quite describe that flows
under layers of ice, framed, stained
in fading yellow, fragrant larch needles
finally fallen. It would be, in theory
death, but instead it is life that
runs, keeps going, ripples through
the laughter in your voice
you feel flowing, readily
to your throat, and savor. It is
the cold you thought
you feared, but love.