VANYA

There's always a pistol, always a play
always some second-rate characters:

a theatre sifting dust, tea cooling
in gnarled hands, in gnarled hands

in the country, in the endless afternoon.
Cards click down their fatal caricatures

only to rise and fall and shuffle back
all the same. Where is the orchard?

Where the city? Oh my lost one you
exhaust me I could be anything why

won't you kiss me? We cut down all
the trees again. We covered the streets

with song. There is no room for what
I should say to you. There is only time

observing you as if from great darkness
as you wait and wait and wait and repeat.

Someone's leaving. You never catch him.
Someone's taking off. There's nothing here

to take away.

--Joseph Campana

Copyright © 2013 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

ELEGY FOR MY MOTHER

But I still have my river-mother
and all of her glittering fish,

my sycamore-mother who never is cold,

my star-white mother whose eyes
need no closing,

whose wind-stripped hands need not crochet,

whose dove-plain dress does not rip
on the drag of the gutter's wind,

whose kicked-off galoshes never lined up
with all the black pumps of the mothers
of Morningside Avenue,

my mother whose fiddle has two
curved hurts for its f-holes,

magnolia-mother shedding her petals of snow,
tearless November mother refusing soup,

leaving her wig on the steps
for the grackles to nest in,

my broad-boned mother, my corduroy
notre dame of the worn knees,

mother of sidestroke stillness
and loose knots,

my mother who blurs from the effort
of being remembered.

--Frannie Lindsay

Copyright © 2013 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Here on these few streets
people are known for their faults,
a liar, a skinflint, a woman
who sings too loud in the choir,
but they are known.
This is what everyone in big cities
wants to get back to
or that's what they say
though they don't come back.
The pie is really toothsome at the diner,
there's that.
And just the right number
of flies for the occasional waving away.
If you are passing by
you might think you are being waved to,
now who was that,
I know I know him.
Oh yes, he made his boy
carry buckets of water from the house,
the wire handles biting into his hands,
and pour them into the creek
for laughing in church.
The creek did not swell,
not even slightly.

--Michael Chitwood

Copyright © 2013 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.