Barbara Crooker

WE ARE LIVING IN MAGRITTE WEATHER*

above our heads, in "The Battle of the Argonne,"
floats a luminous cloud and a granite stone,
history's opposing forces, dividing night
from day. You can't see us in the painting;
everything human's reduced in scale, the kind
of tiny town an electric train runs through.
But we're there, in the shadows, beside the small
barn, still doing our work, tending our gardens,
while generals mass their armies, and politicians plot
their next moves. Beneath our feet, more stones,
dreaming their flinty dreams. They neither yearn
for more nor envy their neighbor. They roll where
gravity takes them, gather moss and starlight.
They remember glaciers, and they praise the sun.
If you lie on the ground in the moonlight,
they will whisper what you need to save your life.

* * *

STREWN

It'd been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end
of April, an icy nor'easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now
I've landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives
two blocks from the ocean, and I can't believe my luck,
out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand.
Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running
for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one's in the water,
but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack.
The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot,
strewn, are broken pits of pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls
of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog,
fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything
broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse
of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way
or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

* "We Are Living in Magritte Weather" was previously published in Louisiana Literature and "Strewn" first appeared in Christian Century. Both are included in Crooker's latest book, More.

Barbara Crooker is the author of three books of poetry, Radiance: which won the Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, which won the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C&R Press, 2010). She is the recipient of three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2004 WB Yeats Society Prize, and the 2006 Rosebud Ekphrastic Poetry Award.