George Bilgere

In the summer twilight,
a couple of hours after dinner,
we like to take a walk.
The birds have turned in.
The air has finally cooled,
but the crickets and katydids
are getting so worked up
that the lightning bugs catch fire
a few feet above the lawn,
just where we left them
when we were kids.

Now and then
we pass another couple
from one of the green, old,
more or less identical
streets of our neighborhood
as they move through the atmosphere,
mystical and obscure,
their voices softly registering
the news of the summer.

Good evening,
we say to each other.
Lovely night, isn’t it.
What a scorcher, we say
with gratitude and affection
for this shared mystery
of being human
on this dark little planet,
on one of the slender,
gracefully swirling arms
of one of the smaller galaxies.

Mary Oliver

Here are the perfect
fans of the scallops,
quahogs, and weedy mussels
still holding their orange fruit –
and here are the whelks –
whirlwinds,
each the size of a fist,
but always cracked and broken –
clearly they have been travelling
under the sky-blue waves
for a long time.
All my life
I have been restless –
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss –
than wholeness –
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.
But every morning on the wide shore
I pass what is perfect and shining
to look for the whelks, whose edges
have rubbed so long against the world
they have snapped and crumbled –
they have almost vanished,
with the last relinquishing
of their unrepeatable energy,
back into everything else.
When I find one
I hold it in my hand,
I look out over that shanking fire,
I shut my eyes. Not often,
but now and again there’s a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.

Pierluigi Cappello

My eyes turned to salt in looking back,
my thoughts stood still in gestures,
in the silence of what’s been done;
I gathered the crumbs of another lunch
and shook them into the garden’s vitreous air
where the sun’s just cracked and spilled.
Here, even a flutter of blackbird beyond the hedge
stands still, as my words stand still, like ships in bottles.
Your language is mine but mine is not yours.
At home, I could feel myself thinking
while the television glowed in shadow
and a film score spread like smoke in a saloon.
I keep to myself what it means to tend a fire,
the thick scent of soaked wood, a match between my fingers,
the way a day resides in what’s to do, in another light
split by the clouds, a different sunset tied to the tallest trees
flush in the eyes of houses, on the poor man’s livestock;
a touch here, a touch there — the way loneliness comes,
today, a day like this, one day more alone.