Three Poems

“Painted Desert” by Leah Dockrill

A History of Light

What is there that’s surprising that has not
surprised before? Whether
Apollo pulls the sun or it pulls earth, the light
attends us like a prosecutor: are you going to
cross the Rubicon? Fire on Amritsar, flee
your home in that boat? 

Always making the world new along pretty much
the same lines, we're punctured  from such great
distance by the lightest of wavelengths, convinced
we’re built of solid stuff. Then a craft arrives
through storms, full of strangers, electrons build and
rebuild untouchable ladders,

and we feel, truthfully, that Perseus and Mars,
Juno, dimmed, have nothing on us. 

Love Note on a Paul Klee Postcard

To be a duck with an ember sun inches above your head, or the landscape surrounding them as distressed and singed as the printer paper I soaked in tea  for a school diorama on ancient Greece.  Real parchment requires a mammal's death in service of whomever, a welter of centuries ago, like me in cell but smaller in body, with hand-mashed indigo ink spilled wholly different senses of earth and heaven. To live a life that means something, you know? You don't, unless we watch the same Ginko tree drop all its leaves at once, together, sitting in the grass beneath moonlight needlessly decorated with stars whose given names are needless as yours and mine. I couldn’t say this in an email. What are we if you and I don’t touch? More than a picture or less than a roll of dice betting how close we can lean to the sun without burning our feathers or homes. I could be a sheer idea and you could wrap your waist in me while Missouri heats to floodplain. If you'd rather flip this over and decorate your fridge with Paul’s ruby-lit lamppost, I get it. We'll be two trees shedding our coats of leaves on the same night each year, dying or dormant, apart in a temperate zone. 

Stepping Clean Past Mystery

—After Geode, a sculpture by Michael Ayrton

Miniature man of bronze, of thumbnail-sized
head  crouched before a sheet of tinted glass,  can
you see, behind the pane, the geode

you'll never touch? Left fist a perch for your chin, 
right leg flung back like you’re ready to bolt—
did you know that shell of quartz

and that meaty pyrite interior formed  inside
a bubble of volcanic gas long before either
of us squatted to look? I learned that

just now, standing beside you with my phone. In all
your unblinking years, what have you learned from
the antediluvian whispers of rock?

Was the geode there when Charlemagne  crossed
the Elbe, did it hear Ezekiel
raving with sand in his mouth? I can step

clean past the translucent mystery, revere the
geode's purple-veined brightness, its perfect
cleft the work of an artist with designs on me.

I can see everything you can't—landscapes, war
propaganda, a Japanese crucifix—my heels
the only sound on the museum floor. I watch you

from the geode's side of the wall, and I can barely make
out the map of your face: a small rise of lips, moat of
iris maybe. You might as well be anybody.

About the Author

Alex Mouw's poetry, nonfiction, and scholarship appear or are forthcoming in West Branch, RHINO, Ruminate, Twentieth Century Literature, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis.

About the Artist

Leah Dockrill holds degrees in education, library science, and law. In addition she has built a thirty-year art practice which includes painting and collage. Her work has been exhibited in both Canada and the U.S. and she has earned many awards. In recent years images of Leah’s art have been published in over two dozen art and literature journals and reviews. Some of these are Split Rock Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Mud Season Review,Cosumnes River Journal, Glassworks Magazine, Sunspot Lit, High Shelf Press, Chaleur Magazine, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, The Esthetic Apostle, and ArtAscent: Art & Literature Journal (Gold Artist Award, August 2018, Bronze Artist Award, April 2019 and Distinguished Artist Award, January 2020.) Leah is represented by Tag Art Gallery, St. Catharines , Ontario and nowords Gallery, Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. She is an elected member of the Society of Canadian Artists and the Colour and Form Society (Canada). She and her husband and two Siberian cats live in Toronto, Canada. More of Leah’s work can be viewed at www.leahdockrill.net