Selections for 2007

Here are this year's selections for the Poetry in Motion® program. They appear inside and outside TriMet buses and MAX trains.

Havens

The cold descends from the north
and all the spaces between us fill up
with silence, as in the spaces between voices
in a cantata that comes on the radio
at dawn, a calming segue between
morning's first cycle of news and the next.

from “Havens” by David Axelrod
The Cartographer's Melancholy
p. 50 Eastern Washington University Press, 2005

Thirst

Your eyes must stay open
to the color of flowers.
Wherever their bright flash
catches your gaze, water flows.

You see rain
days after it stopped raining.
In your breath, you taste
the river running underground.

“Thirst” by Paulann Peterson
from A Bride of Narrow Escape
p. 73 Cloudbank Books, 2006

And Like Music, the Mouth

That something so beautiful brings back
the simplest things: taxis, warm rain, broken glass,
makes him think that behind our every action
and even our smallest thoughts,
there is music.

from “And Like Music, the Mouth” by Matt Yurdana
Public Gestures
p. 9 University of Tampa Press, 2005

Used Book Store

Lovers hold hands in never-opened novels.
The page with a recipe of cucumber soup is missing.
A dead man writes of his happy childhood on a farm,
Of riding in a balloon over Lake Erie.

from “Used Book Store” by Charles Simic
My Noiseless Entourage
p. 21 Harcourt, 2005

On Earth

between here and here
between hidden points in the soul
between hidden points in the soul born from nothing
between saying and said
beyond what one has oneself done

from "On Earth" by Carolyn Forche
Blue Hour
p. 34 HarperCollins, 2003

Dogwood

yellow sun shining
skinny brown
lifeless dogwood tree
never grew an inch
ashes of my dog
underneath

“Dogwood” by Jenna Kendall
Laugh Like I Do: 2005-2006 Writers in the Schools Anthology
Literary Arts, 2007