Lastness                                                                          —David Axelrod


The first word lived inside 
of everything then, a buoyant 
music we roused to touch 
the porous surfaces of  

and it's rising through us again, 
gathering flecks of clay
from the bottoms of wells, 
gravity drenching us in a twilit room. 

Acrobatic vowels warble 
across a child's tongue, answering 
another child, lost to us now, 
who tasted honey from that hive. 

Our faces bestirred 
by the old quarrels in Sheol,
we don't want to forget last things—
the station crowded everyday 

with departures. Lifetimes 
a thousand deep trail us, 
little bits of ourselves 
sloughed in rooms, farm fields, 

the villages left behind, 
and snowbound forests 
under whose canopies we sheltered
with migrants, runaways, unmoored men.

And here we are, besotted again 
at this blue hour, your hair falling red 
all around us, the held and beheld 
in this storm of last things.


Song of 45º N, 118º W


Spring’s early this year
as last, the foothills already 
grown white with the ardor 
of syringa and wild plum, 
swaths of blue lupine 
and yellow balsamroot, 
the Ice Age prairies
glimmering lakes again
full of camas, mule deer
turning pale as bunchgrass, 
gray as wings that carried
sandhill cranes north—

our small world’s here
in the middle, ready
as always, yearning 
and yielding to touch.

David Axelrod

David Axelrod’s second collection of nonfiction, The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence was published by Oregon State University Press in the spring of 2019. Axelrod wrote the introduction, “My Interests Are People,” for About People: Photographs by Gert Berliner, which appeared last year from Arts End Books. His eighth collection of poems, The Open Hand, was published by Lost Horse Press. Axelrod directs the low residency MFA and Wilderness, Ecology, and Community program at Eastern Oregon University. In addition, he edits basalt: a journal of fine & literary arts, and serves on the editorial board of Lynx House Press.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2019