WHITE BIRD / BARE TREE An egret, or maybe a heron. This bird-app’s terrible: I need a better guide. Look at the bird, how calmly prodigal. It would be a shame to waste the light it throws. In its candid plumage, the stripped boughs are leafed again. //////// WAS IT BASHŌ who regretted that his mind was sometimes a leaky bucket sometimes hummingbird- glitter frantic in its bamboo cage, too empty or too full? //////// Poet Ann Lauinger’s newest book of poems, Dime Saint, Nickel Devil, is forthcoming from Broadstone Books; her two other books are Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2013) and Persuasions of Fall (University of Utah Press, 2004), which won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Poems and translations have appeared in publications including The Cumberland River Review, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, Parnassus, Plant-Human Quarterly, The Southern Poetry Review, and Valley Voices, as well as on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Martha Stewart Living Radio. She is a member of the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee and a professor emerita of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, who lives along the Hudson River in Ossining, NY.
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Photographer Pauline Moffitt Watts lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area where she grew up. She taught Renaissance History at Sarah Lawrence College and has lived in Rome and Florence. Her paintings, drawings, and photographs are often inspired by memories of time spent in Italy, and by the natural world she encounters on walks with her dog. (Website: http://paulinemoffittwatts.com)
Lightwood 