Issue One

what all our lives we’ve prepared for -

the changing of seasons,

when the winter birds gather seeds

and hoard fires left by hunters; their three-pronged prints

strewn through a blind of snow.

Who else believes there is a treasure

under each brittle leaf that marks anew

possibility’s grave? I dreamed once

of a staircase still wet

from washing, its stones ringing

with myth. Perhaps a girl had planted dianthus

between the cracks, but by the time they bloomed

she already stood at the ship’s deck,

her hand flitting through air

to mimic the wonder of motion.

The romance we demand from our lives

is nothing compared to an old farmhouse,

defenseless against nature’s desire

to render it colorless, roughly-hatched

as the skin of the wrist close-up. Maybe the girl

knew all this, confessed it

at the summit of all the places

I have never been. Give me summers I spent

enraptured with the grasshopper’s grace

as it outran the combine’s blades.

What has come after is too contained.

Nobody knows us here,

but in a book I read

a whole house burned without a sound.

Anonymity was a gift

for the one who struck that match.

Pastoral | by Darcy Shargo | llustration by Nina Gara

Here is the history

between first stroke and final form:

figures carved into Aspen bark

somewhere in the mountains outside Flagstaff,

where perennial green held promise

to Basque sheepherders surveying

the glare of sunlight across leaves

as a star mysteriously does

the river. Each sketch is crude;

hard to distinguish from the gouge of an elk’s antler

or the rings a tree will take to mark its own demise.

One shepherd has written

the word for gift.

It is translated as candle left on a darkening windowsill,

the light from which filled

my every shattered step away from home.

His dreams have found a way into this country-there, a hill

descending into his mothers waist, her hair a creek

that cut through the valley of his hand.

Permanence becomes currency

as trunks oblige the weight

of certain decay, the stories of a people threatened

by the talent that light has

to make a shape of any shadow.