Category Archives: Poetry

Up Liberty

by Jordan Collins ‘15.5

We talked about how last night was a birth canal
The two of us started our ascent without expectation
Knowing only that the sun sets and sight fails
Realizing soon what it means to travel as if motionless
Through a vortex that likely led up

To arrive out of such black silence
Pierced only by our dim sphere perception
That miracle headlamp glow, outside of which
Any noise resounded in the imagination
(What surrounded seemed empty, might not be)

Was difficult, changed our bodies
Tricked them into strength outside of space and time
The night became an accidental escape from intellect
Consciousness pushed to the surface like our sweat,
Letting senses carry us forth as it would
On scrambled legs

We were born, this morning, naked
On a mountain, its cliffs conducting
A symphony of orange

Our first wail was a melody
From lives past, our singing caught by the winds
That curve around this world in currents
The precious sting of those high
Breezes on our bare bodies
The essence of creation in sensation

And bliss coursing through our newly pulsing veins

You will not waste this time

by Ben Harris ’16

Sun at half-mast on Sedona sandstone like a high water line of light.
You are looking through the lens at the years
Stretching across the strata of rock,
And I am dripping wet, standing in stillness at your side
The way driftwood washes ashore unannounced.
Cool air on naked skin tells of twilight,
All the time that remains
Until the aperture of this hour curls in on itself,
And leaves us worrying away at the tortoise shells of our selves
Wondering where did it all go, this life
We were rumored to be living.
Minutes from now, when we step into that car and drive from here
The full moon of the moment will sliver.
By then I will be far-gone
Into the days laid out ahead,
Like long ribbons of road, remote.
Out there is a future in which
I am telling myself
You will not waste this time
You will not waste this time
As if this life is some sort of school detention
Scrawled over and over across slate.
So it seems there is nothing more to do but
Walk to that tree bridged between the banks
And like the beaver,
Cut my teeth on the bark of meaning.
You will follow with the camera as I climb,
Bleeding from these bared soles.
When I reach the last of the branches,
I will pause, and prostrate myself
Before the water striders forever skimming the surface of mystery,
Meanwhile the rest of us stop to think
And sink.
When I let myself go and slip into the waiting stream
Your shutter may break the silence.
But I won’t have heard—
I’ll be busy listening
To the story spoken in the syllables of river stones,
Their whispers coming through water like whale song.
And in the end I will have to trust you to tell me
If falling from that tree
Did I make a sound.