Tributes

​Robb Jackson
Right Now,
it's open-windowed, ceiling-fanned, full-tilt boogie spring at my Corpus Christi home. It's March, just past the equinox, the middle of mournful Lent, when sunny Gulf gusts raise leafy green boughs into great big ruffling roars, like something's outrageously funny. My neighborhood sounds like a B grade Tarzan movie: a tropical paradise, trilling with puffy grackles, chorusing & mimicking like boat loads of yellow-eyed pirates freshly ashore, they strut their stuff, mating. Cooing doves are stupid with love, and the air is drenched with that sticky sweet smell, perfume of huisache, making the entire earth into some sort of crazy boudoir.

I'm bewildered by it all. While the tomcat's flat out on the front porch, sleeping last night off, I'm struggling to compose myself. Look, on days like this, it's too damned hard to be serious, too boring to write another ridiculous poem! I'm no celluloid Tarzan, but I still feel like grunting affirmatively as I swing out on another limb.  ​

Vanessa Jackson
The Lark Ascending
How, at the end, that lone violin catches
flight, song rising beyond comprehension
till it slips through silence in a thread of blue. 

I was pathless in the grim forest when we met, 
a stranger stumbling a new country, voiceless
among wild birds crying incoherently.

You gave me such gifts. Mind, hearing, sight
illumined. Thousands of geese rose as one for us,
goldfinches swirled in the milkweed, trilling,

and I understood. I opened my palm, life-lines
to a smaller land where sea and sky become one
and the cliff grass, green, hides singers in it

that spring up as if fired from under the ground
quick in a spiraling glory of voice, the poets, 
the skylarks who soar so enviably close to God. 

Back and forth from your land to mine we flew,
both of us carrying the other's life as our own
in joy, as if the ascending music had no end.

How, alone now, I stand on the green cliffs,
where the larks still lift into infinite threads
of blue. And it is your song I am listening to.