Summer-Fall '23
Horizon
E.J. Evans
I have some sense of loyalty to that line or curve
in space, whatever shape it may take
where I happen to live—my guide, my teacher—
silent stage for the sky alive and churning with possibility—
ever the theater of imagination, while far below in the valley
the house I found myself in grew smaller,
too small to hold anything but contradictions.
It turned out all along there was only one way forward
and it was to look far, to find that sharp edge
where the hard earth shears off into the unlimited.
To keep it clear within me.
The Garden
E.J. Evans
Just beyond the house, in the wild of morning
gusts of wind push and pull among the pines and birches
whose branches hold up parts of the light
as in silent celebration,
as birds appear and disappear on them.
From here you can see the curving path that no one walks anymore
winding through the trees to the cliff at the end of the yard.
These few flowers—a fragment of a pattern much larger,
a grand scattering.
Somehow all of my distant past as a child lost in the world
has become transformed by time into this—
E.J. Evans is the author of Ghost Houses (Clare Songbirds, 2021), Conversations With the Horizon (Box Turtle Press, 2019), and the chapbook First Snow Coming (Kattywompus Press, 2015). They've lived in California and in Florida, and currently live in central New York.