Sharon Auberle & Ralph Murre: Porte des Morts

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crow and seagull

on whirling winds

a white orchid at the window

fading

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Dull olive of cedar outweighs other colors, rationed so carefully in northern winter. The ground is snow-covered; the sky gray; the bay, jagged slates, soon to be frozen. Slender crimson of osier, hue of salmon-flesh where the wind has stolen bark from birch. Rarely, salmon on the rocky foreshore to feed a gull or crow.

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Winter reminds us that all things come and go. There is freedom in what remains—the bones, the wind, bare branches. An old man dies on an island.

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out in the passage

a ferryman’s fog-signal

the great lake steaming

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by Sharon Auberle & Ralph Murre

Sister Bay, Wisconsin

And Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Ralph Murre: Canvas

Route 31 buses pass like time in fog and the canvas waits, as I look at brushes and knives, put them back, squeeze a gob of payne’s grey and some pthalo blue on my palette, consider the quality of the ground, pour some turps, hold off on linseed oil, have a coffee. Look at that woman out the window. Stare at books I should read. Mix a touch of sienna into the too-bright blue. Go for a walk in a grey-wash afternoon, think of slicing into a tube of alizarin crimson, think of a friend whose crying-out-loud crimson slicing will someday end in another failure or, worse, success.

stretched canvas waits
for her pale body
the way I’ll paint her
the flake-white bed
from which she’ll rise

by Ralph Murre
Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Ralph Murre: In Apartment 3-B

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where wall meets ceiling

a gossamer web

on spackled plaster

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O.K., first off, she wasn’t “Little,” they just called her that to be funny, the way you called the shortest kid in your sophomore phys-ed class “Stretch.” At 398 lbs., when she wasn’t retaining water, Miss Tiffany L. Muffet would not have fit on your average tuffet even if she did have some idea what it was. It is true that she was eating a tub of extra-creamy cottage cheese (technically, curds and whey) and a 32 oz. bag of Doritos with Skippy and was washing it all down with a 7-11 Big Gulp, when a rather demure, grayish spider descended, yes, more or less beside her. But “frightened her away” ??? Please. On the day in question, Tiffany Muffet, barely looking up from a re-run episode of “Conditioning Hints of America’s Biggest Losers Contestants,” grudgingly pushed aside a Double Whopper she was saving for after the show, rolled up a copy of the Enquirer which was close at hand, and splattered that little sumbitch all over the dark-walnut veneer of the pressed-wood headboard that would be hers with just three more payments.

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by Ralph Murre

Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Ralph Murre: MARCH 19TH, BAILEYS HARBOR

The sound is a blackbird, forever clearing its throat, like the morning-after chanteuse of a smoke filled club. A barking crow. A crowing dog. A cardinal calling for love as if a red shirt isn't enough. There's a rattle of pick-up trucks bound toward morning coffee, the discussion of March Madness and no work, yet the light has an angle of promise. A trickle of snowmelt and an old woman scrub at little corners of big problems, and the town yawns, if a town can yawn, into grudging wakefulness. The ice is mostly gone from the lake.
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a blackbird
in all its darkness
a bright wing
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by Ralph Murre
Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Ralph Murre: FROM PARADISE

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This minaret of dolomite, cold-water flat, artist’s garret of a peninsula appended to the broad side of my state, this bit of rock with life oozing from every fissure holds my heart, holds my thoughts, carries my prayers. Floats body and mind from fertile farms and second cities, away, into the cool of the lake. Here, to be a member in good standing of sunrise and set, to be part of rainbow’s arc and thunderhead’s roll.

Here, too, the rush of commerce, the haul-it-in, haul-it-out retailing of the gross world product in the shapes of lighthouses, gull-like geegaws and fishing boat fol-de-rol. Lodgers in plaid shorts replace loggers in plaid shirts. Where cedars live on rock and hope, and trilliums announce the season, signs of spring also include “for sale”, “private beach”, and “own the dream”. We’ll each buy an acre and mark its corners with bright ribbons, to show one another where the dream ends.

in a leaking boat
someone from paradise
rowing hell-bent

Ralph Murre
Sturgeon Bay, WI