Natural light and trickling water course through the poems in this collection, grounded by stones. Poems on two very different kissing sculptures spit the book in twain, the first half warm and sunny and the second half cool and wet. This schism allows for observations to wind through the book, echoing the sentiment "Let me be a flat stone half whose body touches earth, the other half the rain."

W.R. Hastings has been writing poetry actively since the early 1990's, participating in community readings, editing a local anthology called "Church Hill Poets" and leading various poetry seminars in the local lifelong learning program. His poems have appeared in Yankee Magazine, Potpourri, The Berkshire Review, SLANT, The Lucid Stone, Poetry Motel, and New England Watershed. A chapbook entitled "Making Bread", was published in 2007 by Juniper Creek Publishing.



To a Sister Who Did Not Land on Earth

Her face arises now from dreams:
her high cheeks lit by delphinium eyes
following those of others like hounds,
her laughter like a steel hoe
striking unexpected stones,
her hair out of place, a smoke tree in bloom.
There is a heron lightness in the way she moves.
We sometimes wrestle as we talk,
dance wordlessly to 50's music
or argue all night long.

This is the woman who lives inside.
She is always ready for love
the way lions love the taste of zebras
and bears find blueberries when ripe.
When I was a boy I had only brothers,
thought that love needed muscles or round hips
and touching until all your chemicals
smelt like sweet cider,
could not have understood her need to stay outside
these forms in which we wander Earth.

Her arrival takes me to places in dreams
where yesterday's rain lingers in leafmold
or streams over old stones along the same runs
it took last year and the year before.
Though now we often meet behind my eyelids,
there is still one question I cannot ask her:
where is she when she is not with me?