CARON ANDREGG

Caron Andregg has published dozens of poems in English. She is the Publisher and
Editor-in-Chief of Cider Press Review. Her poems have appeared in print and online
journals including Spillway, Rattle, Poetry International, Solo and many others, and in
the anthology Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (2002) published by
Southern Illinois University Press. In her non-poetic life, she runs a web design and
marketing company with too much help from office cats.

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Cloud Chamber

1
A neutrino reveals itself
in the infinitesimal
oxygen-bubble path
through an astronomer's
cloud chamber
high on Mt Rainier;
like so many things, invisible
yet always with us.

In the trail it burns
through everything it burns -
an asteroid's suicidal dive
striping the atmosphere,

a rain-streak weeping
down a solitary window
in Aberdeen - its single
yellow square framed
by rainswept night.

There are so many ways
to be alone.


2
The insomniac in Boca
watches his lover's ribs
heave and sigh in sleep.

He is thinking of neutrinos
and the theory they (of all things)
can travel back through time.

He would return
to that moment
between her knowing

he pressed damply to her back,
her rump, her thighs,
and her not knowing;

return as she slipped under
on the dark tide
of her breathing;

return to her,
poised and fluttering,
just before the fall.


3
The penitent in
Scranton enters
a house of glass.
He is thinking of stars
in their slow march,

and of the night
their light no longer traced
the shape of God,

when they became
the sprockets and cogs
of constellations
indifferent to atmosphere.

The house stands empty
as his throat fills
with draft. His soul
is a box of fog.


4
The exile in Aberdeen
watches as endless rain
streaks the night into bars
against his solitary window.

He is writing a letter
to his lover in Indiana
and thinking of the time
she'll split the seam
he licks to seal,

of how his lips
in leaving pressed
one by one the pink
cabochons of her fingertips
pale as moonstones.

In streaks of ink he traces
the shape of her thigh,
ciphers the subtraction of one.

On this sail of pale paper
he returns to her hand.







We Lie Down Beneath Stars that Never Set

If indeed we make a beast
with two backs, then let it be
a juncture of bears - denned so long

alone, splendidly famished; joining fiercely,
teeth to lip, tongue to salt-lick skin,
our furred parts streaming.

The night is black as bears.
As we huddle in our caves
of bone, pearls of our absent sweat

reach across the sky as stars -
Callisto and Arcas pouring
one into the other -

assume the shapes of strung bows -
the arc of shoulders, back and thighs,
the long legs trailing.







The Thursday Night Trap Club

We're skeet shooting
the potter's seconds.
The catapult slings
skewed plates, cracked
vases in erratic arcs
across the dry creek canyon.

Each Thursday evening
we obliterate
the week's mistakes.
When the pellet-spread connects,
explodes a shrapnel star
it's an absolution.

Lucinda's been casting
reproductions of Egyptian
bowls with tiny feet.
One seems near perfect;
but when I set it
on the trap-box edge
it lists, daylight gleaming
beneath the toes of one foot.

When wet and forming
it must have rested
on a warp, something
not quite level in the firing.

It seems somehow unfair
this small, lame thing
wound up in the slag-box
destined for buckshot
just because it totters.

And it strikes me
how much easier it is
to love a flawed object -
the supplicant's posture
like a pair of cupped hands;
the sloped bowl tilted in offering;
its little feet of clay.

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