 A Web Chapbook from The Literary Review
Beth Houston
I admire through a piece of cut purple glass
the sun in its nimbus of glistening light:
it will shadow nicely between the amethyst
folds in the goddess's spreading skirt.
My Buddhist client is telling me how death
dissipates into waves of pure energy.
An elegant way of saying dead is dead and I'd
argue with his spiritualized materialism but I'm
too busy filing down blazing turquoise to fit
the pattern transmuting into his stained-glass sky.
Beth Houston, MA, MFA, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley-Extension, and has taught at San Francisco State. She has published nearly two hundred poems in journals such as Yale Review, Massachusetts Review, Chicago Review, 'feminist Studies, The American Literary Review, 13th Moon, Minnesota Review, American Writing, and the anthologies Drive, They Said, 1995/1996 Anthology of Magazine Verse, and Yearbook of American Verse. A resident of San Francisco, she conducts creative writing workshops throughout the Bay Area.
A Work by Beth Houston:
JOURNEY OF THE MAGI
On such a night as this they must have gazed
Up doubting, questioning their compass star,
Their lushly-laden caravan camped far
Beyond well-charted desert; tired, stalled, dazed
By harsh, vast sand and sun, they must have praised
Their hard bread, salt, the last full water jar,
Then burned their scrolls, their zodiac, this star
Eclipsed by heavy eyes no more amazed.
...But dreamed their comet seared maps in the dark;
These stars compelled their reason's bend, remiss,
Resolved: My journey trudges toward their mark,
To trust cold nature guides through awe to bliss,
When structured Love uncovered flares from stark
Astronomy on such a night as this.
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Selections from Beth Houston's work:
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