Volume 16, Issue 2 (2003) Say it anyway

From the Editors:

The everydayness of our lives tends to take over if we let it. Wallace Stevens gave us thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, but sometimes we can't even see two sides. It seems our eyes are closed, or covered, or stolen; but we can open them, peel the cover back and get a bird-dog to help us find our eyes. They're there, and when we've found them, we'll look as much as we can. Find at least thirteen ways of seeing it. We'll tease routine and drive all night through mountains and flatlands. Pick the place that we've never been and conquer it. We'll say the thing we couldn't say without eyes, and we'll pass that thing around. We'll put our arms around the ones we love and then put our arms around two more. But with our new eyes we'll know that we cannot see the future; not even the glasses around our necks will help with that. So we'll love for now; we'll see that it makes sense and that the things that confuse us aren't even real. We'll sit around on rooftops or porches; we'll call the far away eyes and tell them we're doing so, and we'll be connected by that time that we found our eyes together—staring into brown and green and the blue of deep water.