Rick Cannon   A SMALL REPROACH He was not the best of fathers when I was young and the best of sons. Those lessons he gave I carefully lost and took my truths from strangers. How is it then his death broke me like any loyal boy? His reclining face of ash and ochre hovers in my mind like some macabre magician's trick over the heady bank of flowers, stays with me years later, threatens never to leave. Sometimes his death inhabits my body like fog, the day a gray sheet raised by a blind sun, a gray sail pulling me toward him, and I hear his cloud voweled voice. Tonight I could drive in this sorrow till dawn, walk in it till twilight and lie down at its blue horizon, my soul drifting out and out in it like a small tin can.   AFTER THE BUCK LEAPS IN FRONT OF THE CAR After the buck leaps in front of the car, I joke to my boy, "He's on his way to Wichita." Then strangely all day I touch wichita, feeling at doorways the stiff flaps of teepees, at the xerox brushing ash and berry inks. It gathers mass. It seems in wichita less is spoken, sharing easier, and by evening I've grown sure wichita is the center of all gentleness where charity rules truth and the land remains unbroken under long prairie grasses. Whimsical as it may seem, when I see the buck now, or the doe and fawn blocked from wichita at the side of the road, I know the dark shade of their sorrow and the mystic twitch of impulse which must ignite those lean delicate boltings before our lights. Richard Dana Oblivion mixed media on canvas, 20" x 16"(1994) see more work by Richard Dana     POINT OF ARRIVAL He stands barefoot on the gray concrete, the iron season cooling the blood dull red through his flat slow soles. He's forgotten why he came to the garage and stands in his shaggy robe before hammer, awl and ratchet, dumb, blank, as if stunned by a piece of news. Out the window he sees the tight copse, stripped spar and mast shrouded in pale yards of light. Still he stands, lost, but beginning perhaps to sense, as dawn will seep beneath a blind, that from far away and through much trial he's come exactly here. And as he stands issuing breath, that slow rhythm leaf by leaf, he feels the earth shift slightly under tonnage of wind toward white winter. For several minutes he stays his feet flat on the stinging stone, a robed man in a cold garage accepting his extremity, seeing it had always been so: even from the beginning he'd been, by far, out too far to survive more than just this little while.   THE BOY IGNORES HIS FATHER'S ORDER LEAVING THE LAWN UNCUT and lays his head softly in a damp bed of iris pulling a knit cap so tight across his face he sees through yawed webbing warm blue sky and green stems descending from a dozen upthrust pods, bright yellow! Large, wobbling, half the morning honeybees come, legs extended black as phones, swinging down ragged blooms to his face. Through thin petal- cups, as through a filmy curtain, he sees each bee's bulky fumbling and hears malevolence whir in his ear like seething pieces of Beezelbub. Slowly, then, the stem straightens, throws its yellow gob into the warm blue air, again! again! the boy imagining the honey-slow frenzy of the hive, its great feeble bison of a queen.   WATER AND FIRE For a long time with the heavy, dreamy struggle upward, the natural cupping of the hands, the lengthy earning of a stroke, a man does not know fire. It's not until he sees how easily things melt and slide away, how his father went, his mother fails, the skin over his wife's cheekbones suddenly softens, is looser, not until then does he walk on flaming grass into the furnace of the trees and wonder that he's not consumed.   Rick Cannon, graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, has taught English at Gonzaga College High School and as an adjunct at Trinity College, for the past 27 years. He and his wife of three decades are the parents of five children and live in Silver Spring, MD. His poems have appeared in dozens of periodicals including America, Antietam Review, Folio, The Iowa Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Mudfish, Nimrod, Whole Notes, and Xanadu. In 1992 he was awarded Best Poem of the Year (for "Of Little Faith") by the Catholic Press Association, in both 1995 and 2001 a Maryland State Arts Council Grant in Poetry, and in 1996 a Pushcart nomination (for "Point of Arrival") by Poet Lore. In 1998 his chapbook manuscript, Of Little Faith, was a merit selection in Baltimore's Artscape, and he was chosen to read at the Miller Cabin. Since 1995 he has devoted much of his writing time to Otis Truitt, a tale of historical fiction set in the Civil War. Currently, he co-edits Poet Lore. Published in Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 2003.