Rhonda Williford   IN PRAISE Praise the martyrs--so many faiths-- with their tender wrapping-paper flesh crushed inside a fist, their bones glass splintered under the jags of heavy rocks, their nerves so near to the surface-- offered up--to fire, stripped back to so many variations of hell, when even an extracted tooth can heave a body, tilting, toward some urgent escape. How vulnerable the skin and all it holds-- a convenience for those wrenching these martyrs into martyrs-- their gaped-wide or squeezed-taut mouths, turning or still, the sensate and so easily pried open, so easily snapped bodies of those who gave their sinews, their nerves for something further beyond calculation. And praise most those martyrs who did not thrust their bodies like spare kindling into a bin--but spun their light, the very light of life, into the source of light. Praise those who knew that the air they departed was full with glow, with waft, with fruit, and tasting, loving these textures, these aromas--the cherry's stone curled inside the mouth, its wet pulp sliding, the bird tracking the pale sky, and most, irredeemably most, the strong warm watery waves of a love pressed closed into the arms' fold-- still relinquished knowing with their entire raw sensibility-- every particle of all this and their own lives' worth.     ONE WIDE SKY-- Picasso and Braque Create Cubism Each day, Pable and Georges meet. They share one studio-- two rooms, blocks apart. Their four hands pull down by one cord a sky. And across this sky, their eyes fly back and forth, and always their hands, their paints and pastes. Their words follow as best they can. Their eyes and hands scatter like small birds the blue and clouds into new-found shapes-- the wings upturn sharp, slice the hidden layers loose from what only seemed a flat sky. The fluid sky with its temperature of bodies, heats often in a summer glow. It flames under the right sun like lovers whose limbs re-mingle for fresh embraces, split into wild and various angles to take in more of never enough all at once. One artist's hand picks up the conté where the other's has stopped the day before. Between the bits of newspaper and cardboard, Pablo and Georges separate only at the body to enter different women. Two "Marcelle's" love them-- Pablo renames his "Eva," between Fernande and Olga. But when they lift their separate canvasses to the wall--one name, "Guitar." Listeners lean into their harmonies. Pablo and Georges sell all their canvasses by a plan, save only their one wide sky. It churns until the sky outside churns war.     THE WELCOME BOWL --After Babel The sower unfurls his canvas of seeds. He prays for wind--for breadth, not height. The kernals spiral out-- a genetic code--into unmapped corners. And now, he is pulling in his net of words--the nubs full-grown and fruity, the wheat bending luxuriously. His fingers sort the ingredients, unraveling one more code dreamed in an ancient, distant land. He names the juicy pomegranates and smooth green peas. He starts with his native pods, but travels wide. He tosses each relearned song-- a star--into a gleaming bowl, then sleeps long, restful strokes under the bowl's mirror-- under the harp of the sky.     CHOICE To love something is to want it to exist. --St. Augustine Who can choose a blank box instead of the sky-- its blues--as if there had to be even one blue-- painting all the corners, rounding them out smooth? An interior voice cries, "You may fall into the void," but now, the trees are puffing out beyond their limbs, which stretch to make broad laps. The sun bends to simmer all counts of sands, while the wide tongues of the oceans lick out and in, soaking yet more sands. And in the heavens, blazes keep pulsing vast ether alive. Who can turn from that first burst-whirl, flagella flashing wildly against dense night, until, like some God-thrown comet, one flamepoint pierces what solely meets its courage with its own frenzied, melting receipt? How can a body, fired on such a tremor, but lean and lean to enter, catch each space-filling breath? How can a praising mouth not brim and brim with words?     THE WITNESS And this gingko goes all the way back to the first tree--maybe the tree that Adam lay under, even before the naming, tossing with some dream--feathery nests, shining water--traveling toward an image of Eve which couldn't match the flame- leaf on fired-maple that she was, and Eve, unfurling from some unpaired rib, stirred beneath a mirror-dream-- more smoke and tremor than vision, and this also not quite Adam, that stretch of God's imagination, not her own. And this old gingko, from wet-curled roots, overflows mid-air into a wide lap for all the coming stories--the blood, iron, and tinsel--rippling as it catches, then releases, shimmer and shadow. And now, Adam, with hand on thigh, considers, while Eve sighing, leans breath toward words--their bodies, not yet touching, arch to start all history--under the gingko tree, casting, in a shake of leaf, light, dark, light. Rhonda Williford is a lifelong resident of the Washington, DC area. She works as a labor lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board. Her poetry has been published in The Plum Review, Wordwrights!, Folio, Bellowing Ark, and Beauty for Ashes. Her chapbook, One Wide Sky, was published in May 1997 by The Argonne Hotel Press (now the Argonne House Press). She has given several readings in the Washington, DC area, including for the Library of Congress Poetry at Noon Series and the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series, and she coordinates the poetry reading series for the Takoma Park Branch of the District of Columbia Public Library. Published in Volume 2, Number 3, Summer 2001.