Green Linden Press

In 2024, Green Linden Press will publish Lunette, a collaboration between poet Bruce Bond and photographer Walter Cochran-Bond. Lunette is an Editor’s Selection in the Wishing Jewel series. Three pairs of photographs and poems follow.

Lunette 15

I came into the world through a wound
I opened, still wet with the aftermath
that fed me once. Then my mother took
to the long sadness that sometimes follows.
Not the ache of loss or any one loss
in particular. No discernable farewell
or foreclosure. You have been there.
This rain that gave you comfort falls and falls
into a sea whose shorelines never rise. 
If I cried out to no one in my crib,
know that I survived. I carry the stuff
of oceans after all. Blood understands
what it means to move, to want to move,
to press open the valves of the heart.
However deep the grief, flesh is deeper,
the quiet joy and journey of the water,
air, and vital sign. Our pulses tell us,
we have something to lose. No telling when
my mother’s sadness lifted, let alone why.
But she is in me, mending. In her sleep
and mine, the falling angels of the rain.

(first published in Plume)

Lunette 17

On earth as it is in heaven, I prayed
when I was young and the chapel glass
held us inside a stained parade of saints. 
It bore the sun that came and went inside
their eyes, their halos and their lacerations.
Like the soldiers I saw in televisions
lit from the other side, or some such world
bigger than the cabinet it came in.
Those were days the grasses of Vietnam
rippled giant eyes beneath the copters
and the palm fronds waved like castaways.
It felt unreal until a neighbor boy
arrived, in a cold crate, to keep the flesh
from turning. Believe me, he was no saint,
and yet the black lacquer of his coffin
glittered with the acolytes of candles.
I heard the mother weep, as a sermon set
its sights on heaven, and I wondered
at the sadness of paradise. Must it always
arrive in the dark, when the souls inside
our windows fade, and earth receives the stars. 

(first published in Matter)

Lunette 20

Landfall breaks the wave into a scythe
of fragments or some such frail,
defiant gesture, some figure on a field
of battle. Where water goes so too
the glass whose breakage if not rapture is
our own. And so we stare into the sea
for analogies, friends, to give the reckless
temperament a photographic stillness,
and then another, design after design
inside their frames to open up what ails us. 
When I think of those who looked out
on the same stretch of ocean, I feel
small. My skin turns the color of water. 
The objects in the room begin to complain.
They need to be seen, to turn into words,
to rise from the furrowed graves of books,
thinking a breath or two would make them stronger.
When I am lost, the voice gets louder.
A cold mist dissolves in one great shiver
over the window at dawn. What a wave
desires shatters the form, never the water.

(first published in Matter)

Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-five books, including, most recently, Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books, 2021), Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), Liberation of Dissonance (Nicholas Shaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner, 2022), Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023), and Choreomania (Madhat, 2023). 

Walter Cochran-Bond is a former class action employment attorney who retired from the pursuit of justice and now embraces the art of seeing.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023