Edited by Phillip Levine. Submit up to three poems to Chronogram at a time. Send via snail or e-mail. Poetica. PO Box 459. New Paltz, NY 12561. E-mail: poetry@chronogram.com. Subject: Poetica.

This issue marks the beginning of my second year as poetry editor of Chronogram. It has been a rewarding year for me. Thanks to all who shared their work. It also signals the end of the "Phil" experiment. I go by Phillip, so Phillip it is.

...

The deer - it must have been several - moved through the garden with precision, eliminating colors from left to right, leaving only roses high on stems. My neighbor swears in three languages. The word neck figures prominently in all three, and in a fourth he speaks with his hands. Later, his gentleness restored, he says simply, "next year we put fence." He shows me his neck. Like the map of his country, it has many new lines. And he tells me of the hills where he was born and the garden he kept outside of town, where soldiers camped one spring. "They probably thought onions," he says. "Each day I see them watering. But when they bloom, was lilies.  Beautiful! Then they come into town."

- Philip Pardi

Pause....
Halfway round the world in a bamboo thicket
A still shadow drifts
The sun resolves.
Flourishing, it scatters as a
Product of pollen,
Honey sweet sunlight
Dripping into the afternoon haze.
Resume....

- Matthew Luks

In the Times Square Nathan's downstairs
dining room, from fancy days as Toffenetti's,
while eating a fried-oyster sandwich, I bit
something hard. I feared a stone, a dislodged
filling, a chunk of shell, but my tongue found
a pearl - tiny, but a perfect sphere,

a dot of opalescence balanced on
my fingertip, an idea of pearlishness
more than potential jewel - no real value,
yet formed by the same extravagant

response to an irritant as a priceless one,
or as poems are formed.

All right, I admit: I lost it. In some year
of the decades since, I misplaced it, or else
it vanished as minor souvenirs will,
hidden between dresser-drawer boards
or pulled out with coins or a tie tack
and lost on the floor.

The pearl is not a symbol of what is lost.
I have enough reminders of lost friends,
lost opportunities, lost youth and money.
That a pearl was lost is not important,
but that something real, something rare,
something of value once was found -

in a mediocre sandwich in a drab space
of a dim place on a gray street - on a day
of no other consequence, a pearl took
its brief place among the world's honored
specks of substance. It isn't owning pearls
that matters, but finding them.

- Lewis Gardner