Behind the curtain.

Sunday in the great house, preparations

Are being made on something like a stage

By something like performers holding props

For something like an audience.

One like a master of ceremonies

Pours something like a god into something

Like souls' empty vessels, saying, This

Is the way and the truth, this is the blood

And the bread and bones of all our lives.

This working out of something like a script,

This handing out of programs and arranging

Words in the marquee, what does it mean

Back stage among the organ pipes,

When nothing sounds, where long dead carpenters

Have scrawled their names across the beams?

Or high up in the tower where the bell

Sits stone silent and the air never stops?

Everything is wood-dust and wings

Of fallen moths, like play-bills from old debuts.

And in their pale wing-dust, designs I can almost read.

Poets in this issue: Brad Bostian owns a Subway sandwich shop; his work has appeared in Triquarterly, The New Review, White Heron, and several on-line magazines. Daniel Corrie has been published in a number of magazines, including The Nation. Virginia Quarterly Review, and the American Scholar. He is working with William Jay Smith to prepare a volume of Smith's selected poems for the Johns Hopkins University Press. Mary Ellen Foster McEvily is a poet living in New York, whose latest appearance in Cross Currents was Spring 1997.