my romantic tryst with cancer

by Aaron Fogel Fellow compositors and pressworkers! I, Chief Printer Frank Steinman, having worked fifty- seven years at my trade, and served five years as president of the Holliston Printer's Council, being of sound mind though near death, leave this testimonial concerning the nature of printers' errors. First: I hold that all books and all printed matter have errors, obvious or no, and that these are their most significant moments, not to be tampered with by the vanity and folly of ignorant, academic textual editors. Second: I hold that there are three types of errors, in ascending order of importance: One: chance errors of the printer's trembling hand not to be corrected incautiously by foolish professors and other such rabble because trembling is part of divine creation itself. Two: silent, cool sabotage by the printer, the manual laborer whose protests have at times taken this historical form, covert interferences not to be

by Ted Kooser Today, from a distance, I saw you walking away, and without a sound the glittering face of a glacier slid into the sea. An ancient oak fell in the Cumberlands, holding only a handful of leaves, and an old woman scattering corn to her chickens looked up for an instant. At the other side of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times the size of our own sun exploded and vanished, leaving a small green spot on the astronomer's retina as he stood on the great open dome of my heart with no one to tell. from Solo: A Journal of Poetry, Premiere Issue, Spring 1996 Copyright 1996 by Ted Kooser .