On Certain Nights / Jack Ridl
Tag: Jack Ridl
Winter Issue of 3rd Wednesday Magazine
Cover art by Jude Dippold 
New Poems from:
Ted Kooser (13th Poet Laureate of the United States)
“Ohio Blue Tip”
Marge Piercy (Arthur C. Clarke Award Winning Author) 
“An Argument of Crows”
&
“I Observe the Climate Changing and I Complain”
Jack Ridl (2013 INDIES Award Winning Poet)
“Sitting on the Back Deck of Our Houseboat
in Key West a Few Days After Jim Harrison Died”
&
“It’s What He Does Instead”
New Fiction From:
Phillip Sterling (Author: In Which Brief Stories are Told, 
Wayne State University Press, 2011)
“Recognition”
Chamber Musicians Also Wash the Dishes, Check the Mail
Our Poem of the Week is a piece by one of our favorite poets, Jack Ridl, who is from Michigan. It’s a great poem with an even greater title.
Chamber Musicians Also Wash the Dishes, Check the Mail
But now the chamber musicians are
just past halfway in Glazunov’s Elegy,
the part where in rehearsal they stopped.
“It feels as if I’m behind.”
“I don’t think so. I think I’m ahead.”
When I listened all I heard was a whole note held
in the third movement of a symphony
by Tinnitus, all I felt was the wax waning
onto the timpani of my ear drum.
Next comes another elegy, this by Suk,
Suk who was fifteen when he wrote its
sorrow-filled walk through what he did
not yet know. The chamber musicians
know. They carry elegy in their fingers.
They open the world on the other side
of every note and let us breathe
within the haunting space between each
touch of key and pull of bow. They believe
heaven is between the stars, music
in the empty sleeve of the one-armed man.
-Jack Ridl
Douglas, Michigan
Third Wednesday Magazine 