Hunting the Unwritten Poem


You see them in the mercury
light of water, the expanding
orbs of silver where trout
breathe. You hear
them in the sleepy kiss
of rainfall on pine needles,
smell them as if they were snow
to the west.
 
Like a pheasant’s eye,
they lose luster the moment
a hunter kills them
to glean their mysteries.
The mute membranes close.
The bird’s secret holds.
 
From across the field,
a crow’s dark instincts
distinguish men with sticks
from men with .22s.
 
Poems are world-wary, too.
Hear the whistle of wing lift
as they take flight.
Look again—an unwritten poem
shifting in the wind, whistling
like an open wound of torn air.
 
from The Indifferent World
 
 
 
Reading Poetry at 4 A.M.

 
Poetry is best read
in the thin hours,
when words and light
explore as if for the first time,
when eyes scan the bright and the shadow
of syntax, walk the diction primeval,
find font’s canyons on day’s
struck page.
 
It’s morning when lines break
under the rhythm of crow call--
their gentle rocking of sky,
black and forth, black and forth.
 
A line can be lifted by a cardinal’s
match-head strike of pine,
when it sings its loneliness,
the reddest tassel in the wood.
 
Lines can be herded by the green memory
of hemlocked stanzas, too; sometimes
they are scraped smooth by a cricket’s
night legs still warm with its song.
 
That a poem prefers readings
from dawn’s breviary
is a metaphor halved, the soft flesh
opened and musky, redolent
of a satisfying ripeness. Each is a koan
of its other half, enjambment
still sensed by the vine.
 
While others sleep, you can better listen
for a poem’s metered pulse.
You can better breathe and smell its incense.
But only in the nave of morning. ​

from The Indifferent World