August 2024
Bio Note: I am a long-time editor and the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). I live in Massachusetts, in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees, preferred nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of my writing attic as a runway. Most days I walk in a nearby cemetery, greeting rabbits and trying to decide if the possibility of reincarnation is reassuring or horrifying.
After I tour showplace gardens
I come home to a wild sprawl.
Squash plants with prickly leaves
as big as serving platters.
Cucumber vines hindered
by absurd bounty but persisting
across flagstones and pine-
bark paths and ragged grass
toward the back door. Black
and green hoses left unfurled
like languid snakes in the sun.
A tunnel under one raised bed
where a skunk labors nightly
on her massive excavation
of a yellowjacket nest, soil
mounding up as she digs.
How brilliant she is, to work
while they slumber—the few
who stumble out to defend
are rolled dumb by ursine paws
as she crawls the underworld
where larvae are, her caviar.
How I adore the disarray
she brings, this low priestess
of chaos theory. She squeezes
under the fence to waddle home
before the sun comes up
on all this unbound beauty,
leaving behind the scriptures
of my found religion:
imperfectionism.
The Necessity of Catbirds
It seems late in the season for catbirds to show up,
but they’re finally everywhere. One likes to perch
on the edge of the birdbath, scold us if we don’t change
the water often enough. He dunks and dunks,
sloshing great waves into the ivy, whipping up storms
in his own little sea with a vigor
that reminds me of your dad at eighty-five, the year
he was finally too old for faraway travel. He came here
for his birthday instead, and you took him to every pond
and lake you knew—the ocean too. As many places
as we can swim in one day, you said. At each one,
he flew from the car in his tattered swim trunks, singing
and spidering across parking lots and sand, and threw himself
into the water, all of life a chaotic celebration. We never
really noticed them before, but now every catbird is the one
we need, even the ones we hear but can’t see, when the world
is so dark we think it’ll never be light again.
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL