March 2024
Bill Prindle
prindles2004@msn.com
Bio Note: I am a poet drawn to the paradoxes of life inside human beings. I am also drawn to the nonhuman world, and to the possibilities of restoration between these realms. I am deepening and broadening my life in what I call the "third half of life," when I have the freedom to mine past and present with faculties I had not discovered as a young man. I've been published here and there: Streetlight Managine's 2021 anthology, Tupelo Press' Thirty Days anthology, and the Live Poets and What Rough Beast blogs. I support the poetry community through subscriptions and book purchases, and occasionally through investing in new books, including Tupelo Press' Native Voices anthology, in support of my abiding interesting in indigenous wisdom and art.

Like a Red Corvette

We sit in the park with our lunch
of pastrami on rye and Beck's lager.

It was human error, is all he will
reveal to me about his son's death

in the avalanche he created himself
for snowboard-surfing in Colorado.

And though he has dipped his hand
in the well of grief, he will not slip

beneath the surface to the place he
cannot breathe. He will not say

how many nights he has lain awake
over the years since he first parked 

those feelings like that red Corvette, 
canvas-covered in a locked garage.

After another hour sitting together, 
we part with a hug, turning back 

to the only lives we can save.

Progress Report 50 Years After Reading Black Elk

Last night in the silences between barred owl calls
I thought I heard some people passing by the pond.

Might have been plangent minor chords of bullfrog
and fowler’s toad sounding a bit like human voices,

but I thought I heard Cherokee forced westward, or
was it Monacan disappearing into the high coves?

I thought I heard bluegill or maybe perch rising to 
the surface to feed, but maybe it was only the sound

of four hundred years of weeping. There were no 
tracks this morning, but winter is coming so today 

I left out on the trail leading west from the ridge 
line where you can see the mountains some small

packets of poems written on lichen, bound up  
with braided sweetgrass, placed on mossed stone.
©2024 Bill Prindle
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