I Stopped

I found a book that I should have bought, but I will next time. It made free-verse seem like a manual on using a laser printer. Even the text was weird, with footnotes in fiction, and type crawling up the margins. So cool. It’s time for some of that here, but only a bit. Been itching to do something odd and quirky. Well, more odd and intensely zany. Here’s a poem for a Friday evening.

I stopped.

The snow fell, quiet on the hayfield, intent on making the ground a copy of the sky.

But the fescue, though sleeping, disagreed.*

With an insistence on crumpled lines

Breaking up the white with wilted broom bristles

Tawny.

The hawk sat atop a pole, pigeon-like only in size, like a butter knife is about the same as the razor

And watched me back.

Then I moved, then he moved, and severed the milky sky with a stupendous grace

and a dip of the wing

That cut me down in my heart

To know that I wasn’t a hawk and stood heavy on earth

He saluted again, but for once I wasn’t Cain

feeling glad to see this

this

I don’t know

Well, the reminder of my plodding

Because now I know that I’m plodding

And perhaps needn’t forever.

The next day

The sky turned down low, gathering purple over the mountains to the north

While I watched

I had a sudden thirst for the Word

now. NOW.

It said something, as if to say

“I’ve been telling you all along.”

So I drove home through the purple,

assailed by the usual chatter found in the first part of silence,

fought back by something still,

I

crunched through the frost,

and sat down

To write this.

–Josh

*I crashed a kayaking trip. The half-dozen tough guys planned to drop into the raging Potomac river, paddle halfway upstream, and then return, for a total of 25 miles. “How many miles did you average last week?”

“Uhhh” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

So I stepped aside, leaned my head against one of those river-worn branches you find on the sandy banks, and prayed.

Then I woke up.