Epistemology

Catherine Barnett

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.

Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.

Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord

to keep it from fraying?

Not the man who called my life a debacle,

a word whose sound I love.

In a debacle things are unleashed.

Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.

I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,

the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.

They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.

They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.

And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing

stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect

or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,

to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.

Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth

and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

Morning Song

Sara Teasdale

1884 –

1933

A diamond of a morning

Waked me an hour too soon;

Dawn had taken in the stars

And left the faint white moon.

O white moon, you are lonely,

It is the same with me,

But we have the world to roam over,

Only the lonely are free.

This poem is in the public domain.

aria

Mariama J. Lockington

white-throat sparrows/full of note/netted in the eventide/voices
sawing the trees/fragile little bodies/tracing frantic circles
             not understanding/what we must all come to accept/not one day
                         will last/we must end ourselves/as gently as we can
             take our swords/our facts/oddments of feather
                         turn them into the dark/she takes us as we are
             windswept/awake with shattering & nothing
             is as loud as her arms pulling us
             close/not even these wings
             landing/forever
             in the nests of
             my ears