In the pond in the park all things are doubled: Long buildings hang and wriggle gently. Chimneys are bent legs bouncing on clouds below. A flag wags like a fishhook down there in the sky. The arched stone bridge is an eye, with underlid in the water. In its lens dip crinkled heads with hats that don't fall off. Dogs go by, barking on their backs. A baby, taken to feed the ducks, dangles upside-down, a pink balloon for a buoy. Treetops deploy a haze of cherry bloom for roots, where birds coast belly-up in the glass bowl of a hill; from its bottom a bunch of peanut-munching children is suspended by their sneakers, waveringly. A swan, with twin necks forming the figure 3, steers between two dimpled towers doubled. Fondly hissing, she kisses herself, and all the scene is troubled: water-windows splinter, tree-limbs tangle, the bridge folds like a fan.
From Poems Old and New by May Swenson, published by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 1994 by the Literary Estate of May Swenson. Used by permission of the Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved.
(Johnson, VT)
At night the river,
frozen over, fits
its bed like a key
its lock. The current
keeps turning but
the surface won’t
open. I can
hear ice click, shift,
its crystalline pins
caught. Twenty miles south
of Lake Eden,
its origin,
the Gihon’s near its end.
After the old red mill,
before it enters
the Lamoille, it falls
flat, a closed
door. Wrong key
in the wrong lock,
I like to put
my mind where two worlds
meet & agree to
disagree. The teachers
say : take up the water,
make it your body
& mind, make it thought.
But I think I
must think the way
elements make
temporary
arrangements
with weather :
hydrogen locked
to oxygen,
each strong molecule
expands, a lattice
of tetrahedrons.
All their new shapes make
ephemeral color
the way what light there is
at midnight heightens
ice, brighter briefly
than snow. & toward
that whiteness my mind
pushes outward from
the interior
where olivine water
washes over gravel
& sand. Thought
exerts drag
against the icy
underside, & I
feel a border
experience
can’t cross over
into knowledge
the way in front
of paradox
my mind stops :
for five years
my ill body killed me
while it kept me alive.
On the bank bare
brambles catch snow
weighted with rain
that falls straight down,
hissing as it hits
the ice. Who am I
now. Above : mountains.
Below : the river.
Both moving & still,
inaccessible
& everywhere, being
is & keeps to itself,
hidden in emblems
of the outward, seeds
extracted from bracts
of a dry pine cone.
The spring equinox
is near : rain coaxes
the icy lattices
to relax into lapse,
little cracks
mid-river.
It’s so quiet
I hardly feel
desire. But its soft force
flenses the strongest water
from thaw : there, at
the thinnest brink,
kinesis that
resists stillness,
thinking on thinking,
the current pulses.
From Doomstead Days (Nightboat Books, 2019) by Brian Teare. Copyright © 2019 by Brian Teare. Used with the permission of the author.