In the Congaree

Samuel Amadon

I’m home. I’m not home. I’m on the road or
Off it, briefly. I’ve been out of place. I’ve been

Taking familiar walks. I like the boardwalk. I like
The swamp. I feel ill at ease. I feel fine.

As August ends, I’m thick and cold. As I circle
Above a tide of cypress knees, of webs,

Fallen trunks and leaves, I gather out
The mud a mossy repose. A violent mist.

A green allure. I have spoken into
A dead and standing pool of air, where,

In its center, a spider hangs. I can hear myself
Moving, notes taken on paper, on

My feet, I stop and that makes a sound.
I look out into what feels ancient. It

Doesn’t seem old. My voice is spun.
I’m rolling out myself last rung by rung.

I pinned my eye to the base of a loblolly pine,
And rose, much higher than I would

Suppose. I know everything already. I have to
Ask people questions. All of my relatives

Are famous. There are so many people dead.
Look at these trees. They’re shattered in pieces.

They’re tall and full. I look forward, steadily,
At the moss grown high as the flood.

Copyright © 2016 by Samuel Amadon. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 21, 2016, this poem was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Imagine Your Parks grant.

The Greenness of Grass Is a Positive Quality

Morning was when we decided if not for the grass rising then wind shifted the film even as your fingers said wind can’t shift film inside a camera.

What inside the camera couldn’t be shifted from grass rising to a tree without the film shifting the tree black we decided was purple with light between your fingers.

Was the tree light between your fingers?

Or was the curtain along the windowsill how we didn’t measure the width was where the wind was coming from?

Samuel Amadon

2017

Each H (II)

We are for the park, as we are for
enjoying its proximity to how
enjoying it for itself, as a park, is our

sign we are clearly thinking. On a tangent
as often as of two minds, but
then, perhaps, also another, and yet,

like pillows, I always feel I would be
more, if I could have more, which
makes me ask what gives us

over to giving ourselves, don’t end.
Don’t structure. If structure
is over, we could have had it

done. Like the seriousness become
a better secret as a secret

Samuel Amadon

2017

Pedestrian

I am a walker. I follow the sun as it angles
Into the evening on an edge where

A thoroughfare meets a hill of empty houses,
And as it spreads through back roads, I walk

Into nights—imaginary city—into nights
I walk changed, to be changed like a character

In a story I might read at the diner
On a damp morning when I don’t feel right, or

By the fire, folded into fire, days or nights
Or days again, walking with a map in

My head, a little blood in my teeth. If I walk
Out into my own block, and don’t know

Samuel Amadon

2017

Poems

In the Congaree

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The Greenness of Grass Is a Positive Quality

Each H (II)

Pedestrian

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In the Congaree

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