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Here you go
light low and long
in the fields
at sunset and sunrise
Everything twice
a doubled existence
two nows
two thens
two names
yours and the other one
also yours
folded into a paper boat
the points of which
constellate stars
Copyright © 2017 by Carl Adamshick. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 18, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
I came home
from my mother’s funeral
to a house of my own making
to dust I didn’t want
to lift from a shelf
I came home astonished
by life being the same
struck dumb
when the knife
sunk into the melon.
I live between the bus stop
and something I can’t explain,
between the night sounding
with green leaves and a few
visible stars, between a horse
and philosophy wondering
if it is a great clenched fist
that keeps me from my life.
Now I live between my mother’s
death and my own. I close
my eyes and see a different
darkness. Under the trees
wind falls through my hair.
You were a place, Mother.
I’ve always wanted to be a place,
a destination with a park bench.
I’m afraid I’m only the weather.
If you are anything like I am
and I have faith that you are
then you have already stepped
out of your body
and been irrevocably wounded
I was born in 1969
Chances are you were born
during a different year
It doesn’t matter if you were born
three thousand years ago
or if you are born
three thousand years from now
we share what it means to live
Maybe you have gone
back into your body
and found words
the only guide
into the known dark