Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
When a three-legged dog chases its tail, the stakes are higher, somehow. These poems are like that: trios of unrhymed tercets that strain toward the phantom limb of a resolution but never quite reach it. I call this form 3verse. It takes its cue from the web comic 3eanuts, which consists of old Peanuts strips from which the fourth panel has been amputated. The result is something perhaps sadder but also freer, more open-ended, succeeding in ways the original strips could not.
Ideas for the poems usually come to me on mid-day walks, whence the working title of the series.
Clouds pull their shadows
across the snow-filled valley
as if dragging for a drowned swimmer.
I watch from the ridge,
mesmerized by the alternation
of gloom and glare.
The No Hunting sign rattles
on the electric pole
above the deep claw-marks of bears.
If it calls often,
it’s a hairy woodpecker,
less often: a downy,
never: an ivory-billed.
Each year the ground grows simpler
and the sky more complex.
Right over there,
in a hollow locust tree,
a hive of wild bees used to sleep.
The footprint of the collapsed house
seems hardly big enough
for a closet,
let alone three floors
of moldering furniture
and typewriters full of dead beetles.
Up in the woods, a beech tree
has filled the opening beside it
with outstretched limbs.
When it died, the porcupine
leaked its fluids onto the snow
like a junker car.
I turn it over
with a stick: no sign
of a wound.
Startled up from the forest floor,
sixteen doves go whistling
into the snow squall.
The sky lacked
the thinnest
whisker of cloud.
Jets untethered by contrails
hardly seemed to roar,
lost in all that blue.
This was the sky I labored at
with crayons,
having given up on the sun.
A four-pronged twig tumbled by wind
has left the oddest tracks
in the snow, no two alike.
The fox, by contrast,
has walked more than a mile
in her own, earlier footprints,
leaving a single set
of blurred tracks with toes
pointing in both directions.
Day by day
the shadows are dwindling,
assuming more realistic shapes,
like the ambitions of a man
in middle age.
The snow hardens underfoot.
I hear the first
mourning dove call of the year:
desire in a minor key.
I was land-hungry in my youth.
In the summer I turned soil
and in winter hoped for snow—
a Platonic kind of field,
rich in solitude as any desert
and as free of weeds,
the leafless rose in the yard
alone with its snarl
of barbed canes.
The perfect pits
in the snow around
the lowbush blueberry stems
awaken in me
the old urge to collect—a museum
of pots and bronzes,
and in the plaza,
a fountain that accommodates
every coin-sized absence…
Small birds fly up
into the bare branches
of the walnut trees.
The phone rings.
Someone we know has had
another breakdown.
At the sound of my voice,
six deer delicate as ballerinas
raise their tails to leap.