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.
A small cloud on the cliff
above the railroad tracks—
the shadbush is in bloom.
As I drive up the hollow on
our one-lane road, a red-tailed hawk
passes me going down.
All the spring ephemerals are emerging,
leaves wrinkled and damp
like freshly pitched tents.
Clouds hide the top of Ice Mountain
and it looks like a real mountain again,
no turbines in sight.
Below, the ugly subdivision
where a black family once woke
to a burning cross.
I find a shed antler on the powerline,
a twisted Y like the bottom half
of a stick figure.
After all-night rain,
the forest floor is soft
and full of give.
A birch log collapses
when I step on it, but the bark
arches back after I pass.
New ferns uncoil,
heads slowly dissolving
into spine and ribs.
Fungi are like us—
absorbing oxygen, releasing CO2.
This puffball is an abandoned factory.
I nudge the intact wall
with the point of my umbrella.
It’s all out of smoke.
Ovenbirds and the black morel,
writes a friend.
Impossible to see.
A haze of jewelweed sprouts,
the dimpled embryonic leaves
like conjoined twins.
From the valley, the sound
of horses pulling a buggy
in their eight steel shoes.
The crooked sassafras—
something has found under its bark
a blood-colored door.
That gobbling on the ridge:
turkey, or turkey hunter?
That whistle: factory or train?
I follow a vole’s progress
by watching where the grass trembles—
until a breeze springs up.
How the weasel must hate the wind!
And how it must strive to sound
exactly like it.
The first surveyor—1795—
labeled this mountain Violet Hill.
Did he study it in the blue distance,
or see right at his feet
the crowds of violets fluttering
under the attention of the rain?
A warbler just back from the tropics
sings quietly, as if trying to locate
all the notes.
The beech tree has seven eyes
where limbs used to be,
each of them gazing upward.
Down below, the scars
of old, knife-cut graffiti:
Smoke Up. Fly High. Manson Lives.
A warbler in the crown
of a neighboring oak,
its shadow crossing my face.
Hooded, worm-eating,
cerulean, black-throated green.
I tick off the names
like prayer beads,
and later, when a black snake
rears up like an instant tree,
I remember all
the deadly false Edens,
the acres of glass.
Huge tulip poplars
holding tiny leaves to the light,
each with its four incisors—
the sun doesn’t stand a chance.
Already it’s staging a sunset
on the back of my neck
as I crouch down
to puzzle over the maze of roads
on a yellow morel.