Gnomon
       

i.

You don't have to go too far
to live a full life,
if you're traveling
the great distances
of circles.

Autumn 2020.

Unlike the planes,
these cranes haven't been grounded.
These cranes aren't scared.
These cranes are the same cranes
that drooped to draggle their landing gear
through the calm surface waters
of every story ever told.
I know these cranes.
They are incorruptible.

As are the soughing grasses,
the mopsy-tops of goldenrod, the chicory
and the fields right stupid with clover,
the Queen Anne's lace,
this tangle of trefoil! (thinks he is so serious,
I nearly laugh out loud),
these fields
as familiar as soft hair
and aprons.

ii.

And there, up ahead,
a student of philology,
a juvenile turkey vulture,
all pluck and ponder,
ogling over the latitude of a grass snake.
When he stops thinking for a moment
and manages to wrangle the snake
into his claws,
it is still alive and wriggling.

I think of Hass saying,
"One of the powers of poetry is,
you make a line."

I've parked my car
and am walking the acreage in circles.
No matter which direction I turn,
I am always headed for home.

iii.

Chicory,
you are as beautiful as my mother was
in her black turtleneck,
wearing her forties
and her mascara
and her lipstick.

Hello corn,
broadcasting
your dark country's national anthem,
a cold-war kind of cricket clatter.

Dear cranes,
your plaintive cries a singular sotto voce
sung by an immense, sad,
brown-shod
beige-overcoated
bureaucrat.

Sow thistle.
              All butter and burrs.

iv.

Cool wind.

Yet somehow
a warmness
rises from the earth,
a yeast-like scent
permeating
everywhere, everything.

v.

I meet my match in maturity,
clots of choke-cherries
dangle over gravel,
a quarter-past ripeness.

I fill my hands with berries
and plug my mouth full,

suck loose the sweet skins,
puckering,

then rapid-fire the pits.

I am no woman.

But rather,
more profoundly
what a real woman is.

vi.

(I have been
silently numbering
the bear paths
through corn stalks,
through grasses,
past chokecherries,
through asters.

I put an end to this now.

This is no labyrinth.

It is only how silence

passes through silence.)

vii.

A butterfly dapples,
a hallucination,
the fringe of a hayfield.

This is no Terrence Malick movie.

Something
is at play
in the distances...

viii.

Thinking of bear scat,
I finish up my last mouthful
of chokecherries.

In my mouth—
a whole hive of honey.

ix.

Spontaneous skein of wind.

              Bye-bye butterfly.

x.

(I'll take any intoxicant
you can dream up
and raise you, triple!
Do you know
how exhilarating it is
to pee in a cornfield,
stalks taller than you,
to discover
you're crouching beside
a steaming mire of bear scat?!)

xi.

The clouds
over the corn fields
take on the strange stewing density
of an ocean.

Up or down?

And who will swim?

I walk on,
this Death-joy walking
utterly thorough.

xii.

The longer I walk,
hawk/weed becomes simply hawkweed again.

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Copyright © 2022 Erin Wilson All rights reserved
from Twelve Mile Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission