Today's poem is by Todd Davis

Goat Dream
       

While I sleep, wind shears the plateau, lifts trees by the crown,
uprooting and felling the oldest or weakest, those sick

with some new blight. Long before we were born, grass tried
to steal from trees. A larger pasture. More wood for the fire. Oaks

and maples. Gray children cloned from the roots of a mother-beech.
Huddling beneath a skirt of branches, they held what now melts:

stumps and snags dripping, windthrows dissolving. Not waste,
as the farmer claims, but a reimagining of what comes after

when we wake. Nothing can separate, not even death as it composts
existence. Like water from the mountain when it enters the river.

A beginning starting with what ended at the tributary's mouth.
Incremental loss, teeth tearing moss, grinding the green passage

of what came earlier. All of it entering the body. Joining me
to snow and rain, to the rocks they cling to. A labyrinth of tunnels.

A warren of roots thick with the memory of chestnut mast.
A red eft navigates the leaf-rubble. A trail to follow. Before I wake

a taste in my mouth, a hunger to give thanks for the merciful strength
of jawbone, able to bend metal, to gnash and mince the hardest gourd,

to gnaw the world open and taste what is good.

Copyright © 2024 Todd Davis All rights reserved
from Ditch Memory
Michigan State University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission