Cacciatorepoetry.net » Man vs. Nature

Bumps in the Road

bumps-in-the-road

I woke up one morning with the expression “bumps in the road” in my head. So I designed a poem around it. This was written for a friend of mine who was getting married. The moral: You may trip up along the way, but just keep heading down the path together.

Winding through the brilliant wood,
Where lovers amble berry-fed,
Runs a narrow earthen aisle —
Irksome hurdles in its pebbled tread.

With maples tow’ring to the sky,
Lining ev’ry random crook,
It only follows that about the way,
Vie cords of interruptive root.

Along the shadowed leafy course,
O’er which the owl muses tranquil,
Slumberous stones spring coldly forth,
Commingling with unwitting ankles.

Bobbing between root and stone,
Like some angry nest a-swarming,
Tufts of grasses yellow-green,
Confuse the path without warning.

And fallen from the arms above,
Lie blackened limbs and nodeless branches,
Whose fingered webs of tangle twigs,
Outstretch before all advances.

Ah, the corridor does not exist,
Of forest floor unabated;
The trick is to accept sudden missteps,
And pursue the road nature created,
Like a set of vines forever braided.

Confessions of a Poor Swimmer

Swimming was never one of my strengths growing up. Still isn’t.

When swimming in a pool underground,
In shallow water is where I am found,
Trying to resist, with eyes fixed,
The still and silent lure, of
The deep end coaxing me toward,
The opposite cement shore.

Logjam

logjam

Saw an old photograph in a magazine of a guy sitting atop a stump in the middle of a river. There were trunks and limbs everywhere — a massive logjam. If that happened during the fall months back in the 1800s, you were out of luck until Spring.

When his back was at its broadest,
And his means were at their most modest,
He shouldered his neck of the land,
With a muley saw gripped in hand,
That shrilled lead in a tree-splitting chorus.

All autumn he labored in good employ, —
Thru the pain his bones ached to avoid; and
After the clearing had sapped all his strength,
He bucked the timber to market’s length, then
Pointed the mules to’ard the chilly St. Croix.

To the mill his kill he dutifully skid
Downstream, as it lazily slid,
But when the water became o’erwhelmed,
By the lumb’ring white pines he had felled,
He feared himself a stuck river pig.

Like brothers-in-arms, the limbs banded first,
Then leant on each other for added support,
And when reinforcements shored up the rear,
His heart filled up with heavy despair, for
The backwoods refused to march forward!

Its current now past, ‘twas a sure lock,
It would take thirty days to unblock —
Far too long at this time of year, in
The unforgiving Midwestern air;
The river beneath would soon turn to rock.

Atop a stump he paused to critique,
The nature of his calamity:
Until next April’s next faraway thaw,
He must surrender to an icy stall,
Constructed by boards and planks to be.

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Shoveling Wet Snow

Sometimes, in the bleak of winter, I pine to get out of the house and abuse my body. Shoveling the driveway always does the trick.

Shoveling a driveway full of wet snow;
Nothing to do but bend, thrust, lift and throw,
Over and over and over again.

It’s a chance in the drear of winter to lose intellect,
To lose self.
No higher consciousness,
No considering.
Just muscle and fat and bone, and my heavy panting —
All in the solitude of a bitter cold
New England night.

You know the panting.
It’s the type that sounds like you’re breathing
In slow motion, with your ears plugged full —
Loud and measured and very, very natural;
A reminder that oxygen, not food or water,
Is our foremost essential sustenance.

There are other things at play, too —
Other things that make you forget your intellect.
There’s the sound of the thwap
As I toss the snow over a rising bank of white.
And the dull concussion of my leaden boots
As I tromp around slow and mindless.
And the buzzing of the power lines overhead,
That sounds like the sun baking a desolate savannah.

And then there’s the weight of the snow,
Sitting there like a lump on the end of my shovel;
So heavy, it easily crooks my back in two,
Like a fat child on the end of a seesaw.

It’s all so refreshingly mindless:
The panting.
The thwap.
The concussion.
The buzz.
The weight.
The solitude.

Nothing to do but bend, thrust, lift and throw.
Over and over and over again.

When the warmer weather finally comes,
I think I’ll head out back and dig me a hole.

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The Arrival of a Storm

arrival-of-a-storm

Oftentimes the anticipation of an event is more memorable than the event itself. In this case, a slow-approaching summer storm. One of my first free-verse poems.

[With each minute that passes by,
The air grows heavy,
And heavier still.]

At dusk the sky is leaden overhead,
The clouds fathoms deep and rudderless,
Moving aft, beckoning;
Peering out my window,
My hands scale the screen for first dew, —
The lawn in checkered view,
Breathes with swirling leaves,
Marshaled by a brutal upcreeping wind.

To the east, the birds rally and dive,
And sing a melancholy strain, trying
To outflank the widening thunder
That barrels hollow across the sky.
Then all at once, it arrives:
A precipitation of glory!
Silent quasars release o’er yon,
Beacons of the advancing march, then
Great gouts of rain crackle the ground,
Splashing my elbows on the sill.

In the distance, an old man slogs outside
To batten the doors of his shop;
From his hand a single ray of light
Pierces the dark, and bounces
Along the mud-splattered ground.

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The Last Snowman

Forget that crick in your knee. As a kid, this was how you truly knew Old Man Winter was on his last legs.

With each roll of April snow,
My statue’s head and body grow;
But tracks of green in arrears,
Coincidentally appear,
Reminding me that Spring is here.

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Working the Crop

working-the-crop1

In the dry, blistering days of summer, a farmer’s only hope is prayer. One of the best photos I’ve ever snapped with words.

His time like money wisely spent,
A farmer’s tendered one lament —
To wring his brow in the trembling air,
While his yoke unflummoxed blankly stare;
Then like his blade chevron-shaped,
Touch his hands to singly pray,
For a faraway black overcast,
To thresh him free from the chaff.

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