1 John 4:16
What the river knows, it keeps
beneath ephemera of foam,
far below pull of eddies and currents,
beneath its bed
and into its cold dark heart,
though from the watershed
we can see
how it harbors fish and lamprey,
feeds swallow and raven,
slakes thirst of sheep and wolf,
all haphazard,
how it floods thirsty fields,
or careless withers into a parched arroyo,
how it goes [...]
Five hours feeling happiness
I have been walking for five hours.
I got off the subway five hours ago.
I kept on walking with the city on my back
Streets becoming tracks
Tracks becoming old dry creeks
Creeks steep
Climbing to the top of one
Then making my way back
Five hours feeling happiness.
Five hours getting numb
Five hours leaving real life down there in [...]
I know this sounds stupid but but
I can’t help it
It is good for my health
My mental health
You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?
The range goes deep into the horizon
It’s been snowing for days
I’m cold comfortable cold
Nobody was coming on the track
It was only me
White to both my sides
White front
White back
Light
I keep following the track
I keep [...]
Keep your craggy, up-thrust mountain peaks!
Your chasms and your cliffsides roughly made
From clattering and shattering of plates
In the devil’s galley by some shade!
I’ll have my soft-edged tinder coulee view,
Tan and green, and gently, supply formed
Like mother earth was always thought to be:
Green-crowned, or seascape prairie grass adorned,
Our traces nestled, sheltered, on her knee.
There’s hope in [...]
Remember wild, ungardened greens?
Dark mulchy woods of unkempt trees?
That broad, telestial paradise
Of birds and bugs and field mice?
Remember snows of varied hues?
High drifts? spring thaws? fat summer dews?
And fragrant, flatland buzzing air?
Paint-palette, musty harvest fare?
We’ve none of those in this dry place
Where seasons are a figment of degrees
And landmarks fickle as a ninja bride:
Trembling within, [...]
Fallow soil, windblown, is a rigid latticework
Pressed hard against patchwork fields etched with snow.
A river, drawn amblingly, God’s Hancock doodle,
Flows its cursive way across the whole.
Jealous of its motion, frozen lakes and ponds
Lie low and sullen in their teardrop bowls.
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More from Jonathon here and here.
The soil’s the earth’s best mother;
Old songs its virile seed
Planted by wind and weather,
Each grown by craft and need.
The soil’s the earth’s best mother:
Each plant a green refrain
Written by a poet father,
And harvested again.
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Photo by Jonathon Penny.
For more poetry by Jonathon and his bio click here.
Leave them lie, these leaves,
Beneath the snow;
Let leaf lead on to leaf in Nature’s way.
Let daylight run its course,
Then let it go;
Let grief lead on to grief, night lead to day.
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Jonathon Penny took his MA in Renaissance literature at BYU and his PhD in 20th Century British literature from the University of Ottawa. He has [...]
Prologue
When two universes collide
one is destroyed, or
is it
masked?
hidden
in the wind,
preserved,
like a seed to come
forth later?
The other however
folds in on itself,
slowly,
a topological twisting,
until it engulfs itself and
is gone.
Coyote-Man, it seems, never
learned how to deal
with motorized vehicles.
They escaped his desert
logic.
Hasje-altye—Talking God—
never prepared him for
the intrusion.
The invasion.
But who’s to blame?
Who would have believed that
metal
and carbon
seduced from the earth
could [...]
I cannot look at moths.
One seizes himself from
spade to spade, in
the haggard mat of grass roots, and
I feel impatient with the
inefficiency of frenetic,
blind antennae.
Still it is my lawn,
great, or small and disturbed.
It’s all my glorious mix of crab
and Florida blue;
roaring ant lions,
and creaking night crawler.
Even the scat of a neighborhood pet
that wandered off the street.
And [...]