Wilderness Interface Zone

by Tyler Chadwick
 
1. First
“She’s like an apple
in a water balloon,”
the doctor says. They watch
their fruit unfold across
the screen in light movements.
Submerged beneath her sea
enclosed by silent walls,
slow fluid breaths inspire
her ripening, baptize
the room in innocence.
Within this matrix
of tranquility,
they sense her beckoning
through sound’s translucent waves,
calling from her still place
into time’s raging sea
for a Return. Then Light
ripples [...]

(For Leslie Norris)
By Tyler Chadwick
Day’s last reflections
catch on wind-swept ripples
as two geese throw shadows
across watered silence.
Embraced by echoes,
each circles the other.
Tracing this current,
I watch Hudson’s pair
venturing back
across the continent:
Her wings bear no scars
of hapless encounter
with fox or wolf or man;
his body carries
no hunter’s spray,
the lead that felled him
to the dogs. They bask
in this dusking plane,
watching [...]

(On “Pond at Thompson’s Station” by J. Kirk Richards)
by Tyler Chadwick
The sun has been misplaced.
Or, if you’d like to get more
Biblical, it’s returned
to the dove’s abyss—or
was that Milton? I can’t be sure
as I dance so near the beginning
with words so supple they
bend into themselves until
only the landscape remains:
the field flushed white, hills
seduced into bed
by cloud [...]

10 May 2008
by Tyler Chadwick
I wish I knew the names
of all these birds: I’m sure that’s a sparrow,
wings wound tight against the wind,
dropping to the tip of a cypress
before re-mounting the sky; and
two more there, circling the birdfeeder,
vying for seed. And there, a robin, breast flared
even at this hour,
sifting the xeriscape for a meal,
prouding its [...]