Gravity
Each window I looked out of there were crops
Rows blurring into the path of each other
Even the weeds swooned in the heat of this geometry
The birds that gathered did not gather long
The groundhogs skittered toward their borderland salvations
All my imaginary friends in the end betrayed me
My friends at school lived on another planet
They lived in a house with another house next door
Why would they worry about falling off the edge?
Why would they notice if I should vanish from the earth?
Condensed Version
The body swooning up into the air
When I died and entered my old yard
The baseball field white angel of the ball
The wind that made the hog smell come our way
The boy that rose into the limbs of the falling tree
The owl listening to the mouse by name
The garden hose wrapped harmless as a snake
My mother who loved snakes with her sharp shovel
My father whose arm got caught beneath the ploughshares
The trees that died because we built a house
The words that popped out in my father’s innards
The words that led to more words spreading in his final year
The words that ate up other words until nothing could be left
All the Corners of the World
This morning the bright frost in the old cornrows from last fall,
the fog trying to hold on,
the deer in the corner of the field, the white flag of their tail
another shade of white, the movement of the world
besides my own.
Our niece in Philadelphia with her own white nurse’s mask
moving from bed to bed. I think about what she is thinking,
her daughters at home. Each action she makes—
her fingers flipping a light switch
or brushing the top of someone’s face—
pulling a dire string that might unravel
the precious everything of someone’s life.
So much happens so far away. But then it comes closer.
Think of all the times you have loved
to see a deer grazing.
Or your panic if it happens to cross
the road leading to your bed.
How close do we all abide
to disaster anyway?
Carolyn, you did not sign up for this.
Deer leaping past headlights.
Your two fawns
breathing for your return
in the dark, far ditch.
Daniel Bourne’s books of poetry include The Household Gods and Where No One Spoke the Language. His poems have appeared in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Guernica, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Field, Michigan Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Plume, and others. Born on a farm in southern Illinois, since 1980 he has lived in Poland off and on, including 1985-87 on a Fulbright for the translation of younger Polish poets, and most recently in 2018 and 2019 for work on an anthology of Baltic Coast poets. His translations of Polish poets appear in a number of journals, including Field, Colorado Review, Partisan Review, Plume, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, and Prairie Schooner. A collection of his translations of Bronisław Maj, The Extinction of the Holy City, is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press in 2023, and his third collection of poetry, Talking Back to the Exterminator, has recently won the 2022 Terry L. Cox Poetry Award, and is forthcoming in 2024.