I.
So many countries, so many crawdad holes to chart.
The corn starch stalk sticking up the pants leg.
He sings each bend of the river,
the snake shedding mud, fingers
stopping each knotty hole in the log
just below the surface of the keel.
The beerkeg upturned by the burdock.
Jewelweed at the start of school.
II.
The hammer munching the loaf of bread
does not think it wastes food;
too busy searching
for the nail
it chews and chews.
III.
Emerging from the cracked clay beneath the bridge
over the Little Wabash
all the mosquitoes
read to him
with their busy tongues.
The dragonflies ride piggyback
over the dank and tiny slough
of the hog trough water.
All the animals are too shy
to come in.
IV.
The scroll of the world
mashed under his arms:
Any one can find a road.
The ditches
take planning.
Bet on a horse
and you ride it.
Ride a horse,
and all the bets
are on you.
V.
Racetrack, hootchie cat, South End Tavern,
Thistledown, Wynoose, Dundas.
Red Hills, Chiggers, Church Chowders, The Kent Bog.
But there is a place for everything. The legend
on the lip of the page. Vernon Reservoir
where the fish speak with the voice of Rumi
before the dust of the world settles on them. Blue
tick hound dogs scratching
their stink parts all raw. One year you pulled
Greece from the pot like a lobster, claws
pointed downward. A whole year of meat.
Or the state of Wyoming
in the pronghorn’s square pupil, the 4-H goat
every child wants to dance with.
VI.
Major Ragain, you are
a beer-drinking Chautauquea, a picker of horses
that could hold the weight of James Wright, the bright
greeting of Ohio
spoken each morning in Japanese.
The other side of the world
from your side of the bed. The moon
as it looks outside your window, the way your bed
looks from the mares of the moon,
the surface of your desk,
the ink smeared all over your fingers
last night, trying to write your way home
past all the skittery deer
you try to keep balanced
on the weedy lips of the road.
The line from Rumi is taken from Robert Bly’s translation of Rumi’s poem “Eating Poetry,” appearing in the Poetry East anthology The Last Believer in Words (Poetry East, Nos. 45-6, 1998)
(Originally published in Central Ohio Writing, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring/Summer 2002, pp. 9-11.)
Daniel Bourne: Poet, Editor, Translator 