Poetry by JC Snyder

(sun rises)

don’t ask
the sun to change its course. everyone knows
the east wins the morning,
west dictates the night.
don’t pine for a
brand new shirt, or a new
route home. don’t beg to erase lines,
they are carbon-dated.

(next day, sun rises)

my father and mother know this. my sister too.
a small child shakes her head with a laugh,
so elementary.

(next day, sun rises)

a leopard
loves his spots; he sits smugly in his tree,
licking a paw absently.
everyone knows this.

(next day, sun rises)

Have you ever looked so closely at your hand that you lose all sense of place and self? Try it now… what do you see? Have you ever seen your own skin this way before?

Discovering My Own Hand

At one time i didn’t exist
except in dreams of woman and man,
(mom and dad!)
yet now, i am here,
setting out free from such
long arm – trekking through
unfamiliar terrain to a
sharp rising range of arteries
jutting above
quiet rivulets of blue. These appear suddenly,
silken, subtle, like glacier waters
ancient below thin cave walls.
Looking closer, there is a cobbled road,
a patchwork of steps leading north.
Like Frost, i take this lesser way,
carefully avoiding
crevasses deepened by time,
weaving through
small hairs, delicate like seaweed,
to venture finally to such rosy
oyster-shell pearl plains.
Here, i take my rest, grateful for the journey,
feeling night’s gentle breeze
like breath from my folks.

I can offer you nothing more than this
single flutter of an eyelash.

You can offer me no more than a wink back
inhale, exhale
then that too is gone.

if you and i are the same,
then why are you always chasing me?
(tail might say to dog)

maybe we live different
paths after all, maybe your face
is not my own.

if you and i are the same,
then why go around, around, around
around?

There is a silence between pauses,
after laughs, seconds before sighs,
You miss these every day.
Just like the last time by the ocean,
did you hear the silence or the crash?

Listen carefully, this is where they live,
waiting for you
to take notice of the blanks,
the space between space,
silent sound between sounds.

This is where they live. Not in dirt or sky,
but with us always, speaking the language
of pauses between breaths,
ocean waves cresting to that perfect silent
unnoticed moment.

(You are all missed).

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

It seems we’re born with a need for stories, for hearing them and telling them. Here’s an account of just one story, made remarkable in part by the teller’s aversion to telling it. Poet Mary Avidano lives in Nebraska.

City Lights

My father, rather a quiet man,
told a story only the one time,
if even then—he had so little
need, it seemed, of being understood.
Intervals of years, his silences!
Late in his life he recalled for us
that when he was sixteen, his papa
entrusted to him a wagonload
of hogs, which he was to deliver
to the train depot, a half-day’s ride
from home, over a hilly dirt road.
Lightly he held the reins, light his heart,
the old horses, as ever, willing.
In town at noon he heard the station-
master say the train had been delayed,
would not arrive until that evening.
The boy could only wait. At home they’d
wait for him and worry and would place
the kerosene lamp in the window.
Thus the day had turned to dusk before
he turned about the empty wagon,
took his weary horses through the cloud
of fireflies that was the little town.
In all his years he’d never seen those
lights—he thought of this, he said, until
he and his milk-white horses came down
the last moonlit hill to home, drawn as
from a distance toward a single flame.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by The Backwaters Press. Mary Avidano’s most recent book of poems is The Zebra’s Friend and Other Poems, 2008. Poem reprinted from The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, The Backwaters Press, 2013, by permission of Mary Avidano and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.