Adagio
even the things that are most “thinglike”
are nothing more than long events
– Carlo Rovelli
These few acres once
a homestead once
ancient forest once
scraped clear by ice-
dragged stone
Not being but becoming each
boulder an adagio of dust
A stand of second growth and waving
fields of goldenrod cradle
the little house nothing
between us and wild yonder
but a few sheltering gases
The darkness out there not
the emptiness we sense but
an entity its own waving field
Afternoon fades distinctions
dissolve What’s animate
inanimate Most of us slide
into silence crickets
chant cattails tap one another
Languages overlap an acorn sprout
launches through decaying
layers of leaves I shuffle
words Beneath the trees
roots interlace
Distance
A blustery headland cluster
of boulders remnant of henge
or burial ground though when
we step between the stones we find
a hearth of recent use Sunlight
spills in the gusts cut off
Below the unheard waves recast
the shoreline ancient people knew
We venture down the rugged
path skirt a marsh scale
grassy dunes descend
into distance ocean sky
Thrum of breakers burn
of wind tide edges in
Marginal
Ice pond watery
crown I skip stones
splatter reflections
of bankside pines
scoot across sprouting
cracks in the crust
Come spring the stones sink
to the bottom
Threshold and the space
on either side
What’s weighty what’s
insignificant
Margin feather on the edge
of a bird’s wing
The way meaning travels
from border to marker
to not worthy of notice
Latin margo The quarry
of a hawk is a mark
Visit
Foot path stir and snap splashes
of sunlight scoot across trunks
Forest-combing we garner pine cone
scales acorn caps chanterelle
She comes into the cabin little smile
on her face notes and scraps dusty sill
settles on the day bed I’d tidied a bit
rolled up wrinkled packing paper
She tears off a piece sketches
clouds in the creases
ancestor painting a stag
from a curve on a cave wall
Gray-blue storm swells tint
of petrichor brush of thunder
She adds a strip of birch bark
from our gleaning boat
or home in the tempest
Katrinka Moore is the author of Wayfarers, Numa: An Epic Poem with Photo Collages, Thief, and the chapbook This is Not a Story, winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize. She and her mentee in the PEN American Prison Writing Program were recently awarded the L’Engel-Rahman Prize for Mentorship. Moore lives in the northern Catskill Mountains of New York.
Header photo by Dean Pennala, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Katrinka Moore by Michael Lawrence.
