The maple is shedding—
I lug in firewood, crushing
summer with each step.
No visitors this month.
Me alone
for distraction.
To hike sidehill
this slope studded with rocks
is an awkward honor.
Ah, trapped spider,
evolution
didn’t plan on sinks.
Sleek does drink
and nuzzle at the pond.
On my desk, a gray hair.
Moonrise over Goodlow
sends juniper shadows far
downhill on frosted grass.
The pond skinned with creased
ice this morning—a spider
begins an expedition.
In the blue distances
of snowy land this evening,
spirit sings its silence.
John Daniel’s most recent books are Gifted, a novel, and Of Earth: New and Selected Poems. These poems are from a collection in progress, Dryside Verses: Four Seasons on Goodlow Rim, written during a sojourn in the semiarid steppeland of south-central Oregon. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, Daniel has written ten books of essays, memoir, poetry, and fiction. He lives in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.
Read two poems by John Daniel and an excerpt of his novel Gifted previously appearing in Terrain.org .
Photo by S. Borisov, courtesy Shutterstock.
