Miscellaneous
In the beginning
there were maples
I love apples
but it was the succor
of maple sap not the snake
which gave my world
shade
A walnut table in my home
I crawled between the legs
of that antique great grandparental
wood rising to meet my hands
I forgot my knees
beneath nut brown shadows
where they once paid bills
the wood moaned like a bough
in variable weather but would never
default
There is an arborist
who insists that trees
were the first beings to ignore
the official either/or and they adore
the way a single twig is neither male
nor female but dips to a dual
rhythm
Diffuse like pollen
and splayed
no rod of Asclepius
trees are miscellaneous.
What music is for
My daughter says
all of the animal characters
in the novels we read together
speak like people
I suggest it is because people
write about animals
who have eyes set into the sides
of their faces
Stories of foxes and rabbits
squirrels, birds, mice
even whales
might be different if they had eyes
facing front and seated above their noses
My daughter considers this
and dismisses it
replying, “remember that depiction
of the gorilla
the one who thought like a person
pursuing his freedom”
She is right, of course
and I wonder if the problem
isn’t animal physiognomy
but my failure to grasp that bodies
are manifestations of one great thought
split billions of ways
Like verbs
nouns
even water
droplets
My daughter says
ice moans like her little
sister “you would think some
writer would write a story where
people sound like glaciers”
She’s right, again
Great point, my dear
but maybe making people
sound like the rest of nature
is what music is for.
Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in places like Rattle, Belt Magazine, Writers Resist, Mobius, Mad In America, New Verse News, Poetica Review, Topical Poetry, and 365 Tomorrows, among others. His latest poetry collection, Flint River, is published by Alien Buddha Press (2023). Jeremy has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net (twice).
Header photo by gregovish, courtesy Pixabay.
