White Noise: Narcissus
Once there was a perfect pond
with perfect frogs and perfect reeds
around it: milkweed, pye weed and cattails,
just the best you could imagine.
And there were often perfect clouds
above it drolly looking down
at their rough bellies, semi-distorted
in the almost perfectly placid sheen
of the surface of the perfect pond.
And once there was a frightened pond
which thought the world around it mean,
the endless echoey deaths reported
by gunshots sounding the hills around
and red-tails keening their joy so loud,
rising from the shore to spin
the world like a difficult top, the frail
world, which hardly seemed to need
to see itself in the frightened pond
at all, or in the perfect pond.
There’s another pond choked with weeds,
but cool still in its shadows and swale;
the air there smells bright and clear like gin.
What must have been a house crowds
the bank on one end and sags like a frown
into the water. The house has courted
life and death and lost both, but its deed
is kept safe on the surface of the pond.
White Noise: Mahout
The slate-silent gray elephant leg of the beech
to me sometimes feels just as hard to reach
in a meaningful way as an elephant itself
would be. I touch it and the endless shelves
of parchment that are its leaves don’t even shiver.
The elephant continues across the river
though I’m frantic in my begging it to stay.
I’m not actually frantic with the beech the way
I am in the metaphor, of course, I know
better than that by now after this long show
of years, in which the beech appears on the stage
of my eyes and I touch it with my palm and its age
is as unknowable to me as its name ever was.
And in winter when its leaves all rattle and buzz,
it tells me nothing I can understand.
So I bury the beech again inside my plans.
Nathaniel Perry is the author of two books of poetry, Nine Acres (Copper Canyon, 2011) and Long Rules (Backwaters, 2021), and a book of essays on poetry, Joy (Or Something Darker but Like It) (University of Michigan, 2024). He lives in Virginia and is editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.
Read more poetry by Nathaniel Perry originally published in Terrain.org: “March” and three other poems.
