SPRING IS SOON
Before you say if to the road,
you have to draw the curtains
over every mirror. You have to
sanitize the voices in your mind.
The mornings are all the body
can feed on. They buzz like words
you have forgotten. A black beetle
jousts with your newest, crazy fears.
Maybe your breathing is an old habit
sold to pill bottles. Maybe daffodils
tease a few small bumblebees into March
while you crank a truck you don’t have.
FREEDOM SEARCHER, ARE YOU?
I’m not sure if the trickiest freedom
is in the dirt of our pioneer ancestors.
Or if it ever sings, and if it does, it croons
silently like a bucket of bruised apples
in the cellar, and that real cellar is buried
after a flood, ninety years ago, so you
lug around a metal detector, and if you’re
hoping for gold coins, the tone is different,
more of a buzz, like an intruder’s cry razzed
from eternity. Why else are you here
with all your settler myths?
Clyde Kessler has been publishing poems for more than fifty years, and during that time has published four books, most recently, Fiddling At Midnight’s Farmhouse in 2017. Also, during that time, he has done field research on birds, butterflies, moths, and dragonflies, and published a few scientific articles in natural history journals.
Chantarelle's Notebook 