and am told to bury them in the yard so they’ll ripen.
Author: Dave Bonta
I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. My books of poetry include FAILED STATE: HAIBUN, ICE MOUNTAIN: AN ELEGY, BREAKDOWN: BANJO POEMS, and ODES TO TOOLS.
Every autumn
I’m impressed anew by the sheer inventiveness of death.
I dreamed a giant silk moth fluttered into a museum
and joined its life-like relatives on the wall.
I dreamed I’d written a book about all my disguises.
When I woke up, it was true.
The rain comes hammering on the plush roof of the earth.
on the plush roof of the earth. After a while, it opens one by one its mush rooms.
Four months away
even the full moon isn’t
where I left it
I place myself
on the Underground map uneasily, wondering how such ideal points and lines can add up to anything resembling the surface.
Bronze Age
I dreamed myself adrift in a forest of the dead.
bronze Gandhi
patina sending tendrils
toward the earth
Do the inhabitants of the past ever tire
of our clueless questions and our rapacious gaze?
What is it that we are missing
between footfalls, in a caught breath? What tic or tick of rhetoric makes the ground so unsolid wherever we are told we must mind the gap?
Christmas in July
the half-dozen hues
of dead needles
