on the Underground map uneasily, wondering how such ideal points and lines can add up to anything resembling the surface.
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.
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
cloudy Sabbath
all eyes are on the bright
heirloom tomatoes
Threat levels us:
targets of surveillance, casualties of public sector cuts, persons of interest to advertisers and politicians.
Purely cosmetic.
A found videopoem.
where that heron used to stand
a painting of a heron
In Weimar
the very trees are smothered
in historic moss
Immersed in a language you don’t understand,
you become even more attuned to the music of speech and the dark magic of writing.
