the first arabesque of a new wild.
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.
mountainside
echoing with tundra swans
a dead deer
A small box of leftover parts
from all the broken things I tried to fix.
In every quest narrative, it’s the very beginning that I like—
before the first adversaries appear, when the path is still a magic carpet and has yet to reveal its serpentine coils.
quartzite
on a warm winter day
the absence of bees
trapped in ice
the cattails shape-shift
into clouds
It was only when I switched to unlined paper
that the poems began to come without being called.
Just by living and pushing back against the world
we build our memorials, our rings of stone.
Teeth sprung from their skull prisons
enjoy a second obsolescence as typewriter keys.
Audubon walk
admiring a pheasant’s
dismembered foot
On a friend’s kitchen counter,
three potatoes had gone feral, growing ghostly branches out of their eyes. I kept my shirt pulled down so my navel wouldn’t get any ideas.
For a moment I forgot where I was,
the familiar trail colored by my train of thought, which might take me anywhere.
