September 19: Something Different, Feeling Creative, "Poem After Annie Dillard"

I'm going to do something a little different tonight, because I'm feeling slightly creative.  This afternoon, I finished a draft of a poem on which I've been working for several weeks.  I think it's good, but I can't be sure just yet.  Got to give it a couple of days.

However, I am still feeling a little creative, so I decided to write a quick poem of the chapter titles of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  I thumbed through my copy of the book this evening, and, unlike other times, no particular passage stuck in my head.  But I kept coming back to the headings of each chapter.  They use sometimes beautiful, sometimes strange terms.  I thought to myself, here's a poem just waiting to be written.

So, please keep in mind that this is a first and last draft.  It is for amusement, not serious contemplation.  A poetic exercise.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.

Poem After Annie Dillard

by:  Saint Marty

Heaven and Earth in jest look down and up
at us, seeing only the pitiful winter skins
of polar bears, black as the fixed universe
where everything revolves around this planet,
untying the knot of cornel bark, jettisoning
the present into the grasshoppers of spring.
Intricacy is nothing more than a flood of silt,
the fecundity left behind by tsunamis, where
landscape shifts, moves its ass like some teenage
boy stalking a neighbor girl, his nightwatch
from his bedroom window rewarded
with the horns of the altar, bright northing
glimpses of her neck, shoulders, the waters
of separation that map the blades of her back.