Alignment

Hoofs punctuating
the tawny fur of four
legs like quotation
marks of a final line,

splayed upward
in angles of non-sense
above the foam and swirl
the rocks whip up

under which the deer’s carcass
continues in a still twist,
head invisible in the unknown
underwater cold in its

appropriate time at the dead
end of the season while the new
struggles in the thin atmosphere
above, where limbs align to

the grounding below and the face
toward the reassurance of sky,
an upper-world stance, safe until a slip
brings a flip, a tumble from head to toe.

  John Zedolik__

Speed of Thought

Drops the nut with a swish
and crack to the slopes
of the small forest’s floor

follows in seconds
a squirrel’s scrabble
to the prize—before another

plummet to the muffled
decline and another pursuit
that beats even a ludicrous

thought to scramble over
the chain links and descend
to the hickory nut’s thunk

too slow the two-stepped
thinker to claim the toothy prize
that now goes to the one

fleet and furred, comfortable
in his own element, as skin,
anyhow, to use it better

than the clumsy ape who might
only imagine to have lightning limbs
and endless license to gather

given life under the leaves.

  John Zedolik__

Low Friction

Those plastic orange meal-trays
did not break despite our use
of them as toboggans

on that slope above the lake,
just aside the school on the late
afternoon we returned

before the teen-students
and their scholar-needs
that would eliminate

the time and empty hill
necessary for our twilight
descent from untrammeled

snow to its mate of the same
below, blue-white under
the spectrum-range of red

January’s skies displayed
like a banner as if in defiance
of the month’s frigid decree

and allied to our revolutionary
regression to childhood slides
we would put aside in a dropping

hour, just as those trays that would
slide back under an identical,
unused kitchen mate in a dark

and quiet cafeteria to which we,
as adults and moderate local powers,
had privilege to its flexible wares,

while our imagination held the key.

  John Zedolik__

© Luigi Cazzaniga: spazialita' conosciute

  

Worn Fabric

My shadow startled me,
as it snuck up, as I supposed,
under a pale and unconcerned light

as if my misdeeds and mistakes
were returning after having
lost my spoor in the travail

of moving time, motley crowds,
and my diverging conditions of life
that left room for confusion

and maneuver in the ensuing
tumult—easy to grab my coat
and get out—give the shade

the slip. But, of course, it came back
after having never left. I mistook
it for that coat I half-threw across

my shoulders so carried it all
these years without a weighty thought
about those ancient ruins I had wrought.

  John Zedolik__