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
© 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__