By Dylan Stover
Over the burrs asleep
and winter’s bowed weeds, sunlight
turns into things without bias:
There’s a shadow,
I say, plainly peeling
from the bark of the sumac
trees: the need inside’s been dead, white
like bone for the last two summers
(perhaps I alone have counted
the time this way),
as I continue to cut
a trail through high snow: my system of
pocketings and ruts—history
of a blind wanderer’s strut over the field’s
white wrecks—into which the poplar leaves
scuffle and at last find some semblance
of rest—wherever, I guess, there’s a will
to fill what’s hollowed, there’s a wind to push
one into the keyholes of death:
See, I’m not a drifter after all,
but a sort of locksmith—
I don’t know
if sorrow is strictly necessary here,
if aimlessness was a condition of the fall
of leaves; but I do follow
what this January meadow shows
of my retreat: every holepunch step I make
becomes a repository for the windblown
drift of a goldenrod’s seed, or dropped fragments
of the over-bearing trees; how each footprint delved
just-below, and so-deep, becomes a well
for tomorrow’s gifted spring treasury:
that same fool’s hope,
or one-in-a-million chance,
to start it all—bloom-gush, dry, then repeat—
over again.
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Dylan Stover has worked variously as a landscaper, donut maker, field botanist, factory assembler, museum collection manager, and cheesemonger. Poetry, he is assured, isn’t a real job, just a way of appeasing the language deities. He currently resides in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where he works for money. He doesn’t own any pets.