National Poetry Month
Poem of the Week
April 5, 2004
Why let it matter so much?: the morning's morningness,
early dark modulating into light
and the tall thin spruces jabbing their black outlines at dawn,
light touching the slope's outcroppings of rock and yellow grass,
as I sit curled under blankets in the world
after the world Descartes shattered,
a monstrous fracture
like the creek's water surging through broken ice.
A silent wind bounces spruce branches
in that motion that sets molecules vibrating latitude by latitude
to crack the absolute
of feeling, of knowing what I know, of knowing who I am,
while down the road the town wakes to hammer and saw---
a sound that says to some, if you don't grow you're dead---
and then farther down the elk and deer gather
at a farmer's fence for his handout of hay.
Late January: just outside Rocky Mountain National Park:
a high branch of ponderosa offers a rosette
of needles blackgreen and splayed as in a Japanese scroll painting,
which is beautiful if I focus there and not on the sprawl I'm part of
in this rented condo where I don't want to live since I, too, need
more rooms to haul my coffee to, more bookshelves for books
I haven't time to read---bird chatter!---I shouldn't make one more
resolution
I can't keep to spend more time with friends.
But it's morning and morning's my time of day
as spring's my season; more light, I say.
I do regret some things I've done and if I could,
I'd do things differently: start sooner, say, look deeper.
One flake of snow drifts down slantwise,
a lovely interruption to my tirade---
as each aspen is to the larger grove of taller firs---
and brings me back to what's happening here.
Tires rumble as a jeep passes,
rumble that in hours will crescendo into a roar
and, down on the plains, into that background drone
I don't hear even when I hear it penetrating my walls and sleep
because I've learned---haven't you?---to live without one
square inch
of silence. But it's morning light filling the skies if you're up
to see it,
sky washed white with thin clouds
the ground white with last night's snow.
--Mary Crow
First printed in Ploughshares, Fall 2001. Copyright (c) 2001, by Mary Crow. Used with
the author's permssion.