from Leafmold ["Reading the same words..."]
from Leafmold ["Oxygen: old houses iced-over...]
from Leafmold ["In the tea leaves..."]
from Leafmold ["Reading the same words..."]
Reading the same words ten times over, calling my brother to sob about fish, falling asleep with an empty belly—the world’s hand over me like woodgrain, my face like hammered metal made of water: a pure hybrid intent on dilution. A curse and a rhyme—a black feather, a red feather, blown in opposite directions. A white dog flashes back and forth behind a fence. Yesterday, the inch-tall anchorite living his days out in our silverware drawer began speaking: “zucchini, cantaloupe, tomato, arugula, sweet corn, beets, chanterelles, leeks, olives…” Rain alone in a room. Death at the bottom of the Maumee River, thinking. The wheat fields are only hungry under a full moon and oysters dream of midnight—water in the back of my throat. Quite drunk and reading “The Man with the Blue Guitar”—made perfect sense this time. Little hero: a fruit fly spiraling relentlessly above the bowl of red wooden apples. Look, now, into the snow-blue eyes of a white and grey cat.
from Leafmold ["Oxygen: old houses iced-over..."]
Oxygen: old houses iced-over and a rooster braced on one leg against the north wind. Give us this night a bowl of soup, a glass of beer, a cake of soap. The namer of wet tree branches is in paradise here. Gone were the mutterings of runoff below sewer grates and gone were the slender, golden-green walleyes that spawned in the river like gods. A fact is nothing if not treacherous. My dark sweater is darker where rain has attacked a seam. When the temperature drops as the day rolls along, you know a change is waiting. The sapling prospers right up through the overturned cinderblock. Nothing is easier to grasp than the there that could be here, the where that would be over, the past that hasn’t come: your breath exiting as random shapes in the year’s coldest hour. The dust that filters through a quail’s feathers as she bathes: no truer burial for my doubts and half-guesses exists. The shooting star—but all heads are turned away.
from Leafmold ["In the tea leaves..."]
In the tea leaves: first a stairway, then an eye. Make something happen now—contradict the stairway, undermine the eye. Anyone who wishes may tear off a piece of my red and black shirt and carry it with them—I have nothing but candle-heat and spittle to offer. Trees vanished along the front: rain erasing leaves being erased, trunks melting in the steam from the ground. She walked past the open door without looking up, hearing the neighbors cackling, the trucks rattling by, the world boiling down again. Little things, big things, all animal things, regardless of your consciousness. Today my lungs feel vicious and dry, but it had nothing to do with you, dear one. Same for the deer’s slender face above the burned meadow; same for the hunk of formless meat bobbing in the weedy shallows, beckoning to the hornets and black flies all afternoon. All human drama becomes insignificant in this place yet this poem somehow demands that I employ the words “irreconcilable differences.” So be it.
F. Daniel Rzicznek’s collections and chapbooks of poetry include Vine River Hermitage (Cooper Dillon Books 2012), Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press 2009), Neck of the World (Utah State University Press 2007), and Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press 2006). Also coeditor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press 2010), Rzicznek teaches at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.
