Wrens Hopping Up the Dogwood Limbs & The Work of the Centuries
By Jeff Hardin
WRENS HOPPING UP THE DOGWOOD LIMBS
I’m sure today had other plans, but I’m still here.
Between me and the cattails, a race: who’ll grow taller?
Who looks more ridiculous leaning in wind?
Come fall, I’ll set up residence at the windowsill
and be an old man for a season. Just me and oblivion
and those afternoon naps where I’m a poem of a single word.
Given a chance, what would I do? Yes, what would I do?
I’d stretch out in the creek and be a stone gone smooth.
I’d climb up in the spider’s web to catch the morning light.
Distraction. Distraction. It’s all distraction. Except
when wrens start hopping up the dogwood limbs.
They’re dancing, I know, so why not join their call?
The narcissus bulb may one day grow into a stalk of corn.
And what will we do then—late in a barren world—
when fields once chided are a harvest of listening leaves?
THE WORK OF THE CENTURIES
If I sit for an hour and watch leaves tremble,
I’m doing the work of the centuries come down
as prayers
to say how little the centuries have changed.
The oak I pass daily has memory too. I must be familiar
steps for it to stand so still before me. The shape its
limbs make
mirror my own attempts to hold up the light.
Is it possible a child already has a mind grown
old? What else call his rollicking in oak leaves,
how he climbs to his feet
with a radiant face?
One could do worse than be devoured, like Neruda,
by a lily breaking on water. I know I’ve been
stolen by the wake of a rowboat
avoiding shore.
It’s taken a while, but I’ve reached this conclusion:
I want only what the crow in the evening grass
wants,
and the crow wants whatever it finds.
Jeff Hardin is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Small Revolution, No Other Kind of World, and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear inThe Cortland Review, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Sugar House Review, The Laurel Review and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in Tennessee. Visit his website at www.jeffhardin.weebly.com.