If you knew the forest
If you knew the forest was listening,
what would you ask & for whom
& for whom was the scent of soil made
& for whom the green vines
that hug these hills through winter
& why
love this place, of all places?
Nothing was made for nothing
declares the One who loves
this little park
this pocket of wildness
behind Connecticut Ave
that holds no
grand Sequoyahs
no buttes or coyotes
but plenty of holly
and oak,
no clear
rivers coursing with a Cascade’s worth
of snowmelt and boulder
but a good few brooks, quiet brooks
of a stream named for a thoughtful
(white) man of the landed
gentry
with enough money
or sense or
taste
for earth or
all
of the above that he
or his wife or his children or maybe
someone he never met,
decades after his death,
who needed an elder, claimed him:
a name to hold
this closeness with trees
this kinship where
a regathering from air
falls in the fingers of a book
and is carried into this book
(these pixels) sent
by someone who loves you enough
to send you a poem,
a tenuous thing
& rooted
as we are.
.
In the beginning
— After Denise Levertov
In the perpetual stillness
of Sanborn House, where Autumn set
our desks aglow, we learned
how to read a poem, how to circle
humbly, rather than run through
words we thought we understood
mirror, dream, return
how to drop syllables like clumps of yeast
into the warm
waters of sound.
After class, how radiant
the world was, as we strolled
the market on the college green,
chatting with the baker, devouring a scone, laughing
as the maple
icing cracked free. I remember brushing
loose crumbs from her lips.
It is good said a voice between us.
Blessed are the children who believe
in first love lasting, who misread the symbol
of a clock tower’s shadow pointing west.
Her face was small
and tawny as a bird’s. I adored
her freckles, their sheen in the sun
and her thrumming spirit
that the both of us caged –
and for what? It haunts me still.
An idea, an image, a symmetry.
No matter now. The fingers I write with
once brushed her lips; our tenderness
leavened a life.
We learned at least one good thing.
.
Kip Dooley is a writer, photographer and athlete of Irish, English, French and German settler descent. His writing has appeared in In These Times, Minnesota Playlist and The Barn Raiser, and he’s at work on a book of essays about food and family with his mother, food writer Beth Dooley, for Milkweed Editions. By day, he manages communications & events for the Public Interest Technology program at New America. Shaped by the lakes and forests of traditional Anishinaabe and Dakota lands in Minnesota and Wisconsin, he lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife Alli and their hound dog Lita.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 