for Tianna Kennedy
we wind up sun’s tresses
conversing, strangers disappearing
patridgeberries giddy red
band reading land legacies
in wolf limbs and wide crowns
blistered bark and boggy bits
ascending to sky’s green hem
darkness locked on steepest
final ridge slopes
when wormwood eyelashes
rise in crisp lichened gloom
along the ridge line
a grey whale rises
up through stone waves
surfaces, eye opening
whirled in wrinkled waves
a pod now
crests blue white gray
cast zinc hides ripple out
immaculately lined
the land
the sea before it
looks out at us
and we smile and exclaim
and gambol in the mossy
savory leaved surf
newly unalone
we look back
a faint spout of mist
rises from valley frost
eyes winking as they
swirl leatherily closed
I have never seen a
creature so old
I have never looked
in a mirror
til now
—
Brad Vogel is the author of the poetry collections Find Me in the Feral Pockets (featured in The New Yorker in spring 2024) and Broad Meadow Bird. His writing has appeared in The New York Times and various poetry publications. He founded NYC Poets Afloat, a residency and reading series aboard ships. He lives and canoes in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which reminds him of his one-time home in post-Katrina New Orleans.
