At first we lay down by the blowing vines.
Next to the ditch, dragonflies.
And a small hawk bisected a cloud.
And he moved, and his breath was sure.
And maybe the river flowed backwards.
Maybe far away the river flowed backwards.
Plastic tops and strings made their way out of the brush.
And a set of gills pulsed, big friend of the stones.
An infant’s body in the Ganges, a white sun. Then
all at once he was walking away I could tell I could tell.
Up the green dune to the forest of lost children.
It was dawn, it was his beautiful back,
his lovely face at the mountaintop. There
were so many others and each one loved
him. What a flame occurs in the throat.
All night I toss petals into the ditch.
All night under the stars revolving.
This poem first appeared in Old Snow, White Sun (Jackleg Press).
—
Caroline Goodwin moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Sitka, Alaska in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. Her recent books are Old Snow, White Sun (JackLeg Press, Washington, DC), Madrigals (Big Yes Press, Arroyo Grande, CA), and Matanuska (Aquifer Press, Wales, UK). She teaches at California College of the Arts, Stanford Continuing Studies, and UC Berkeley Extension; from 2014-16 she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, where she lives on the coast with Jimi Hendrix the Pug. http://www.carolinegoodw.com
