Oh, Salt Fork, I’ve come to hide
inside your autumn, walk
beneath the cathedral of your branches
become a meditative painting,
a Cézanne—your impressions
revealed in planes of pigment,
the slow study of light,
pin oak and American beech awash
in swaths of topaz and carnelian,
the lake a reverie of reflections.
The universe is out of whack, tremulous
in the pathos of floods, wildfires and drought.
Here, red squirrels wax comedic,
all bark, tuck and tumble, a white-tailed
snorting at their antics.
Tangy pockets of frostweed
and switchgrass intoxicate my airways
weak-knee me into giggles.
Chickadees hip-hop branch to thicket,
their black caps adorably gangsta.
Above, an osprey chirps its tea-kettle whistle,
ascends, thrusts, disappears,
returns, as if parleying ancestral maps
stored inside the lace of its bones.
Cricket songs stitch the afternoon.
I don’t know how long your trails can hold
such abundance, your fervor of tones and textures
winding their way to my insides, transcendent
as a psalm, the rhythm of your balms and breezes
rumoring their promise of peace.
—
Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour is the author of four collections of poetry and is the recipient of a POTY Award, Storytrade Award, Legacy Award, and Best Book Award. She is a Pillars of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio, a member of the Ohio Advisory Group of the National Museum of Women in The Arts, the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project, and is the editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her work has been featured in a number of periodicals and journals including the American Book Review, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poem-a-Day. Find her at www.kariguterseymourpoet.com.
