Rodney Nelson

Lake of the Woods

I had to come to this much water
to this hard true beach and shell and wood
not wanting to read
                  having written
my would and shall I wanted this wind
to happen on me where I might not
have been as it did on the lake now
I had to hear in my sleep the hum
of big water continuing a
jack-pined half mile away as if I
were not anyone there but a shell
or wood fragment of all that was
                                  I
wanted to read that beach
                     would and shall

Goldening

Between dike and river the color in willow
hung on in the lull of a warm not summery
day
                   hip-high dock weed kept some too
                   russet that in
the clarity of afternoon seemed to golden
and invite the watcher but to what
                   a student
crow worked at the river edge to the chivvying
of a parent
                   he might not have wanted to leave
                   for it to either
                                   der Tag ist süss und ladet
                                   ein
his argument might have run who knew only
summer
                  nothing of any fadeaway or end
                  no
current even showed and smoke would have gone straight
up and been reflected
                  too late
                  the autumn for
that was over and olden crows and olden men
were ready to yield to winter not this
                  goldened
day of no motion that invited them to what

The day is sweet and inviting.
                        --Wilhelm Lehmann

Prairie Wetland

Trail went around on the hummocky earth and
around and even without a hiding tree
he had a right approach and needed not have
flushed the heron he had not known of but a
green heron hove up loud out of the reed bed
circling
                  that same June day he went around in
a public room and waited half-hidden to
talk with a known right woman he could see but
she did not turn and moved away and out which
made a hunter alien of him who had
not been going around to flush anyone

Sky Without Let

He knew how prairie waited outside the grove
and the lanterned interior wherein he
had nursed on fume of pipe and kitchen
                   how huge
and all-daylight it would be even in a
low-snow winter with wrinkled white old paving
to run out to
                that in a dry hot summer
it would be hard too with naked earth chapping
under him but he had to get there any
month
                leave the inside to jig where every-
thing was wide and not fixed and sky had no let
                                   the kid
would know in time enough how it was
to walk the Zócalo at the ache of noon
                no Tenochkan or Latin triumph being
                memorated
and meet a same huge blinding
prairie in flagstone
                would learn in time the good
of having an offset
                a dimmed hotel room
on Avenida Francisco Madero
even the smoky dugout he had been in

 

Eclipse in February

Tree would not pop nor house wood
                   the occulted full moon in
gray peach light
                                 no cloud or wind
                                 just earth umbra
                   to tarry
the cold up there and snow field
too awaiting an other
word another tribe story
                               maybe raccoon
                   were around