GREGORY SHAFFER
———————————
Forest
The forest is thick
with end of summer.
Flowers give to seed
on threads of wind
white dreams of fields.
The forest is thick with green.
What in a forest is a weed?
What dandelion
with its regal mane? What firewood
with rose pink petals of fire?
From frayed bones of birch
each leaf
is a lung of the sun.
The forest is thick with dreams
they sin in the underbrush and sing
of the fat ground
the branching blaze in limbs
the underthigh of moss.
Golden before its bare
barren before it's gold
the forest is gravid with what
is gone and does not remember
what it returns.
So rustle raddled reds:
everything dies
not everything is dead.
[73]
Gulls
Hovering on prehistoric wings
dark spread feathered bones
leathery from this distance
you ride the reeds of wind
in the magmatic blare of dusk
a blaze of orange
as if you have been there forever
descending only
to fill your taut bellies
with frog, drowned dog
waterlogged loaf.
Up there
your laughter reverberates
shakes down through layers
of air
as if in mockery
of misery
the pointlessness of it all
the dirty business of digestion
and decay.
You drift
above the shoreline's sway
the sea's drunken jetsam
the water's crumbling lace.
[74]
Lichen
A glacier blisters in the sun.
We step across the softening snow
the only path the path we leave behind.
Icicles taper in the sun
slate mumbles into loan
crevasses grin their blue-green bones.
For the sun everything reflects the sun.
A polished bluff. The meadow's crease.
Taking it in, giving it back.
Path of crow across the snow.
The only path the path we leave behind
as lichen casually breakfast on the stones.
[75]
November
This is the season
of the crows:
what could be was.
Black-scissored wings
caw, caw, jeer
shadows across the snow.
Where limbs held leaves
black blooms cry
nothing which we own.
The snow is white
until iced rain
and then the ice is gray.
Now each on its own
wheels round the others:
who by whom's betrayed?
Into a cloud
a frozen pond
cold snared the sky.
A crow caws black
some snow lies white
the ice is here.
[76]
Gregory Shaffer is a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin
Law School. He received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College
in 1980 and his law degree from Stanford in 1988. Shaffer practiced law
in France from 1988 to 1995, when he joined the law faculty at Wisconsin.
His poetry has appeared in American and European literary magazines and
in a collection titled Forest Poems (Artemis Art Gallery, 1998)
(illustrations by Ewa Kuryluk). |
