Jar
Time trapped me in this canyon, this dark jar —
jabbed holes in the sky to spare me light and air.
Only, sometimes, even without you here,
there’s beauty: this is night. And those are stars.
Greg Alan Brownderville
Antique Windfall
The windfall drags the river / its hem is a broom
in the hen food and mud / the hill is a game show chainsaw edged
in silver threads and never drawing blood /
heaviest the hand that stills the plow /
thistle blur and vesper fruit // the gravity artist hung back
shrugged off his harness carefully / he travelled one month
in front of the circus through equestrian squares and an antique wind
till pollen closed the streets / and I hung seashells
under vagrant bells where his hands often chapped /
in a trellised span of the split green air / the thin blued hills turned back //
the pear boughs brace and blister in gentle scrimshaw
above the shed / it has nothing to do with abundance or ruin
it’s always being done above clovers in the dry creekbed
that still the plow / thistle sheen and a vespertine
is any evening opening // and the earth grew tuned so a certain chord
is always nearly playing
Zach Savich
Poems taken from Silver Threads, a six-song cycle composed by Jacob Cooper and released by Nonesuch Records. Cooper commissioned a set of poems inspired by ‘Silver Threads’, a haiku attributed to Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō.
Image courtesy of Nonesuch Records
