Vista

"Somewhere outside some village," by Prashant Prabhu

Vista

I.
The eye hurries and hurtles and rolls downhill to gobble it all up

It: the green proof that places
are alive and that we can trim and locket up
their tendrils

All: the Great Sweeping Up
the room that the broom invents
with wishful walls

Up: down
inside A secret-clasping place
which we know is called a safe

II.
There is beauty here and I am anxious to claim it
There is pain here and I am anxious to reject it
but not by pretending it does not exist

Where has my disembodied voice gone
Now when I speak all I can say is baby boy
and ache and love and worry

Voice what has happened to you
Flower sounds like terror and power
just like it always has

and more than it ever has before

The Woods by John Muir

The Woods by John Muir

In the dream this is a poem
I am failing to memorize

Each time I lift the page
the lines have shifted themselves

It is becoming a different poem
because I am trying to memorize it

It wants to elude me a reader
who wants to own it Like every poem

Every song's running faucet
Every skypatch of canvas with

its shoulder braced against a door
of pigment and crushed minerals

Like the woods Definition
Clusters of trees whose edge

you cannot see Whose ending
mercifully you will not reach