by James Engelhardt
Dixit, Jean-Louis Roubira
Libellud, 2008
I am a sculptor of clouds.
I am a king becoming his own statue,
forming bone into stone
and dissolving both again.
My only gold is a ring
sliding over a tight braid.
I climb spiral stairs that rise and rise,
until I face a field of sunflowers.
I am covered in Post-its.
I am a snowfall of small ideas.
My day is not an hour old,
and already traffic gathers with
hum and horns, demands
I know I cannot answer.
My aspiration:
the life of the groundhog
that garden skulk
sunning its bulk on low rocks. I want
to breathe when I need breath.
I want
to find the opening
in the fence
to cut the kite’s line. Yes,
to sit here with the roaring sun,
thin wood smoke on the air,
December rain drifting in.
About the Author:
James Engelhardt’s poems have appeared in the North American Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Terrain.org, Painted Bride Quarterly, Fourth River, and many others. His ecopoetry manifesto is “The Language Habitat,” and his book, Bone Willows, is available from Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. He lives in the South Carolina Upstate and is a lecturer in the English Department at Furman University.