The East Margin

         The East Margin

Whenever my lines find the real east

margin, always a word like an icon

bounces back into the middle of my poem.

North, west, south, the sun rises, sets, or floats

in a slow flat line.  An osprey dives, locks

talons on a trout too heavy to lift,

and drowns, a victim of greed and lust. 

The South Fork, her runoff held in check

by a dam, flows her implacable way

to the sea.  I’ll settle for that.  But once

on the bank of the Clark Fork thirty years

back a poem burst past the east margin

and found its way through the kingdom

of dark to the very heart of the sun. 

—Donnell Hunter

                                                 28 September 2011

Newborn

            Newborn

                                                for Donita

With eyes that can’t yet focus

you look around the room with wonder,

at faces draped in linen and hear sounds

unlike the muffled heart you grew up

under.  You hear voices you can’t

articulate, nor differentiate tones

of joy from those that signal danger

in this new world where everything

is strange and you the newest stranger.

                                    —Donnell Hunter

                                                 18 September 2011

September Song

September Song      

Somewhere between the man I’ve become

and the poet I have not, my life moves on.

Where my self is is another question.

Maybe out back in the yard too wild to tame

with my one good arm.  Or in cottonwood shadows

flung across the lawn I have yet to mow.  Yes, winter

is on its way.  We cover tomatoes and hope

Indian summer will let green ripen into red

and allow the last two ears of corn to find

our table before raccoons finish off the patch.

Both our streams are man made.  They run from May 15

until October when the water-master turns

them off and fish gape in pools left behind.  My neighbor

tries to catch them on his one day off.  I retired

and no longer fret about things like that.  A friend

ten years younger than I would like to leave this world

and join his wife, but can’t seem to find the right

path out.  All our older friends are gone. 

The poets who taught me how to make these lines

passed on where rivers run west, not north like those

in their poems.  They took sea lanes out or hid beneath

the ice when I asked about the farm.  Telephone lines

gave way to wireless.  The birds who listened to their rhymes

flew south except for mottled finches in full molt

who wait for tails to grow back in to guide them home.

                                                —Donnell Hunter

                                                               14 September 2012