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