Tarquinia
Cats stretch out among the licked-clean
clam and mussel shells
between burial mounds.
The purposes and their gods are written
in backwards Hellenics
on the urns and the replicas.
So it is verified.
I lie by tomb 3679
listening to cicadas raise the old flags
to the hill rim’s dissolving.
Under me underground someone
pushes a button to see
the lit-up cabinet’s
extinct sky.
All Forks
I take the lake fork today:
grass gives way to
saplings, bushes, vines,
every type
of branching thing. My eye
picks a red-barked
bush from the field’s edge:
forks in threes radiate
around the red
main-stem,
but
symmetry
eludes me:
up through
their flexible predilections
these
forks radiate
in relation to every other fork-
in-the-field’s sun-seeking,
raising a staggering
dynamism
of caught
droplet lights. The ways one eye could trace
from fork to fork
across the field balk
calculation. Still, I long
to take all forks at once,
to find a formula by which
upper prairie, frozen marsh, dry creek-bed might
condense to an infinitesimal
equilibrium of
deep structure
and surface
tension, yet
one touch
of this red branch and beads slide
into beads,
shiver free, re-
coalesce at new
coordinates
on the bush.
The way is newly
lighted as
the iced-over snowed-over lake in cloudbreak is
brilliant, and, ice melted,
under cloud, is
dull,
so that the number of forks must be multiplied by
the number of days, hours, less—
and to take each way in each
combination, even in this meager preserve,
would take more attention than many lifetimes contain.
What a choice, then,
to walk this moment this brilliant
edge
of lake and sky.
Brandon Krieg is author of a poetry collection, Invasives (New Rivers Press), a finalist for the 2015 ASLE Book Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and a chapbook, Source to Mouth (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BOMB, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, FIELD, West Branch, Witness, and many other journals.