In Place of Thinking
Was it in high school, college, dream
I saw the frog’s leg muscle twitch?
That’s all there was, the muscle flayed,
tacked to a board, so that a few
cc’s of acid dropped on it brought
it back to what the teacher called
life.
I wish I had a more exact
memory. Or a memory
that wouldn’t interfere with things.
A mind that didn’t need to think
it was a mind to be a mind.
A twitch in place of thinking. Thought
that could throw rocks across the room
at the drop of a cloud’s shadow.
A Marsh
It’s likely I came from a place like this.
The silken muck at the bottom of it
feels like an early attempt at skin
along the inner arm. The tiny bugs
on the water’s surface flash like a thing
about to break into thinking. The tufts
of last year’s grasses, cattails blown apart,
I know that raspy clatter of wisdom.
It looks good on the page but tastes like dust
if you utter it. I’ll take the moss
that curls to itself and never leaves home,
lichens that grow on rocks. And, of course, rocks.
Broad, level, varied, this place gives water
a break from all that rushing out to sea.
Still Life
He would be twenty-six now, curious,
lean, possibly a runner. Still becoming.
He, too, would have found ways to resist
his father’s hope. What either hope might have been,
I can’t imagine. Certainly not a poet.
He would have met too many poets
to want to be another one.
He may not have been a he, of course,
but I call him that to honor
an old, predictable, foolish, desire.
Daughters are wiser. I learned that by being
one of the other. They’re smarter, too.
Still, when I took what flesh was left after
the D and C, from his mother’s hands
into my hands, I spoke to it
as I thought a father might to a son,
greeting and grieving in the same breath.
Why Did God Make Nettle?
The poem doesn’t know what it wants,
but it knows the minute it hears
the boot on the floor, the catch in the throat.
It watches to see if the snowflake stops
in mid-air. It cheers when the afternoon
fails. It dreams of tomorrow and kisses
it gladly goodbye. It doesn’t ask if
God made nettle, but it praises the child
who, when it stung her, wondered why.
Roger Mitchell is the author of eleven books of
poetry, most recently The One Good Bite
in the Saw-Grass Plant. His new and selected poems, Lemon Peeled the Moment Before, was published by Ausable Press in
2008. The University of Akron Press published his two previous books, Half/Mask, in 2007 and Delicate Bait, which Charles Simic chose
for the Akron Prize, in 2003. Mitchell directed the Creative Writing Program at
Indiana University and for a time held the Ruth Lilly Chair of Poetry. Other
awards include the Midland Poetry Award, the John Ben Snow Award for Clear
Pond, a work of non-fiction, two fellowships each from the Indiana Arts
Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, the River Styx International Poetry Award, and the Ren Hen Press’s
Ruskin Art Club Award. He was a 2005 Fellow in Poetry from the New York
Foundation for the Arts. Currently at work on a biography of poet Jean
Garrigue, he and his wife, the fiction writer Dorian Gossy, live in Jay, New
York.
