Daniel Bourne
Layers
They talk of onions
But it is the Sprout of Brussels,
Green ingénue, whose layers
Delect the palate.
Peeling back the veils,
Each fluffy,
Green scarf
Perfumed and charred—
So who can blame me
That I save the heart for last?
Noah’s Ark
Of course all the animals were babies—
that way the atlas bear
would not molest the auroch
and the quagga
would not kick Ham, bruising
his already dark skin.
But let’s not
get too smart with this. Think
of the dove’s partner,
when it flew back.
The olive branch not just a sign of land
but of love. In just forty nights, I beg you,
how much they had grown!
Daniel Bourne’s books include The Household Gods (Cleveland State) and Where No One Spoke the Language (CustomWords). His poems are forthcoming in Salmagundi, Yale Review, Lake Effect, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, and have also appeared in such journals as Field, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Conduit, Boulevard, Guernica, Pleiades, Shenandoah, New Letters, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Many Mountains Moving, and North American Review. The recipient of four Ohio Arts Council poetry fellowships, he teaches in the English Department and Environmental Studies program at The College of Wooster in NE Ohio, where he edits Artful Dodge, a magazine of American fiction, poetry and essay with a special interest in translation, and for which he has interviewed such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Tim O’Brien, Czesław Miłosz, James Laughlin, Rita Dove, and Terry Tempest Williams.
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