Folded Word
Exploring the world, one voice at a time.
Category: WrittenWordWednesday
WHALESONG
whalesong’s bow displacement weight longing Ron Scully is a professionally retired bookseller.His first two chapbooks,Listening for 13 Blackbirds, and Darlington Braves will be published in the spring 2019. He has given up on being the Yale Younger Poet and Wimbledon, in exchange…
The Woman Downstairs
The Woman Downstairs has a calendar tacked to her kitchen wall
Next to the table for one, where she sits by the window
Looks out at the sliver of garden she keeps and
Footfall
I walk following shoe print and bird fork as they press along together for a stretch, as if their pressers met and shared some brief common cause— a conversation which trailed off, the human plodding above the edge of rough toss, fowl returning to…
Beached Whale
She made a mistake, and died from it, sinking into the spongy, bubbling sand on the Atlantic shore of Colonsay. Careless, injured or impaired, old or tired, she came inshore too far and lost the tide, hemmed in between dune and sandbank and outcropping…
The Road to Big Bend
Under an interrupt-this-broadcast gray sky. Headed west toward the quiet edge of Fort Worth the sky gets bigger. Deep in January the land is naked, exposing the razor burn hidden by the green in spring in summer. But winter is honest. And beneath the…
Still Life with Motion
In photographs, the Earth is still a circle. It’s a geometry we keep relearning, just at new velocities. We’re always at the open end of the radius. Asymptotes. The way any two numbers have infinite numbers between them, two numbers even further apart have…
To Be Tacked On Corporate Doors
A bird stands in heaven. Spring. Cold, still. Taking the day one sky at a time. How deep the beats of wings, how smooth the gusts that raise them. Beauty. Spring cold. The sky one day at a time. Beauty still. We humans belong…
Cape Cod
Life can be lonely, winters are harsh red-winged blackbirds sing in the marsh spreading the word all throughout May and on cranberry bogs, “It’s opening day” families bond in sandals and sunhats at kettle ponds, on trails and beach flats pairs of lovers, delicate…
Insect
I am an insect, carapaced, visor-faced and joyful. Smaller than other travellers, I fight the air’s viscosity and feel its every rip and eddy, its waves of coolness under trees and its warmth over sunlit fields and tarmac. You hear me before you see…
If You Had Eyes
If you had eyes, you would stare slowly, very slowly, upwards at the many shades of green and the single blue. Even without eyes, you sense the blue and reach towards it. You expand in the warmth and drink in air and light. These…
Two Quatrains
Galley The oak sails before the wind, going nowhere. Its first autumn leaf picks the lock on its manacles, escapes: One more illusion of freedom. Lauds (2) A penitent crow puffs up and shudders, lifts his wings as the sun rises, letting light…
Prayers for Maa Ganga
Sunset invocations for purification rise up from worshippers at the river’s edge like incense through my unbraided Western hair to the streets, where exhaust thick as dust storms fills the undulating lungs of millions. On jammed highways and byways cars and motorcycles beep warnings…
