Tuesday poem #194 : Barbara Langhorst : Dark Matter

So shy, immaterial, you lit out at night for a climate

that knows no change, peeping to the call of winter

in Jamaica, first-primed paradise. Now, Swainson’s

warbler, spread your wings wide, a better treat

than an eagle in the hands of the migrating

naturalist, your

if-a-tree-falls-

in the forest

rock-a-bye-ba-

by song interrupted

by glass. More elusive

than two in the bush, you lay

splayed on the chiller for twenty

empty hours. Stroked now, how

your peppered yellow

throat thrills to the fall

heard only in the mind

of the unknown,

wholly.

Barbara Langhorst’s collection of experimental poetry, restless white fields (NeWest 2012), won the Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Book Award and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book of the Year in Alberta. Langhorst teaches at St. Peter’s College in Muenster, SK, and shares her acreage with five moose, thousands of geese, an assortment of other tame-ish animals, and her wild family. Her first novel is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in 2018.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan