The Day of Books and Brooks

On the day of books and brooks
we’ll head down to the lowlands

where water meanders toward
meaningful flow, where beekeepers
bend over manuscripts checking

for spelling errors, where young
children read Mary Oliver to old

women, who sit on their laps on
the muddy banks, where nouns and
trout nibble on rhymes hooked to

lazy lines fishing for meaning, 
where joy flits dramatically in and 

out of the silent readings, where 
authority and poets sit side by side 
on fallen logs worn to glass, where 

we take turns reading paragraphs
and tossing acorns and verbs,

where the symbollism of paper 
and trees escapes no one nor the
metaphor of dark meandering lines

on maps connecting continents
and the phase “water like ink runs

to the oceans” is both nonsense
and revelation and we rake cliché
into loose beds in the mud where

we sit with books in hand and our feet 
in the cold water and the earth 

becomes fiction and fiction becomes
sand and sand runs through our
hands like plot and when the sun

begins to set we burn the pages
we have already read so that we

can continue to avoid all things
electronic, save the sparks that
pass neuron to neuron just the

way that fireflies show off in the 
fields behind us, the way that 

vowels and owls haunt the night.

This poem appeared here on PoetProjects on November 13, 2023. If you have a look you’ll see that I’ve updated the poem, a bit. It no longer is one long block but instead is in two and three line alternating stanzas.

I used to write in blocks and back then, a bit over two years ago, I loved the block of text, its rigidity, the texture of that black and white space.

Now I often prefer stanza breaks, especially to break up a poem like this that has a rush to it.

I did not jot any notes anywhere about this poem, but I remember how much it caught my fancy. The pace of the poem, I recall, was to run parallel to the brook itself, which I pictured moving water at a pace, not a lull, although I do say “meander” here.

I’ve been writing quite a few new poems recently. I have about thirteen or so right now.

I’m taking on a goal to be published the old fashioned way — submitting poems to journals and waiting to see what happens.

Today I sent out my first batch of poems. I’m reaching pretty high for this first group.

I’ll let you know what happens.

It could take up to 12 weeks to know, though. I won’t be able to cross my fingers that long.

Because I’m not trusting luck.

Because I’m going to keep writing at a solid pace.

Because I’m going to be submitting also at a solid pace, going for saturation. Hopeful, of course.

I don’t want to be lucky, though. I want to earn my place.

Even if it takes time. Even if I fail much more often than not.

And so, I’ll let you know.