Two Poems by Nathaniel Perry

Two Poems: Nathaniel Perry

february Over the mossy wood just west of the meadow’s quiet swells, through the beech-tops in their light vests, like unexpected bells, or more like the clattering of fallen bells, we can hear the sound of trucks and gravel, and the swollen sound, a ringing round cymbal-sound, of saws cutting lengths of something, beam or truss or spar, a measuring of strength.

Someone’s building a house on our road, which sucks a little because we love driving through those woods.

Though its leaning pines will give you pause on a windy day, they’re good in the main, like a covered bridge or the dark forest from a tale where someone almost gets lost but hearkens at last to nature’s pale

N AT H A N I E L PE R RY

bosom and is saved, or something along those familiar lines.

And while these woods are comforting we get along just fine passing through them, though that is not my point. Maybe we ask too much of trees and trees that have caught some fading light? We task them with our spiritual needs, when they, in earnest, might have their own.

So I never needed those woods for safety on my way to town or to whisper the secrets of God to me or help me learn to see.

I just liked them empty. And now, as I nod along unconsciously to the irregular whine and thump of concrete and block and board I wonder what else of this place we’ll lose. We meet the ground around and under our feet on seemingly equal terms but it’s always so much faster than us. We never seem to learn that all of our disasters are made of our successes. As soon as something is loved it’s lost, or so the trees have taught me, and the moon and the briar, and the glimmering moss.

67

68

T WO P OE M S

February Sometimes I stop to wonder if the rain considers us at all, as it pools and pours and makes itself conspicuous.

Rain’s hard not to notice. Even in its lightest ghostliest mists, you can hear it falling in the woods, like the s’s and t’s that kissed and left the ends of my words just then.

What is barely there collects itself, coheres on branches, and spills again through air.

But what does the rain make of me, what can it know, and how does it know it?

Does it see me by the pond in the mornings when I choose a stone and throw it just to see the ripples ripple out or just to watch the rock skitter and dance across the ice and make that crazy shock sound it makes, something between twangy and echoey, but with edges and futuristic, like Tron, but Tron on a farm without Jeff Bridges?

N AT H A N I E L PE R RY

And speaking of bridges, we almost need one after all this rain, just to get across the low spots in the yard. My shoes are stained with trying. And maybe that’s what the rain would notice of me, my tiptoeing around its mess, my mincing attempts not to slip in the mire it’s left before us. In that way, perhaps, it’s a bit like love.

It sees me and laughs (or makes a grail of laughter) at my deft moves of avoidance, my pirouettes and dips and moustache twitches. But all the same it knows I’ll stick my feet right in it, or maybe fall face first into a wet embrace, which shocks me more than hurts, and I always laugh at myself and wipe my dirty hands on my shirt with that high smoothing motion that does nothing but make matters obvious, then continue on as I was, just more, or less, ridiculous.

69