Karen Donovan
Orient
Heel prints of men and cattle
mark the ground at the watering place
The mean wanders from center point
I love you I love you I love you please
At the watering place
men and cattle wander
Look I’ll mark the ground
Here is where we’ll meet
Right here
Scores wander off the curve
Fresh prints of men and cattle, filling with snow
I know you can find it, it’s on the map
The map is a map
There is a forest there is a steppe
There is a watering place
Point line plane solid hypersolid
Angle radian perimeter sphere, cherubim seraphim
Men and cattle, later a panther
Find Sirius Rigel Aldebaran
Horizon: The tabletop The doorstep The road
Orchil sunset
Sweet fig
Tracer bullets
The woodsmoke
The slipknot
The clove
Origin
About how in the beginning it was
strong yet viscoelastic with certain properties
that distinguished it from sheet metal
About how you can walk out on it for ice fishing in January
About how it flows when warm like asphalt
O how light it was
Which made it advantageous for aerospace applications
Hallelujah how there was no darkness in it
because we had had enough of that
About how it made everything
except for everything that wasn’t since there isn’t
anything else than what keeps on getting
made and remade from ingredients the experts dispute
About how nonlinearly it iridescently was
hard to predict with a tendency under load to deform
As worms grow wings hillsides implode bones rattle up
from rotor-whipped sands and begin to sing like flutes
O how in the beginning it was
Karen Donovan is the author of Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press). Her poems have appeared recently in Blackbird, Conjunctions, and Mudlark. For 20 years, with Walker Rumble, she published ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of short prose. contact
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