Kirsten Dierking: "The Ordinary"

It's summer, so
the pink gingham shorts,
the red mower, the neat rows
of clean smelling grass
unspooling behind
the sweeping blades.

A dragonfly, black body
big as a finger, will not leave
the mower alone,
loving the sparkle
of scarlet metal,
seeing in even a rusting paint
the shade of a flower.

But I wave him off,
conscious he is
wasting his time,
conscious I am
filling my time
with such small details,
distracting colors,

like pink checks,
like this, then that,
like a dragonfly wing
in the sun reflecting
the color of opals,
like all the hours
we leave behind,
so ordinary,
but not unloved.


 

"The Ordinary" by Kirsten Dierking. Text as published in Northern Oracle: Poems (Spout Press, 2007). © Kirsten Dierking. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: A "close-up of the wing of a Green Darner dragonfly," macroscopic photograph by Paul Kelly.

Kirsten Dierking: "Shoveling Snow"

If day after day I was caught inside
this muffle and hush

I would notice how birches
move with a lovely hum of spirits,

how falling snow is a privacy
warm as the space for sleeping,

how radiant snow is a dream
like leaving behind the body

and rising into that luminous place
where sometimes you meet

the people you've lost. How
silver branches scrawl their names

in tangled script against the white.
How the curves and cheekbones

of all my loved ones appear
in the polished marble of drifts.



"Shoveling Snow" by Kirsten Dierking. Text as published in Northern Oracle: Poems (Spout Press, 2007). Reprinted with permission.

Art credit: "Snow Drift," from a set of photographs of "nature's faces" by hvila (slightly altered by curator).

Kirsten Dierking: "Sailing on Lake Superior"

Before us now the edge of the earth,
below us the nearly endless cold.
Around us nothing but shimmering
water,
the miles of empty and sparkling blue.

For a few hours, the sail fills on
toward infinity. Shadows of
our delicate bodies ebb and flow
across the deck of our delicate boat.

What if the beautiful days, the good
and pacific temperate moments,
weren't just lovely, but everything?
What if I could let it fall away
in the wake, that ache to extract
meaning from vastness?

Let this suffice; the ease of thinking
it all goes on, whether we're here
to see it or not. The splashing waves,
the suntipped gulls arcing across
the radiant world.



"Sailing on Lake Superior" by Kirsten Dierking, from Northern Oracle. © Spout Press, 2007.

Photography credit: Tom Stuart (originally color).



 

Kirsten Dierking: "In the Produce Aisle"

In the vivid red
of the fresh berries,
in the pebbled skin
of an emerald lime,
in the bright colors
of things made
to be transitory,

you see the same
loveliness
you find in your own
delicate flesh,
the lines fanned
around your eyes
charming like
the burnish
of plums,

your life like
all the other
fragile organics,
your soft hand
hovering over
the succulent apple,
you reach for it,
already transforming.

"In the Produce Aisle" by Kirsten Dierking, from Northern Oracle. © Spout Press, 2007.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).