Tom Hennen: "Looking for the Differences"

 

I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their sameness.

The way a tiny pile of snow perches in the crook of a branch in the

tall pine, away by itself, high enough not to be noticed by people, 

out of reach of stray dogs. It leans against the scaly pine bark, busy

at some existence that does not need me.

It is the differences of objects that I love, that lift me toward the rest

of the universe, that amaze me. That each thing on earth has its own

soul, its own life, that each tree, each clod is filled with the mud of

its own star. I watch where I step and see that the fallen leaf, old

broken grass, an icy stone are placed in exactly the right spot on the

earth, carefully, royalty in their own country.

"Looking for the Differences" by Tom Hennen from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Art credit: "Icy stone," photograph by Gungyoel.

Curator's note: Take a breather from holiday bustle. Read a poem you love. Then take my two-minute survey to will help me (and any potential publishers) decide upon an anthology of mindfulness poetry. A Year of Being Here concludes on January 1.

Tom Hennen: "Love for Other Things"

It’s easy to love a deer
But try to care about bugs and scrawny trees
Love the puddle of lukewarm water
From last week’s rain.
Leave the mountains alone for now.
Also the clear lakes surrounded by pines.
People are lined up to admire them.
Get close to the things that slide away in the dark.
Be grateful even for the boredom
That sometimes seems to involve the whole world.
Think of the frost
That will crack our bones eventually.

"Love for Other Things" by Tom Hennen. Text as published in Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Art credit: Untitled photograph, perhaps by ask4christina. The caption is a quote from John Muir: "God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild."

Tom Hennen: "From a Country Overlooked"

There are no creatures you cannot love.
A frog calling at God
From the moon-filled ditch
As you stand on the country road in the June night.
The sound is enough to make the stars weep
With happiness.
In the morning the landscape green
Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.
The day is carried across its hours
Without any effort by the shining insects
That are living their secret lives.
The space between the prairie horizons
Makes us ache with its beauty.
Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue
To the farthest cold dark in the universe.
The cottonwood also talks to you
Of breeze and speckled sunlight.
You are at home in these
great empty places
along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.
You are comfortable in this spot
so full of grace and being
that it sparkles like jewels
spilled on water.



"From a Country Overlooked" by Tom Hennen. Text as published in Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected & New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Art credit: "Tallgrass Cottonwood Sunset," photograph taken at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Flint Hills, Kansas (USA) by Kevin Sink.

From the caption: "For me, the Cottonwoods have an existential quality. Standing alone on the prairie, they take the full brunt of wind, storms, and lightning. They face all these hardships and unpredictability alone, yet as a result become stronger for it, and then can offer shelter to other wildlife in their branches and shade. Sounds a bit like the human experience!"

Tom Hennen: "Spring Follows Winter Once More"

Lying here in the tall grass
Where it’s so soft
Is this what it is to go home?
Into the earth
Of worms and black smells
With a larch tree gathering sunlight
In the spring afternoon

And the gates of Paradise open just enough
To let out
A flock of geese.



"Spring Follows Winter Once More" by Tom Hennen. Text as published in Darkness Sticks to Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Art credit: "Crowd," photograph by Mike Hollingshead. Caption: "1.3 million geese came to Squaw Creek [National Wildlife Refuge, Canada] this spring—more than the population of any British city except for London." The birds were returning to their summer breeding ground in Central Canada.

Tom Hennen: "Report from the West" [Prose Poem]

Snow is falling west of here. The mountains have more than a
foot of it. I see the early morning sky dark as night. I won't lis-
ten to the weather report. I'll let the question of snow hang.
Answers only dull the senses. Even answers that are right often
make what they explain uninteresting. In nature the answers
are always changing. Rain to snow, for instance. Nature can
let the mysterious things alone—wet leaves plastered to tree
trunks, the intricate design of fish guts. The way we don't fall
off the earth at night when we look up at the North Star. The
way we know this may not always be so. The way our dizziness
makes us grab the long grass, hanging by our fingertips on the
edge of infinity.

"Report from the West" by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

Photography credit: "This long-exposure photo shows how the North Star, Polaris, stays fixed in the night sky as other stars appear to move during the night due to Earth's rotation," by M. Menefee (originally color).

Tom Hennen: "The Life of a Day" [Prose Poem]

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

"The Life of a Day" by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

Photography credit: "Rotting Apples," by Laura Berman (originally color).

Tom Hennen: "In the Late Season"

At the soft place in the snowbank
Warmed to dripping by the sun
There is the smell of water.
On the western wind the hint of glacier.
A cottonwood tree warmed by the same sun
On the same day,
My back against its rough bark,
Same west wind mild in my face.
A piece of spring
Pierced me with love for this empty place
Where a prairie creek runs
Under its cover of clear ice
And the sound it makes,
Mysterious as a heartbeat,
New as a lamb.

"In the Late Season" by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).