The Woodpecker

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

The world needs drummers,

And hollow trees

need to speak of the lives

they have lived.

Listen carefully

for the pause,

that faint collection of seconds when the

resistant insect is extracted and swallowed…

just before the story begins again,

and Death smiles at his own cleverness.

© 2012-2013/Jamie K. Reaser 
Published in "Wild Life: New and Selected Poems" (www.hiraethpress.com)

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The Mark

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

At first I wanted to hide them

from the hunters;

These four tawny brown, 

horizontal slashes

with their shreds and peels of

old black birch bark

in which a late-wandering

black bear had written,

“I am here!”

I often keep secrets of the

forest folk,

especially this time of year.

“Shhhhhh!” I wanted to say.

“Shhhhh! These people,

drunk on sorrows

and looking for retaliation for

wounds you didn’t place,

seek to kill you.

These people have forgotten

the proper way

to take medicine.”

But when the rust-gnarled

pickup approached,

thundering down the mountain

slope, throwing twisting red

dust clouds

into the chilled air,

I stepped beside the tree,

and stood, plainly,

at the edge of the road.

You see:

In a split second, I had re-membered

what it is to be human.

You see:

In each one of us

is a deep desire

to leave a mark.

You see:

The one true mark you are

uniquely here to leave

necessitates that you risk

your life in being seen.

The courageous and

the sacred fools

make their mark anyway.

They make their mark anyway

because choosing to be

vulnerable

is our human medicine.

I smiled and waved to these

strangers on the Ridge.

You see:

I wanted to let them know

that they’d been fully seen.

© 2012-2013/Jamie K. Reaser

Published in "Wild Life: New and Selected Poems" (www.hiraethpress.com)

Thin Ice

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

There is always one winter morning

that is the first winter morning

for ice on the pond.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to those

who have lived decades

in the north next to still water,

But, for me, it still remains a wonderment,

an ordinary miracle made possible

by elements conspiring

to wake us with befuddling

predictability.

We have a ritual,

this particular winter morning

and I.

I wait for the sunlight to come,

anticipating the spectrum of colors

dancing among the gas bubbles

trapped in the glassy-crust.

And when it does come,

memory transports me back to my youth:

I am watching small wall-rainbows emerging from

crystalline prisms hanging from lamps

in a home that we once thought

was quiet and tender.

And then I’m in my teens:

The minister arose and ventured

onto the frozen reservoir,

and with the confident stride of a

once-Olympic skater,

drove forward until he found a place

thin enough to free him

of this world.

The imaginary me has stood,

for many a winter,

at the gaping hole left by his

sinking body,

asking questions about beliefs

and vows

and faith.

Now older, I focus on the red-spotted

newts and the snapping turtles moving

in the cold waters below the ice:

No one ever told me they could.

By the rules I was taught,

they can’t.

But they are.

They are there shuffling their thick legs

and looking, golden-eyed, back at me

with not a glint of surprise.

I love this ice, thin as it is.

It reminds me that 
that which can be readily explained 

is sometimes

best left

to wonderment.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author
From "Wonderment: New and Selected Poems" (a work in progress)

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