for cummings and the very beautifully suddenly rendering death and forever
Take what's left and place an ampersand between it.
Finish the rest when you're on a trail
in the forest, wandering
through your head like a clearing filled with
jay-blues and thrushes, and when there’s snow
on the trail you know that you’re an existentialist
on the page of a Wallace Stevens poem,
except it’s too cold to watch
the blackbirds and their variations
of bird-meter and wing-rhyme,
so you’ve brought lenses and a notebook
for sketching the things you're hearing
into a new existence, something that will flash
before your eyes days later,
when your head is a living forest full of songbirds.
Rosemarie Dombrowski is a poetry editor at Four Chambers, the co-founder of the Phoenix Poetry Series, and the founding editor of Rinky Dink Press (a publisher of micropoetry). She has received four Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for the Pangea Poetry Prize in 2015. Her collections include The Book of Emergencies (Five Oaks Press, 2014) and The Philosophy of Unclean Things (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming).