Among the Leaves
At dusk a lone nightbird drifts
And cries above the street. When
It quiets down we see how stars
Begin to gleam among the leaves
Of the tallest elms, far but clear.
As the dark deepens they shine
Like the warning-lights on buoys
Rocking beyond the harbor,
Though we’re happy to be walking here
On the bottom of the sea.
–George Keithley
ANIMISM
Imagine your favorite CEO furry, forepaws
up, with a nut in his teeth—what if every
bureaucrat & CEO who ruined it were forced
to live in nature? But it is not enough
to make a CEO scamper in a poem,
though the poem seeps water vinegary with
solvents from a shunt creek at the company
outlet. Even if you make the CEO shrug
downstream on his belly, you’ll change
nothing. You must believe that the gods inside
things can re-make themselves, that rural houses
will set themselves on fire—though the tree
is cut, the spirit won’t leave the wood.
Bless the jay whose dogma is rancorous
but who still absorbs blue heaven.
Bless the 8 AM windfall apples so spattered
that the only solvent for the light is more
of the light that spattered them.
–Dennis Schmitz
