Matthew Cooperman
from Spool 14
something true green
initiated in the
brush a call
from woods wild
man hairy and
harried he needs
a shadow to
hide his drive
restore good grunts
the way animal
carts and suburbs
are too barred
or uninitiated see
how we fail
in public all
our roles the
one to honor
is most child
and the turn
to the woods
forgotten in bling
primitive happens as
a course we
must survive evolve
so start a
fire move into
the circle first
of all fathers
a child becomes
§
who sees a
sky begin to
snow the opening
multitude of flakes
under streetlights all
at once one
vcry real limit
less imprinted imagined
beyond the eye
the mind in
memory seethes a
parent synapse drives
spooling out / in
yet it’s not
that very night
when snow why
how many times
this sweet pearl
so well remembered
the quiet falling
all around sparks
how many times
in your life
§
what she becomingly
the gap between
the child enflowered
our dreaming then
the schist enjoined
made youth all
sunny ocean afternoons
I see it
now she grasps
the pen her
dreams and frames
the want of
impossible mountains and
oceans I will
take her there
§
I want perilous
mountains they are
granite and obdurate
near and far
goes the heart
to the world
precisely it doesn’t
care engenders lure
on approach to
the sea the
body pulls the
child never rests
and the mountain
mountains into time
rumbles each our
risk our want
Matthew Cooperman is the author of Still: (to be) Perpetual (Dove/Tail Books, 2007), DaZE (Salt Publishing, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), as well as two chapbooks, Words About James (Phylum Press, 2005) and Surge (Kent State, 1998). Recent work has appeared in Verse, Volt, New American Writing, Chain, Pool and Denver Quarterly. A founding editor of Quarter After Eight, he teaches poetry at Colorado State University.