print previewback JOAN BARANOW
From This Distance
NYC Sept 11, 2001/Olympic Valley, CA
An ant clambers onto my sandal,
strikes out across my toe,
is joined by others like water
sucked through a straw.
Is it awe I want to feel?
Am I supposed to know
about these furry-edged leaves
whose berries are bluing?
To my left an aspen snapped
at the waist. Several here
have avalanched
as if with sappy brains
they’ve judged their own heft
and heaved over. We can’t be everywhere
though to touch a particle
alone in space
jars another. Even an eight-year-old
can see the empty swing
sway. But this is simple.
Explain instead the moth’s physics,
its unsteady flight
dipping and doubling
back with blind, frenetic tack
though it sees
with fifty more eyes
than ours. What am I asking?
The sun grows the shadows,
I’m tired of the strict music in my head,
“the wind’s entreaties,”
which are not the wind’s
but my own grief
gasping its speech, poetry’s
hypnosis.
Distrust. Distrust.
Pick the bee’s legs of their pollen.
Thrust your hand down
a snake’s throat. Wheel yourself
into the operating room.
Watch how lovingly they scrape
the bodies out. Cough up
something sick. Is this it?
What? Have we finished
gnawing our bones?
Have I?
An ant is dragging
a dead larva
three times its size toward me.
I know you know that
but I won’t stop the words.
They are beating out the—O—
briefest pilot light. Inferno. 
Anthology: a collection of flowers
From This
Distance