Meadow Shade Made of Body Parts
Meadows do not have deep water tables
And sometimes originate from bodies of water.
Split me open, I was here with you then.
A lime-rich lake, a weedy pond, human appetites:
Livestock, fodder, water, pasture, play.
Is this trail where I left my last snakeskin?
They live as a part of and apart from these woods:
Meadows do not run off. Meadows margin. Meadows
Slender. Sky parlor’s immense second cousin
Architected to fear the Lodgepole pine. Love
The Lodgepole pine. Purposeless, they live forever
As the shape of what can be imagined and present
Sensory impressions of “completeness” and complete
“Interconnection;” uniform material nowness
[A Polaroid: nape, trunk, calf, the turned’ head’s chin]
Yet structured like the Copernican graph of a flower:
Bract into sepals into petals, stamen into pistil.
The knee of the Little Sur turns in the underbelly of my skin.
The stem of the meadow the conceptualization
Of the medulla oblongata: as meadow is meadow.
Can light dislike its wave? There is a ghost within.
David Koehn won the May Sarton Poetry Prize with his first book, "Twine" (Bauhan Publishing, 2013). Judith Kitchen in the Georgia Review applauded it as “illuminated—and complicated—by invention.” He published "Compendium" (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), revisiting Donald Justice's approach to prosody. Koehn's second book of poems, "Scatterplot" (Omnidawn Publishing, 2020), per a review in Gulfstream, "helps make sense of the world." Koehn's writing appears in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, McSweeney's, The Greensboro Review, North American Review, The Rumpus, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Zyzzva, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. He earned his BA in Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Florida. David has taught a post-graduate workshop, “Prosody as A Form of Revsion,” for the last decade and a post-graduate workshop, “Forms: Breaking The Bowl,” for the past five years – both online for Omnidawn. The poems included in this submission will appear in his next book, "Sur," forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2024.