GOING WITH

artwork: robin chapman

GOING WITH

by Robin Chapman

At ten, his hair slicked back

With styling mousse, Josh

Let's us know he thinks he's going

With a girl in his class, who called

A friend, who called to ask.

In front of the mirror the rest

Of the evening he tries on ties—

Fat ones, thin ones—his face

Alight, practicing for the first time

The complicated, conventional knot.

~ first published in The Christian Science Monitor

Praise More . . .

artwork: robin chapman

Praise More Than Can Be Told

by Robin Chapman

And what’s left out, unseen, unnamed—
the shifting soil and rock, the fungal mesh
that knits the roots to living cloth; the tamed
path and homestead cellar stairs, its bush
of lilacs blooming in the undergrowth;
the hummingbird who comes to the red shirt
you wear, chokecherries, the chickadee who goes
ahead in the greening wood, the whirr
of a tractor’s plough far off; wild straw-
berries ripening in the poison ivy patch; high clouds;
the wind like a river pouring down the draw,
aspen's shaking grey-green leaves; turned clods
underfoot as you gain the ridge; skylined friends
as you descend again into the mystery of woods.

~ originally appeared in Poemeleon

WHAT LUCK

artwork: robin chapman

What Luck
by Robin Chapman

to be tuned to this fraction
of spectrum we see as rainbow, rainbow,

that our two small ear-drums
move to the hum of another’s voice,

those twin stretched membranes
vibrating resonant with breath,

that these gyroscopes of our inner ear
track our cartwheels when gravity tugs,

that our tongues taste honey and salt.
What luck that we can smell the rain,

that these hands can touch, cradle,
caress this skin that enfolds us

all our days—what luck to be born
root and blossom and branch of life

into this world we’re shaped to—
to tremble in its flux

with the hunting hawk, the mouse
the layered rocks, the eelgrass meadow.

~ originally appeared in Ascent and,
subsequently, in the eelgrass meadow (Tebot Bach)