Today's poem is by Andrew Collard

Sub-pastoral
       

The syntax of the houses reads easy
                and makes no sense, side yards
        and driveways built on what?

Origin's not a single point, untraceable,
                but still the past slides forward
        populating all we don't consider

with itself. Somewhere there's a river,
                then after millennia we come
        to know the river's history, piecemeal,

like a child knows the shapes of words
                before their letters.
        The morning starts like this:

a type of tree, a type of grass, a father
                in a vehicle, departing with
        a brand-name soda. A bouquet of fragments

intricately arranged to root us, those little
                breathing things. But between?
        A man once told me spirit is

the name for what the living cast
                that can't be caught, leaving
        patterns of silence, like the gaps

punctuating lineage, each no more important
                than the last. The dandelions
        missing aren't a mystery, aren't missing,

aren't there nonetheless, opening from
                elsewhere, like broadcast, through
        the receiver of the body. A landscape's

nowhere but a point to pin the storm on,
                a subdivision imposed, like a dream,
        by what's beneath it: the routes

worn into roads by the commuters,
                the envelopes addressed to no one
        living, yet delivered promptly

every day at three. What makes
                run-of-the-mill so alluring is
        all the death along the edges, the grasp

of what our comfort has required. It's like
                the blinds exist solely to gesture
        toward a sense of closure,

shielding a relief of jars, laundered shirts,
                and a child framed at the window,
        wondering if today will rain or shine.

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Copyright © 2024 Andrew Collard All rights reserved
from Sprawl
Ohio University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission