The Dependencies

Poem of the Day: The Dependencies

BY HOWARD NEMEROV

This morning, between two branches of a tree   

Beside the door, epeira once again

Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap.   

I test his early-warning system and

It works, he scrambles forth in sable with   

The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows   

The meaning of. And I remember now

How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came   

Back as they do about this time each year,

Grey squadrons with the slashes white on wings   

Cruising for bugs beneath the bellied cloud.   

Now soon the monarchs will be drifting south,   

And then the geese will go, and then one day   

The little garden birds will not be here.   

See how many leaves already have

Withered and turned; a few have fallen, too.   

Change is continuous on the seamless web,   

Yet moments come like this one, when you feel   

Upon your heart a signal to attend

The definite announcement of an end

Where one thing ceases and another starts;   

When like the spider waiting on the web   

You know the intricate dependencies   

Spreading in secret through the fabric vast   

Of heaven and earth, sending their messages   

Ciphered in chemistry to all the kinds,

The whisper down the bloodstream: it is time.

The Body

Poem of the Day: The Body

BY MARIANNE BORUCH

has its little hobbies. The lung

likes its air best after supper,

goes deeper there to trade up

for oxygen, give everything else

away. (And before supper, yes,

during too, but there’s

something about evening, that

slow breath of the day noticed: oh good,

still coming, still going … ) As for

bones—femur, spine,

the tribe of them in there—they harden

with use. The body would like

a small mile or two. Thank you.

It would like it on a bike

or a run. Or in the water. Blue.

And food. A habit that involves

a larger circumference where a garden’s

involved, beer is brewed, cows

wake the farmer with their fullness,

a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat

understands I will be crushed

into flour and starry-dust

the whole room, the baker

sweating, opening a window

to acknowledge such remarkable

confetti. And the brain,

locked in its strange

dual citizenship, idles there in the body,

neatly terraced and landscaped.

Or left to ruin, such a brain,

wild roses growing

next to the sea. The body is

gracious about that. Oh, their

scent sometimes. Their

tangle. In truth, in secret,

the first thing

in morning the eye longs to see.