Is death that breath we hold inside ourselves until
it lips into the sun?
Like love, does it take us to the edge, and just beyond?
A line of cranes in its ellipses?
Portions of each poem in the poet’s assigned color can be seen in Morse code on the library walls, in the cumulate exhibition book, and on the hanging cloud sculptures within the Calvin T. Ryan Library on the campus of the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Corresponding colored Morse code runs vertically down the walls, reminiscent of rain. By choosing Morse code for the translations, cumulate makes a connection between the analogue beginnings of telecommunication and the digits 1 and 0 of digital communication, extending poetry’s natural brevity of word and phrase.
In the yellow dawn, uncurl your one and only body,
take inventory of each pulse and curve.
Hasn’t it, after all, served you well?
Pull on your shorts and shoes,
stick the elusive key into your purple shirt.
Navigate the river walk,
part the morning with your tongue.
A carnival helix of the great wild birds
spirals upward far to the west,
winged escort singing you
up from the season of planting and birth,
out of the cyclic skein of time, where
what we here consign to the earth
has already flowered.
A strong wind from the south
blows through the orchard,
and suddenly the world is apricot:
apricot in a downpour on the ground,
at the ears, apricot,
at the nose, apricot,
the air as far as the eye can see
a shimmer, a haze, of apricot…
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds.
Poetry
Poetry is hard I wish poetry could be simple, unlike my thoughts, more like my tree
My tree that lives in a tower of light and drinks from the same water bottle that I do
That breathes when I forget to
My sky is in your face, and all my dawns
Flush there, and all my evenings hallow it:
And it is awful with the drift of stars,
And mystic with the wandering of moons!
Rain, rain upon me kisses, O my Sky!
nebraska stars
peek through a sunroof
a small town kid’s truck
dreaming about tomorrow
A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;
A pungent odor from the dusty sage;
A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;
A breaking of the distant table-lands
Through purple mists ascending, and the flare
Of water ditches silver in the light;
A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
A sudden sickness for the hills of home.