Raven

Chronicles

Shining Horns

Nature Writing at Raven Chronicles Online

3 poems by James Bertolino

 



Nature's Poem

I would like to spread over
the pebbled surface
of duckweed carpeting the slough.

I could find my cousins there,
whose toes fork the water, whose wings
brush the leaves of red and green gathered

like tiny cabbages. Our breathing together
might be Nature lacing us into a sentence
that speaks of the salt and sweet.

Don’t ask what the syllables of estuary
mean––we’re not finished here and
wouldn’t want to know.


To Be Loved by Nature

Nature claims
two roses that open
outside the bedroom window in late November

Nature shapes your thoughts
to a petal’s memory
of sunlight

Nature precedes the fixed spirit of the reeds

To love and be loved by Nature
is water’s idea

Nature embraces rain

Nature plants passion beneath
the landscapes
of protein

Nature claims the small blue mouth
at the base of the spine



The Garden

She lays her flute down.

It is Spring.
She needs to be enclosed

by the green which can lift her
beyond her senses, over the structures

of music to where motion becomes
a desire for form. But God

touches her ear
with a butterfly wing

while His devil pushes mud up
between her toes.

 

James Bertolino's work has appeared in Ploughshares, Notre Dame Review, Indiana Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, The Raven Chronicles and Seattle Review.  Nine volumes and fourteen chapbooks of his poetry have been issued by such publishers as Copper Canyon Press, Carnegie Mellon University Press and the Quarterly Review of Literature Award Series at Princeton University.  His volumes in print include New & Selected Poems from Carnegie Mellon, First Credo and Snail River from QRL, and his most recent, Pocket Animals: 60 Poems, published in 2002 by Egress Studio Press.   In Spring, 2005 he was the first Washington Poets Association “Poetry Roadshow” poet, and gave readings and workshops on four college campuses. For 2005-06 he was Writer-in-Residence and Hallie Brown Ford Chair of Creative Writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He lives outside Bellingham in the shadow of Mt. Baker.