In the Kingdom of the Ditch

Contents

Contents i.  Taxonomy  Perspective  A Consideration of the Word “Home”  Consciousness: An Assay  Dona Nobis Pacem  Seeing Things  The Consolation of Wind  Limbo  Deer Dreaming Me  Imago Dei  Midrash  A Mennonite in the Garden  Fishing for Large Mouth in a Strip-Mining Reclamation Pond near Lloydsville, Pennsylvania  What Lives in the Wake of Our Sleep  Two Sounds after an October Storm  Resurrection: A Field Note  Morning Poem  The Knowledge of the Lord  The Gospel of Beauty  Brushwolf  Vigil  Letter to Dave B. with May’s Insatiable Hunger Tagging Along  Upon Looking Down onto the Top of Your Head Where the Hair Has Gone White  Atrial Fibrillation  What We Do while We’re Dying  Begging Bowl  Nurse Log  Thinking of Li Po while Fishing the Little J  What I Told My Sons after My Father Died ii.  Thoreau Casts a Line in the Merrimack  Thoreau Hears the Last Warbler at the End of September  Dreaming the Dark Smell of Bear  Thoreau Considers a Stone  Emptying the Bedpan  Give Us This Day  Psalm Written the Last Week of December  Thoreau Dreams of Margaret Fuller Three Days after Her Death  In the Clear-cut  The Virtues of Indolence  Offering, as One Example, the Satisfaction of the Bee  Thoreau Surveys the Ice  In the Kingdom of the Ditch  Heaven Come Flying  Thoreau, in Death  Consecrated iii.  Not Writing, Then Writing Again  Hermetic  Hawks Flying  When the Body Is Absent  Coal  Three Songs for Flannery O’Connor  Theophany  Ordinary Time  Spring Melt  The Sound of Sunlight  Letter to Dave B. from the Karen Noonan Center on the Chesapeake Bay  Last of the Sea  Missing Boy  Apophatic  Most of What Is Written Is Simply Grief  Heliotropic  The Poet Stumbles upon a Buddha in Gamelands  above Tipton, Pennsylvania  Crow Counsels Me in the Ways of Love  Deposition  Perigee  Somnambulance  Transfiguration  Last Bones of Winter  Umbilical  Poem on the Anniversary of My Father’s Diagnosis with Pancreatic Cancer  A Prayer for My Sons, after a Line of Reported Conversation by the Poet William Blake to a Child Seated Next to Him at a Dinner Party  Meditation on Hunger at  a.m.  I’ll Catch You Up  acknowledgments This is why we pray: we were not born tundra swans. —K. A. Hays ...