It Makes It Important to Wake Up from the Winter Nap to the Smell of Pine Smoke, Snow, and the Light That Comes in the Frost-Thick Window, Pale and Lonesome as Distant Music

NOON POINT

Clark Coolidge

I think I wrote a poem today but I don't know well.
Though well do I seize the trees shale but am not given pause.
The lights are every one of them out, we see it all so well.
Nothing is taken care of, everything lies.
Everyone rise.







WINTER NAP

Tom Hennan

On a sunny winter afternoon I fill the stove with wood. When it is hot it makes the purring sound of the heart of a man revived after being dead a few minutes. I pull up a chair to the heat, sit down with a book, and fall asleep. I leave my body and fly out over the snow-heavy fields. I sail about, avoiding treetops, ignoring airplanes, gliding past the sheds full of the cold metallic silence of tractors. I've always had to work with machines, be a machine, or less, part of a machine. Only those who don't need to earn their living chained to technology can afford to be romantic about it. The machine breaks down the nerves. Its rhythm is different from the rhythm of life. Its steel and plastic voice wedges itself between each beat of the heart. It throws the who body off center so that it can't digest moonlight or sunshine or understand a single chirping cricket. It makes it important to wake up from the winter nap to the smell of pine smoke, snow, and the light that comes in the frost-thick window, pale and lonesome as distant music.