"From a Country Overlooked" by Tom Hennen

The Prairie Is My Garden" by Harvey Dunn, 1950

There are no creatures you cannot love.
A frog calling at God
From the moon-filled ditch
As you stand on the country road in the June night.
The sound is enough to make the stars weep
With happiness.
In the morning the landscape green
Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.
The day is carried across its hours
Without any effort by the shining insects
That are living their secret lives.
The space between the prairie horizons
Makes us ache with its beauty.
Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue
To the farthest cold dark in the universe.
The cottonwood also talks to you
Of breeze and speckled sunlight.
You are at home in these
great empty places
along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.
You are comfortable in this spot
so full of grace and being
that it sparkles like jewels
spilled on water.

"From a Country Overlooked" by Tom Hennen from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

"Spring Follows Winter Once More" by Tom Hennen

"Snow Geese, Spring, Point Barrow, Alaska" by Michael P. Frase

Lying here in the tall grass

Where it’s so soft

Is this what it is to go home?

Into the earth

Of worms and black smells

With a larch tree gathering sunlight

In the spring afternoon

And the gates of Paradise open just enough

To let out

A flock of geese.

"Spring Follows Winter Once More" by Tom Hennen from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013. 

"Winter, Thirty Below with Sundogs" by Tom Hennen

The sun came up chased by dogs

Across a field of snow.

As they passed the pile of broken logs

Frost fluttered in the air

Between the birch trees

Standing in that spot exactly

Where the ridge becomes a hill.

In another thousand years

Sky and woods and land

Will have come to be there, still.

And still pursued all day, a winter fox

Too smart for dogs,

The sun goes in animal delight

Over the farthest edge of earth

Not far ahead of night

And jumps into the dark pool

With a last great splash of light.

"Winter, Thirty Below with Sundogs" by Tom Hennen,

from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

"Love for Other Things" by Tom Hennen

It’s easy to love a deer

But try to care about bugs and scrawny trees

Love the puddle of lukewarm water

From last week’s rain.

Leave the mountains alone for now.

Also the clear lakes surrounded by pines.

People are lined up to admire them.

Get close to the things that slide away in the dark.

Be grateful even for the boredom

That sometimes seems to involve the whole world.

Think of the frost

That will crack our bones eventually.

"Love for Other Things" by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013. 

"At the Beginning of Winter" by Tom Hennen

"Ice Dawn" Linocut by William Hayes

In the shallows of the river

After one o' clock in the afternoon

Ice still

An eighth of an inch thick.

Night never disappears completely

But moves among the shadows

On the bank

Like a glimpse of fur.

Meanwhile

Trees

Grass

Flies and spiderwebs

Appear alone in the flat air.

The naked aspens stand like children

Waiting to be baptized

And the goldenrod too is stripped down

To its bare stalk

In the cold

Even my thoughts

Have lost their foliage.

"At the Beginning of Winter" by Tom Hennen, from Looking Into The Weather. © Westerheim Press, 1983.

"Report from the West" by Tom Hennen

"Tetons from Signal Mountain" by Ansel Adams, 1930's

Snow is falling west of here. The mountains have more than a

foot of it. I see the early morning sky dark as night. I won't lis-

ten to the weather report. I'll let the question of snow hang.

Answers only dull the senses. Even answers that are right often

make what they explain uninteresting. In nature the answers

are always changing. Rain to snow, for instance. Nature can

let the mysterious things alone—wet leaves plastered to tree

trunks, the intricate design of fish guts. The way we don't fall

off the earth at night when we look up at the North Star. The

way we know this may not always be so. The way our dizziness

makes us grab the long grass, hanging by our fingertips on the

edge of infinity.

"Report from the West" by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

"Plains Spadefoot Toad" by Tom Hennen

Plains Spadefoot Toad

Toads are smarter than frogs. Like all of us who are not good-

looking they have to rely on their wits. A woman around the

beginning of the last century who was in love with frogs wrote

a wonderful book on frogs and toads. In it she says if you place

a frog and a toad on a table they will both hop. The toad will

stop just at the table's edge, but the frog with its smooth skin

and pretty eyes will leap with all its beauty out into nothing-

ness. I tried it out on my kitchen table and it is true. That may

explain why toads live twice as long as frogs. Frogs are better at

romance though. A pair of spring peepers were once observed

whispering sweet nothings for thirty-four hours. Not by me.

The toad and I have not moved.

"Plains Spadefoot Toad" by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything.

© Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

Two Poems For the Season

SNOW FALL

by

May Sarton

With no wind blowing

It sifts gently down,

Enclosing my world in

A cool white down,

A tenderness of snowing.

It falls and falls like sleep

Till wakeful eyes can close

On all the waste and loss

As peace comes in and flows,

Snow-dreaming what I keep.

Silence assumes the air

And the five senses all

Are wafted on the fall

To somewhere magical

Beyond hope and despair.

There is nothing to do

But drift now, more or less

On some great lovingness,

On something that does bless,

The silent, tender snow.

"Snow Fall" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems: 1930-1993.

 © W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. 

IN THE LATE SEASON

by

Tom Hennen

At the soft place in the snowbank
Warmed to dripping by the sun

There is the smell of water.

On the western wind the hint of glacier.

A cottonwood tree warmed by the same sun

On the same day,

My back against its rough bark

Same west wind mild in my face.

A piece of spring

Pierced me with love for this empty place

Where a prairie creek runs

Under its cover of clear ice

And the sound it makes,

Mysterious as a heartbeat,

New as a lamb.

"In the Late Season" by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything.

© Copper Canyon Press, 2013.