Meditation With Winter Coming and Determining All – a poem by R.W. Jagodnik

Meditation With Winter Coming and Determining All 

Sometimes the distance between is
deeper than salmon can swim, oceanwise.
These limits only lead “out there,”
a direct current beyond, a dark panther
snarling and pouncing into morning,
devouring.  Musts awaken this feeling —
the willed so bound, so unheeded
by the very breath that feeds them.
That beast, like spores in a powder,
closes pieces together into power.

*

Blue jay, tweeting under the elm,
freezing out before this winter’s end,
(a cruelly impotent entropic blend)
bewildered into the hulk of it —
no seized-on mood to thaw its
blue flesh, melting into ice.
There, the dark belly lifts,
an animus of pieta, the Christ
ascending on top the abyss
of Buddha.  Here, monks wander
without wit of arriving, their
minds clung to staffs. Here, cures
for luck grow slow like moss
under a bell-jar glass, eponymous.

R.W. Jagodnik has had poems published in The Cortland Review, M Review, The Poeming Pidgeon, Borrowed Solace and The Mantle. Currently, they care for developmentally-disabled adults in Milwaukie, OR.