Pink-stained cafe business card
where the aging owner served us slabs
of huckleberry pie twenty years ago, south
of Missoula. Penciled notes on how to find
the Medicine Wheel. Phone numbers
for winter cabins, beach bike rentals,
that old hotel in Boonville, by the bridge
looking down on the wide Missouri.
Torn concert tickets, and a coupon,
long expired, for the Voodoo Museum
across Rampart from Congo Square—
that dark-eyed tour guide who conjured up
Choctaws, West Africans, and French:
the dancers, the cathedral, blood history
deeper than artifact.
Layer after layer
into the recycling bin, of no more use
at this address, or any other.
Out in the yard, juncos still skitter
under late winter feeders,
and I think of the great migrants—
loose-limbed cranes, night-flying neotropicals—
no baggage, no GPS, only
the whole galaxy spinning—
a vast planetarium
lit inside each tiny skull.
Scott Lowery
Judge’s Comment:
Specific and precise details are everything in this rapidly unfolding catalogue poem, which, toward its end, unexpectedly, and extremely effectively, opens out into a cosmic view of Nature which puts those almost fussily-rendered details into dramatic and even startling new perspective.