Connor O'Callaghan, "January Drought"

It needn’t be tinder, this juncture of the year,   

a cigarette second guessed from car to brush.   

The woods’ parchment is given   

to cracking asunder the first puff of wind.   

Yesterday a big sycamore came across First   

and Hawthorne and is there yet.   

The papers say it has to happen,   

if just as dribs and drabs on the asbestos siding.   

But tonight is buckets of stars as hard and dry as dimes.   

A month’s supper things stacks in the sink.   

Tea brews from water stoppered in the bath   

and any thirst carried forward is quenched thinking you,   

piece by piece, an Xmas gift hidden   

and found weeks after: the ribbon, the box.   

I have reservoirs of want enough   

to freeze many nights over.

--Connor O'Callaghan, "January Drought"

A. R. Ammons, "Hymn"

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go on out

     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

           where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

     coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

    far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

--A. R. Ammons, Hymn