Thirty feet from my windows,
an old kennel-wire fence
thickly grown over with honeysuckle,
poison ivy, and wild
roses
just beginning to open
into the loose sort of droopy garlands
an aesthetic young farmer
might drape around
Elsie
or Dobbin.

....................Where the wire ends
and the knotted up, spiraling vines
paw toward more
light, six slim
grey trunks of chokecherry
feather into leaves and
clusters of blossoming fronds
that lift and
fall with the breeze
like diminutive mare's tails
--each separate flower a rose,
each separate
flower
three-eighths of an inch of
white disk, radiant
about a head of yellow-gold stamens.

Beyond the
chokecherries
and a rutted road, beyond
locusts posts and barbed wire,
a deepening pasture lights up
with
ranunculus, "little frogs"
for some reason, lights up
--in fact--with buttercups
as clouds move sunlight
around.

And beyond them, veiled 
and perhaps faintly blue
in the distance, broadly
lit by the same shifting
light,
four rounded green mountains,
on the nearest and tallest of which
someone has built a white silo
and low
barn--or more likely
some kind of radar station
that talks all night to darkness,
some kind of early
warning,
perhaps an observatory.

.......................................I'm
just happy to stand here,
and
hold my vote close,
white-blinded and stupidly
gazing into random galaxies
and minor constellations,
starbursts
of yellow-haired stamens
in white corollas.

Poet: Peter Klappert
Poem: Chokecherries
Poem of the Day: Aug 4 2010

Are you looking for more information on this poem? Perhaps you are trying to analyze it? The poem, Chokecherries, has received 4 comments. Click here to read them, and perhaps post a comment of your own.