Jonathan Ponder

Eastern Washington
 
The Blue Mountains, spread low and tapered like feet
hiding the horizon, are barely a memory until I place them 
into the day I realized it was possible to not believe,
 
felt this drop through and split. I left to hike those hills
outside the cloistered mind, seeking the body lost
between my feet and my thoughts in the sky. Then
 
the slow turn from story through doctrine to the break
from stable language and rule to poetry and books,
until the daily mosaic of prayer and ritual and cross
 
could no longer comfort and no longer explain
the loss of a friend or the distance of God. And yet
I walked many more years before I confessed this.



Normandy Coast
 
A patchwork of fields embedded with the memory of war
and of so many seasons, so many bird songs,
that it would never occur to a soldier, or maybe
 
anyone, to count them. The day that I rode a bicycle
along the coast and rainstorms blew in and out all day--
when I sheltered against ruined stone walls
 
and inside old gun emplacements facing the sea,
ate Camembert cheese and baguette for lunch,
and imagined the soldiers alone, firing at thoughts--
 
that day began with family breakfast in a youth hostel,
a mosaic of languages and accents, of unspoken memories
and plans singing inside each parachuting heart.

Jonathan Ponder is a writer, librarian, and record collector. He has published poems in Epicenter and The Pacific Review and also wrote and recorded an album of Americana music called Many a Good Long Year. He is from Southern California but lives in Michigan with his partner, cat, chickens, and record collection.