Rob Cook
MAGELLAN
I grew up with a map of kindergarten
God wandering outside speech
where his wings hurt the water
Someone wrote in apple colored crayon:
Stay away from the slaves hauling Legos
to the first grade cities of Mrs. Iskra
A baseball card torn in half killed me once, then we were friends
I grew up following the clumps of chewed gum stuck to the sky
It's taken thirty-six years
to reach the shore of this one drop of rain
IN THE DEEP WOODS
The boy takes out
his prayer map
and gives thanks
to the trail maker,
smear of white
blood on a tree.
The rocks breathe
and fail here
because their fathers
took the same abandoned
path to the mountain
and ran out of mountain light.
There are circles
in the grass where grasses hide,
and search parties of rain
leading the cold
the hard to find city.
The trees keep bending and shushing
the dandelions
breathing for other dandelions
this far at night.
The boy stands in a meadow that follows
the wind, someone
out there birthing katydids—
deep katydids without a proven summer—
and scattering them
across the leaves, or some
unknowable thing's fallen,
leaf-sized shrouds.
Rob Cook lives in New York City's East Village. He is the author of a few books. Work has appeared or will appear in Sugar House Review, Versal, Bomb, Rhino, Hotel Amerika, Birmingham Poetry Review, Caliban, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Toad Suck Review, Dalhousie Review, Verse, Quiddity, Redactions, Phantom Drift, The Antioch Review, etc.