Daniel Simon
(USA)
A Poem a Day
To start with a blank slate
As if a single line could carry
The weight, a cosmos of words
An incipit, a fiat,
An ex nihilo that
Breaks from the repetition
Of always and forever
And promises a world
Anew.
Jupiter’s Ear
Midway along life’s path,
if ascent is still an option,
is it possible to spring forth
as a poet, fully formed,
before Minerva’s owl
takes flight at sundown?
No dark wood surrounding
or night of the soul looming
just the concatenation
of storylines, irresolution
and serendipity accreting
into the lineation of days.
Not chaos theory
but a sort of indeterminacy
radical in implication –
neither fate nor absurdity
just reason enough to go on
despite all evidence to the contrary.
After Reading Everything
October was the fallow month
even as harvest’s plenty filled bins and bushels.
While reading long-rowed words like drilled furrows
my own page blank with infecund white.
One lifetime’s worth of reading could fill
the brain’s stockpile, overflowing it with
abundance, yet the vessel filled is nature morte,
still life in suspension, waiting for metamorphosis.
When life writes itself into consciousness
the expectant self, rapt in absorption,
seeks a new birth in expulsion
leaving lines behind –
cultivars and cuttings
tilled into existence.
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BIO
Daniel Simon, is assistant director and editor in chief of World Literature Today magazine at the University of Oklahoma, where he also teaches for the Department of English. He is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, the National Book Critics Circle, and PEN American Center. A Nebraska native, he lives in Norman, Oklahoma, with his wife and three daughters.