Lines in the Backyard
Have you seen the lights in the windows of the trees?
No one is at home there unless you count what’s wild.
Do you know the names of everyone asleep in your leaves?
I am not just talking about genus and species.
It’s hard work keeping up with the new ones
Or those passing through the yard for the night.
Once I saw an owl perched on a low-limbed tree.
I never did get its name because it took off soon.
Jake the vole rode its talons to the stars.
He never came back, but a new Jake lives here now.
STUART DISCHELL is the author of Good Hope Road, a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues, Dig Safe, Backwards Days and Children With Enemies and the pamphlets Animate Earth and Touch Monkey and the chapbook Standing on Z. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies including Essential Poems, Hammer and Blaze, Pushcart Prize, and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems. A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
