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Nathan Hoks

after Will Alexander


Say I climb the ladder of wheat
and at the top there is a faucet dripping beads of water
but the water takes a year to turn into an eagle
and the sky's forty-three shades of gray pierce
the first inflection of my heart, the point where the signals
throw grass into the river. Say the river sags
and the horizon sucks the lance out of the ghost's hands
like the moment of being born, the point where a shadow's
tongue slides through the faultline.
Grace. Sunlight, cherries.
Say for once I can hear all the bugs and clowns
in my middle ear. Say the dark center spreads
its grainy inflection points into the keyholes
and like a wheel they are singing.
Like a drunkard they are sweating.
Like a spider their threads stitch the oakmoss
around the perfume factory. O elastic fibers.
O floral molecules in the olfactory bulb!
Say my favorite dog decides to hop over the boxwood
and the boxwood flings the thorax into a spiritual gulfstream
where I'm ungluing the windmills.
Then I feel the hay settle into my marrow
and the farm animals gather near the fence.
The lake inflects its waves, the thunderhead wobbles.
A bolt of pain passes through me.
At last I am a tunnel.
from the journal DENVER QUARTERLY
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As usual, I don’t remember what I was thinking when I wrote “Inflection Point.” I do remember that it came about from a workshop discussion of Will Alexander’s Across the Vapour Gulph. A student commented on the line “Say I climb the ladder of wheat.” A fabulous line! We were all jazzed by it, and made up a prompt where everyone should start a poem with it. I always write with my students, so that’s how the poem came to be. 
Robin Myers on Finding Her Way as a Translator

The problem with loving a place isn’t love but reciprocity. It’s easy to love with your senses, to thrill at the sensation of being swept up in something enormous, a tiny cog in a vast and beautiful wheel. It’s easy to marvel at the mountains in the distance, occasionally visible through the smog from the valley they once cleaved. Their nearness is a solace. You could get there if you wanted to. But you don’t want to: you want to be here, in the middle of the human swirl, swallowed up. You hear yourself say it: I love this place. Which doesn’t have to love you back.

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Dumanis on Natalie Eilbert's Overland

"The word 'overland' connotes an arduous journey, a direct engagement with the environment and the vicissitude of nature. Broken into its constituent parts, 'over land,' the term is also the root of global disputes, why nations go to war. 'Over' can mean about, but also done, finis, kaput. But this is more a book of journey through life than despair at it."
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