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Green
by J. C. Todd
Cries in a flurry — water? — can it chime?
Mica or garnet ringing, struck by brookspill
tumbling below the window, rain-fat, high.
Spring was all storm and, pouring down the hill —
side, is with us still in groundflow’s vagrancies.
But those faint cries seem closer, in my skull,
back of my eyes, not thoughts but reveries,
child-like. Latif on oboe, riffing, tune lost
inside a plaint diffused or stirred by leaves,
green in it, laurel sprig of Orpheus,
fern of Ophelia. What’s green will unravel
the cinch of isolation, grief or loss,
green of a promise, like a kiss or a cell
linking with cell, then spinning off, green as when
current surrenders bluest wave to shoal.
Pause. And then pulse. The silence Latif’s last tone
comes from and becomes. The everywhere cries —
whether my own or world’s, or are we one?
Silence. The arc of my hearing widens. Pines
filtering breeze, a sparrow’s chitter, raven’s crake
merge into groundbass, emerge as line,
mapping the woods’ proportions, depth and drape.
Mist, a loose gauze of stratus, wraps up mossy
trunks to reveal the woods’ secrets and signs, to make
whole what dapple scattered when, casting each
thing in relief, it tore the meshwork of green,
split it into items, billions of solo leaves.
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Bio: J. C. Todd’s poems and translations have appeared in the anthology Shade 2004,
and in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard
Review and other journals. Pine Press published two chapbooks: Nightshade (1995) and Entering
Pisces (1985).
Awards include a fellowship in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, two awards for poetry from
the Leeway Foundation, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts international artist exchange fellowship to
the Schloss Wiepersdorf colony in Germany, a scholarship to The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators
in Sweden, and a stipend from the Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation. Her poems have received five Pushcart
Prize nominations.
She is an associate editor for the poetry web magazine, The Drunken Boat
(www.thedrunkenboat.com), where she
has edited special features on contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian poetry in translation, and she was guest
poetry editor for the Summer, 2005 issue of The Bucks County Review, and co-editor of “Recurrence
in Another Tongue: Poets Translating Poets” that appeared in Frigate 4 in 2003.
A lecturer in Creative Writing and in the Writing for College program at Bryn Mawr College, she has an MFA
from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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