Catherine Bowman

HYMN

Today, I’m a religious nut, 
all kernel and seed, fired up
when it comes to bafflement, 
to bewilderment, to all
those impenetrables, to
the ancient art of huh? 
Wonder’s my escape
hatch, my dreamboat, 
my hitching post, my safe
word and my overused 
cliché.  Wonder’s my welcome
mat, my exit ramp, my overhead
projector screen, my cup
of live forever tea, my full-strength
weakness. Just think, about the two
each locked in a different dream 
as they dream tango across 
the sheets during a thunderstorm. 
Behold the reindeer’s 
eyes change from summer gold
to blue in winter. Or a wild
cat scooping up a wild beast
right out of time. The eyeshine
of the great lake sturgeon heavy
across the great lakes floor
cloaked in the lake shadow 
of mammoth cumulous – the infants
monumental turn from
back to belly – and that old one
with the eyes and heart of a pony. 
Why do butterflies eat with their feet? 
I suffer my own fool daily. I have
doubts, no doubt but here’s these
ring stains on my ring fingers
that I can’t scrub out because
I’ve been married to her 
– this sphere – this earth for life,
where we argue, trifle, and gloat. 
In thickness of apple, in this thinness
of a blue sliced sky. I am my beloved
and my beloved is not mine. Now,
we’re castaways, lost and afloat chasing
stars forever. Now, we’re reformers, 
wrecking chaos in accordance
to the vows of wonder. And like the butterfly, 
I taste leaves with my feet.

THE EEL TRUNK

They make their way over open ocean,
to the inland river, through wetland
pulse and marshes and old paddocks
flooded with salt meadow hay. 
And there in a dark estuary, 
the eel-catcher waits with his
eel-trap.  And with the secret key
he wears around his neck, he locks
the young eels, these midnight elvers
into a mesh strongbox and lowers them
with a chain into the midnight pond
cradled by swamp rose, willows, and reeds.
In the moonlight, through the iron apertures
you can see their skin once glass now gold
rock in the pond crafting infinite golden knots 

They loved each other, those two, but they 
didn’t even know it. They didn’t even know it 
themselves. They could not access their own
paradise locked away in their hearts. This boundless
unending never-ending knowledge could
not be opened even with a secret key.
And the eel-catcher there at midnight
singing a love song without words to the eels.

Catherine Bowman is the award-winning author of 1-8OO-HOT-RIBS, Rock Farm, Notarikon, The Plath Cabinet, and most recently Can I Finish, Please? She also edited Word of Mouth: Poems featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The LA Times and Best American Poetry. She is Provost Professor at Indiana University where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program.