Reverie at the Poetry Lecture.

The clever remark of the lecturer
caused me to envisage in vain,
while he talked on and on,
that bump on a birch to hear
how silent it could remain.

I imagined instead curly-haired
yellow and river birch, smooth broad-backed
black, white stripped-trunks
of canoe, inverted black triangles
of ubiquitous gray.

All seated there raptly around me,
but nary a birch bump, silent or not.
Drained from my daydream,
I heard him conclude with his view of
how two roads would and did often diverge.



© Sherman K. Poultney 1 April 2006

“or you may remain as silent
as a bump on a birch”
B. Van Vechten