The Cave by Rustin Larson

The Cave

.

The most beautiful thing I saw today

was a damaged square of sidewalk

where an old butternut tree had fallen

and cracked it like a pie crust

revealing a hollowness that plummeted

forty feet down into an abandoned coal-

.

mine shaft.  A room with walls of coal.

I once entered a cave, felt an ancient comfort.  Today

I woke in my room.  When I meditate I plummet

and imagine I can understand bird song, the sidewalk

robin, “For this day we thank thee, for thy pie crust

we thank thee, for our lives…” The song falls

.

down the long shaft of being to where I sit, fallen.

The cave was in Missouri; I felt at home inside; no coal,

just graffiti from Jesse James.  I could see the crusts

of bread strewn in the bandits’ grotto.  Today

however is blind.  I pound the sidewalk

with a stick, hear its hollowness.  Coins plummet

.

as I throw them into the crack.  A buzzard plummets

from an invisible mountain, roses have fallen

and light the cavern with embers, onions walk

out of the garden, sugar burns into a lump of coal,

the pie becomes a rock, the robin creates day,

our ancestors’ bodies sleep in the earth’s crust.

.

If I have time for stories, I trust

so many things are subtracted, plummeted

down into nothingness, just like daylight

without earth for it to shine upon, the fallen

soul’s limitless with wings soaring around a coal

of intention in uncreated space, a walk

.

without soil or solidity.  No, my fragmented walk

is what it is, my mind broken like the crust

of a communion wafer, the lit coal

on the tongue, the destruction, inevitable, plummeting

around and dependent upon and part of the body fallen

from its tower of ashes into unending day.

.

Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, and North American Review. He won 1st Editor’s Prize from Rhino and was a prize winner in The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation contests. A graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival, and a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top Festival.

.

.

Advertisement