Cathedral Woods
Monhegan Island, 1997
The cry I heard I didn’t make.
What I heard was sheared from sky,
a cosmonaut’s capsule on reentry,
a keening of broken orbits.
Was this how God enters one’s travel?
Here, where the thermometer stapled
to a pine had snapped in two, and tiny
capsules of mercury bobbed on a sea
of needles? In those woods, where I
kept confusing deer trails for what
would lead me to the sea, the wind
rubbed the trees together. They could,
would, burn. Oak against ash—revelation
compels consumption and that’s why
saints adore the magnifying glass, thunder.
I did find the sea that day, and sat,
shivering on a granite shelf. Above me, seagulls
wheeled through various grays, and below,
the ocean frothed while I rubbed heat
into my hands—all I could hold, my one reply.
.
James Wyshynski is a former editor of the Black Warrior Review. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nimrod, River Styx, Stoneboat, Terminus, The Cortland Review, The Connecticut Review, Vallum, and are forthcoming in the American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod, and others.