A pond will deepen toward the center like a plate we traced its shallow rim my mother steering my inner tube past the rushes where I looked for Moses we said it was a trip around the world in China we wove through curtains of willow that tickled our necks let's do that again and we'd double back idle there lifting our heads to the green rain swallows met over us later I dreamed of flying with them we had all the time in the world we had the world how could those trees be weeping?
—Jody Gladding
Rights & Access
From On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists, March 1994
New Cambridge Press
Copyright 1994 by Jody Gladding.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Persea Books from On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists. Copyright 1994 by Jody Gladding. For further permissions information, contact Yale University Press.
-
Jody Gladding
Jody Gladding (1955- ) is the author of four books of poetry, including Translations from Bark Beetle: Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2014).