In Defense of Nature Poetry
If I undress nature take off its robes
pull down its wedding gown watch it itch
in its woolen underwear I see it
made of human bones of starlight
a billion years old of crocuses
poking from frozen ground of aged
oaks of roots like grasping hands
and mountains marked with cairns
above the tree-line where clouds are
shaped like desire desire shaped like
curved space and time like gravity lensing
and stars in the shapes of rings rings
in the shapes of Einstein’s dreams like Einstein
and his tongue sticking out like a telescope sent to space
that sees that perfect ring perfect as a gold band
on a young man’s finger perfect as longing
perfect as a bride perfect as evergreen limbs
draped in snow perfect as a gray-cloud day
and the winter doe brought down by the perfect coyote
perfect as the hate Nazis have for Jews perfect
as an AI poem written by an AI muse.
Remembrance of Things Past
I bought a box of Blackwing 602s, the kind Billy Collins uses to write of rising on a lazy Sunday and walking by just-bloomed petunias on the way to the coffee shop where he’ll sit and notice a cute couple making moon eyes at each other. The girl has a most arresting mole on her neck and the boy’s chin-cleft is deep as rivers out west where rafters crash over class four rapids and, later in the day, laze in pools where the water is so clear you can see the shadows of cutthroat trout blackening the bottoms.
The tip of the Blackwing breaks and Billy looks up from his moleskin notebook and sees a single fly struggle in a web which makes Billy think of fishing and he quickly resharpens his pencil and finishes the poem with a line about him pulling the last trout from the Bitterroot River and then letting it go.
I wanted to write like that, be an august poet, my hands smudged with graphite and shavings strewn on my desk so I vowed I’d write my poems with a 602 but had forgotten how my fingers cramped when grasping writing implements and that I got Fs in penmanship and paper has a way of getting away from me and there are no coffee shops walking distance from my home.
admiring old poets
writing
in pencil
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist and nominated for numerous awards including Best New Poets of 2025. His poems have appeared in ONLY POEMS, Rattle, and Whale Road Review among others. More at www.dickwestheimer.com.