An Address to the Old Self
In all those old stories, the old knew. The image of the dark porch
and their gaze out into the blackness behind the pine trees.
Just a few words were needed. The squeak of the hinges. It is so good
when the characters know from the beginning
the last words they will have to speak.
History moves on to the next chapter, often forgetting to wave goodbye.
Meanwhile, you await your own message from the emperor.
Darkness falls as it should.
So why complain like this? If it is the end
at least make clear
why you should have been invited to the party in the first place.
Goodbye to the Poetry of New Hampshire
I think of the ovenbird’s slow
progress, his instructor
scribbling old nonsense on the board.
The moose
clomping over the road
in search of cranberries
even though they sog up his beard.
I return to Ohio. The old
man of the mountain
tumbles as I pass.
My wife’s sister sold her house
and now I have no Mount Washington.
No Lizzie Bourne
burdened with petticoats. O you, are her final words,
don’t know what it means to survive.
Sometimes you
have to risk the dying
just to claim that you lived.
To say teacher, teacher, teacher.
Note: Lizzie Bourne, a distant ancestor of mine, died in a September snowstorm while trying to hike up Mt. Washington, the highest mountain in New England, in 1855, just a few years before the cog railroad opened to bring tourists to the summit in much more safety and comfort.
Innisfree 43
A Closer Look:
Born on a farm in southeastern Illinois, Daniel Bourne has worked in a tree nursery/peony farm, a rare book library (at Indiana University), and in the English and Environmental Studies programs at The College of Wooster in NE Ohio. His books of poetry include The Household Gods, Where No One Spoke the Language, and Talking Back to the Exterminator. His poems have also appeared in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Guernica, Conduit, Salmagundi, Crab Orchard Review, Rhino, Shenandoah, Field, Michigan Quarterly Review, Plume, Yale Review, and others. Since 1980 Bourne has also lived in Poland several times, including in 1985-87 on a Fulbright for the translation of younger Polish poets, and most recently in 2024. A collection of his translations of Polish poet Bronisław Maj, The Extinction of the Holy City, appeared in 2024, and his translations of Maj and other Polish writers have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Field, Colorado Review, Partisan Review, Plume, Salmagundi, and Virginia Quarterly Review.