Ground Cover
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves,
Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Hummon, Ground Cover, intaglio print, Tetra Pak plate
Oh, Walt, you would have loved this cover too,
The dried pine needles, like grass, beyond counting, in swirls
and waves, this way and that, bedded down for a nap,
The fragments of twigs, broken and rebroken to the size of
fingernails,
The cones, last year's crop, and the year before,
and before that too . . . those tiny bits,
The occasional longer stick, and best, the exposed tree roots,
breaking the surface of the soil, mimicking tibia, ribs,
that you, the nurse, stoop to caress.
Not the best for a summer tumble, admittedly—too rough,
hard, uneven, though that might not have stopped you—
But beautiful, beautiful, this collage of bones . . .
whole, chips, splinters, perhaps an unmarked grave,
with certainly a trace of you.
Words
Have you noticed how Anglo-Saxon words
weigh more per character than Latin ones?
Pick up a handful—frog, cow, death, dark,
luck, bread, fire, stone, grave—they have more heft.
That's why they’re better for paper weights and poetry.
The last few years I've noticed that some words
have legs, others, wings. Names often stand up
and go for a walk around the block. The winged ones
fly off like birds, landing too far away to identify,
though you think you’ve seen them before, somewhere.
Some days, I look for lost words, not in the attic
where dust blankets stick-shift and hi-fi, circle pin,
petting, and telephone. More the wanderers, the ones
that can’t find their way back home to a sentence,
like pristine, courtship, and character.
Some words know how to speak, they talk to you
and make you smile, even sad ones. Awry—has
something gone awry?—who can resist saying that?
You can just feel the sharp edge, the twist,
the unexpected turn, like life.
Dear Reader
“looker, gazer, skimmer, skipper, . . .
first-timer or revisiter
Billy Collins, “Reader”
I don’t think of you often, except indirectly,
when I revise, search for a better word,
or maybe wonder whether you'll get an allusion
or pun, and whether it matters in any case.
You don’t need to, though I hope somebody does,
and you can always make things up if you're good.
It’s probably because I don’t believe in you,
not that you don’t exist at all. I have a few of you,
and once an angel wrote me who’d read a published poem.
You’re a bit like God, worth thinking about from time to time,
thanking, for sure, maybe praising, even if you don’t exist.
So maybe we should meet for coffee. How do you
take yours? I’d be happy to treat, something sweet.
We could talk, even read aloud, listen, laugh.
That would make you real, and me, too.
David Hummon is a poet, artist, and emeritus professor (Holy Cross). His work has been published in various journals, including The Worcester Review, The Healing Muse, The Bicoastal Review, The Connecticut River Review, and The Naugatuck River Review. His first full-length collection, How to Write a Bench, has just been published by Finishing Line Press, 2026. He lives in Winchester, Massachusetts. davehummon.com
Innisfree 42
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