Pine shadows on snow like a Jasper canvas,
if only my pen equaled the downy’s stabbing beak
this January morning, her frantic
chipping, more resolve than frenzy, to make a feast
of beetle larvae, if only my wood-boring eyes
could interrogate the known like pillars of sunlight
through fast-moving clouds scanning the side
of Corporation Mountain where on a distant ridge
white plumes dissolve like theories.
Urban Renewal (lxxxi.)
Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. He is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.