Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Shadows
How, when young, I loved the shadow of that
massive oak, splayed like a great fork across
our lawn. Squirrels leaping from its limbs
onto the wispy cross-hatchings from higher twigs
along the rented tar-paper roof above our
heads. Crowning, I suppose, our indigence.
Or now, long distant in both place and time
from that rural town, the shadows still persist
in altered forms. That piece of sculpture
over there_ . . . _? At an exhibit, even now, my
interest’s in the shadows cast, before my eye,
enticed, seeks solid shape. And if I do say
anything (to others or myself), it’s simply this:
“What interesting shadows.”
DeKalb, Illinois
Dan Stryk’s collections of poems and prose parables include The Artist and the Crow (Purdue University Press) and Solace of the Aging Mare (The Mid-America Press). His most recent book, Dimming Radiance: Poems and Prose Parables (Wind Publications, 2008), combines Far Eastern and Western concepts and writing forms. A former National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, his work appears in such journals as Poetry, TriQuarterly, AGNI, Ploughshares, and The Antioch Review, and is represented in Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (University of Virginia Press), among other anthologies. (updated 6/2011)