Danielle Mckinney, Mercy (detail), featured in AGNI 103
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
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)