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Published: Fri Jul 1 2011
Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Convirtiéndose en characoteles / Sorcerers Changing into Their Animal Forms (detail), 2013, oil on canvas. Arte Maya Tz’utujil Collection.
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 formsA 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)

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