Today’s poem is “Boulder” by Sidney Wade. Her eighth collection of poems, Deep Gossip: New & Selected Poems, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020. She taught workshops in Poetry and Translation at the University of Florida’s MFA@FLA program for 23 years, and she has served as President of AWP and Secretary/Treasurer of ALTA. Sidney served as poetry editor for the literary journal Subtropics for many years, and her poems and translations have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry, The New Yorker, Grand Street, The Paris Review, as well as many other literary publications. She spends part of each year in Rangeley, Maine.
She writes, “It all happened just as reported in the poem. And let's see, the process--I was in the middle of learning how to write long, very skinny poems, with two or three words in each line. What I found that did to my writing process was it made me listen MUCH more carefully to each word in every short line. I liked paying that particular kind of attention so much I kept at it for many years.”
Boulder
by Sidney Wade
this world
is full
of beautiful
surprises
here’s one:
one bright
blue noon
on Loon
Lake I sat
on the porch
eating lunch
and watched
a chipmunk
on the compost
pile nibble
a strand
of spaghetti
until he’d
consumed
it all and then
I heard
a tremendous
fluster
in the lake
a moose
had quietly
been munching
on underwater
plants—fine
delicacies
to northern
ruminant types
and what
I had taken
to be a boulder
turned out
to have been
her shoulder
as her submerged
mouth hoovered
up all the juicy
stems of my water
lilies until
her hungry
lungs ached
for air
and she reared
her head
in a great
splendor
of bright water
a sloshing
slurping
slurry
of mud
and stems
profuse and
dripping
from her
streaming
maw as she
observed
me coolly
before
heading down
for more
“Boulder” by Sidney Wade. Reprinted from Deep Gossip: New and Selected Poems (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) by permission of the author.