From Fieldbook series

1

Ships before me
meet land
meet indigenous woods
of which they have no knowledge.

Every sense, a birth

Hovering above the shore
above the ship,
a hummingbird in curiosity
(is it the same curiosity?)

Only just arriving here-
We – that self –
must be an eternity on the shore
with the skim pooling at a footprint
a presence
an observance

The hummingbird sips at a flower.
the ship takes to the river
the mouth of everything we are given
opens

2

Trying to find fruit,
feet clad in grasses,
destructible world all girded in blue.

A line of cane borers elongates and compresses.
A velvet leaf, thick of blackberries.

They bore
their children into bark
behind a dark curtain.
A generation spiraling

up between a tree,
flattened by birth
trailing out on a surface
on the ground
against grass

What light they saw was that by which they lived

Grant Souders is currently earning a B.A. in Creative Writing at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. A few of his poems have appeared in A Literary Journal.