Six New Poems by Daril Bentley

Arctic Sample Core

Through this fragile blue tube of glacial glass

humanity’s mammoth survivals pass.

Coyote

Coyote, the nowhere-lingered,

is a tourist icon

of kitschy bric-a-brac.

Low One, he’s

the slim stealth and opportunity

of the wind

Where it goes with belly-lack

scrawny along the ground—

stopping, watching,

Listening.

Coyote, he’s this thick-fingered

woman

On vacation

from Wichita or Branson

or New York city,

Haggling over pinched pennies—

the man

miffed waiting with a car running.

Give, Because

Give me three

branches hanging low

and filled with

cedar waxwings.

Give me a sunlit stream

meandering

through every memory

I know—

And let it speak of

feathered things

in tones that roll soft

and silver.

Give me these because

my mother died

today and I

need to let the world go.

Moss and Lichen

Moss can be more harsh to a face

than tree bark.

Lichen can be softer

Than cottonwood down.

Moss is the matrix of common sense.

Lichen loves too much the shade.

My father was moss.

He sang as he worked.

My mother was lichen.

She scrubbed with a vengeance—

oblivious to the meaning

of a fern glade.

These days I seek out both.

Just to look at. Just to remember how

I came to this place.

Murmuration

The profession and art of direction

as by flash of fish in the sea.

How flawless synchronized swimming

in the air is done.

Five thousand hearts beating

And ten thousand wings

folded and unfolded in perfect time.

The symbol for infinity

morphing in 3D.

A massive amoeba in the sky.

A lightless, roiling constellation

of starlings

against a violet sunset.

A living dark cloud dimming

yet fascinating the setting sun

With a fluidity sublime.

A piecemeal being repeating

the creation

of every blood-run life with a single cry

upon a peaceful planet.

Neolithic Petroglyphs

Scoffing at the utility of words

looking out

upon petroglyphs etched

in the igneous ousted

from the core of the earth

before humanity’s antler-chiseled

impositions first were,

Before primary purpose came

to knowledge—

and gazing further out, where

prairie grass is industriously

tooling its few moments

into the weightless tablature of these

inarticulate winds—

One can imagine him sitting there

holding his brutish

head heavy

in his sunset hands

and staring out at the future,

grunting dismissively from that thick-

browed skull of his.

***

Pushcart Prize nominee and Yale Series of Younger Poets Award semi-finalist Daril Bentley has been called a nature poet of the first order—his work likened in review to Frost, Jacobsen, Oliver, and Thoreau. His book The Long Lake received a Writer’s Digest Honorable Mention, a Brittingham Prize Series Editors’ Commendation and Finalist for the New Mexico Book Award for Poetry. He lives in Elmira, New York.