while the black oak
takes coaxing.
That popping and
whistling? Yellow
birch and red pine.
Difference
might for now define,
but soon the whole
church is chanting
at the same time,
flame splashing
bright from the dirty
bucket of the earthly,
roaring likeness
and only likeness
into the bottomless
cool of the night . . .
Source: Poetry (December 2007).
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This poem originally appeared in the December 2007 issue of Poetry magazine
Poet Todd Boss grew up on a cattle farm in Wisconsin, and was educated at St. Olaf College and the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he received an MFA. Boss’s pared-down, idea-driven poems are propelled by internal rhyme and balance clarity with a nuanced attention to sound. “I think of poems as pieces of music, or a work of architecture,” he told the Utne Reader in 2009. “The poem is a space that you’re inviting someone . . .
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