Carol Frost

Wilderness
August 9, 2013 Frost Carol

Wilderness

 

The mind is a wilderness like Bartram’s, razed, cemented over, marked by rows

of parked cars and citizenry stones of those less and less well remembered.

It is Muir’s “glorious forest’ and turpentine factories, and Audubon’s pistol shots.

For mind, like Audubon’s, contains birds of very description, the pretty one on my sill

with painted crest and impossibly red bill and feasting vultures.

The commotion

in so much stillness lured me nearer in my kayak and I waved my paddle high

when the vultures circled back for more of the carcass, scattered and rotten.

Mind possesses and is possessed by bits of history. And Arcturus, and the houselights

in cities, when there is no other light, blazing like stars. And the human

voice, your laughter in the null moment,

at null o’clock before one last good night.

 

New poems by Carol Frost appear in On the Seawall and Vox Populi, and in 2020, Madhat Press published her latest book Alias City. Retired recently from Rollins College, where she directed Winter with the Writers for more than a decade, she is presently a Chancellor for the Florida State Poets Association. When she is not writing, she tends her olive and her citrus trees.