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Mark B. Hamilton has published Earth Songs (6th
Annual National Chapbook Award, Panhandler Press, University of West
Florida, 1993), Confronting the Basilisk (Muncie: Ball State
Publications, 1994) and a video, Discovering Home: a sojourn on the Lewis
and Clark Trail (Gig Harbor: Robert McConnell Productions, 2000). Since
1983, his work has appeared in many magazines and journals both in the U.S.
and abroad.
He has an MFA from the Writers Workshop, University of
Montana and has taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing.
Currently he teaches at Missouri Western State University, St. Joseph,
Missouri.
A Thought for Poets
Train your eyes with practice in the visual arts: e.g.,
painting or photography. Train your ears with excursions into music, drama
and nature. Bring your heart to these studies, your sensibilities to every
discipline. Read as much great literature as possible. In all of this, think
of yourself as the center of a turning wheel, the referent to the context
which surrounds. Develop your sense of language until it can convey the
essence beyond your own personal awareness. Explore. Surprise yourself.
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As if a desert
this land
becomes cold quickly
when the sun
goes down,
but the
curving rock
sweeps and
steps into buttes and towns,
into clouds
and prairies
so newly green
with rain they roll emerald
past New
Town’s long bridge.
White pelicans
paddle as I
paddle past:
fifty-five,
plus all those wings!
At a marina I land wet
and cold
to walk the
mile toward town,
but The People
show a concern for me.
Their cars
stop and they talk
with bright,
comfortable Arikaree eyes
--compassionate--a family’s warmth
offered to me,
a stranger, the wind at his back.
After such a
day of change: the laundromat,
the café,
tenting near town,
I relaunch the
kayak, my “Gander” body
under fast
patches of blue.
All day
becomes one long lesson
in paddling
storms,
the wind
heaped up into powerful waves.
I lean back
and surf their scowls,
slough down
their backs to let the rough ones pass.
They lift
Gander hour after hour
whooshing us
toward that unsure shore.
In control but
without direction,
we rush past a
man, an unspeaking man
signaling from
his unreachable beach.
Then, far
downwind, we land;
more miles
lost than gained
to camp under
the cutbank of tree roots.
The wind
crests over us
in sunlight
breaking between clouds,
hailstones
bounce amid mushrooms and stones.
From inside
the tent
I watch a pair of
western grebes
mirrored like
white flowers
linked by
glances side to side, petal to petal,
shoulder to
shoulder.
They entwine
necks,
one around the
other, and bob in unison,
chirp and
stare. They rise up
to dance on
four splashing feet:
mirror to
mirror, splash to splash.
They paddle
the sweet water
of this red
slate beach
scattered in
the safety of its lee.
And in a
blink, they arch and dive
and disappear.
How wonderful
the sun
rising and
setting. How strong
is our trust
in song.
Storm winds
have steered me home.
How like them
to bring
me back to
myself.
Previously published in North Dakota
Quarterly,
Summer 2005: 63-64.
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