Ed Higgins

Escaped Poems

Sometimes my poems escape. They crawl out through my Wi-Fi connection, I suspect.

One I found on the cluttered workbench in my shop next to a pair of garden clippers I hadn’t gotten around to sharpening yet. Tossed among other assorted tools scattered about the messy work area. The poem had been flirting with a slatternly trouble light when I caught up with it.

Another had made it as far as the barn. Had dropped into an open feedsack of All-Stock Grower for its intoxicating smell of molasses mixed with rolled oats, corn, and barley. The poem was sticky with the stuff.

A haiku had crept under a sitting hen, thinking itself a brown egg of sorts, enjoying a keenly perceived Zen moment: the silence of warm breast feathers.

A longer poem had climbed onto my tractor seat where I had left the machine in a half-mown hayfield while I went to the house for lunch. The green-sweet scent of newly cut brome, timothy, and red clover when I returned had left the poem heady with this palatable fodder drying in summer sun.

Several poems had found their way to the garden patch, cozying up to still green tomatoes, watching the pole beans rapid climb up bamboo stakes, nervous at discovering asparagus spears pushing through the dark loam. One poem was conversing with the Armenian cucumbers in their own language.

There are more escaped poems out there I have yet to find. Many I don’t remember writing. Some I have come upon have transmuted into reality. Like the blue dragon flies hovering over the pond down by the creek.

Still, I am always surprised to stumble upon any of them again.

words as intimacy    noun verb modifiers   thought’s syntax