The Sunday Poet: Jon D. Lee

Jon D. Lee Poet

Jon D. Lee is the author of three books, including An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease, and These Around Us. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Sierra Nevada Review, Connecticut River Review, The Laurel Review, Oregon Literary Review, and Clover, A Literary Rag, as well as the anthologyFollow The Thread, and a craft essay on how humor creates motion and meaning in poetry is forthcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle. He has an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University, and a PhD in Folklore. Lee teaches at Suffolk University, and spends his spare time with his wife and children. 

Blackbird Grind

1.

Seemingly undifferentiated lines
Of blackbirds. Seen in focused simultaneity,
Pointillist illusion of black against white
Mountainside of winter aspen. Distant enough
To occlude motion & sound, meaning reduced
To grayscale.

2.

Less dully, but distal: webwork of limb
And body, breast replacing leaf, clear line
Of thicker branches. Resolution
Of wing, curve of bone beneath feather. Then
Sternum swell, hollow bone, space
Between ventricle snap. The eye dilates
As if it were our own.

3.

Bird & bird & bird &
Bird weighing the lines. The eyes;

So much motion absent motion; an embarrassment
Of purpose delayed; the sky-egg
That clings to the oblique.

4.

So much should be lost. But seldomly
The grind erupts the hollows, blossoms the tree line,
Rises to fragment the light and scatter the shards--
Reveals, newly, the clear unfrozen lake, whose still surface
Shows both sky and lake-bottom, bird and fish,
Branch and root.