Pastoral By Joel Glickman

Pastoral                                                                        
 
The long night walks with slow and measured steps
across a field to meet the coming dawn,
his pockets filled with secrets of the dark,
soon to be spilled beneath the rising sun—
 
a pile of fur between two rows of beans,
some of them gnawed and some of them pristine,
and barefoot prints on moist and furrowed ground
that disappear in stubble past the fence
 
around the garden, but the mystery
for me is not who came or where they went,
but that the curving earth forever bends
away and down behind the distant rim
 
and gives no clue to where the dark of night
has gone without a backward glance or thought
but just a wink and kiss on morning’s cheek,
and not one word of what the moon has wrought

Joel Glickman is Professor Emeritus of Music at Northland College, having retired from full- time teaching in 2017.  He still teaches at Northland occasionally, part-time.  His poems have appeared in Aji magazine, Speckled Trout Review, Jerry Jazz Musician,  Spitball Magazine and Minor Trips Digest. He is a clarinetist, banjo player, recorded singer-songwriter and a once avid but now occasional fisherman.  He and wife Susan live in Ashland, Wisconsin.