11th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Daniel Johnson of Chicago, Illinois

Jorie Graham Says:
"Another ascetic master the great plains seem to have produced: The sky becomes what is added to it: what a great clear image, that is, managing to keep all the wisdom abstraction allows. I love this poet best in his use of the longer line, in the first and the last poem, in the geometries and mathematics of thought and logic as they encounter what is called, here, longing, singing, keening. In addition, this poet knows sky--a very hard thing to know."

BIO:
Daniel Johnson is a poet, photographer, & grass roots educator, who was born in Ohio's Steel Valley. Currently, he is finishing his first manuscript of poems How to Catch a Falling Knife-- a collection that states, "To catch a falling knife / you have to double-doubt / the knife." He was selected by Campbell McGrath as a finalist in the Poetry Center of Chicago's 2004 Juried Reading, and his poetry has been featured in American Letters & Commentary, 88: a Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, and also appears in the anthology I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio.

Accounting for the Wren, the Rocket, and the Immaterial

The sky becomes what is added to it-
          a radio tower, a stratus cloud, one hundred Chinese kites-

until one day, a day like today when winds gust east, then
          west, blowing hard off the lake,

the sky becomes what is taken away,

          a vapor trail vanished. The absence of geese. A gaping
          space where before there was none.

Begin, again, the slow math of loss. Use feathers; use flint,
whatever is around,

until the sky, once more, fills with that which is offered to it-

          our love-cries, curses, kaddishes, our whispers, our howls, our
                    longing, our singing, our long, long, keening.

© 2005 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.