Three Poems by Alex Missall
"Koan #1 at Camp Geronimo," "While at Camp Geronimo When Peeling Back the Rising Light," and "The Leaves That Dance in a Vulnerable Open"
Koan #1 at Camp Geronimo
This nightcloud crosses over the silent, full moon I watch now through trunks, limbs and branches caught in black. Before me, there’s the fugue of flickering light by a fire’s state of flame and cracking wood. Or one town from this campground, a locomotive’s whistling echoes the air. Once I turn away from such reverberation, I see my dog, in the glow of a headlamp, keeping watch to the absolute, empty koan of surrounding Nature, it reflected back into her outline.
While at Camp Geronimo When Peeling Back the Rising Light
A spring wheel’s morning wind gusts through such no-matter to camp, and sways the sundry trees starting to leaf around this clearing. The breeze blows smoke from a fire (which cooks breakfast in a skillet) toward the top of last night’s tent, whose staked-down rain top flaps from a headwind. This dawn, I awoke in the static to birdsong, gathered wood, then saw the half-circle of a sun paused through woods on a skyline (its light spread thinly across the horizon) while my dog meandered by the picnic table I stood over, then, to begin slicing potato and onion. With the round, white onionlike sun risen now, the turning of mid- day’s blustering weather peels back the past of yesterday’s descent by fire- light into a thought bottom, while I sit beside dying, afternoon embers, and listen to a silent swirling that carries my green focus to growth, again, filling the forest with color, the blossoms that shake like the sound of things rising, this rising announcement of Time, its things beginning to up- tick.
The Leaves That Dance in a Vulnerable Open
From out a network of paths cleared within the woods behind home, I soon emerge onto high ground— before an old, run-down shack— the lostness of its structure which was once, I think, an outhouse to what is left of a shelter’s splintered frame some paces farther. But the stuffed and toy monkey children from the neighborhood have hung—by velcroed paws upside-down on a limb near part to the paint-chipped past of this displaced edifice—is a sodden, gray and ragged reminder to the coming spring. But winter has been dusk light turning snow the color ash. Its stark illusion like the fragment of deadwood appeared as if suspended on the frozen white of Sunfish Pond’s shore I paused before in a waning real. After lightless weeks, I walk now under surreal vines hanging down trees, out a frame’s sheltered otherness, then into picture and field. And the bright, expansed wheatfield swallows such thinking through my emptying, even, of the collection to days spent not by seeking meaning in destination, but seeing beauty in things between, here, finding the red gate’s forest entrance, and the leaves beyond, being swept up in wind’s lost light, encircling there above trail ground, their dancing held out into vulnerable Open.
ASK THE POET
Jen Knox (JK): Hi Alex, Thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions here at Unleash Lit. We are thrilled to feature your poems, and we’d love to know a little more about your process. How and where do you find inspiration?
AM: That’s a good question, Jen. Most of my recent narratives have been sketched out from primitive camping, or hiking trails around Ohio. The how of inspiration, I think, goes closely with the where I find it.
JK: Speaking of inspiration, who are your favorite authors?
AM: As a kid, I read Roald Dahl. I played sports competitively until college, and would withdraw books on David Robinson the NBA player, or anything else that caught my attention at Merwin Elementary School. I’ve always been a bookworm. Lately, I’ve been reading writers like Lacan, Richard Rorty, Heidegger, and Habermas. I’ve mostly been reading philosophy, but I can say my first, most important influence was Raymond Carver. I learned poetry from a fiction writer.
JK: What is your revision process like, and how do you know when a poem is complete?
AM: It’s so easy, AI could do it, right? Usually, I sketch a poem in a composition book. After editing, the page appears unreadable as crossed out, moved around, or arrowed words, and sentences moved to different places. Eventually, I type out the poem to print out, then tack the piece into a wall by my desk, so I can see the work differently.
JK: What is the best advice you’ve received as a writer?
AM: My Dad once told me, “You’ll never make any money at it.”
JK: Ha! Great advice. What’s next for you as a writer?
AM: Next, I’m beginning a poetry collection on camping along the Buckeye Trail. The Buckeye Trail outlines the state and travels through different state parks and metroparks. I’m taking my dog with me.
Alex Missall studied creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. His work has appeared in Alexandria Quarterly, Hole in the Head Review, and Willows Wept Review, as well as other publications. He resides in Ohio, where he enjoys the trails with his Husky, Betts.
This is deep! Very inspirational