Poems by John Schneider
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After the Darkening Trees
by John Schneider
From Canary Fall 2023
John lives in the Wildcat Creek watershed near Tilden Park in Berkeley, California.
We welcome these hints of gold, such small swirls of light
glimpsed through cracks in autumn’s shifting clouds,
as if to mirror forgotten grief, guilt; these leaves
that once held us have started falling again.
Even this shallow lake reflects deeper than
the masquerade of summer’s wide-open eye.
And we see ourselves in a less grand light,
the sky’s softening takes us back to sensual matters:
the smooth skinned surface opening for whatever
enters it, whatever we surrender to it.
This skipped stone leaves my hand with impossible
precision, bounces with a brief evenness, again
swallowed by its own concentric circles, returning
to its place of origin. Slowly, so very slowly,
the stone I once held—like everything I thought
I knew—sinks out of reach, as I vanish back
into the shadows of the darkening trees.
© John Schneider
Like the Trees
by John Schneider
From Canary Fall 2023
Wandering over the Mid-Tallac with skeletal
patches of cloud, it is late October once again.
Fog from the hardening lake hangs thick as ghosts
from seasons past returned to roost.
Feathers soft as a consoling blanket
in these barren branches of aspen and sky.
Golden leaves shed their homes, fade away.
Nothing left undone. Nothing left to grieve.
They wait for the earth to close over them.
To heal what had never truly broken. To break
apart the earth into nourishment and goodbye.
© John Schneider
Mother Earth
by John Schneider
From Canary Fall 2023
Bending and meandering like a creek
running cursive along the fence line
keeping the wildness at bay, she rakes withered
roots and thimbleberries from a hardening
soil readying her yearlings for the encroaching
winter in this interval between fattening
and hibernation. And there is always the broken
song of the quieting creek water stumbling over
slabs of rock and smooth cobbles, all our unspoken
griefs and guilts. On the sylvan Sierra breeze,
our woodsmoke curls its message of warning,
as the mother teaches her children how to listen,
how to keep some distance. In the near distance,
scampering freely, madly, they learn how play must
evolve into survival, how weaker wood houses enough
carpenter ants for most smaller hungers. At her subtle
command, just some hoarse grunting low and sharp
as a chainsaw’s echo, they scramble back down
a towering body of sugar pine and evening light,
their shadows lengthening, their faces hooked
into question marks without the comfort of a question.
Retreating over a neighboring hillside, far from fence and
smoke, another family deepens its prints into freshly turned earth.
© John Schneider
Sea Lion
by John Schneider
From Canary Spring 2020
The seagulls hover, patient attendants, waiting
with a mid-wife’s interest.
Others perched at the edge of the hedgerow
inch foot-to-foot, by-standers
revealing nothing of their intent,
as the surf’s momentum curls into waves
drum rolls to the main event.
The surf continues its
opening and closing
beckoning and sending away
while she lies broadside to the surf
washing over and around her
rolling her this way and that.
Her sand-spackled fur glowing in the sun
she utters occasional guttural coughs.
With scant warning, blood seeps
traces of red ink
and in minutes the squirming pup
is born, the mother nudging it to swim with her
in a blood tainted sea.
The gulls swoop in and feast on what remains.
© John Schneider
Sierra-Gray Moth
by John Schneider
From Canary Summer 2020
She arrives with the fervor of an unfinished dream.
Drawn to the after-dinner cabin light
the moth returns to a work in progress
tap, tapping—a writer intent at a Smith Corona
her wings chalk the window glass with smudges
like the residue of dreams, blurred figures
left from the all-night twitching of eyelids.
Morning. The writer wakes
to her message—
an outsider hoping to find a way in.
© John Schneider
Symbiosis
by John Schneider
From Canary Summer 2023
A flotilla of seabirds casts off from the sloping
palms of this crescent shoreline like
white kerchiefs rising brightly
with the wind over the surging swells
along a South Pacific horizon, then vanish
into a landscape of faint green mist.
They scout the ragged sea-top for this
bounty of small silver fish boiling
to the surface to escape
the bellies of bonitos below.
This chaos of wings and hunger guides
the fishermen who skipper their trawlers
each morning to a place with no land in sight.
And as they return to that drier home that’s not
really home anymore, the birds follow to fill
themselves with gutted castoffs, then roost
in the open hands of trees, awaiting another sunrise
© John Schneider