Poems by Jack Phillips

Iambic Muck and Shivers

by Jack Phillips

From Canary Winter 2021-22

Jack lives in the Missouri-Kickatuus watershed (in modern times known as the Platte River) where the tallgrass prairie meets the western edge of the eastern deciduous forest and where the Omaha tribal lands meet the Pawnee.

Nature poets gone before us have muddied and mucked their way into used bookstores. Much less than to make a footprint where we don’t belong does it take a poem to make, nothing more than clear exuberance of wild moments running over, each step flowing into the next on land no more enchanted, no less than it ever has been. Or holy. In this moment in muscle and blood-rush shivers, earth-beats in living skin matter most. We go lightly in love with silence but a silence never requiting; the woods here and prairie, river bubble voices of a thousand beings as free as we might be freed. Come what may muddy is later shared boots by the door feet to the fire, cardamom cake still some left fresh pot of coffee on, and poems of our own composing.