TPQ OnLine - Spring Meditation

TPQ OnLine
poetry by david koehn

Spring Meditation

Gone are the same white mornings returning again,
Watching the run, fish leap beneath the skin,
The darkened waters returning to the mountain.

The currents flicker cerulean where river bends
Sky down to skein a line from Pantagruel's pen.
Gone are the same white mornings returning again.

An eddy whirls where other lines descend,
The banks repose near the troubles of troubled men.
The darkened waters returning to the mountain.

Sunken clouds drift upstream past storage bins,
Past fields of furrows, the fin of a tractor on the horizon.
Gone are the same white mornings returning again,

The broken cut banks thin the river's thread down and in.
The ledges littered: tires, tins, and the lines of fisherman,
The darkened waters returning to the mountain.

This season's sky closes like a door, for others it opens,
A troubled man tosses in an empty bottle of gin.
Gone are the same white mornings returning again.
The darkened waters return to the mountain.

David Koehn's poetry has been published in a wide range of journals including Artful Dodge, Painted Bride, and Alaska Quarterly. He also won the Midnight Sun Chapbook Contest, held by Permafrost of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His longer manuscript was a finalist in both The Bluestem Award and the National Poetry Series competitions.

David has a Bachelors degree in Professional and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon, an MFA from the University of Florida, an M.Ed from the University of Alaska, and was a Breadloaf Rural Teacher Fellow at Middlebury Breadloaf School of English.

He has taught in high schools in Alaska and Japan and served on the faculties of Pennsylvania Governor's School of the Arts, Eastern Oregon State College, University of Alaska, and San Francisco State University. He started an ecotourism company in Alaska and has worked for several software companies in the Silicon Valley. He currently works for TailWind, a company he founded.

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