Dan Rosenberg
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Early Still
Seated on horizon-
like slats, benched,
fading the morning’s green,
I fill my ears.
One distancing car hands
its noise to the next,
nesting hum into hum
like different things can
be one thing. I breathe
in the absence of need.
Watch pollen betray
the sun, its angles
arranging gravity for
a while. Maybe a compressor
is wrapping that tone around
the ornamental stones,
or was John Cage right
about silence and being
a fleshy, sloshy, zipping beast?
How we are, noisily.
Under my seeing the beds
effloresce, a spray I name
with this humid mouth
as I gather aloud the air.
Dan Rosenberg’s books include Bassinet, cadabra, and The Crushing Organ, which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He has also published the chapbooks A Thread of Hands and Thigh’s Hollow, which won the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he co-translated Slovenian poet Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome. Rosenberg teaches at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, NY, where he currently serves as the Tompkins County Poet Laureate.