BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Jon Woodward and art by Gregory Euclide.

These poems reel forth with equal parts sorcery and science—their power, their art, such that what fractures so accretes—revealing within a scenery a scene within a scenery within a scene.

The Tree That Has No Reference to the Horizon

They wrap their model of the universe around
Until the water overflows the horizon

The tree doesn’t fit that and stays put.
They walk on it but never discover it.
One of the suits of armor from the boat
Falls empty, clanging, and a rabbit hops out.
It is an imperceptible event

One of the suits of armor from the boat
Is clasped around a different tree trunk all of a sudden & the men laugh

And in the morning they find the horizon
And run along it, laughing and singing in Spanish.

–––––––

Lodged in a tree of smile teeth
Ensnared in the branches of teeth
With legs kicking laughing trying
To get free, a rabbit
Scrambling to get free.

The tree that casts no shadow
The tree that preys upon parasites

No one is content to tell the right joke
No people is happy where they are.
No tree hosts nothing

Or, this tree hosts only a simple smile not its own smile
A laugh that casts no laugher’s shadow

It’s as always night
As it is always day
And the discoverers row over from the old this world
To the sky-filling laughter of this tree

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