Poetry

Open Guitar

The cat hit the strings at 3am.

I woke sweat-covered to the sound

of her sheathed claws

tipping the chords, the way

she moved through the notes

in ascending melancholy, the violence

of muffled sound before

the day broke.

Mt Aso

The man on the diesel train tells me, voice

Bored beneath the hum of the slow-turning fans,

The mountain is a god—

Five gods, one for each peak.

One god must be snoring.

Perhaps all the gods are sleeping here;

The green fields lie so quietly

Under white clouds.

Perhaps the best thing the god of Aso

Can do for us is to keep sleeping,

Upright and unmoving like a man

Sleeping on a train, head back

And mouth open, his rattling breaths

Turned away from the fields,

Rice, corn and slow-moving cattle,

The blue-and-white painted train crawling

Like a caterpillar across the low slopes, all held

So lightly in his cupped hands.

Erin Snyder