ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN SLATER is thirty-three, Canadian, a former student of the classics, and a former furniture mover. He now lives as a monk in upstate New York, where he helps to look after older monks and putters about in a quasi-Japanese garden. His poems have appeared in the New York Quarterly, Wascana Review, and Queen’s Quarterly. His poem Lost and Found won the 2007 Foley Poetry Contest run by America magazine. Two co-translations of poems by Hafiz of Shiraz are forthcoming in CrossCurrents.

Two Poems

By John Slater


Cut

 

All day rainfall. Intuitive
pruning amid the branches
of a cherry: last year
it was cut back roughly, now
a thousand new shoots
but no fruit or flowers, sap
leaking out like a mountain
lake into countless rivulets.
Anyhow, I’m in the tree
like Pollock ‘in the painting’
pure, from-the-hip
discernment: each
clipped twig, every
branch lopped off,
irreversible.

 

 

Promising

 

It showed promise
the shade garden
under the spruce:
mulch-bed of
straw then bark-
shreds; sparse
plantings, a fern
sprawling over
a boulder, myrtle
streaming down
through gaps
in the rock like
rapids; and a
frail azalea,
with leaf-wilt,
killed, almost,
by the winter sun   
but showing now
a few shy
blossoms: first,
tentative
love-notes sent
to the shade.
 



Published July 2008