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Spiral Weeds
Under the Water

A poem by Thomas R. Smith

Off the end of this abandoned dock
fallen birch trunks roll in mire,
their bark, once blindingly white,
discolored by mud and algae. So it's
true that the father-eagle
of this world, plummeted from
his high vantage, will not fly again.

Then what is left for us now,
sitting while the light of day,
its work nearly finished, walks
away from us across the water
on thinning rays? I look down,
notice growing on the bottom sun-
lit weeds that spiral tightly.

Their ends, parted like small mouths
or the lips of the phallos,
breathe below the surface,
roots planted among the feathery
muck and disjoined halves of shells
which life has left behind.
But must our imagination follow

the path the world is taking?
Here and there in the stagnant
shallows a glowing weed veers
from its carefully wound course
and streams upward with muscular
serpent motions as if escaping
toward the breaking gold.

Originally published in Horse of Earth, Poems by Thomas R. Smith, Holy Cow! Press, Duluth, MN, 1994. www.holycowpress.org. Reprinted with permission.

Copyright Thomas R. Smith

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Photo of Thomas R. Smith

Thomas writes:
"Spiral Weeds Under the Water" pre-dates "Rain at the Holiday Inn Express" by about ten years, but both poems tell essentially the same story. They're really about the struggle of the individual soul to maintain integrity and purpose in the face of what we used to call, in the Sixties, conformity.

Thomas R. Smith is the author of several books of poems, most recently The Dark Indigo Current (Holy Cow! Press, 2000) and Winter Hours (Red Dragonfly Press, 2005). His self-published anti-war chapbook, Peace Vigil: Poems for an Election Year (And After) will be available for the duration of the Bush administration. He lives in River Falls, Wisconsin, and teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

Photo by Phil Pfuehler. Reprinted by permission of the River Falls Journal.

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