Jason Barry
Maybe in the end it isn’t longing
The road winding up Guanella Pass,
a bloom of summer larkspur,
penstemon, and marigold the elk
have skipped for sedge.
My father, who turned seventy this year,
never spoke about his dad,
the flame in the window,
the way a hawk – in sheer gray dawn –
descends.
I feel it tighten now,
the air thinning out, a wet vole shaking
in the cleft of two rocks.
Jason Barry’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Poetry Ireland Review, Bad Lilies, Crab Creek Review, The Cortland Review, Thrush Poetry journal, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for “Best of the Net” and other awards, and his poetry was recently selected by Ada Limón to feature on The Slowdown, a podcast supported by American Public Media and the Poetry Foundation. He has been offered fellowships in verse from Poetry by the Sea, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Boston University (where he was a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow).