Jeff Fearnside

Jeff Fearnside
 
Too Often We Think
 
Too often we think
of nature so seriously
that we neglect it
 
in its fullness. Yes, it is
marvelous in its efficiencies—
carbon and nitrogen cycling
to thrumming precision—
 
yet it is also winsome
in its redundancies,
lovely in its foolish excesses.
 
The splintered logs of moonlight
sluicing over my shoulders
are deliciously absurd
and wholly essential.
 
 
 
Jeff Fearnside’s poetry has appeared in various literary journals, including The Fourth River, Permafrost, Qarrtsiluni, Blue Earth Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and The Los Angeles Review, and is forthcoming in an upcoming anthology of writers who have been awarded residencies at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. His chapbook Lake, and Other Poems of Love in a Foreign Land, winner of the Standing Rock Cultural Arts 2010 Open Poetry Chapbook Competition, was published in 2011 and additionally won the Peace Corps Writers 2012 Poetry Award. He has taught writing and literature for many years at the Academy of Languages in Kazakhstan through the U.S. Peace Corps and at Washington State University, Western Kentucky University, Prescott College, and—currently—Oregon State University. He lives with his wife and their two cats in Corvallis. http://www.Jeff-Fearnside.com