John Fitzpatrick

Manifestation
  
Water softens. Love, too.
The maples blaze forth
while a great blue heron
wings through stillness.
A rock sits and sits,
waiting to receive
and to give.
Deep inside self,
awareness in silence
 
 
 
Cobwebs On Morning Lawn

A spider has worked long
           to create these intricacies of design
                      that mesmerize us to venture
into its dew drenched webs.
           Once inside, we roam about,
                      balancing on strands
of thin glistening wire,
           an acrobat without pole.
                      If we fall, the abyss –
a void spider ignores,
           gliding back and forth.
                      Inside web, children,
jump over, never glide,
           their up and down motion,
                      a way to reach
the highest sky. Ecstasy,
           this lifting off hold
                      of gravity, this breaking away
from pull of one’s past.
           A child jumping rope, going
                      faster and faster when string held
by others who wish jumper
           to hurdle beyond pull of self,
                      exhausted, reaching peak of endurance.
Does a child create inside self its own web?
           Does this child string its
                      glistening labyrinth where there’s
plenty of wire to travel on,
           plenty of space to fall into,
                      plenty of rope to jump over,
to become an acrobat saving itself
           from falling back into memory
                      where nothing is resolved,
only let go, this simple beauty
           of moving through the day
                      carrying void within, balancing
on strands of its own intricate web?
 
                      -for Ryan Walsh
 
 
 
John Fitzpatrick, Rhinebeck, New York, recently appeared or will be forthcoming in Georgetown Review, SLAB, Bellowing Ark, The Rockford Review, The Cape Rock, BIG MUDDY, and Stone Voices. He received Vermont Studio Center poetry residencies, the Hackney National Poetry Literary Award from Birmingham-Southern College, and a Ph. D. from New York University with a dissertation that treated the poet as writer and reader of poetry, with poets Barbara Unger and Michael Burkard participating in his research.