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Poetry

A Woodpecker Pecks

(Siegfried Poepperl)

“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”

A woodpecker pecks at a juicy place on or maybe in

the roof right now. With my left index finger wedged

 

where the guidebook’s woodpecker section starts,

I’d tiptoe out to the ramada or maybe have to pad

 

as far as the hillock of scrap wood for which Robert

has big plans to get a clear enough look to identify

 

the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet

another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook

 

& in any case enjoy not having developed a lust for lists

of birds as I have for so many other often obscure

 

phenomena. Oh inner solipsist, Mexico really does

lie right over there, Columbus Circle an idea

 

of romance I never lived but visited many times

with people who may no longer scrabble upon

 

even a square foot of the planet’s surface, all of us

loving the aroma of roasted chestnuts & fresh magazines

 

& saying so while folding slices of sable on warm

halves of onion bagels. I’m almost sure Cynthia

 

once wrote Kiss me, blue dog./Better hug/than bite tough/

questions in the ass. It’s worth pondering why I recall

 

those lines & not the Roethke I sweated so hard

to have by heart in the purgatorial flat on Phillips

 

or, for that matter, even a phrase of Kropotkin

or a note of the trance-out riff I once pioneered

 

on Ted’s guitar as I gazed at the mother-of-pearl

Karl seated in the neck or right now any other

 

anything sublime as a peach after a fast.

 

John Repp is a poet, fiction writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Seven Kitchens Press has just published his twelfth chapbook of poetry, Star Shine in the Pines.

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