Poetry

FEBRUARY 2016

The Day of Saint Richard of Wyche

by RODNEY NELSON

we want to go rowing on it
but more than cold is holding up
the river

we do not see moving current
in the middle open reaches
of water

the remnant ice at either edge
may be thick enough under it
to join there

but more than cold is holding up
the flow and we can only wait
to know what

could be what came as snow today
in a waiver of April sun
and until

it lets the river run again
we’ll have to do our boating
in the sky

Rodney Nelson

Rodney Nelson's work began appearing in mainstream journals long ago but he turned to fiction and did not write a poem for twenty-two years, restarting in the 2000s. So he is both older and "new." See his page in the Poets & Writers directory http://www.pw.org/content/rodney_nelson for a notion of the publishinghistory. He has worked as a copy editor in the Southwest and now lives in his native North Dakota. Recently, his poem "One Winter" won a Poetry Kit Award for 2011 (U.K.); it had appeared in Symmetry Pebbles. His "Upstream in Idaho" received a Best of Issue Award at the late Neon Beam (also England). The chapbook Metacowboy was published in 2011; another title, In Wait, in November 2012. Bog Light and Sighting the Flood have just appeared. The chapbook Fargo in Winter took second place in the 2013 Cathlamet Prize competition at Ravenna Press in Spokane. Directions From Enloe won third in the Turtle Island Quarterly contest. Nelson's chapbook of prose narratives, Hill of Better Sleep, is out from Red Bird Chapbooks. Mogollon Picnic is already in print; and the poetry ebook Nodding in Time (Kind of a Hurricane Press) is "up." The full-length Felton Prairie has appeared at Middle Island Press. Red Dashboard has brought out another, Words For the Deed. Cross Point Road and Late & Later (Atlantean Publishing, U.K.) came out last summer.