Underworld
Poet: B. J. Buckley
You find it when doing something as ordinary
as stacking wood in earliest spring after it's lain
all winter on the ground, the wet soaking into bark
from beneath – long rainy autumn, the saturated
ooze of muddy earth – and from above, the heavy snows,
hoar frost, wild thaws and freezes – so that when you turn logs
belly up to dry, there's shelf fungus – tiny thumbnails –
and jelly spore brainwrinkled and orange and citrus
sharp as marmalade, little toadstools with thumbtack caps,
blue pine stain transported by bark beetles, slow seep
up the grain – and holding the cut lengths to the ground, the way
those Lilliputians anchored Gulliver – mycelia,
small rooms, walls of fuzzed white string, and inside, absence: lost
Eurydice, her ghost's ghost, sowbug alseep in her hair.
B. J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has taught in Arts-in-Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for more than four decades. Her chapbook, In January, the Geese, won the Comstock Poetry Review's 35th Anniversary Chapbook Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Grub Street, Dogwood, Vita Poetica, Calyx, and Aesthetica, among others. More information and sample poems are on her website: