The Good Part

Poetry by Will Walker, Summer 2015

*

I’d like a Sunday

like a Mary Oliver

poem, with a few

perfect words and

lots of white space,

and paper with

a high rag content

and maybe some

righteous soy-based ink.

It would be a leaf

in one of her spare

little collections, with

a fine old lithograph

from the public domain

on the cover,

one that recalled the idyllic

Transcendentalist woods

of Thoreau and Emerson

and John Muir.

I’d like to stare

at the few

perfect words

close up with

my glasses off

and appreciate the clean

edges of the fine

big print and feel

like I’m in church,

the good part, when

the church is empty

and there’s only

silence and the sound

of my own breath.

*

Will Walker lives in San Francisco with his wife, Valerie, and their dog. He is a former editor of the Haight Ashbury Journal. You can read more at http://www.erickentwines.com/pages/category.jsp?catid=212 

"The Good Part" was originally published in Burningword 72. www.burningword.com