Having gone this far into a minor
if mildly inspired avocation
as an unknown poet without
mentioning the landscape of this
my northern Indiana homeland
as it were, probably because –
heresy of poetic heresies:
I haven’t really seen it.
My predictable proletarian excuse is
I’m not rich. We didn’t live
on one of the lakes. I neither
fished nor swam. Nor are we
on one of the jankier lo-budget lakes
occupying our own in a cute
little cluster of trailers. Rather,
I’m in an older neighborhood not far
from the cemetery.
There are trees, I am aware of that,
deciduous and evergreen.
Our very own maple shoots
helicopters across the driveway
in spring and one of those awful
Callery Pears whose blooms smell
like semen, or toilet, spreads
its carnage on the lawn, committing
unnatural atrocities underground
with root-fingers creeping into the buried
poop-chute like It collecting children
in the sewer. All of this is real –
you and I know it, because
we live here, we’ve detected it.
I’ve gotten out my binoculars, I’m
on the case, Encyclopedia Brown!
I know what the sky looks like.
You can’t argue with that
as long as we don’t argue
about it. Sometimes I sit
in the backyard by the fire box
and sneeze. Most nights – more
often than not, anyway –
I notice the moon.
this poem originally appeared in Trying to Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World
Steve Henn’s latest poetry collections are Trying to Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World (Arroyo Seco 2025) and the forthcoming Deep Cuts from Wolfson Press in 2026. He’s been publishing poems, mostly in the small press, since around 2003 and co-edited a short-lived copyshop litmag called Fight These Bastards from 05-08. He teaches in northern Indiana.