Midwest Eclogue: Poems

[...]we ride over the sweet-smelling earth neither toward each other nor away. In the title poem, the issue is a local pond choked with an abundance of "subsurface growth" that cuts off oxygen to the fish and amphibians that inhabit it. [...]in "Midwest Eclogue," not even the layabouts can avert their gaze when the poet pulls onto the bank a "sloppy mass" of vegetation and mud that reveals in great detail the pond's "dimming possibilities": tadpoles and minnows, shiny as coins, egg- clusters of sun perch, bluegill roe- throbbing in the grass, twisting to be loose, aglow against the color of the coming night.