Poetry

Three Poems in Impost

Posted by David J. Bauman on

If you haven’t seen the collaborative poetry chapbook my son Micah and I wrote, we’d be super happy if you took a look at it here. That link will give you a preview and links to more information, including how to get a copy for yourself. He and I have been continuing to work on poems and projects both together and separately.

In the not too distant future we hope to be able to tell you about those solo projects as well as what we’re referring to as “The Sequel” to Mapping the Valley. We’ve had several poems published recently that will appear in that collection, and here are three such pieces, just published in the latest issue of Impost: A Journal of Creative and Critical Work, a peer-reviewed journal published by the English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities.

Some of the new poems were born of our traveling around the state of Pennsylvania. Here is one of such piece, but please check out this link to read the rest and peruse the whole issue. Our gratitude to editor Anne Dyer-Stuart and her team for including us, and to poet and professor Jerry Wemple, author of We Always Wondered What Became of You, for suggesting we submit our work there.

Dark Skies “It’s just a hole in the ground,” someone said of the ice mine, an online reviewer, almost as bewildered as Billy O’Neil, the man some say discovered it, digging for silver but finding ice instead. Enormous columns of it grow each summer from cracks in cave walls as colder, heavier air gets trapped underground. They built a shack around it, charged five bucks for folks to peer over a little railing. Eventually, a gift shop opened up next door to sell T-shirts and bumper stickers. We arrived in April, too soon for cave ice. Just wet rocks run through with silver rivulets, dripping water. It’s not that we were disappointed; after all, we came for the sky— the darkest sky in Pennsylvania. We came for a clear view of space and the icy glints of ten thousand stars, more visible here than in the light-polluted towns and cities. We scheduled a sky tour led by a guy named Snowman. When clouds cleared, we followed his coordinates over dark roads, headlights carved a tunnel of light through the forest to a half circle of benches set up in a field, like a church camp amphitheater. We had never seen so many stars. They shimmered—brighter than any silver. We didn’t see the Milky Way. Again, it was too early, and so we vowed to come back in summer. That night we slept in an old, restored cabin on Ice Mine Road, O’Neil’s former home, and planned our return. To cave ice and the Milky Way, the underground freeze in summer, and shadows cast down from the sky.

Published by David J. Bauman

Poet, librarian, birder. Author of Angels & Adultery (2018), Co-author of Mapping the Valley: Hospital Poems (2021), both from Seven Kitchens Press, 2018. First chapbook: Moons, Roads, and Rivers (Finishing Line Press, 2017)

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