Aza Pace

Two POEMS

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LISTING

AFTER A LIST OF OBSERVED PLANTS WRITTEN IN THE BACK OF APGAR’S TREES, 1892

Someone walked out in the green 
with a book and an eye

for wild indigo, buckberry, jasmine.
Someone’s hand eagered the leaves

of this book. Now my eye
walks their bramble of cursive—

someone’s hand, eager in the leaves
of knee-high blackberry and gray beard.

Walking the brambles, their cursive
attention a kind of love.

Knee-high blackberry, gray beard,
looking-glass, fleabane, showy milkweed—

Attention is my kind of love.
Someone walked out into the green

like a looking-glass. Fleabane, milkweed,
someone—my hand eager, the leaves.

chickadee

AFTER A PHOTO IN TREES, STARS, AND BIRDS BY EDWIN MOSELEY

Black-gloved hand against snow.
A chickadee conspires
on the thumb.

A hundred years old, this book
assumes I already love 
the chickadee, 

a favorite, the photo says,
for her confiding disposition. 
What gossip

did she bring to a hand like an ear?
How to prove trusty:
come bearing seeds

to the snow-hush every day, 
half-sapling, root your feet
and prove

gentle. Do you remember
the small sovereign
of the forest edge?

Once, she trusted you with a secret:
her whole self, her wild
fragile pulse.

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Aza Pace’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse, New Ohio Review, Passages North, Mudlark, Bayou, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of North Texas. Visit her website at azapace.com.