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D.R. Goodman USA  Photo credit: Linda Nikaya
A
native of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, D.R. Goodman studied biology and
philosophy before leaving academia to practice martial arts full
time. She is founder and chief instructor at Redwood Dojo in
Oakland, California. Her poetry has appeared in many journals; in
the anthology, Sonnets: 150
Contemporary Sonnets and in an
illustrated chapbook, Birds by the
Bay. Her poem “The Face of Things”
won the 2013 Able Muse Write Prize, and is the title work in a new
song cycle by composer Joel Mandelbaum, which premiered in 2015 at
the Aaron Copeland School of Music in New York. She is also the
author of The Kids’ Karate
Workbook: A Take-Home Training Guide for Young Martial Artists (North
Atlantic/Blue Snake). Of her collection of poetry, Greed:
A Confession, Beth Houston writes,
“[these] poems register a deep appreciation of the intricate
meanings emanating from Nature’s tangible riches. http://www.
Starlight, Mountains
Some evenings, looking out across the pass,
one can mistake a porch light for a star;
a common lamp of filament and glass
will shine with such a clarity that Mars
and Venus seem its match; and it will rise
as if to trail its billion brethren there
into the crowded, turning, star-spilt skies
one only sees at altitude—thin air
and isolation sharpening the night.
Already the horizon is erased,
stone cliffs and snowfields liquified to black,
stark mountain summits easily effaced
by nightfall; and within this liquid dark,
the pressure underneath one's feet the last
surviving frame of reference, in a world
of space, and pinpoint lights, glittering past
infinity—the Milky Way unfurled
from here, by one bright star and simple sight.
A pity to discover the mistake—
that star too fixed, too steady, holding low
upon the pass, when, higher, toward the peaks,
a subtle movement and the faintest glow—
enough to bring the mountain rushing back
in all its cold solidity: a jeep
negotiating switchbacks in the dark,
tight to the cliffs, inching along a steep
descent, a trail more suited for a mule,
the tension visible miles from the tracks;
just one missed tread, and that small, shining jewel
would be a falling star, throwing off sparks
of accidental beauty, until light.
All
poems are selected by Andrena Zawinski
with permission
from D. R. Goodman's Greed,
A Confession
© Copyright, 2015,
D.R. Goodman. |