Jared Carter

Crinoid

     Some thick limestone beds dating to the mid-Paleozoic 
     era to the late Jurrasic period are almost entirely 
     made up of disarticulated crinoid fragments. Wikipedia

It seemed your scattered cylinders
          would always be
Entirely random — souvenirs
          some ancient sea

Had cast adrift. But then a man
           showed me a stone
That, split in two, held in its span
          your shape, full blown

And reassembled — revenant,
          responsive to
Some immemorial covenant
          still holding true.


Journal

Better, perhaps, simply left plain —
          blank notebook page
Not burdened with twinges of pain
          or pocked with rage.

Not doodled or cross-hatched or scored,
          but torn in half
And forgotten. Not to be stored,
          or bound in calf — 

An emptiness seldom intense,
          but near, at times,
To a bitterness one can sense
          between the lines.

Jared Carter’s most recent book of poems, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia.  He lives in Indiana.