Cow Hill, Bull Hill

by Christopher Kennedy

It’s not the tedium of cold rain or the cliché of its presence. It’s not the atmospheric conditions or the confluence of lakes when the glaciers moved through here eons ago, the slow, reticulating gesture of nature, mindless creator and destroyer. It’s the certainty of mood, the gray of the interior life reflecting the sky, that render me here, like a snapshot of myself, a still image in the chiaroscuro wash where I float like a cloud of steam, amorphously, the air around me winter-midnight cold, and I’m amazed at the notion of my own consciousness and distill into the gradually warming air as the winter-heavy sun starts to filter down its silver light where a few tall pines still feather the hills.

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Christopher Kennedy is the author of three collections of poetry: Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd.), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2007, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press), and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press). His work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Slope, Mississippi Review, and Double Room. One of the founding editors of the literary journal 3rd Bed, he is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University, where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

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Back to Issue Two: Winter 2009