Welcome to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Christine Perrin. She's a teacher at Maasai College and in the Gordon in Orvieto semester from Gordon College.

She's a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and her work has appeared in various journals,

including the New England Review, Image, tricorderly, Blackbird, Christianity, and Literature,

The Crescent, and others.

And she is the publisher of the Art of Poetry out from classical academic press.

Her most recent collection is called Bright Mirror.

Christine is a friend of mine, full disclosure, but this is a poem that I really love,

and it's a great poem for Spring, and I did want to share it with you. So, despite her being

my friend, I don't feel any shame in sharing this poem with you. It's always a little bit weird,

though, reading a poem by a friend, because they can get back at me for abusing their words.

But this poem is called The Book of Nature, and again, it's from Bright Mirror, which came out a couple years ago.

This time it was spring, because I can remember grass piercing the wet earth like needles that sewed disparate cloth.

The wilderness seen from an airplane or the many homes of childhood, of starting new.

Heart jaggedly pieced and compassless, I'd step into the woods pretending a course,

interested less in true north than how to get to center, how to be anywhere besides the dark,

green edge.

I'd walk under the tree-broken sun and crack skeletons of last year's leaves beneath my feet, trying to source or hedge the loneliness,

which is near to me still in detail. A spider's silken sack on the leaf whore. Fur in the bearscat.

A gray gild mushroom that felt like my thigh with smooth, sun-deprived inside.

A tree torn out by root.

The hollow space pooled with rain from which I drank and bathed my face.

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