ALL I'M ASKING

All I’m Asking

When the ninth planet was stripped
from the pantheon of the orbiting gods
I thought: What of the other verities?
The slow slippage of day in its wooden tumbrel
or the blue night leaning into the dark lap of the earth?
The musky sea scent inside a grotto
or church stone long since quarried?
What of the last pair of jays gorging on Indian summer
or wind’s curvature and the voice
it brings of a child called to supper?
What of sleep that will not come, the pallid light
behind your eyes? Memory’s unerring grip on misgivings?
What of the word that flirts on your tongue
the one that sounds like shadow
or the oblique beauty of a legend softly fading?
What of beggars and bones and the aurora borealis,
language and loss and the rhapsody of you?
What of…what of…It’s all I’m asking.

The Unified Theory of Truth

Truth resides outside our perception.
You embrace the grip of gravity
and call it truth.
It is not.

Nor are particles of light.

Nor forces of strength or weakness.

Truth lay in the flash of an eye
that squeezed a singular tear
of such heat and compression
it could not hold to its own symmetry,

the fracturing to forms less pure

the way anger abates in the mind
or love degrades into tolerance.

How your child no longer turns
at the sound of your voice.

Caribou Bones

I80 where Jersey gives way to PA
across the Delaware Water Gap
here at the northern reach of the Appalachians
the Blue Mountains they’re called
here, this far north,
the Blue Mountains
where the river cut through shattered gray quartz
over an achingly stern sweep of time
the slow breath of Silurian millennia
and the epochs it spawned
Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic
erosion hastened by the blind crush
of the Wisconsin glacier, gutting
what could be gutted
the sharp serration of the land
retreating to reveal its handiwork
its origami…
and not a single human to bear witness,
not a single cairn or midden
or caribou bone charred of flesh.

Ken Holland has been widely published in the journals and nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. He placed first in the 2021 New Ohio Review poetry contest and finalist in the 2025 Concrete Wolf and Moonstone Press Chapbook competitions, which Moonstone is publishing. He lives in the mid-Hudson Valley of NY. More at kenhollandpoet.com