C. E. Chaffin
published and edited The Melic Review for eight years prior to its hiatus. This month he joins the staff of Umbrella as Contributing Editor, Poetry.
His new volume, Unexpected Light: Selected Poems and Love Poems 1998-2008, is due out soon from Diminuendo Press.
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Fern Creek Falls
Surf pounds granite
in white explosions,
carving arches and blowholes
into mussel-walled islands.
Up the shore’s dark sands
blue ovals of stone
grow smaller and flatter
to the high tide line
where driftwood snakes curl
beside a freshet’s
serpentine inroads.
Upstream past alders
carpeted in green suede,
redwood stumps
sprout sprigs of trees;
rare open stretches
choke on blackberry.
At last the falls,
a black fortress ribboned in white
where one patch of granite
appears more pale, as if—
No, it was a trick of light,
the same coin for which
these redwoods and Douglas firs
spent all the limbs
beneath their green crowns.
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