Jeff Gundy

Jeff Gundy's latest books are Spoken Among the Trees: Poems and Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing.

Articles by Jeff Gundy

Poetry

Contemplation with red bridge and windy sunshine

Jan 03, 2013 by Jeff Gundy

The space between two people never quite closes. That’s
all right. It’s the rub of surfaces we need anyway, the slow

brush of hand on arm, the quick hug as we discover
an old friend has gone gray, that he’s reading on a hard

chair in the back room, leaving most of the house to strangers.
It’s all right to leave him there, maybe, to walk across

the red bridge and into the woods, travel the worn paths
in windy sunshine. Turning left each time will bring

you back. It’s all right, maybe, to explain that you won’t
be back till late, that you hope for coffee in the morning,

for a small table upstairs to spread out your books and papers,
most of which you won’t open before you pack up to leave.

The space between two people can open like a net, collapse,
dangle loose and empty, ready to catch and hold, to bind.

Poetry

Natural theology from the Sherman bench

Nov 02, 2011 by Jeff Gundy

East Lansing, May 2003

If I really loved Jesus I would surely not be here in the sunshine.
I'd be trying to love the poets now reading in a room without me.
If I really, really loved I would not even think what I think,

and it would go easier. Because my neighbors' dogs bark
at dawn for sheer joy. Because like them I have known joy.
I have matched and folded the family socks, survived history

so far, seen my small desires satisfied. Did I come all this way
to sit on a bench? Did the ragged goose feather once have a home?
It's too hot to sit long in the sun. Can we, can we, can we, the girl

asks her mother, and her brother hitches his pants and runs fast
as he can down the wrong path. His sister calls and he runs back,
sniffs a yellow tulip. Oh do what you want says her mother

and the new weeds, and the cardinal says I will do what I can.

Poetry

Yellow Trail at Laurelville on Rapture Day

Sep 16, 2011 by Jeff Gundy

I could sit down on this rock, partway up the hill. No time
for the overlook, much less Split Rock. A good day
for caterpillars and new greenery, mushrooms and

puddles just starting to shrink. All this rain, yet one day
we will pray for more. Some say the Rapture is hours away,
but there's no sign yet. It would be some kind of change.

I'm expecting something besides bodies sailing up into
the void, something more like the way new shoots
of mayapple and poison ivy appear out of the muck,

or spring warblers call invisibly from 10:00 high.
Sometimes a leafy branch will wave and beckon
through a window in the trees, then go still. Years ago

I walked up this hill at dawn, sweating with the climb
as I did today, and in the meadow at the top I walked up
on a flock of wild turkeys, as if they'd been waiting for me.

Poetry

Evening rhapsody between Madison and Whitewater

Nov 24, 2010 by Jeff Gundy

Too much of anything is better than Milwaukee's Best
when the first snow hits in November and I'm already sick

of winter, when it's stone dark by five, when the country roads
are lettered and empty and I should have obeyed the instructions,

should have turned around, should have done it all right,
every road swerves and twists and with each little town

I have to stop and squint at the atlas, astonished when somehow
I find them all on the map, somehow each turn brings me closer

to the pretty clerk in the low-cut blouse who will hand me
the key card with a smile like the deluxe continental breakfast,

somehow not a single deer pops sudden and solid into my headlights,
and the aching ball joint holds through each and every curve,

and there's room in the ditches for a lot more empties—not that
I'm drinking—and I keep glimpsing water along the road,

glints and shivers of light and the roads curving among them
as I sweep through darkness, and I am never truly lost,

not after the late moon rises in the east like God's thumbnail,
like a medallion of embossed paper torn carefully in half.

View All>