Poetry by Tim Tomlinson

GOLDFINCH
                     That’s it.
                – Chase Twichell

I’m upstate New York, something like  
a hundred miles south 

of Chase Twichell, a Zen poet 
I greatly admire, and once actually met. 

She hated me (some poets will, 
other poets…?), but that doesn’t matter.

What does matter is, I think, 
that goldfinch there—the first 

I’ve ever seen—on the disc of a sunflower, 
pecking away at the seeds, 

cracking some, dropping others. 

That’s the way it is with seeds.


  AN ISLAND IN GREECE

         Whatever had been there must have fallen 
          among the soft corals …
           – Donna Masini 

A former girlfriend posts a photo 
of the view from her desk window 
on an island in Greece—

all that blue … 

You could imagine a hero falling 
into all that blue. 


TRUTH

              A strange old man 
              Stops me,
              Looking out of my deep mirror.
             – Hitomaro (tr. Kenneth Rexroth)  

how elevated 
the Japanese masters 
apprehending truth 

in so few syllables 
whereas I 
fill paragraph after paragraph 

page after page
with words and more words 
and now and then 

some punctuation 


QUESTION

If you ask me 
you’re asking the wrong guy.

But what?

Tim Tomlinson is the author, most recently, of Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World, a poetry-prose-photography hybrid collection concerning the perils facing the world’s coral reefs. He is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and he teaches in New York University’s Global Liberal Studies. 

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