Quiet Poet

He is a quiet poet, she told me, and knows
how to dequill a porcupine without gloves.
His mother sent him to his uncle’s farm
every other week-end and for a month
each summer to learn how to make do
with little or no amenities of modern living,
like eye-patches and complete alphabets.

His love for glass shards could not be
qualified, and coffee meant nothing. He
made Caribbean cornbread and simple syrup
to use as a lure for black ants that he trained
to line up on the edge of Moby Dick. He was
an orchid in a glass box, willing to use
the bathroom outdoors 75% of the time.

He lived under the bed during thunderstorms
and kept a baby ferret in his shirt. He hated
the sight of snakes and screamed like a third-
grade girl when he saw one. His first book
of poetry described preventing forest fires
and how to apply for funding should his
family lose a house. He loved the back porch
most of all and watched a family of skunks
build a den on the side of the barn.

He was a quiet poet rings in my ears, a man
of many talents who could catch lightning
and send it in any direction he chose. He hated
crowds and school and decided to educate
himself, he and the bats and the bugs,
the wolves & coyotes, the horses & pigs.
Not enough books had been written
for him to get the gist of it all. In time,
it overwhelmed him, pushed him
over the edge into loud voices and clamorings
that would wake up the forest and send
it into an early spring.

By: John Dorroh

Whether John Dorroh taught any high school science is still being discussed. However, he did manage to show up at 6:45 every morning for a couple of decades with at least three lesson plans and a thermos of robust Colombian. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net and hundreds of others appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, Kissing Dynamite, Burningword, North Dakota Quarterly, and Many Fine Donkeys. He once won the Editor’s Choice Award for a regional Midwest journal and earned enough money for a sushi dinner for two.