Poems by Ron Riekki

Thought

I was not thinking of my watch.
Because I only wore it when I had

to count the number of heartbeats
on patients.  And those days are done.

I am not thinking about November,
the palette of the windshield

and no one wanting to scrape it.
I am not thinking about death

because there is nothing to think
about death, nothing to imagine,

nothing but worry that has no reality
in reality, only the emptiness of soul

talk, the arguments for and against God
solely done to control.  It was life

all along, every action, every failure,
every heartbeat, every sentence.

Ron Riekki’s books include U.P. and The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (Wayne State University Press, a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, http://wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/way-north).