This week’s poem, Jay Franzel’s “Night at Liberty Spring,” takes us into the woods and into a meditation on thinking and feeling our place in the world. I love this poem’s simple dialogue, at once restrained and searching, and how its last two lines feel both like a pause and a sustained rush of the mind’s motion.

Franzel organizes the Bookey Readings series in Hallowell. He has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies, and is currently retired after working with at-risk youth for over 30 years.

Night at Liberty Spring

By Jay Franzel

We sat on a rock while Kaplan

heated water on his old brass stove.

He pointed into the trees.

You ever feel in the woods

nothing’s out of place?

Yeah.

You think your mind

could ever be like that?

No, never felt that.

Up at the camp site we sat by the spring

and looked at the darkness.

Those stars, you feel connected to them?

Not really.

Yeah, like we know we are

but don’t feel we are.

I heard my breath and the wind.

And I couldn’t stop thinking.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Night at Liberty Spring,” copyright © 2021 by Jay Franzel, appears by permission of the author.