Cacophony

after the painting “Excavation” by Willem De Kooning

A forest of winter,
scratchy avalanche.

Music. Motion. Or at least
the memory of them.

See criss-crossing
islands. Bursts of flowers.

Maybe a leaf.
Or is it a mouth?

People say ghosts
are flying off a mountain,

the land thrashing
as if it were the sea.

But where looms
the horizon?

Missing,
like a pair of eyeglasses.

Dane Hamann edits textbooks for a publisher in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, later serving as the poetry editor of TriQuarterly for over five years. He is the author of A Thistle Stuck in the Throat of the Sun (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Parsing the Echoes (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2023).