Poetry

• Publication year: 2005
• Citation: Vol. 2005 No. 12

Vermont Bar Journal 2005.

December 2005 - #6. POETRY

The Vermont Bar Journal

#163, December, 2005, Volume 31, No. 3

POETRY

by John B. Kassel

John B. Kassel is a partner with Shems Dunkiel Kassel & Saunders in Burlington, and plays with words in his spare time.

Seeing Both Ways You, a gray squirrel, and I, a gray lawyer, hustle through our daily grind within feet of each other. But only occasionally do I really see you, paused, usually, on the fence around our courtyard, eyeing me as you do, from the side of your face. At that moment, as you sit down, lift your front arm and scratch your armpit with your rear leg, I feel your itch. And we pause some more, regarding each other, until you flinch and move forward, and I wonder: were you looking at me out of your near eye, or at something else, out of the far one? And did we just have a moment of interspecies communication, in which each of us considered what makes the other tick, before we both hurried off, to gather more nuts against the winter. - John Kassel, 2005

Deep Space What power of the cosmos brought together these two headlines in the New York Times, on the 4th of July this year: Presidents, Choosing Justices, Can Wind Up With Surprises, and Spacecraft Hits Passing Comet, Just as Planned. Consider the comet. A universe-carousing mystery (is it ice, is it rock?), it careens around the infinite in odd elliptical orbits, completely unaware (we suppose) of its ability to captivate us mortals, grounded as we are on our homey little planet. But we can catch it. It's a piece of cake, really, requiring only a few hundred million dollars, and a phalanx of brainy engineers, to send an 820 pound object 83 million miles away and, 6 months later, tag our roving friend at 23 thousand miles per hour, while we watch the camera-captured images, beamed...