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© 2012 Rhonda Ganz Rhonda Ganz is a Victoria poet whose poems have appeared in Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry , the Times Colonist, Ascent Aspirations and on buses in Vancouver as part of Poetry in Transit. She is a regular reader Friday nights at Planet Earth Poetry. "First, Disperse Resistance" was published in the Winter, 2011 edition of The Malahat Review.

First, Disperse Resistance

A tall man does not stand unnoticed in a field of slow rye.
Stock-still, the crop kneecapping him. Accepting,

on occasion, a cup of coffee. But not an umbrella.
I am overcoming my fear of water he told us.

Arms loose at his sides, he let the dew collect
on his leathered shoulders. The almanac, right again,

sent two consecutive Saturdays, an intermediate rain.
Rivulets. A slithering round his ears, down the sides of his neck.

The ear has three semicircular canals. A tall man
needs three tries before he's surefooted, crouched

on a rock in the middle of a pond. A crop circle showed up
at a neighbour's farm, but we had no way to see it from the air.

We crawled on hands and knees over bended stalks and tried to guess.
Saturn and its moons, Eileen said. No, this from Arthur, it's an inward eye.

Me, I was sure the spiral would take me back to the tall man, balanced now
on one leg on a rock in a dark pool ringed with blackened stumps.

 

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