Read and hear these two poems in the Kenyon Review Online.

The title of the first is from a letter by Ralph Waldo Emerson who was writing about his grievously ill brother. A note on lichen: it is not a single organism, but a symbiosis between a fungus and an alga. The fungus cannot live alone; together they thrive.

“Oster, Oxter” incorporates etymology and sentence fragments from the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “oxter.”