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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. His first book Instrumentality, was published by Word Press in May 2004. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, and Gulf Coast, among other publications. He is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. An interview with him can be found at: Jacket Magazine.

FURTHER READING
Essays by Ravi Shankar
In Praise of Abstraction: Moving Beyond Concrete Imagery
Poems About the Natural World
Birches
by Robert Frost
Butterfly Catcher
by Tina Cane
February: The Boy Breughel
by Norman Dubie
Four Poems for Robin
by Gary Snyder
God's World
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
In Michael Robins’s class minus one
by Bob Hicok
maggie and milly and molly and may
by E. E. Cummings
Naskeag
by Alfred Corn
October (section I)
by Louise Glück
Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
by William Wordsworth
Of Many Worlds in This World
by Margaret Cavendish
Pastoral
by Jennifer Chang
Russian Birch
by Nathaniel Bellows
Song of Nature
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spontaneous Me
by Walt Whitman
The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy
The Leaves
by Deborah Digges
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
by Ezra Pound
Traveling through the Dark
by William Stafford
Trees
by Joyce Kilmer
Two Butterflies went out at Noon— (533)
by Emily Dickinson
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Crossings  
by Ravi Shankar

Between forest and field, a threshold 

like stepping from a cathedral into the street—
the quality of air alters, an eclipse lifts,

boundlessness opens, earth itself retextured
into weeds where woods once were.
Even planes of motion shift from vertical

navigation to horizontal quiescence:
there’s a standing invitation to lie back
as sky’s unpredictable theater proceeds.

Suspended in this ephemeral moment
after leaving a forest, before entering
a field, the nature of reality is revealed.




Copyright © Ravi Shankar. Used with permission of the author.
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