A pack of playing cards 
lies strewn in a line across a parking lot 
toward a driveway and the street 
joker on a bicycle 
riding at the head of the line 

and I wheel my shopping cart into the store 
and get to the cereal aisle 
before noticing 
a large brown maple leaf 
standing out against the cart’s light grey-painted steel 

while a couple 
standing at the side of a path 
beneath a canopy of trees 
becomes 
a single tree at the end of a black road 

on either side of a field 
black ridges of soil 
crest 
over furrows of snow 
a reversal of waves hitting shore 

all real 
compared to the crow 
perched on a curb 
in an AI-created photographic image 
studying 

and pecking at its reflection 
ripples 
spreading from beak and beak 
as one non-entity 
confronts itself in another 

as crows are smarter 
and ravens 
looking at themselves in still puddles 
inspecting 
perhaps admiring 

but never 
touching the water 
and I hear crows cawing back and forth 
laughing in agreement 
as I type this 

Playing Cards, Grocery Outlet, 2024 © by Jonathan Yungkans. All rights reserved.

Maple Leaf, Grocery Outlet, 2024 © by Jonathan Yungkans. All rights reserved.

Couple at Wayfarers Chapel, Rancho Palos Verdes, 2013 © by Jonathan Yungkans. All rights reserved.

Photograph of winterscape in Switzerland (2016)
Copyrighted © by Pierre Pellegrini. All rights reserved.

Image courtesy of Galleria Valeria Bella of Milan. Reproduced
here with Pellegrini’s permission from his Instagram gallery.

Pierre Pellegrini (born 1968) is a Swiss landscape photographer renown
for his evocative black-and-white images of trees, shot in long exposures.
Learn more about his work in B&W Minimalism (22 March 2017):
Interview With Pierre Pellegrini.

*Poet’s Note

The title “Palinodes Against the Breakers” is taken from John Ashbery’s poem “Tuesday Evening” in his collection Can You Hear, Bird (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).

My poem is based on three of my photographs, one by Pierre Pellegrini, and an image of a crow credited initially as “Top wildlife photographer’s award-winning shot of the year.” After finishing an initial version of the poem, I learned that the last image was actually created by AI. I thought about removing mention of the crows entirely but reconsidered. Some of my neighborhood’s corvids chimed in as I finished my revision, which sealed the deal.

Bio: Jonathan Yungkans