Tom Driscoll is a poet and essayist who lives and works in Lowell, Massachusetts. His poetry has appeared in Abraxas Review, Rock Salt Journal, Scapegoat Review, The Worcester Review, Oddball Magazine, Carcosa Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Decadent Review, Drawn To The Light, What Rough Beast and Second Coming from Indolent Books and in several Moonstone Arts Center’s Poetry Anthologies. Tom’s poem Leave Home won the Robert P. Collén Poetry Prize in 2017. Notes on Demolition was selected as an Editor’s Choice for the Allen Ginsberg Prize and This isn’t the first time received Third Place in The Frank O’Hara Prize, both in 2021. Upon Stealing Smithsonian Folkways from Franklin Library, Summer 1974 won The Letter Review Poetry prize in 2024. His most recent book is Echoes, A Collection of Ekphrastic Poems.

“Temporal” by Nancy Wood – nancy-wood.com.

Temporal

after “Temporal” by Nancy Wood

Oak branches bound with waxed linen
to hold the limbs in tension and bent away
from their memory —to form another shape.

You might carry this like a bundle of brittle
bone or maybe it’s some delicate creature
that you should care for, cradle and save.

The word —temporal— can refer to time
but It also describes earthly things, mere
daily business, as in —temporal concerns—

It could be  what spans between these two
meanings of the word that interested the artist.
What falls with time and what’s found, salvaged;

each piece worked in hand that might as easily
have become kindling for a fire, wisps of smoke.

— Tom Driscoll