This week’s poem, Kyle Dancause’s “Contour Lines,” comes at the onset of ephemeral season, offering us visions of the dappled, shifting, reawakening world. I love this poem’s tender searching through shadows and pools, the delicate images of what the speaker finds there, and the poem’s koan-like wisdom of how the smallest new leaf holds the all. 

Dancause is a middle school humanities teacher and teaching consultant with the Southern Maine Writing Project. He lives in Cape Elizabeth with his wife, two young children, and cat. He often finds his poems on local trails, rivers, or beaches and follows the lines to where they spool. Kyle plans to publish his first collection of poetry this year.

Contour Lines

I pause on the small bridge
Where ahead spring ephemerals line the path.
Upstream, sunlight glides
Through the cold curves
Where a concrete relic permits passage
Into a dark and sunken hole.
The green braided tendrils have lengthened,
Moss strings casting ever moving shadow cover.
Still, I search the pool for small blue-ringed halos
While the lone trout lily,
Brown-mottled leaves like contour lines,
Soundlessly speaks the shaded story of the world.

– Kyle Dancause

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Contour Lines” ©2025 by Kyle Dancause, appears by permission of the author.