& how you make me more alive
In the high plains, the bright colors of
buildings in snow
I see only a picture on a screen
myself turning away
(this long and studied) fading of even the idea
You (us)
For so long I wanted you
It was not (pretty) though I willed it so
it was (not) but every time you
walked in a room
a small foretaste like two children on
a boat
shining (and) stillness
the voices hushed for night like the house
where the father walks around
turning (out) the lights
or the tiny frogs croaking in the mud basins
what pulsing of throat what (open)
I practice imagining you in places I can’t see
from (tiny) pictures reconstruct elaborate
daily routines
what stones you count, two ravens on a wire
fence or
six swans aligned on a nickel-colored lake
even a sourness of local bread
(do they eat bread?)
local rice, the cold in the bowl
the thin pancake. It doesn’t matter (any) more
he plays more beautifully when she is gone
The orphic (the Orpheus) lute player
in an after of river and willow
heedless and lost (where) his fingers find
the edge in the string
I read this in the “Dictionary of Myths,” a book
I love for its quixotic title. The muffle (echo)
voice through the trees (which is this)
in which I keep pruning (back), cutting lines
like threads of wire as though (without) them I
would (sing) better or (fly)
Letter in October
The man holds himself still in the
glaze of wisteria, that purple bruise
cool to enter me. Now he walks across
a sunlit plaza, the doves above, the
familiar background—drill, paint thinner,
a stillness in his bones and mine—
October: The trees preparing to flame
and fall, become the bareness
under us. I walk to my classroom down
a hall hushed with dust, blown up
from the south, the pure desert where the
light might pin him, leave him
without so much as a shadow.
And today I am all cage, the bones
holding barely, the lava inside corrosive,
a terrible bloom. Want me, the hum
my pulse spins when I know it means
so little—shiny thread, bright button.
Doves gather on the branches outside,
plum petals shiver to ground, the burn
inside the tree, the chill it senses under
the flitter of sunlight, blue and more blue,
the sky like an intercession.
Art Information
- "Japanese Wisteria" © TANAKA Juuyoh; Creative Commons license.
Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq (both published by CW Press). She coedited (with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen) Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), named a Notable Book for 2012 by the American Library Association. A third collection, Wen Kroy, is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press.
Black is a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow in Poetry, selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary arts center.
