silking day / light into glass
I might have / become a grandmother /
or grasshopper / might have curled
inside a flower’s scent of citrus /
or twined around bark / I might have /
chosen a glacial lake / to quench
a drought / instead I learned to twirl
glassine labyrinths / to stall wings /
and quiet claws / to scramble up rafters /
and when I must / to rethread the threads /
one luminous strand after another /
as if to insist / I’m still here / still here /
I learned to fix my unhurried gaze /
on the grasshopper / who blundered
too near my gauzy orb /
and the moth / who might have become
a filament of silk / or a sunflower /
who might have chosen / to be tendril /
or granddaughter / or this memory /
of day / light / and desire
Skywatcher Marginalia during a Solar Eclipse after Reading about Sawfish
Poetry is the cosmos
awakened to itself.
– David Hinton
The magnolia tree erupts, magenta constellations and rainclouds crowding sky. I scrawl in the margins. Rain knocks down the blossoms, my fingernails splashing raindrops:
sawfish spinning in estuaries
like fizzled stars dying stars
abnormally
dying carcasses sinking
a sawfish is a ray
not a shark or saw or star
won’t float
won’t be found—
Are we studying them, or ourselves? Midday, the sky will darken for four minutes, fireflies swarming and giraffes galloping somewhere else on earth. Will the estuaries go dark, will the sawfish stop spinning, somewhere else?
And why so much fuss about darkness? The moon covers the sun like a coin securing the eyes of the dead. Its path is totality, absence and presence, sinking, floating. Think how we’ll float, how the right words cup our hopes, keep us from spinning out of control.
No gods now, only skywatchers, only sky, only:
viewing permitted with the right pair of glasses—
Sandra Fees lives in southeastern Pennsylvania where she is a Unitarian Universalist minister and past poet laureate of Berks County, PA. Her poems have been published in Crab Creek Review, Whale Road Review, Witness, and elsewhere.
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