A CONVENING OF POETS

A Convening of Poets from Poet’s Corner.

…a flick of hares, a murder of crows

Again this morning I’ve opened the blinds barely awake
so the thief light will backhand my brain,

invited the oxblood jasper on the sill
to ravish my eye. Fists

of fractured rainbow pinning the walls,
traffic thickening the cotton-blue air,

I enter these days head down,
nose to the earth of a poem.

Later, there is tea, maybe bread,
the neighbor crying all morning sings me

his separate grief. This is the one place left
where sound enters selectively—and where you are,

this place is too. Today, you rose too early
and bent your mind around the singed wick

of a kerosene lamp, last night’s waste of letters
and regret. You rose in the hospital ward, exhausted

yet alive, listening to the cool hum of lithium
after the howls of a manic siege.

Today your children woke you fighting
and you wiped them out with a stroke

of your sharpened mind, then got their ever-
loving breakfasts. You walked the hills of a foreign land

because you couldn’t live here anymore,
where the shroud of dreams sticks and burns.

Your husband is sick, your students asleep.
You died in a car crash the first week of Spring.

But more than ever before, nothing is lost—
each silence shapes a perfect word.

You lean your pencil against your teacup and head out
through the gardens, past the graveyards,

down the long road toward the one thing
you were made for. In this time ripe with pauses

you labor lions peacocks mountains armies windstorms
desolation, you honor lovers and conjure the dead.

In this hour of wails and praising, I’m standing
next to you, and you to me.

We’re startled. We hadn’t known each other
or ourselves before this life.

by Alexandra Thurman

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