Each word is a fly foregrounding the gap of its silence.
I scan for microscales something
minute enough to radiate a thought that might be
flown into the carpel of snapdragon.
I can follow the minute in and out,
imagine myself at prayer in the doors of a mouth.
I can do this exercise
without itching now time is palliative and between bells.
It is the Corpse Pose.
It is not vulnerable to crushing by gravity well
do not think about time
or the twilights or the fore and the aft
or those orbits in feathery skirts or stemmy tiaras
witness to the gnawing, crepuscular dress
of what nears us. My space is a gown.
My space is a fancy helmet. I have chevrons.
I have the surplus of my inner hag. Her anise teeth
and oven love, her loose, wandering present.
She spars with the final leaf, which stutters on its mother tree.
She sneaks into the circus of bees
to rustle up compulsion, licks of
salt and sweetness, thick
as buffalo and mink. My space
is a ghost superimposed
on other time a lost-and-found for atoms,
burn-off and hope,
an everlasting prologue.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Rebecca Reynolds has published two books of poetry; Daughter of the Hangnail (New Issues Press), which received the 1998 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Bovine Two-Step (New Issues Press 2002). Her poems have appeared in a number of literary magazines and online journals, including Quarterly West, Boston Review of Books, Cimmaron Review, Cerise Press, Web Conjunctions, American Letters and Commentary, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Verse, Third Coast, and Open City. She works as a dean and part time lecturer at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.
