Summer seems within reach, so I can’t resist a selection from the summer archives.
Cicadas
Their last earthbound form clings
hollow gargoyle relic of claw and eye
split with surgical precision to release
the winged adult.
If I held one of these amber
husks to my ear, would a dusty
song of waning summer pulse
like the tide in a scrolled shell?
Keeping House
I drifted all day
From stanza to stanza
Keeping house
The laundry sloshed and spun
A swirl of blues and grays
While I sorted and folded
The dry remains
Of yesterday
And I polished layers of dust
Into a desolate sonnet
Praising sloth
I translated the kitchen
Wrote its peculiar vocabulary of spice
Into cryptic recipes
And tilting volumes of scent
Then vacuumed the office
Where spines decayed to anonymous
Motes and filled the air
With sneezes
While in the bathroom sink
A single gray hair mocked
Recalled an absent metaphor
Each room and stanza resisted order
With all the hidden power of entropy
The secret law that governs socks
And salt and hungry ants
And these curls of shredded poems
That speak of duty
Rites and arcane lore
Kept in the rooms of my house
Published in Menagerie June 2010
What am I
When I’m spinning?
A giddy earthen child
Hair and hands in orbit
All my brilliant paths described
By Riemann’s rumpled planes
When dizzy, I collapse in grass
Yearn toward the evening moon
Enchanted by its gibbous rise
Its constant tide-locked face
Tugs the sea and me alike
The atoms of our mass
Bound ebb to flow, neap to high
By Newton’s Principia
While Schrödinger’s wistful cat
Waits in later pages
Unknown as yet, and left to pace
In undetermined fate
What am I
When I’m sleeping?
A prism child of night
Splintered into photon dreams
Cradled in hot nebulae
And scattered throughout space
A bleak and cold infinitude
Some billion other worlds
Suspended around other stars
In beginning states of grace
Unseen, like ore in deep, hot veins
Compressed beneath the ages
Until revealed by algorithm
And captured in equation
With Schrödinger’s hapless cat
Purring at my side
Alive and dead, unrealized
An enigma in time’s keeping
Beautiful Things
See all the small
Beautiful things
I’ve crushed under my boots
Or my tires
Or my hurried, strident tongue
The perfection that was a beetle
Splintered because its jeweled shell
Could not bear my weight
And my regret might feel
Like a question
I haven’t the wisdom to ask
The intricate heartwork
That was a rabbit
Dashed under my tire
And left for the vultures
Who might partake of rabbit
Skin and fur and bones
Delicate answers
Ground within the gizzard
And lost
So that should I someday
Remember the question
Or think it first in a dream
Only the vulture could answer
The simplicity of “Why?”
Lost for lack of time
Or patience
Or knowledge enough of children
To know that the answer doesn’t matter
Only the voice
And the moment
And the ritual of exploration
So I offer the only answer
That addresses the question
“Because it must”
Which is also “because
I must”
Which answers all the questions
I have the wisdom to ask
Published in The 2006 Chaffin Journal
If there were no life
Would not the Earth
Still have beauty?
If skies were not
So blue
Nor clouds so shapely
Set against blue
If tides never rose
To purl across sand
If all were stone
Pocked with volcano
Cluttered with crater
Naked of everything air
Would not the Earth
Still have beauty
If there were no eyes
To catalogue her wonders?
Rae Spencer 