Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

their almost-lullaby, their calm insistent pressing
into place, such softness as will not be turned back
bending downward in the fissured wind.
How frail my silver glance; and the body of that girl
as she ran through the torn flowers
of white light, the satellite beaming her up into my eyes,
beaming the torn flowers up and up,
the brightness streaming, seething from her skin. . . .
Darkness, we are brief silver coins
thrown into you
as you close austerely over us.
Black Night
Black night as severe as a frock-coat or doctrine,
there is a stiffness in you, a hardness like the moment when the
radio's
switched off, and no car passes by, not a single car at all,
and the trees are stripped and ignorant of the wind.
You are an injunction, a stare, a crow's wing
swerving toward a blinking, rheumy eye.
A crow's wing that will cover it, consume it.
You are the moment when fright freezes over,
fishes trapped and stunned in the black ice.
Unlike you, the days are fraught, confused, all edges and swift
fissures.
I wait for them. They are dangerous but truthful.
They push you away. You with your prosecutor's sneer,
your tactics and coercions. And should I, too, confess?
And her and him and him and her? Is anyone not guilty?
Daylight busies her hands. She is scrubbing the bedposts and
floors
with her candor. I wake from a dream in which willows bend
and bend.
A whole grove of them, like sorrow. Nothing can make them
rise.
And it was sad because the birds tried to lift them
but their bodies had turned to lead.
It's not that the willows wanted to lose their downwardness,