Shadows are ideasof what casts them;the moon is thereto match, but onlyon one side. Starspick through leaves,a tree-shaped blackspace swallows itself.If I could disgorgemy heart like a star-fish its stomachI’d draw you in,but I only have this headand how I love youlooks more like me than I do.
Night Vision
Kate Colby
Feature Date
- December 15, 2022
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Night Vision” from REVERSE ENGINEER: by Kate Colby.
Published by Ornithopter Press in October 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Kate Colby.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Kate Colby is author of eight books of poetry, including I Mean and The Arrangements, and a book of lyric essays, Dream of the Trenches. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Lana Turner, The Nation and Oversound. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Princeton, New Jersey
"Informed by contemporary physics and by epistemology, Reverse Engineer is a book about what defies description and eludes understanding. Kate Colby acknowledges this conundrum. Thinking about the self and the universe, we tie ourselves in knots. A poem may be such a knot—or so Colby suggests: 'A poem’s a Rube Goldberg doo- / hickey to elicit a flicker—I die / while I’m writing , if as yet not / of it.' I think I will always remember these lines, this flicker."
—Rae Armantrout, author of Finalists
"Reverse Engineer is full of daisy-chained aphorisms apophatically accounting for what thinking is like ('a simile works / like this'), extending beyond sense so that sensation gets severely enjambed, and I get to feeling , 'I am what’s needed / of my own erasure.' I love how Kate Colby’s poems hurt 'me.'"
—Aditi Machado, author of Emporium
"Reverse Engineer begins with an epigraph from Rosmarie Waldrop that reads, 'doubting I love while knowing I’ve wanted to.' In many ways, this is what Colby spends the entire collection exploring; doubt and love are central to this beautiful collection, as the speaker questions what love is, what we are, and how we make meaning."
—Chase Cate, "Reverse Engineer," Colorado Review, November 4, 2022
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
