The design, I see, is extraordinary.Why watch for hummingbirds when I am caughtby the spider web strung in three layersoutside my kitchen door. Silver linking silverfence, its chain anchoring one end, the roof’soverhang studded twice. A geometric pattern,a trick of the light this hot morningafter a hot night. The net holdsa constellation of tiny bugs, inconsequentialflights that ended here, a white mothspinning, and as I look closer,three long silver hairs—my ownI have to assume, migrated from my deck chairand made pure and purposeful.I’m in a kind of sleep, so think to freethe fluttering caught thing.The moth’s wing falls off in my hand.Poor thing, I tell myself, wake up.
Silver
Cleopatra Mathis
Feature Date
- August 5, 2021
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“Silver” from AFTER THE BODY: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED: by Cleopatra Mathis.
Published by Sarabande Books July 7th, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Cleopatra Mathis.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana, and has lived in New England since 1980. She has published seven previous books of poems, most recently Book of Dog and White Sea, both from Sarabande Books. Her many awards and prizes include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, Best American Poetry, and The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women. The founder of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College in 1982, she lives with her family in East Thetford, Vermont.
Louisville, Kentucky
"This generous volume draws from the poet’s recorded gifts and losses: poems of early and late motherhood, a child’s mental illness and institutionalization, human and nonhuman deaths within and beyond the poet’s purview. . . .In these knowing poems, readers may recognize their own humanity, as well as the sometimes-impossible conditions of living."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"From book to book, Mathis demonstrates how memory extends its ‘first claim’ to include not only the mythic richness of her childhood in Louisiana but also the contrasting and complicating joy and grief of her life in New England as a transplanted Southerner. The resolute heart and keen human insights found everywhere in After the Body: New and Selected Poems renew the ‘claim’ many readers of contemporary American poetry have made for decades, that Cleopatra Mathis is one of our most important and essential poets."
—Michael Collier
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