(after Helen Frankenthaler)Rust spreads, there is a seam,green coming through again,a single line makes the horizon,past which we cannot see—instead we watched the surfacewhere waves spread, cloudscasting their shadows, a silver stretchwhere wind riffled the still water—against that, what thought?No thought, the movementof not thinking—slurry of sandfalling through fingers onto the fortressthe child builds too close to the break,bits of cobalt and bottle-green glassjeweling the ochre expanse,its towers rising and falling,and above what substance,air as the voice is an air,in and out of the bodies it moves,into the “crooks and fools in power,”the songbirds and sycophants,children running ahead, and the mindborne forth that way, to no end— Author’s Note: The phrase “crooks and fools in power” is from Michael Palmer’s poem “Scale.”
Sunset Corner
Feature Date
- April 19, 2022
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Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Fisher.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jessica Fisher is the author of Frail-Craft, which won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and Inmost, which was awarded the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her honors include the 2012 Rome Prize, a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship in Poetry, and a research grant from the Hellman Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley and is currently an associate professor of English at Williams College. She lives with her family in Western Massachusetts.
Fall/Winter 2021
Windham, Maine
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