Issue 7 | Summer 2010

Downward

Cold rain paves the path

with gold leaves, calls

to mind the future:

fall of snow. Must

every bright thing

fall, all wither, freeze,

erase our swept paths,

our steps?

How to become

like the earth,

that feels a fall

as a drawing down,

the way a lover’s face

is drawn down? How

to get that unjudging appetite—

inward, inward—dust,

petals, bedsprings,

water silvered with oil?

Come: the stinking grizzled

man carrying a plank,

the sixteen-year-old

stricken in the stadium,

millions of thistle seeds,

sparrows, meteorites.

…to draw the sun a little

and the moon much.

Filed under: Poetry