You are meant to get lost here
among words in a country
of words—diaphanous words
holding a plea against some
wretched, hard reality,
against precision’s pinned-down
rage minutely dissecting
one more hapless pain, against
edgy acid ironies
lying uneasily on
open satin-lined caskets—
imprecise words (joy/hope/love)
suspending death, that lifeblood
of being alive. Words that
see into the life of things,
brook the way one of childhood’s
long summer days lets go its
miracles: steady but some-
how faintly glimmering like
imaginary birds that
might be souls, spirits or tricks
of light. You, me, all of us
vulnerable as any
naked thing born of burned-out
stars (or more correctly: of
resurrected celestial
energy) slowly rowing
our nameless selves as if we
were ghostly sculls noisily
slapping our inexpert oars
out of a fog bank into
the near clarity of in-
definable star-thick nights.
Brenda Yates is the prize-winning author of Bodily Knowledge (Tebot Bach) with reviews, interviews and poems in Chaparral; Pink Panther Magazine; Tishman Review; KPFK 90.7 (Why Poetry); American Journal of Poetry; Mississippi Review; City of the Big Shoulders: Anthology of Chicago Poetry (University of Iowa Press); Angle of Reflection (Arctos Press); Manifest West (Western Press Books); Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee (Texas Review Press); Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books); Unmasked: Women Write about Sex and Intimacy after Fifty (Weeping Willow Books) as well as journals in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Israel, China and Australia.