Sparrows rush together at once, a terror of sight when they sense winter. The leaves have gone, the sky is water-marked. Herons, like maids, in white. You are alone in the woods. And yesterday, all beetles crawled off into the earth’s bowels. The bees and penguins have flown. The birds folded up their wings. The sky’s sidewalks are empty. Winter is making a start on a dark-blue January morning. These are hard times we are raised in. It is no use grinding your teeth. But I still can’t make pain show through the thumping rhythm of my poems. We take our eyes out. We are pleased to be listed in antiquated telephone books. We go quietly into the frost. Shudders run through the trees. Lightning x-rayed the city last night. Snow fell. People shovel it away and toss salt on dim narrow streets. The lilac darkness swirls. The sand rises up in a wall. Gulls whirl in flight. I look up, unready to enter air, like nitrogen, to grow snow-white feathers and become a part of the heights. Distract me with talk. Show compassion. Back-to-back, let’s sit still together: our sweat won’t startle us any longer, slip or spread. The wind is cold, the light weak as ice. I’m content to feel your breath. Here’s time, here we must make time for birds and words. My editor wants a small orchard, a swing, some green, the smell of irrelevance. Another bowl of pasta, a fork split like iron without any electromagnetic pull. I simmer the afterschool hurry harassing the roads and rain for five tepid weeks. It is quiet in this room. Someone is taking my protagonist’s temperature. She sits there guarding her inhales with her most genuine urgency. A day moves on, unfurled like a flag across the sky of ghostly clouds. We clean out closets, chase a pigeon without questioning the logic behind our feet. We learn to grow in our respect for all these things which have survived. We can be in the company of stars if we stay parallel to the pavement, where everything bounces back, like a frisbee, from your first position on this planet, because, from where we are, looking up, we don’t need to see things to know they are bright. We smile, laugh, sing and keep quiet for a reason, and the reason doesn’t stay put long enough for us to work it out. We start again out of the ruins that are nothing to us. We start again out of the ruins that are everything. If we trip it is because we trip now and again.
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her poetry explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.
