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Spring/Summer 1997, Volume 14.2

Poetry

Stuart J. Silverman

Stuart J. Silverman has published poems in more than a hundred journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, England, and France. His collection of poems, The complete Lost Poems: A Selection, was published in 2001 by Hawk Publishing Group. The Ozarks Traveler, a collaboration with his wife, Sondra Rosenberg, was published by Red Crane Books.


 

Overnight

This morning, fog displaced the evening's trees.
Our uncut grass was palpably absent,
As though through a miracle of intent,
And overnight, instead of by degrees.
Brought to a halt, if not yet to our knees,
We saw, each minute, how every minute went
Into the void registering dissent.
The windchime drooped, abandoned by the breeze.

At ten precisely, a watery sun
Drew itself down, like gauze drawn through a crack.
By ten-fifteen, the pool stairs, one by one,
And then the pool, appeared. The fog hung slack
Above the grass it had, once, overrun.
At twenty-after-ten, the world was back.

 

A Witness Speaks Twice

(Joan Agonistes)

                                 a. Then
"Slaked lime is what her breasts remind me of,
Or seethed milk gone quiet in a minute.
No gentled kid, she frets when forced to sit.
Her hair beats at the wind, thinning a groove
In space into which she moves as fluids move.
Now, being what she must be, she makes of it
A final form sweated to fit.
So a copper tube melts into a sleeve."

                                 b. Later
"Down from her neck and arms waves spilled earthward.
Her eyes hammered at the light, driving night
To the trussed mullions of that stony room
Wherein she hardened, needing no magic word
Even for what she held back, half in spite,
Even for what she guarded from the flame."

 

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