Pessimistic Cento
Snow covers half my childhood.
I can not sleep or lie awake. Looking
like a man who wants to feel longing again,
craned to the difficult like a fern to the sun.
The dark comes on in blocks, in cubes,
now, when I’m alone and cold in my bed.
There was perfection in the death of ferns
deep in the rock; but men must die.
The towers are yesterday.
Not enough time to thoroughly
and half in love with the world
I close my eyes & can see
the world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved;
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
Elizabyth A. Hiscox, Stanley Moss, Louise Glück, Natalie Shapero, Thomas Lux, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, Ann Lauterbach, Bob Perelman, John Yau, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath
Inflammation
brings to mind Tarkovsky, son of a nation
of poets and murderers, as they all are. Bagno Vignoni’s latin
sky aflame, an auteur enthralled, Andrei’s notion
he could divorce his homeland, doused. Film
(Stalker’s toxic location) may have killed him, but Tarkovsky, nail
to cross, made two more movies first. Like mana
his snow against black, wooden houses. Essential, natal,
the land he couldn’t fully leave (viz. Nostalghia). Russia’s the atom,
spark forever glowing at his core, the mama
bear of lyrical terror, Mirror’s eternally burning barn. Nil, nil
from the State and yet, headwater of his art—his lifelong inflammation.
Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, I will not kick my friends, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her poems have appeared in Yale Review, New Republic, New Statesman, Agni, Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Awards include the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, Ralph Johnston Fellowship, and Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award.