JoEllen Kwiatek

A Delicate Thing

Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing.

--Shelley

The woods are full
of relics, toppled
gestures, deposed
  ideas.
              Imagination's
banked in a crevice,
sponged by leaves,
humus, quiet.

...The staying power,

where the soil's been
churned, of a mess
of leaves, one
like a black silk glove

face down on the path...

Face down or aside, going
  below
the derailed stream or
above...to the lot.  The trees

there are like men, though
not walking.

                       Neither

are you:  

                stock still,
                
invisible, drifted
from the open 
                          where, hushed
by cold, paddles lifted for
the glide forward on dark
intuition

                beneath those trees...

Sea Below Rocks

What does the sea see--?  Something
  awful.  It has the roving
thwarted glance of a mare in blinders,
  something awful facing her stall.

Petrified, swaybacked, the sea
  jerks on its tether but
remains facing the rocks--vision
  is a bridle, something

worn until it's threadbare, like
  the mystery of a thing
worn to brightness--rain or stone.

Snowlight

The mind's a lonesome flourish,
stark as deviation's
branch before the snow;
a dark cabin ogled by snowlight.

Crossing the hacked up sea
of snow, the moon
waist-high, lunging and
capitulating, addressed by
resources that make no sound.

---

JoEllen Kwiatek's first book, Eleven Days Before Spring, was published in 1994 by HarperCollins. She teaches in The Writing Arts Department at SUNY Oswego. contents | next