19 February 2014

Jennifer Chang [Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts]

from Jennifer Chang's The History of Anonymity:

And the night illuminated the night

No one sees how night fades you.

Not the stars' lambent sparks —

born blind, light years gone.
Even you don't see

                                    the black line of yourself,
the vanishing

you slowly come to, a shadow gift.

You're the kind
who walks into a forest
and becomes

                          indistinguishable from the trees.
Find a ghost reflection

in the field
flooded
with the moon's graylight — why is splendor

            so ordinary?

Be branch and dirt,
be stiff as your oak skin, oak heart.

No one led you here, 
only dark curiosity, the trail

trained to lose you.
Inside, you have a longing

but it is hard.

                           You could have been odd,

a fiddlehead: embryonic
and translucent, it waits to unfurl,

to spore. You could have been a white thread
tangled in the grass,

a thing that feigns glowing,
a thing that feigns.


Pastoral