Genevieve Kaplan
The birds
Over the slant of the idea of the house. In the steam of things.
Over the wings of snow, over the side
of what's aching, out with the stars and the cold.
The landscape
Granted, the flowers will take hold,
what is yet rising will ease somehow. From here,
the light attacks
the window and the stress of the shining
does not ease.
The ice storm
Wherever the mountains. Knowing what the rows
look like in the sun (plaids appear) (dust coated).
The look is fading and the hills too
where the sun slopes across, they're circled
in dust.
It is never the heat that remains.
It's the same in every downpour
A full blood-rain
has already shattered the tepid west.
--How can we even speak of it?
The bird constructing a nest in the branches
of the tree above us
can't last.
It's the same in every downpour: changes
in our lovely valley--
(Will the fruit hold long enough to ripen? Is a
giraffe tall enough to pick it?)
Keep watch, for a falser motion is mourning.
The sky chromatic
and calling and not weakened
by prosperity or success or failure in the least.
--and I see you in it, monkey-footing around.
(When we're walking down the street
unafraid of animals, it must be Fall.)
Near the constant river
in which we find ourselves rock-solid, done for.
Instead we see palaces, turrets always holding
the rain in place.
Genevieve Kaplan's poems have recently appeared in Cimarron Review, Mrs. Maybe, The Hat, and Gulf Coast.
