From the Fall, 2012 issue of The Antioch Review

Uplands, Winter

Catch: the morning’s sky went
falling, crystalline clumps
snowheaped.

Firs coated white. In between,
gray. In between the stillness
that might be time

measured for sight. I was quiet most
hours. Heart’s pulse. A certain
nothing to mind.

Rabbit tracks print
the yard. Buried woodpile.
Each shiver

and shrink of an old house has been
felt. Mice nesting in
the walls. Some shuffler

boots his way to some car. Some
dour face. Some of
a heaviness.

Could the day change, it won’t.
Minus the blue, the gold the sky
a solid permanence.

At noon, the bell out on the hill
snuffed under
a train whistle.

No other sounds
to startle. No startling thought
but here and here and here.

***

 

Emily Rosko’s two poetry collections include: Prop Rockery, awarded the 2011 University of Akron Poetry Prize and Raw Goods Inventory, winner of the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in AGNI, Anti-, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, New Orleans Review, and Sycamore Review. She is the editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press, 2011), and the poetry editor for Crazyhorse literary journal. A former Stegner, Ruth Lilly, and Javits fellow, she earned an MFA at Cornell and a PhD at the University of Missouri. She now is assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the College of Charleston.

 

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