RUIN
When the
earthquake hit
freakishly last summer,
I stood upstairs,
the house swaying
on the rolling land.
I ran outside.
The neighbors
in the street
knew what it was. I
didn’t, looked
as is my nature up
for the cloud
above the trees.
But there was no
horizon to be sure of
so as to see
evidence
of the world’s ruin.
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THE SPARROWHAWK SITS
so still on the
high electrical wire,
later in the pin oak with its
beautiful rust-dark streaks on the breast,
late light entering
the black seep of the eye,
for what seems like
eternity. Thus can a bird like that
be so ignored
by all it will devour.
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ALLEGORY
A Byzantine relief
in an out-of-the-way chapel in Venice
shows
Virtue and Vice, Vice depicted as
a rabbit, Virtue the hawk attacking it.
Virtue the hawk!
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ELIZABETH ARNOLD is the author of four books of poems: The Reef (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Civilization (Flood Editions, 2006), Effacement (Flood Editions, 2010), and Life (Flood Editions, 2014 – forthcoming). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Nation, Paris Review, Slate, Conjunctions, and Kenyon Review. Her awards include an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a Whiting Writer’s Award, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown. She is on the MFA faculty at the University of Maryland and lives outside Washington, D.C.
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