[WHEN SUNLIGHT BECOMES AN OBJECT]
When sunlight becomes an object, my echo creates a hole in sound:
a thousand doors, many handshakes of air.
Like the snapping hazel flings its yellows into the woods,
my coming and going is marked in the ear of the hearer.
When the hazel dormouse hides, she hides for months at a time.
It’s the grip of an unknown animal she fears.
But fear’s a tricky thing; at night she shreds the honeysuckle
and builds nests in the crooks of open trees.
If the big-eared bat can sing, then I was that supersonic love song.
Swinging from crag to crag, I was that blind crooning animal.
Like Lorca, I want to sleep the dream of apples.
I want the old dangers to feel welcome—
the wind displacing the fir tree, the fir tree catching on fire.
Let something burn long enough, it’ll put itself to sleep.
_______________________________________________________________________
JENNIFER MOORE is the author of the forthcoming collection, The Veronica Maneuver (University of Akron Press, August 2015). Her poems have been published in American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, The Volta, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere, and criticism in Jacket2 and The Offending Adam. She teaches creative writing and literature at Ohio Northern University and lives in Defiance, Ohio.
_______________________________________________________________________
Read more poems by Jennifer Moore:
Poem at Inter/rupture
Poem at Phantom Limb
Poem at TYPO
I was the last place on the planet /
where astronauts slept /
my last customers were the planet’s /
last people
"The biggest challenge of translating Sachs into English, for me, had to do with tracking the movement of her mind in the forming of a poem."
Which vein burst / to offer the holy geometry of yearning / a homeland in your eyes?
That thing you forgot to do last year / has turned out to be important.
There was a rippling pond and the croaking of frogs /
and various birds anas crecca, /
there was the tingling of sand on the Borecké Rocks /
and the cracking of pinecones
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
Prague is falling behind the windows /
like an autumn curtain falls on summer /
like a fish falls after a whale
I’d listen to her work her way through its drama: the //
little girl’s errors hitched to curiosity, her wandering hands, the /
way the wolf and the girl had much more in common than not
say it /
briefly //
like /
a finch’s whistle
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Jennifer Moore
Poetry · Tagged: American Letters, american poets, Best New Poets, Columbia Poetry Review, Commentary, contemporary American poetry, Defiance, Jacket2, Jennifer Moore poems, Jennifer Moore poet, Jennifer Moore poetry, Ohio, Ohio Northern University, The Offending Adam, The Veronica Maneuver, The Volta, University of Akron Press, women poets
[WHEN SUNLIGHT BECOMES AN OBJECT]
When sunlight becomes an object, my echo creates a hole in sound:
a thousand doors, many handshakes of air.
Like the snapping hazel flings its yellows into the woods,
my coming and going is marked in the ear of the hearer.
When the hazel dormouse hides, she hides for months at a time.
It’s the grip of an unknown animal she fears.
But fear’s a tricky thing; at night she shreds the honeysuckle
and builds nests in the crooks of open trees.
If the big-eared bat can sing, then I was that supersonic love song.
Swinging from crag to crag, I was that blind crooning animal.
Like Lorca, I want to sleep the dream of apples.
I want the old dangers to feel welcome—
the wind displacing the fir tree, the fir tree catching on fire.
Let something burn long enough, it’ll put itself to sleep.
_______________________________________________________________________
JENNIFER MOORE is the author of the forthcoming collection, The Veronica Maneuver (University of Akron Press, August 2015). Her poems have been published in American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, The Volta, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere, and criticism in Jacket2 and The Offending Adam. She teaches creative writing and literature at Ohio Northern University and lives in Defiance, Ohio.
_______________________________________________________________________
Read more poems by Jennifer Moore:
Poem at Inter/rupture
Poem at Phantom Limb
Poem at TYPO
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