Jennifer Moore

[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.

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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.

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Read more poems by Jennifer Moore:

 
Poem at Inter/rupture
Poem at Phantom Limb
Poem at TYPO