VARIATIONS
after two dead poets
In Paris: in rain, on days I can remember.
An aside—a Thursday, in Paris, in autumn.
No one here is speaking Spanish.
No one is squinting in the sun, there is no sun,
in the autumn, in Paris, in the rain.
In Miami, sun I imagine like days I remember.
Like other days in the wet heat of Minnesota
summer. Like glasses, like the still shade
of these lines. I have my armbones,
my legbones, my head, my blood, and this day, and
all the road ahead to Paris. Rain. Although I know
the rain will stop.
And the kneeling on Sundays. The gray city in
the rain quivering without speaking. The white
buildings, the street as always, in spite of diggers,
gravesides, sunlight,
Miami, beatings, sticks and rope.
Some witnesses can be provided: Thursdays in Paris,
November, a sun like one I recall from another time,
bones of the arm, solitude, rain, lineation, kneeling, roads…
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ÉIREANN LORSUNG is the author of Music For Landing Planes By (2007) and Her Book (2013), both from Milkweed. Other work appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Burnside Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Two Serious Ladies, The Collagist, and Bluestem. She lives in Belgium, where she edits 111O and co-runs MIEL, a micropress.
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Read more by Éireann Lorsung:
Piece in DIAGRAM
Two poems in ILK
Piece in Two Serious Ladies