Chris Roberts-Antieau © 2008 All Rights Reserved
Chris Roberts-Antieau © 2008 All Rights Reserved
Like closed eyes
and less the thirty years in Helsinki,
eggs in the swallow’s nest are veined with cracks.
He said there was an algebraic formula
to express loss. It’s among the lesson plans,
the pressed maple leaves, his computations
outside the left margins, snapshots
of faces softly dying from sepia.
Winter cobwebs the attic with novocaine.
It is too late for embryos: the lake waxes
albumen, the yolk a weak cusp
of sun. Here, a book remembers Orpheus,
the lyre dissolving to verdigris on his fingertips.
And here, he remembers her hair, untied,
that fold of twilight around her shoulders.
Arlene Ang is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A,V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008). She serves as poetry editor for Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. She lives in Spinea, Italy. More of her writing may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.