Lynn Powers © 2006 All Rights Reserved

Wheatfield With Crows

I find myself returning to it,
Its upstroke

Feverishly wincing,
Defying gravity.

Wielded into rows,
An intimate sorrow shunts

With each deliberate birth of slender spiking.

If my eye roams further up,
A violent crush of crows

Frozen into one black swing.

Was it sound or did color
Petition their wings into a levitating virtuoso?

The scene won’t alter with various perspectives,
A viewer’s make is only a checkered take
On a fixed landscape,

So today I am lit
With a measure of vacancy: I let the landscape
Consume me, nourishing its stalks

With my arrival as I veil into the holster
Of an infrangible coldness, didn’t I?

I couldn’t tell the difference
Between the missionary and myself,

And those frozen birds beating loneliness
Out above the stalks,

What foreboding bolstered their trembling? What had dissolved
Inside a temporary dwelling?

This field now suffers under an immortal civilization.
A destination I can charter.

 

Melancholy

Morning plans to unlove itself and day refuses to bloom.
I enter vertically, an incision in a flattened room
Where skylights like oxygen masks stained mulberry
Reign above my private mid-hour, my blue cellophane.
Starfire plummets in a hurry past a window,
A grazing of Elysian bijoux, maze of ribbons darkened quickly.
And still beauty mends no breakage.
Where does one deposit humid flesh?
A tear-stricken bifacial in a pillow’s notice
Attempts to shun the unwelcome visitor in the brain—

I’ve tried to steer the oncoming big picture into another pastime
But morning continues to rise with another slap in the face.
To motor: keep a car’s length from my heart, my frenzied fulsome
Dulled with pain, careworn with scores of patchwork.
Oh, not your heart. Stacked wood, hard as a telephone pole.
No, that is not rain tapping tin, but the nosedive of a splintering pledge.
The thin crack in a muscle valve strung by a thread only saddens the tick.
Tomorrow will wizen. Where to? the new embellishment, the replica
Of bygone lovers embroiling themselves into future embezzlement.
What concludes from a stockpile of grief? Who will conspire unmoved?
 

Jennifer Juneau
Copyright © 2006

 

JENNIFER JUNEAU’s work has appeared in California Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and other journals in the U.S. and abroad. The recipient of two prizes from the California State Poetry Society, she lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

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