Ira Joel Haber  © 2006 All Rights Reserved

Back Burner

I hear the mind has limits
but no universal claims
have been made for those
rare daily scapes where
ideas and images first uncloak.
Even ground-level cerebration
could use some explaining—
crystalline floors cluttered with
words, impulse and unwritten faces.
Conception does have an edge
over imagination’s filtering womb:
unsplintered thought, patterns too fetal
to surface, shapeless unself selves—
all gather into the weight of making.
They push for birth
and the longer they feed
on interior eye and ear,
the more skin-solid they become.
Limits live on the outside of things,
names airbound and earthwise
fixed by the mind’s concrete-green.

Sally Molini
Copyright © 2006

 

SALLY MOLINI’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Southern Poetry Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Calyx, Salt Hill, Ghoti, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She holds the MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives in Nebraska.

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