Barbara Duffey
More nothing will happen
Bitten by sound like two boards
by a vise. A Shaker simplicity
creates in absence the universe
before the universe, or the snow-wrack
of unique weather, its clues
impossible to read by the deductive
because generality limits its cloud.
One lens magnifies all the hooks
in their eyes. The low mist clung
to the still-warm creek in its woody meander
and that’s how I am with my ideas above.
Still, I can tell they condense there
like the tufts above common grass,
dinful in wind.
Epistemological
Northside, snow shadows the hills as each
south-facing crease runs with melt. The wet
land’s electric blue dress catches dawn’s
thumbs rubbing to draw its softness out
like a knit’s brushed nap. Form is chaos’s
devastation, a yardage corralled off
its bolt stitch-by-stitch in pleats like sub-thoughts.
Yesterday’s ice on last season’s stalks lit
up like the chiclet pack of fluorescents
on the Wal-Mart ceiling. The geese rose like
goosebumps. Their loft was a tacit argument
for the crystallization of time, how
thoughts congeal around the swizzle stick
of you, like rock candy, thoughts need a
body to cling to. Form is chaos’s
distillate. It takes the shape of shiny
bottles at the back of Wal-Mart, a pint
for the breast pocket of the hour’s stretch.
The earth melts like a song from your tongue.
The Wilderness
The dew dawn-red and sewn like seed beads through the lawn. Something drew the curtain back, slid off the lid, our reins slipped. Sick sidled up to him.
Breath with one lung elided. His ire wide and sere as the renewed moon. The lawn lewd green now. The wind wends through. Rid of wrens and deer, the reeds bow.
Barbara Duffey is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Simple Machines (The Word Works, 2016), which won the 2015 Washington Prize. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Jentel Foundation, and the South Dakota Arts Council, and her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. A professor of English at Dakota Wesleyan University, she lives in Mitchell, SD, with her son.