a poem

August 13, 2013

4:13 AM

The shift of sleepwalks and suicides.

The occasion of owls and a demi-lune fog.

Even God has nodded off

And won’t be taking prayers til ten.

Ad interim, you put them on.

As if your wants could keep you warm.

As if. You say your shibboleths.

You thumb your beads. You scry the glass.

Night creeps to its precipice

And the broken rim of reason breaks

Again. An obsidian sky betrays you.

Every serrate shadow flays you.

Soon enough, the crow will caw.

The cock will crow. The door will close.

(He isn’t coming back, you know.)

And so wee, wet hours of grief relent.

In thirty years you might forget

Precisely how tonight’s pain felt.

And in whose black house you dwelt.

PRECIPICE

September 3, 2012

"The border
of a thing.

Its edge
or hem.

The selvage,
the skirt,

a perimeter’s
trim.

The blow
of daylight’s

end and
nighttime’s

beginning.

A fence

or a rim,
a margin,

a fringe.
And this:

the grim,
stingy

doorstep
where

the lapse
of passage

happens.
That slim

lip of land,
the liminal

verge
that slips

you past
your brink.

Where
and when

you
blink."

© 2011, Jill Alexander Essbaum
From: Poetry, Vol. 197, No. 4, January, 2011

a poem

August 25, 2012

WOULD-LAND

5 AM. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.

A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight’s

not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.

Last night it was snowing
and now

every path’s a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls

at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.

Below, the season’s
mean deceit—

that everything stays
white and clean.

It doesn’t, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers

are green with this intent,
imploring winter wrens

to trill and begging scuttling bucks
come back.

There’s something that I lack.
A wryneck

bullet-beaks a branch.
His woodworm didn’t have a chance.

What I miss,
I’ve never had.

But I am not a ghost.
I am a guest.

And life is thirst,
at best.

So do not strike me, Heart.
I am, too, tinder.

I’m flammable
as birch bark, even damp.

Blue spruce, bee-eater—
be sweeter to me.

Let larksong shudder
to its January wheeze,

but gift these hands a happiness
just once.

It is half passed.
And I am cold.

Another peal has tolled.
I’ve told the sum of my appeals.

I need not watch for fox.
They do not congregate at dawn.

But I would,
were I one.

© 2011, Jill Alexander Essbaum
From: Poetry, Vol. 197, No. 4, January, 2011