21. From his perch on top of an old telephone pole, a red-winged blackbird, ignoring the hum of the interstate traffic below, unfolds and trills heeeeed, claiming his portion of landscape.
22. The lilac buds, neatly wrapped parcels, nod to the cadence of the hopper cars rolling by.
23. See the boy in the playground at evening, mindlessly digging under the seesaw until the severed hand of a baby doll, one finger pointing at sky, is unearthed.
24. Shape the past and call it memory.
25. Hunched over a small book in the slanting light, the grandmother underscores a phrase and repeats it aloud.
26. The dead have no need for words.
27. She can no longer remember his name, so why does she recall that first warm day
of spring, the year she turned thirteen, when he took the piece of ice from her mouth and placed it in his own as an offering?
28. The true subject of Orpheus, after the loss of Eurydice, is seizure; he makes of his failure a song.
29. The image of two cottonmouths sliding across the surface of a pond is one way to
describe their marriage.
30. Unhinged, my mind translates its errors into sentence after sentence, each one a map.
31. The cartographer, her work completed, notes a group of children playing in a field next door, light moving against their bodies.
32. The squeal of the red-tailed hawk, a ventriloquist’s imitation of a smaller, less ruthless bird, surprises the grandfather painting his shed.
33. In the garden, still in the summer evening, a man and a woman kneel in an attitude of praise, making their way along the rows.
34. Alone in a rehearsal room, the pianist plays the fugue as burden and substance, the essence of congregation.
35. The letter opener, carved by hand as an anniversary gift, was one of three items saved when the house burned down.
36. To keep the mosquitoes away, the tender of the fire, long after everyone’s asleep, watches over the slow abatement of the coals.
37. The suffering of Prometheus, sequestered against a rock, serves only as a coda for thought, transgression, joy.
38. The gravestone hidden in tall grass makes a promise—Put Us to Work Anew—under an unreadable name and two dates contained by parentheses.
39. Discovered near a trash can in the train station, the photograph of a couple at a long-ago costume party provides the conductor an aperture to the dead.
40. My mortal mind, exhausted by concealment and fear, gathers itself in order to praise.
Douglas Smith was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His first book is Judgments. His work can be read in The Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Washington Square, The American Journal of Poetry, and many other magazines. Two of his poems appear in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VII: North Carolina. A contributing editor at Lake Effect, he teaches at Guilford College.
Kathryn Walker teaches at Guilford College.