Lesley Wheeler
Absentation
An edge will sharpen later:
dazzled lot / chilled shade.
Now, at April’s front door,
the woods dawn
imperceptibly.
Wizened sycamores
crook twig-fingers―come in, come
in—but there is no in.
Their kitchen a thousand
howling chimneys. No
green shingles yet
divide dim woods
from ruminating stars.
A woman hovers, yearning
to absent herself, transfer
body across an indistinct
border, the better to hear, see,
seize. Terrified her tale
is closed. Just as frightened
of starting again.
She’ll hike for a morning, a month,
until something dormant blooms
and she can choose. Inside her,
a brambled sleeping world:
another boundary to breach.
Desire / despair. Inside
her, a felted bud may
be fattening. Infant
premonition of leaf.
Lesley Wheeler’s collections include Radioland and Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize. Recent poems and essays appear in Ecotone, Crazyhorse, and Poetry, and she blogs about poetry at http://lesleywheeler.org/. Wheeler is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
Return to November 2016 Edition
An edge will sharpen later:
dazzled lot / chilled shade.
Now, at April’s front door,
the woods dawn
imperceptibly.
Wizened sycamores
crook twig-fingers―come in, come
in—but there is no in.
Their kitchen a thousand
howling chimneys. No
green shingles yet
divide dim woods
from ruminating stars.
A woman hovers, yearning
to absent herself, transfer
body across an indistinct
border, the better to hear, see,
seize. Terrified her tale
is closed. Just as frightened
of starting again.
She’ll hike for a morning, a month,
until something dormant blooms
and she can choose. Inside her,
a brambled sleeping world:
another boundary to breach.
Desire / despair. Inside
her, a felted bud may
be fattening. Infant
premonition of leaf.
Lesley Wheeler’s collections include Radioland and Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize. Recent poems and essays appear in Ecotone, Crazyhorse, and Poetry, and she blogs about poetry at http://lesleywheeler.org/. Wheeler is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
Return to November 2016 Edition