Meanwhile, the wind blows
A cloud in perfect stillness overhead, perfect
What was beetle becomes spider
There was no abstract page on
which was writ
these words
Meanwhile a hand
forms letters, a restraint
of language
around which
two bodies curl
Begin sky
overhead, blue
darker, brighter as it dries
Beginning precise, always
Heron bending in the socket of the sky
Meanwhile, the throat aches, the throat
bathes itself in the perfect fluid
of such stillness
While above the waters run
and underground
the mines have begun burning, they have
been burning all the while
Elizabeth Robinson is the author, most recently, of On Ghosts, a 2013 finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. With Jennifer Phelps, Robinson is the co-editor of Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Women’s Poetry, to be published by University of Akron Press in 2018. Robinson was a 2016 recipient of a Brown Foundation Fellowship to the Maison Dora Maar in Menerbes, France.