Summer 2000

 

Star Black

LISTENING

 

How to love gracefully and stay out of the way?
Let's get to the bottom of this scalding resonance,
the forsythia's emanation, the vehement Etruscan
relevance of antique maps and smashed motifs; pause

a bit, take stock in the tweaking cluster. We are
indefinite. This much we know. We are transients
in a silver bateau. We, not the precious metal, will
go - diminished, wrathful, stubborn - leaving the

bateau to be filched, sold to a manic-depressive
interior designer, I hope, someone with flagrant
gumption and unhinged ideas and more than two
clients, someone who likes apricots and arugula.

I'm dying of sophistication, you talk. I'm leaning
back into cushions of aeolian silence, all yours.

Star Black's books of poems include DOUBLE TIME, WATERWORN, and OCTOBER FOR IDAS. This poem is from BALEFIRE, a collection of sonnets that was released by Painted Leaf Press in November, l999.


 

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