Posted on by Jonathan Duckworth

In the Clearing

the night is large tonight  
            ants mistake our legs
for old fallen branches
& simply crawl
               without violence
 
I tell you that a poem
              is a gasp of words
like my breath on your cheek
& that everything before you
              has been a febrile haze
 
                                          now
even the creek is falling asleep  
              its languid water
tinged a brooding red by tannins
              from fallen pine needles
so Biblical, I say
so natural, you reply
 
I wish I could be taller
that I could gather up the stars
             & string them
             in your eyelashes
             but who has hands
to reorder the sky?
 
all my hands can do  
is hold yours  
 
               you look at me
not at my eyes  
              but through them
 
a coyote yips & yowls
into the open ear of the world  
 
               sound of change
song of my fever lifting

 

Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University and a reader for Gulf Stream. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK, Literary Orphans, Cha, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.

 

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Jonathan Duckworth
Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University and a reader for Gulf Stream. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK, Literary Orphans, Cha, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.