CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Three Poems Ellen Wehle

Every Jet You Watch Cross the Sky Is Me Leaving Lanterns follow the footpath Briefly then dwindle Acorns rattle their hard questions In this hour naked with fog you find me Difficult to hoard Tossed into last night’s fountain I glister at the bottom My kimono of oak leaves Coals underwater If Not the Bliss We Were Promised If stars sing in our blood of trace metals If atomic clocks rely on excitation Sap rising up sugar maples How many winters of white sleep I awaited that arrival If our fingertips house a hundred nerves Each lit with alchemical fire Name my race dust name me void’s daughter If half-dead I just kept choosing Light frozen to a solid What else could it be this brilliant Pane the fly is drawn to Once I No Longer Lived Here Even the songbirds excised my name                                                Bowdlerized, blacked out of snapshots                         Now voyager sail thou forth I became a unicorn of legend                                     Bridled with roses, had I ever                         Slept here domestic             Writ my will upon moving water                                                Archives expunged                                                             Mealtimes carried on without me                                     Sawn in half, a trick I’d perfected Doffing my top hat of aces and doves                                                Cabinets gaping off                         Hinges, music dead-stopped, every chair taken                                     True as a turnstile                         I had left them Not a flicker of wind to trouble the candles □