It
it is almost at the harbor when we strike a precarious
balance on the brink of a surface we call cliff
and then again we play it safe and settle inland
and wait for it initially in its wake a bit
of an idea scribbled into waves cracks
us open a slit it’s like we’re paper it’s that easy
to tear into us in time after our little pas de deux
with denial even its vapor
can obliterate us it’s a catalyst for remembering
at last every repressed memory of what maybe
hasn’t happened yet it bids us
to travel as if over hills and seas to a different
self so we aren’t at home and that’s how we know
what we felt before it’s in the itinerant glow
in the transformative oh the way the smoke
proposes at once to several shades of gray and brick
it’s common sense we insist to believe
in a shared reality that reiterative imitable
systematic illusion of certainty that’s only the tip
but it’s not a foregone conclusion
in anyone’s prefrontal cortex that curiosity actually
is precarious a risk akin to the contrary and comparing ships
we arrive in the end with this it isn’t
really like anything it’s neither in the least a harbor
nor even a brink but is everything it is
estranged from anything but the exiled
and for a while we welcome it
ξ
As Is
what if art makes more sense of us than we can
of it if we’re thirsty it’s a sticky wicket to picture
or ponder the arc of the daily
covenant with what we mean flashing us
its moue we see what we want to see
or maybe we want what we see
we see for a while in the wilderness out yonder beyond
the hanging gardens we fold into the valley
like a language for green fire or scorched earth
for the edges we strike between the particulates
and any way we can we walk into the difference
between a thought and a day hey there’s no need now
to get petulant if it’s mostly a moot path
alas caught in a branch the rusted
rigmarole of memory spends itself
free associating dreaming its mossy dreams
of sticks and stones if we’re lucky we’ll go home
eventually but what if the after image we catch
is the nexus of everything
that came before if it’s another experiment
in these woods of disorder and joy
who cares if we don’t find water
if we do find wine
ξ
Alice B. Fogel is the former New Hampshire poet laureate. Her latest book is A Doubtful House. Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry. Her third book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller. Fogel is also the author of Strange Terrain, a book on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated for Best of the Net and ten times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Spillway, Hotel Amerika, The Inflectionist, and DIAGRAM.