ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert town of Joshua Tree, California. She is the author of two chapbooks, Desert with a Cabin View, and The Finding (Orange Monkey Publishing). Her second full-length collection, Starshine Road, won the 2017 Perugia Press Prize. Her novel-in-verse, Whole Night Through, is forthcoming from What Books Press in 2019. She is the recipient of The Academy of American Poets University Award, The Duckabush Prize in Poetry chosen by Lia Purpura, and two prizes through The Poet's Billow. She edits the online literary and art journal, Aperçus.
Everywhere is the Finding of Not Wings
That the search leads back to itself, fettered inklings whirring in the dark,
as when I’d be so close to finding the chorus of cicadae in the Julys of my childness,
knowing how the cicadas will starve their seekers simply by staying hid.
And so, a canteen of water, hard candies. Perfect ears, backlit, nectarine blood, all tang,
unfurled to an almost-rupture, willing to for the source of that deafening song.
* * *
(There are noisemakers, someone had said, they are tymbals.
They are membranes of sound trapped in thickened ribs.)
* * *
Was it the television that seemed to know so much?
A science teacher. A science teacher on the television.
There are children who will hug the television goodnight in lieu of a parent’s touch,
doubtful that their parents know as much.
It feels like a zap from the biggest, most loving brain.
* * *
It’s the males. They are calling out to the queens. Death is coming.
* * *
But my eyes are seeing stucco and not wings, felled branchlets
and not wings. Everywhere is the finding of not wings.
A forecast of adult life, flung shadows netting the already hard-to-find?
* * *
Closeness is the phantasm of a lifetime! spouts someone gloomy inside me.
When this day ends, hollow abdomens, self-played harps, ambulate back to the impossible,
and I will have missed the witnessing.
* * *
My Christian friends tell me witnessing need not be such a chore.
I could be feasting my eyes and my mouth,
Christ emerging from the ground beneath me, right where I stand, wings and all.
I could accompany his trill on my century-old piano. He likes how I clang,
likes any music made in jubilation.
But when the search leads back to the well-worn clearing, origin of pursuit,
I want to be a woman who can face her own face,
weed patches and partial algorithms frozen in dirt,
preserved repetitions of my shoe tread,
the few essential tools that were left behind, their muteness, exact.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
